Chapter 11: Baad mein — 1984

The assassination happened in October.

Indira Gandhi. Two bullets from her own bodyguards — Sikh bodyguards, men who had worn the uniform and taken the oath and then, in the particular logic of vengeance that Blue Star had unleashed, had decided that the oath was smaller than the wound.

I was in Pune when the news came. Back at Fergusson, trying to resume a life that had been interrupted by history and that could not, I was discovering, be resumed — because you cannot go back to studying English Literature with the same seriousness after you have stood in a city that smells of curfew and grief, after you have watched your father hold a newspaper with white knuckles because the institution he served had attacked the institution he worshipped.

The news came in the afternoon. By evening, Delhi was burning.

Not Pune. Not yet. Pune was — in 1984 — still the quiet city, the pensioners' paradise, the place where the pressures that detonated elsewhere arrived as aftershocks rather than earthquakes. But the aftershocks were enough. Sikh students in the hostel locked their doors. Some removed their turbans — not permanently, not as a statement of abandoning faith, but as the particular tactical retreat of a minority that had learned, in the space of a single news bulletin, that visibility was danger.

I did not remove my turban. This was not bravery. This was stubbornness — Bauji's stubbornness, the particular Oberoi inability to bend that was simultaneously our greatest strength and our most reliable pathway to trouble. I walked across campus with my turban intact, and the looks I received were — most of them — sympathetic. Pune was not Delhi. Pune's violence, when it came, would be sporadic rather than systematic, the work of opportunists rather than organized mobs.

But it came.

Three days after the assassination, a group of men — I will not call them a mob, because "mob" implies spontaneity and there was nothing spontaneous about this — appeared on Fergusson College Road. They were looking for Sikhs. Not for conversation. Not for answers. For the particular satisfaction that certain men derived from violence against the vulnerable, the satisfaction that was not political but personal, not ideological but pathological, dressed in the costume of patriotism.

I was in the canteen. Elina was with me. Prakash was at the library. The canteen — a low building on the western edge of campus, the smell of samosa and chai and the particular staleness of institutional food — was crowded with students who had heard about the group and had retreated to the interior of the campus the way animals retreat to the centre of a forest when fire approaches the edges.

"Take off the turban," Elina said.

"No."

"Farhan. Please. Take it off. Put it in your bag. Just until they leave."

"No."

"This is not the time for principle. This is the time for survival."

"If I take it off now, I take it off forever. Because there will always be a 'now.' There will always be a reason. And each time the reason will be valid and each time the removal will be a little easier until the turban is not a choice but a memory and I am not a Sikh but a person who used to be a Sikh before he got scared."

She stared at me. The stare was — I recognize this now, forty years later — not anger. It was the particular expression of a woman who loved a man and who could see, with devastating clarity, that the man's principle and the man's safety were on a collision course and that she was powerless to redirect either.

"Then we leave," she said. "Now. Through the back gate. My flat is on Law College Road. We go there. We stay there until this is over."

"I'm not running."

"You're not running. You're relocating. There's a tactical difference."

Prakash appeared. He had run from the library — again — and arrived in the canteen with the particular breathlessness of a man whose body was not designed for sprinting but whose circumstances demanded it. "They're at the main gate. Six or seven men. They have — " He swallowed. "They have iron rods."

Iron rods. The weapon of choice for the particular brand of violence that India specialized in — not the clean violence of guns and bombs but the intimate violence of metal on flesh, the violence that required proximity, that required the attacker to be close enough to see the person they were hurting. This was not warfare. This was butchery dressed as politics.

"Back gate," Elina said. "Now."

We went. The three of us — Elina leading, because Elina led in crisis the way she led in everything: with decisiveness and the implicit understanding that hesitation was a luxury that the situation could not afford. Through the campus, past the Gothic arches that I had painted so many times, past the library where I had read Kamala Das and fallen in love, past the particular beauty of a place that was, in this moment, not a sanctuary but a maze through which we navigated toward safety.

The back gate was open. We slipped through — Elina first, then me, then Prakash, who turned at the gate and looked back with the expression of a man who was leaving something behind that he hadn't expected to have to leave.

Elina's flat was a single room in a building on Law College Road — a paying guest accommodation that her father funded and her mother worried about and that Elina had made, through the particular alchemy of cushions and books and a small stove on which she made chai, into a space that was hers. The room smelled of books and the particular incense that Elina burned — not for worship but for the smell, the frankincense that reminded her of the church in Margao where she'd grown up and that she'd carried to Pune as a sensory souvenir.

We stayed for three days. Prakash slept on the floor. I slept on the bed — with Elina, and I will not describe this further except to say that in crisis, the body's need for proximity is not sexual but existential, the need to be touching another person not from desire but from the particular terror of being alone in a world that has decided you are the enemy.

On the second day, I removed my turban.

Not because of the men with iron rods. Not because of fear, though fear was present — fear is always present; courage is not the absence of fear but the decision about what to do with it. I removed my turban because, sitting in Elina's room with the curtains drawn and the news on the radio reporting the death toll in Delhi — hundreds, thousands, the numbers uncertain and climbing, the reports of Sikh men dragged from buses and burned alive, of gurdwaras set on fire, of a genocide that the government would later call "riots" because "riots" implied spontaneity and absolved the organizers — sitting with all of this, I looked at my turban and saw not my faith but a target.

And the transformation of a symbol of faith into a symbol of danger was, for me, the final violence. Not the physical violence — the iron rods, the burning, the killing. The final violence was the one that happened inside: the moment when I looked at the thing that connected me to my grandfather and my father and the Golden Temple at dawn and saw not devotion but vulnerability.

I untied it slowly. The fabric unwound — five metres of cloth that had been wound with the particular precision that Amma had taught me when I was twelve, the precision that Bauji checked every morning, the turban that was not an accessory but an identity. It came off. My hair — long, uncut, the kesh that was one of the five articles of Sikh faith — fell to my shoulders.

Elina watched. She said nothing. There was nothing to say. She put her hand on my knee — a touch that was not comfort but witness, the hand of a person who understood that she was watching something break and that the breaking needed to happen without intervention.

Prakash, from his spot on the floor, said quietly: "It doesn't change who you are."

"It changes everything," I said.

"It changes what people see. It doesn't change what you are."

"In India, what people see is what you are. The rest is philosophy."

He had no answer for that. There was no answer. The turban sat on the bed like a shed skin — the particular shape of it still holding, the fabric retaining the memory of the head it had wrapped, the form persisting after the function had been abandoned.

I never put it back on. In forty years, I have never retied my turban. I cut my hair in 1985 — at a barber shop in Pune, a Maharashtrian barber who did not understand the weight of what he was cutting and who charged me fifteen rupees for the most consequential haircut of my life.

Bauji never mentioned it. When I went home for Diwali — the first Diwali after the violence, the first Diwali in an Amritsar that had been broken and was trying to reassemble itself from the pieces — Bauji looked at my bare head and said nothing. The nothing was louder than any words. The nothing contained: disappointment and understanding and the particular grief of a father who saw his son's capitulation and recognized it as a reasonable response to an unreasonable world and hated both the response and the world that had necessitated it.

Amma cried. Briefly. Then she made chai and asked about my studies and did not mention the hair again.

Esha — I saw Esha that Diwali, at Pushpa's Dhaba, which had reopened with the particular resilience of a business that understood that people needed chai and samosas regardless of whether the world was burning. Esha looked at my bare head and her too-large eyes filled with something that was not tears but the thing that comes before tears: the recognition that something has been lost and the assessment of whether the loss is survivable.

"I understand," she said. And then, because Esha was Esha: "I hate that I understand."

We sat at Pushpa's. The samosa was the same. The chai was the same. The world was not the same and would never be the same, but Pushpa's Dhaba operated on a timeline that was independent of history, serving chai and samosas with the particular constancy of a place that had decided, decades ago, that its job was to provide warmth and sustenance and that the world's job was to provide the crises that required them.

Elina was in Pune. Esha was in Amritsar. And I was between them — geographically, emotionally, the particular purgatory of a man who had two homes and no home, two women and no clarity, a bare head and a turban that sat in a drawer in his hostel room and that he would carry from city to city for the rest of his life without ever putting it back on.

The lie of omission was still intact. Esha did not know about Elina. Elina knew about Esha — I had told her, in Goa, on the Mandovi, with the particular honesty that the river seemed to require — but Elina knew about Esha as a past, not a present. As a chapter that had ended, not a story that was still being written.

Both women believed they had all the information. Neither did. And the gap between what they believed and what was true was the space in which the next decade of my life would unfold — a decade of marriage and fatherhood and failure and the particular destruction that comes not from malice but from the inability to tell the truth when the truth is the only thing that could save you.