October 31, 1984

When I pass a patka or a turban
in traffic, I add it to the day’s score
and ask myself the obvious question,
when did Sikhs, who made Delhi urban,
become rare sightings? Was it ’84,
or the pogrom-affirming election

later that year? Or some other reason?
I was twenty-seven when it started,
IGan shot to rags, the endless dirge
on the radio, then open season.
Gangs of grinning men stopped buses, sorted
men out by hair and killed them on the verge.

After a week when the killing stopped,
how did Sikh boys take the bus to school?
I’d want a world where patkas were the norm.
The Jew, the Kurd, the Bosniak, the Copt,
know, when push meets shove, that numbers rule.
With pogroms all majorities have form.

Should we then practise being minorities,
for all those times we find ourselves alone,
spooked by solitude’s still, soundless dangers?
Because petitioning the authorities
won’t calm that queasy sense of being known
and recognised by perfect strangers.

Imagine ’84 with victims swapped.
How far would I have gone to get away?
Speed-dialled a beard off Blinkit’s shelf,
changed briefs for stripey boxers, dhoti-wrapped
my head to try to live another day,
and died in motley, a cartoon of myself?

Role playing doesn’t work since empathy
turns on feeling like the other felt
and it’s very hard to relive murder.
The most I feel is ardent sympathy;
I play the social hand that I’ve been dealt,
the good desi, the bien-pensant birder.

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