Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (36 page)

“Yes, Khalistan is what we need!” This was a voice she did not recognize, a young man recently arrived from India. “They forget we are Sikhs, the lions who protected them from the Mussulman invaders, and now they treat us like this?”

“Blood for blood!” shouted another young man. “For every dead Sikh, a hundred Hindus.”

Bibi-ji listened, silent, dazed.

“We should hold protest marches every day in front of the Indian High Commission,” Lalloo said. “With the biggest rally on August 15th—India’s Independence Day.”

“I wish to join the rally too,” Bibi-ji said to Lalloo the next morning, surprising herself. She had never been one
for protest marches and processions. But this year she needed to do something symbolic, for Pa-ji’s sake. Instead of celebrating Independence Day at the Patels’ as she had done for so many years, she would march in anger.

On the morning of August 15th she combed her long grey hair into a high bun, wore the red salwar kameez that Pa-ji had particularly liked on her, put on all her matching bangles and joined the protesters. “Indira Gandhi, down, down!” they shouted. “Khalistan forever!” “Blood in return for blood!” By the time she returned home, she was hoarse from shouting. And she was as hard-eyed in her rage against the Indian government and Hindus as the young men who surrounded her had been. That night, for the first time since Pa-ji’s death, she fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

In early September The Delhi Junction reopened, with Lalloo at the cashier’s desk. Grim and unsmiling, he had abandoned the natty suit he usually wore for a plain white pathan outfit, had replaced his hat with a turban and had allowed his beard and moustache to grow. He had temporarily taken over the running of the restaurant. Bibi-ji had not come in since her return from India; she knew she would only see Pa-ji sitting at the till or leaning over the tables to talk to his customers, and would hear his bellowing laugh and cheerful voice.

By midday, the café was full of Pa-ji’s friends; even some of those who had shouted him down at the gurudwara committee meetings came to share their grief. And that old quartet of friends—Balu, Majumdar, Shah and Menon—were there too, sitting at their usual table.

“I still can’t believe it,” Balu murmured, looking at the counter, which seemed empty despite Lalloo’s presence. “What a horrible thing.”

Majumdar nodded but said nothing. He had taken Pa-ji’s death hard, for he had known the old Sikh for many years.

“We’re going to miss him,” Menon said. “Have you seen Bibi-ji since she came home?”

Balu nodded. “Leela and I went over to her house. She looked terrible.
Terrible.
Poor thing.”

An altercation broke out at a neighbouring table between an elderly Sikh and two younger men. “Are you saying that it was okay for the Indian army to invade our temple? What kind of talk is that?” one of the younger men shouted.

The older man held up his hand. “All I am saying is that there were militants and snipers from our own community hiding in every corner of the temple complex as well. They too had stockpiled arms, they too committed sacrilege by turning our temple into a war zone. How do we know it was not their bullet that killed our Pa-ji?”

Harish Shah, who had been quiet until then, leaned over and said in a low voice to his friends, “He is right, you know. What was Bhindranwale doing inside the Golden Temple? A preacher with guns and bombs? It is okay for him to start a war inside his own temple, but it was wrong of Indira Gandhi to send in the troops to stop it? What else could she have done?”

“I agree that it was wrong of Bhindranwale to turn the temple into an arsenal, Shah,” Majumdar said. “But Mrs. G could have used different tactics to deal with the situation.”

“You cannot destroy a nest of vipers by stroking them with your hand, Majumdar,” Shah replied, raising his voice. “What different tactics are you suggesting, may I ask?”

“She could have cut off water and electricity and waited until the food supplies had run out as well. That would have smoked them all out soon enough. And it would have avoided unnecessary bloodshed and destruction, not to mention further stoking of resentment.”

One of the young men at the neighbouring table scraped his chair back hard, glared at Balu’s table, and said something in Punjabi. The elderly Sikh caught him by the wrist and murmured placatingly. But the young man continued to glower at Balu and his friends before adding in English, “Bastard Hindus, you will pay for this.”

Shah looked belligerent, but before he could say something to exacerbate the tension building between the two tables, Lalloo came over, unasked, with their bill. “Maybe you should leave, my friends,” he suggested. “It might be better.”

“What if we don’t wish to leave?” Shah was irate. “I would like another tea, if you please.”

But his friends had risen to their feet. Majumdar paid the bill and urged Shah out of his chair and through the door. “Sorry, Lalloo,” he said as they left the restaurant. “Everyone is feeling emotional about Pa-ji. Shah didn’t mean anything.”

Outside, as they made their way to their cars, Shah turned on Majumdar. “I don’t bloody need you to apologize for me. I meant every word I said. And what do you mean by dragging me out like this? I wanted to tell that
turbaned thug a thing or two. Didn’t you hear? He called us ‘Bastard Hindus’!”

“Why don’t we go to my place and talk there instead of shouting on the street like this?” Balu suggested. A group of young Sikh men brushed past on their way into The Delhi Junction, and he looked nervously at them.

“No, I have to go home,” Menon said. “But you know, Shah, I heard from some friends in India that it is even more tense in Punjab now. Anyone with a beard and a turban is suspect. The army and the police are dragging people out of their houses in the middle of the night and taking them away.”

“To be tortured, the rumours go,” Majumdar added. “People disappear without trace.”

A starched, sharp-edged silence followed. Shah shook his head and laughed. “Really, where do you get all this information? Or should I call it
mis
information?”

“Well, I heard it some months ago from a young man who had been tortured,” Majumdar said. “Pa-ji brought him to meet me. He wanted some advice on how the poor fellow could enrol in a course at our college.”

“Nonsense. He must have made it up.” Shah laughed again. “And I have decided not to go to The Delhi Junction anymore. Not that I have anything against Bibi-ji, but I don’t trust her waiters—or Lalloo, for that matter. Did you see the look in his eyes when he brought us the bill? Those bastards are so angry with us, I wouldn’t be surprised if they spit in our food before serving it.”

Us and Them,
Balu thought uneasily. When did we split into these groups? The Singhs were family. How could
Shah, who had known them even longer than he had, abandon the friendship so abruptly and without a second thought?

Two weeks later. All day Bibi-ji had been trying to clear out Pa-ji’s papers, but she had got nowhere; she had wept over every one. She could not bear to move a single page of his manuscript, which he had left spread out on his desk, or to straighten his chair. Abandoning the attempt to do anything in the room, she instead wandered around it, touching the rows of memorabilia on his bookshelves that were fighting for space with his books. From the walls, the photographs of his “relatives” gazed back at her, meaningless now without Pa-ji to give them life with his stories.

She looked out the window to see the view her husband had enjoyed when he stood in this spot and noticed a man coming up the driveway, a backpack slung over one shoulder, wearing a black turban, walking with a loping stride, his beard unruly and longer than she remembered it. The familiar figure was unmistakeable. She hurried out of the room and down the stairs.

“Jassu is home,” she called to the young men sitting in the living room. “Jasbeer is back,” she called to the women, who were busy—as if they had never stopped—making food in the kitchen. She opened the door and held out her arms. “I haven’t lost you, I haven’t lost you,” she whispered.

Jasbeer hugged her close. “I heard,” he said. “I just heard, Bibi-ji.”

He led her back into the house. Gently, he sat her down on the couch. “Tell me what happened,” he said.

Another week, and Dr. Randhawa arrived again at the Taj Mahal. He was as tall and grey as ever, and accompanied by an even larger entourage. This time Bibi-ji prepared a lavish welcome for him, cooking a variety of dishes with her own hands and insisting that his acolytes stay in the house with him as long as they wished. She suppressed her dislike of his pomposity, his arrogance. He had been right after all, she told herself. The Indians had humiliated the Sikhs and they had killed her Pa-ji. It was now a question of defending the faith, the thing that gave them, as a tribe, a face and a distinction.

Now large meetings were held at the Taj Mahal every day. Bibi-ji did not know many of the people who attended, and after a while she stopped trying to remember their names. Talk of revenge and of Khalistan whipped around like a bitter wind, fuelled by the arrival of yet more people from Punjab. Their stories were of more brutality, murders, disappearances, torture, humiliation. Jasbeer told Bibi-ji how dangerous it was to be a turbaned Sikh man in Punjab, how you could be picked up by the police or the army, thrown into jail or shot dead in fake “encounters.” She was tempted to ask him what he had been doing during his long absence, how he came to know such things, but realized that she was afraid to find out.

October arrived in a flurry of red and gold leaves. Bibi-ji still moved mechanically—she could not believe that so many months of her life had gone by without Pa-ji beside
her. One day, as she sat at her old spot in the kitchen—at the table, sorting out the mail—she saw a flimsy envelope from Delhi and noticed the familiar looping, careful handwriting. With a pang of pleasure or grief—she was not sure which—she picked up the envelope, tore it open and skimmed through it.

A
crow cawed insistently on the lawn of Indira Gandhi’s residence and a flock of mynah birds quarrelled and twittered nearby. The roses, which had been plump and in full bloom only a week ago, had dropped most of their petals.

Indira Gandhi hurriedly finished breakfast with her family. She was in a rush to meet filmmaker Peter Ustinov, who was making a documentary on her for BBC television. Wearing her favourite orange cotton sari, she cut across the compound to an opening in the hedge separating her home from the gardens of her office. Behind her petite, bustling figure hurried a police constable carrying an umbrella, trying to shade her from the sun. But Indira
Gandhi walked much faster than he did, and he could barely keep up. A train of other people from her office followed her like ducklings. For a woman of sixty-seven, the prime minister was remarkably brisk.