Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (35 page)

“Sat Sri Akal,”
Pa-ji responded. “How long is this curfew going to continue, putthar?”

“I don’t know. But it is not a good idea even to leave this building. The army has entered the compound and
I hear there might be trouble. Have you seen them? How hard they walk on this sacred ground. Even God must be terrified!” He lowered his voice. “And it is not just soldiers who desecrate with guns and bombs. Over our heads, on the roofs and under our feet in the storage rooms, our own brothers and sons and fathers, armed too, stamp as hard as demons.”

Pa-ji cleared his throat and the young man became businesslike. “But is there something I can do for you?”

“We wanted some water—to drink and to wash, just in case,” Pa-ji said apologetically. “But if it is too much trouble …”

“No trouble, I will organize it.”

“Can we have a few candles also?” Bibi-ji asked. “We will pay for them, of course.”

Back in their room, Pa-ji tiredly changed into his pyjamas and lay down with a sigh on the narrow bed. Bibi-ji lit one of the candles and stuck it on the rickety table. She moved around silently, performing her nightly rituals of brushing her teeth, washing and creaming her face and brushing her hair, all of which she had neglected the previous night in her exhaustion. The grooming soothed her tired mind as much as it did her scalp and skin. She felt Pa-ji’s eyes on her in the candlelit darkness.

“You are beautiful, my Bebby,” he murmured.

She moved over to his cot and leaned forward to place a kiss on the top of his head. She noticed that his once-thick, long hair had grown sparse; she could see his scalp gleaming through. She stroked his face. “Sleep, Pa-ji, sleep. Tomorrow we will ask Balraj to come and take us to
his house if the curfew has lifted. I was a foolish woman to insist on staying here.”

“You are never foolish, my Bebby,” Pa-ji said. He caught her hand and carried it to his mouth. His moustache tickled the skin and she laughed softly. Pa-ji lay back and was soon asleep, his snores reverberating around the room in a rhythm that had long become familiar to Bibi-ji.

She could not sleep, so she sat on the hard chair by the window, the candle flickering beside her, wondering what the day would bring. Out in the temple courtyard that surrounded the shrine and the dark lake, in the low light from dying bonfires, she could see groups of men gathering near various buildings and hear the sounds of running. Occasionally she heard a sharp command in the darkness. She fell asleep on the chair, her head uncomfortably wedged between the window frame and the wall.

A series of sounds, like those of a backfiring car, woke her abruptly. Pa-ji too was startled awake. He sat up and said blearily, “Bebby? What happened?”

“I don’t know. Something is going on outside,” Bibi-ji replied. She looked out again and was nearly blinded by a floodlight. A loudspeaker stuttered to life and a staccato voice announced, first in Punjabi and then in Hindi, that pilgrims inside the buildings were to come out immediately. They would be escorted off the temple premises by the army. Then there was silence.

“Where do they expect us to go in the middle of the night?” Pa-ji said, getting out of bed and joining Bibi-ji by the window.

“What should we do?” Bibi-ji asked. The candle had guttered away into a blob. She lit another one and squinted in the dim light at her watch. It was four o’clock, an hour before dawn. A crow cawed urgently in the distance, awakened by the bright floodlight, and soon other birds joined in a pre-dawn chorus. Another sound rose above the outcry—that of the morning raagis coming faintly from the direction of the shrine, beginning their chant to a new day. But their song was interrupted by the sound of a helicopter chopping through the dark air, brutish and ugly. Looking out of her window, Bibi-ji saw a circle of light beaming down from it and landing on one of the buildings beyond their own. The loudspeaker crackled again, and the disembodied voice asked women, children and the aged to come out. She saw a small group emerge from the guest house beside theirs and heard the thud of army boots as a group of soldiers sprinted across the expanse of marble floor to provide the promised escort. The group started moving towards the gate closest to the guest houses. The morning singers had entered the Harimandir Sahib, and their singing, fainter now, continued to thread its way into the cacophony—soldiers’ boots, the rumble of a tank entering the sacred space, men shouting indistinctly, the buzz of static from the army loudspeaker and the clatter of helicopters above it all.

Pa-ji moved to the door of their room. Opening it slightly, he peered into the corridor. “Better get dressed,” he said pulling his head back in and latching the door. “We will have to get out of here. I will see if it is possible to phone Balraj.”

“Perhaps we can take a tonga or a taxi or something?” Bibi-ji said, clamping a lid on her rising panic. A moment later she remembered that a curfew had been imposed— they would not be able to find any transportation. Nothing in her previous experience had prepared her for a moment like this. “What kind of government would send an army inside a temple, Pa-ji? Is this Mrs. Gandhi truly mad?”

Pa-ji pulled on his trousers and shrugged quickly into a shirt. “We don’t know what is happening. There are extremists here too, it seems, inside their own sacred temple, defiling it with guns and bombs. It is better not to judge anybody yet.”

They left their suitcases in the room, locked the door behind them and joined the growing crowd of people that was emerging from other rooms and pooling near the reception desk. Bibi-ji spotted the two schoolteachers, Rani and Kashmir, holding some of the small boys by the hand and sharply instructing the others to stay close. “Hold on to my dupatta, hold my kameez,” they took turns repeating to the boys. “Whatever happens, don’t let go.”

Bibi-ji pushed through the crowd towards the two women while Pa-ji headed for the reception desk, which was already surrounded by people, to ask for a phone. “Wait for me at the door,” he said before leaving her side. “I don’t want you to go out there alone.”

She nodded and continued towards the teachers. “Do you want some help?” she asked.

The women nodded gratefully, and Bibi-ji took the small cold hands of two of the boys.

“What is happening?” she asked. “Is it safe to leave? Did you hear those helicopters?”

“Yes, we heard. It was impossible to sleep,” said Rani. “If we stick close to the soldiers, they say we will be safe. They will put us on buses and we can go home.”

“The curfew has been lifted, then?” Bibi-ji asked with relief.

“No, no, the curfew is still on. But the army wants to evacuate the pilgrims—the women and children and old people. I hear that they are detaining all the men in case there are terrorists among them.”

“But these buses will take us wherever we want to go?” Bibi-ji asked doubtfully. “So many of us?”

A short man beside them turned and said, “You are right, they won’t take us where we wish to go. Why should they? We will be driven to police stations and kept there until the end of curfew. Then we will be allowed to catch the bus or take a rickshaw home. But I don’t know what out-of-towners will do. The borders of Amritsar are sealed. No traffic in or out. Not even the trains are running. We are all trapped here.”

Kashmir looked fearfully at her companion. “Rani, I am not leaving this place. Where are we to go with these children if we cannot catch a bus back to the village?”

“She is right,” Rani sighed. She took the two little boys from Bibi-ji. “You carry on, sister. We will have to see what is possible for us.”

Bibi-ji nodded and pushed her way through the crowd towards the reception desk and Pa-ji. “Did you phone Balraj?” she asked hopefully.

“The phone lines have been cut,” Pa-ji said.

“Then what will we do out there? Nothing is open. How will we manage?”

“Just like all these other people,” Pa-ji replied. He held her hand in his, warm and firm, and they made their way out of the guest house to a small gathering of pilgrims. They seemed to be the only people outside the dark buildings, Bibi-ji noticed. “Where is everyone? Where are the soldiers?” she whispered to Pa-ji. “I thought you said there would be soldiers to protect us.”

Pa-ji shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe we should go back inside.”

Bibi-ji looked at her watch. It was five o’clock. She could not see the helicopter any longer. Now the sound of birds could barely be heard over the buzz of voices around her.

Suddenly a sharp sound rang out and a woman in the front of the crowd fell to her knees. Another woman bent down to help her and began to scream. Something was very wrong. An elderly man beside Bibi-ji was the first to realize what was happening. He turned back towards the guest house, pulling two small girls after him.

“Inside!” he shouted as he pushed past Bibi-ji. “They’re shooting! Get back inside!”

Someone else took up his cry. “They are shooting, Oh God, they are shooting us!”

People churned around, trying to run this way or that. Who was shooting whom? No one seemed to know. Bibi-ji felt someone shove her hard from behind, someone in a desperate rush to get back inside the guest house. She
staggered and felt her hand being wrenched away from Pa-ji’s.

“Pa-ji?” She stopped abruptly, turned and shouted. “Pa-ji!”

She struggled to reach Pa-ji, who had been dragged away from her, away from the guest house, by the panicked movement of the crowd. She spotted his tall frame, his dark blue turban, impeccably wound as always, despite the fact that the only light in their room had been from the candle. He turned and waved to her urgently. Go in, his hand said, go in.

Another shot rang out. Bibi-ji saw her husband fall forward as if someone had slammed him hard from behind. She waited for him to rise. She no longer saw the crowd or heard the woman screaming beside the other fallen body. She was aware only of herself standing there and Pa-ji lying on the ground a few steps away. Reaching him, she knelt down slowly, her dupatta settling around his still body.

“Pa-ji?” she said, in the tone she always used to wake him for his morning tea. “Come, Pa-ji. It is not safe here.”

A
knife in the heart. A dagger in the back. An insult. An outrage. Shock, then anger, spread across the world like acid, burning into the soul of every Sikh, turning even moderate, temple once-in-a-while worshippers into true believers. Their most holy place had been desecrated by the Indian government. Tanks had rolled across delicate marble floors, crushing ancient inlay. The library had been consumed by flames; centuries-old sacred manuscripts had been destroyed. Pilgrims had been killed. Nobody was sure how many—some claimed that it was two thousand people and others insisted that it was much higher. Humiliation, indignity, death.

The Delhi Junction was closed indefinitely. At the Taj Mahal, Bibi-ji slept in the spare bedroom, unable to use the pink and gold room she had shared with Pa-ji. When she looked in the mirror now, she found that she had grown old. All these years she had seen herself through her husband’s eyes—a beautiful woman who never aged. But he was no longer here to look at her, and she crumbled, an old woman alone.

She could not remember much of what had happened after Pa-ji caught the bullet in his chest on that morning two months ago. She carried in her head nothing but the song of the raagis and the wail of a woman. Someone, she did not know who, had carried Pa-ji into the guest house. She must somehow have contacted Balraj and Manpreet, but she did not remember doing so. A funeral had been arranged for Pa-ji, but again she had little recollection of any of this.

Balraj had accompanied her to Delhi a month later when the statewide travel ban was lifted, and she had stayed with Nimmo for a few days before flying back to Vancouver. Mixed with her grief was her shame at having truly lost Nimmo’s son. Jasbeer had disappeared. All of Balraj’s efforts to locate him through contacts in the police services had yielded nothing. He had left the Damdami Taksal two years ago, Balraj was told. With some other students. But they did not know where he had gone.

Back in Vancouver, her friends arrived, offering words of sympathy. Leela and Balu, the Majumdars and all those—so many—whose lives had crossed hers and Pa-ji’s. But each time she accepted their words of condolence,
she felt that in acknowledging Pa-ji’s death she was in fact causing it.

“How could this have happened in a
temple?”
she asked Lalloo, who had moved temporarily into the Taj Mahal. Leela had offered to come and stay with her, but Bibi-ji found that in this time of mourning she preferred her own people: she found comfort in hearing the sound of her mother tongue all around her. Then there were the inevitable house guests, those she would not turn away even now, for Pa-ji’s sake, whose voices she heard at night in the living room in front of the big television screen, rising as one in anger.

Lalloo’s voice was often the loudest, bitter in its pain. “They have no respect for us Sikhs,” she heard him cry one night. “That’s why they could go in like that and trample on our beliefs. I am beginning to like the idea of a divorce from India.”