Between Lives

摘要

In 1984, when we were eleventh-class students at Modern School, New Delhi, my friend Amit Joshi started going out with a Sikh girl called Jaspreet. The rest of us were envious. Our envy flowed from the fact that Amit and Jaspreet were doing something we could only dream about; they were going out together. In our puritanical world, where marriages were arranged, romance was off limits. By daring to go together, however, Amit and Jaspreet had shown that they were different from the rest of us. Then on October 31, 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two Sikh bodyguards. For the next three days, riots erupted in New Delhi. Mobs targeted Sikhs and their property. One such mob broke into Jaspreet's house. Her father, a retired army officer, was beaten up. He barely escaped with his life, that too because her kid brother somehow got his hands on his father's old service revolver and fired off a couple of shots. The recoil threw the kid to the floor. But the shots had the desired impact. They scared away the mob. But, by then, the house had been ransacked and looters had carted off many of the family's belongings. Two months later, Jaspreet left for Canada with her family. In the wake of the riots, they evidently felt India was not safe for them any longer. Amit never saw her again.