Gurvinder Singh
‘But have you ever heard a story in which the evil person trumps at the end?’ The boy thought for a while before replying. ‘No,’ he said, ‘but before they lose, they harm the good people. That is what I am afraid of.’
— From Nadeem Aslam’s ‘The Blind Man’s Garden’
My father breathed his last on May 28. Unable to cope with Covid’s onslaught on his lungs, he slipped away unconscious on a ventilator. He would have turned 77. Born in 1944 in Kamoke, a town north of Lahore, he was nicknamed ‘Baagi’ after the rebellious spirit of freedom fighters. Foreboding the events of 1947, the Sikh family moved to Amritsar just before Partition to avoid forced displacement. But fate would have it otherwise. On a day when my grandfather was away in Kamoke on a work trip, a mob set their mixed faith neighbourhood’s Muslim homes on fire. And it is anybody’s guess, people of which faith(s) would have set fire to the Muslim homes in Amritsar. And they would have known that fire does not discriminate between walls belonging to people of different faiths, the way a virus does not differentiate between the religion of one’s lungs.