Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [89]
A series of explosions shook the Sikh’s house. Immediately afterward the veranda went up in flames. There were shouts of, “Death to Pulpul Singh!” And others of, “We’re avenging you, Indira!”
Salar appeared, brandishing a knife. “Prepare to die!” he shouted, and advanced toward the terror-crazed Sikh. Another second and Salar would have lunged at Singh. But the moment he raised his arm, someone intervened.
“Put down your knife, brother,” ordered Sister Felicity, seizing the young man firmly by the wrist.
Stunned, Salar’s friends did not dare interfere. Ganga Ram stepped forward, accompanied by his wife Dalima. She still walked unsteadily. Nevertheless she had managed to catch up with the crowd. She had just seen the nun throw herself between Salar and the moneylender.
“Killing that bastard wouldn’t do any good!” Dalima cried, turning on the rioters. “I’ve a better idea!” She pulled from her sari a small pair of scissors. “Let’s chop this Sikh’s beard off! That’s a far worse form of vengeance than death!”
Ganga flashed his wife a smile of admiration. “Dalima’s right, let’s cut the shit’s beard off and throw it on the flames of his house.”
Salar, the tailor Bassi and Iqbal grabbed the usurer and pinned him against the trunk of a palm tree. Dalima handed the scissors to Belram Mukkadam. After all, it was only right that the manager of the teahouse should have the honor of humiliating the man who had exploited him for so many years. Resigned to his fate, the usurer did not protest. The process took a while. Everyone held their breath. The scene was both pathetic and sublime. When there was not a trace of hair left on Singh’s cheeks, neck or skull, a joyful ovation went up into a sky obscured by the smoke from his flaming house.
Then Mukkadam’s deep voice was heard to say, “Indira, rest in peace! The poor of the Kali Grounds have avenged you.”
The vengeance wrought by the occupants of the slums on the Sikh moneylender was a tiny spark in a terrible explosion that erupted throughout India against the followers of Guru Nanak. The flames of Indira Gandhi’s funeral pyre had scarcely gone out before violence was unleashed in the country’s principal cities. Everywhere Sikhs were brutally attacked, their houses, schools and temples were set on fire. Soon the fire department, hospitals and emergency services were overwhelmed by the flare-up of violence, which reminded many people of the horrors that surrounded the country’s partition in 1947. Despite a rigorous curfew and the intervention of the army, more than three thousand Sikhs were immolated on the altar of vengeance.
On the morning of November 2, this murderous frenzy hit the City of the Begums in a particularly horrible fashion. Forty-five-year-old Gurcharan Singh Khanuja, the Sikh officer in command of the electrical and mechanical engineering corps stationed in Bhopal, came out of his barracks accompanied by an escort to go to the train station. Several members of his family—his two brothers, his brother-in-law and nephews—were returning from a pilgrimage to the Golden Temple of Amritsar. When Khanuja opened the door to the compartment reserved for his family, he found nothing but charred corpses. Assassins had stopped the train between Amritsar and Bhopal, slit the throats of all the Sikh