An Ode Called Amritsar

If you live in Lahore and choose to go North-West, you will be in Gujrawala in about an hour’s time. And if you move from Lahore to the East, on the same Grand Trunk (GT) Road which Sher Shah Suri, the Afghan Warrior-King, carved out, in about the same time you could be standing in Amritsar—except for the ordeal of crossing the Indo-Pakistan border.

How can one cultivate memories for a city without visiting it?

Although just a few miles away from my Lahore home, throughout my life this city has seemed years, if not decades, away. Like a musty page out of history, somehow unreal, the sharpest acuity inscribed on my mind concerning it, was that of the massacre that my grandfather had survived. A massacre brought to notoriety by the immensity of its scale, the chaos engendered by Partition in 1947.

But we were here at last! As the girls with me ran off to do their shopping, I set out on a much weightier mission. The city had been stamped in my conscious, now was the time to adjust, to fit in the pieces, fill in the colors and bond with it directly. This town of a few million has a place in history that few towns have, yet this is the last thing you feel while walking in it.

The city has survived two butcheries too gory in comparison to the size of the city. Amritsar seemed too petite, too delicate to have gone through the ordeals it had been. Yet, in a way, as you walk through the narrow streets that somehow resemble Lahore with their uneven bumps, numerous children and puddles, you have your chance of reliving history. The city had been linked with nostalgia and violence. Two older people in my house missing a home they couldn’t revisit, talking of people who never returned.

Sometimes I wonder what perception would develop of the partition once the older generation, the veterans and victims are gone?

Its one thing to read about Jallianwalla Bagh and another thing to live with a man who lived and grew up close to it around the time the dreaded events occurred there and knew those who had died in the massacre or who had lost their loved ones in it.

The board outside Jallianwalla Bagh reads: “a Land mark in our struggle for Freedom.� The entrance was unbelievably narrow for a park that has the capacity to hold so many thousands. What had anybody gained by blocking it some 89 years back?

The carnage had actually acted as a sort of catalyst for the Freedom Struggle, but it is hard to confirm or deny that without this blood bath, the passion would not have been strong enough to free the country from the British yoke in any case.

Due to the anguish that the massacre brought, and the sordid images that it engendered, I had never actually anticipated that through the tunnel like entrance, one enters a park, resembling the Jinnah (formerly Lawrence) Gardens in Lahore: with trees and tracks, people, greenery and gardeners. The fullness of life in the park, made walking through it up to the well (in which many of the martyrs jumped and died) quite trouble-free. The well had been presented in the movie “Gandhi� too—the phenomenon resembles the desperation of those who jumped from the World Trade Center windows on 9/11, before the building fell.

The piece de resistance in Amritsar was the Golden Temple. The temple seemed floating in the emerald pond, amidst the cool breezes and the sonorous recital of the Granth-sahib by its believers. Each recitation had its own style and tune but all seemed melancholic and wounded. The whole scene had a very spiritual feel to it, almost poetic in nature, perhaps the self-same feeling that compelled the Emperor Akbar to gift land and revenue to the Guru’s daughter on her marriage, which helped expand the town.

It had a white floor, the cleanest I had seen in India and the first one to remind me of the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina; though the floor in Medina was cooler due to the air conditioning, but the feeling was somewhat similar.

Unlike most mosques, it is not possible to lose your shoes here. They have evolved a workable mechanism for saving them. We had to go in the basement and take off our shoes where a number of old-bearded Sikh uncles gave us tokens. You get your shoes back only if you hand-over the token.

The temple is, of course, Golden—has a golden dome which resembled that of a mosque. One of the temples is on an extension of the floor in the pond. The pond, though green, is very clean. My instinctive fear was what if I fall into it? But the fear itself prevented suffering from such an occurrence. It had black fish in it- which seemed to have the habit of swimming near the edge. Some of the fish even followed the visitors around the temple—or so I felt.

A place good enough for any religious activity, or any other life-affirming one: eating, sitting, walking, perhaps even raising ones children. It is too tranquil a place to be seen as a fort for militants to hide in, an improbable one for ruthless police forces to stomp in. Hard to believe just twenty five years ago just such a tragedy in this place had caused the deaths of thousands of believers in Delhi and other parts of India and ended the life of one of the most celebrated leaders of the nation.

The religious power is not all that the Golden Temple has. It was also a symbol of the Sikh secular power, of their unity and past rule, and an historical target that had often faced aggression by invaders—it indeed had many, many tales to tell.

The temple has special religious gravity, at least in my opinion, because the presence of the Guru Granth-sahib, the Holy Scripture of the Sikh religion, the sanctity of which is maintained like that of a living entity. Placed on the Manji Sahib—a throne—you have to be clean, quite modestly covered, respectful, to even think of approaching it. No eating, drinking, no one sits on a platform higher than the Guru Granth. Though not as elaborate, this treatment is rather similar to what we give the Quran. This treatment of the Quran, apparent in Pakistan and India, was radically different to what was meted out to it among the Saudis when we visited Saudi Arabia. So, there is indeed a major ‘cultural’ difference’ between practitioners of Islam here and in other parts, while we seem in many respects to enjoy closer proximity to our South Asian neighbors?

As we sat on the Tonga (horse cart) to leave, a little kid crossed the street, bare-foot and half-naked. Perhaps my grandfather had been like this kid, seventy years back. Running around freely in a Pre-Partition Amritsar, still safe and happy in his naïve childhood?

On hearing that I was about to visit her ancestral city, my mother gave me instructions to reach her childhood home from the railway station, where she had learnt most of what she knew today. If Freud was right that the first five years are the most potent in life, then this is where she had spent them. And if Nietzsche was right about the eternal return then she might continue to take birth and grow up here, eternally.

It was no use shattering such illusions, which served to comfort her. It was very difficult to announce that her nest had been altered in her absence to the extent that hardly a street matched her reminiscences. The city where her childhood existed had dissolved in the reality syrup.

When the busses moved out of the city, the nostalgia overtook me again. The one hour journey back took decades.

After visiting it, I realized Amritsar is not all about blood, massacre and escapes. It’s a city with huge blocks of history, childhoods, memories and romance. The picture in my mind has readjusted. The gold of the temple is alluring, the red of the massacre is green, and the streets are as bumpy as Lahore’s and, maybe, even more vibrant because of the all the “Choorian� (bangles) and turbans. Kids run, men stare and women giggle. The city is thriving and waiting to be visited.