Amritsar. 1+ million people rich. Only 36 miles from the Pakistan border. That was our destination on December 23rd.
It began two days ago as we stuffed our heavy suitcases into a cab. A fifteen-hour plane ride awaited us. It passed, thankfully, event-less. As we stood in the security line in Doha, Doha reminded my daughter of Jamaica. Palm trees fluttered outside the window of the dark evening at 6 o’clock, and the sluggishness of the lines was in keeping with the relaxed Jamaican culture as well. That was also the precise time my oldest started to miss his friends. Realization that we were ways away from home, in a disparate world, sunk into him just as jet lag. Kids started noticing the Burkhas and the Saudi dress of men, and they buried me in a flurry of questions as to why these people dressed so weird. Not weird, different, I repeated to them.
We rode out from the airport of Doha with brightly-lit light poles surrounding us with verses from Quran sculpted on them. Beige, white—all light-colored building marked the desert city of Doha. A picture of a man kept flashing at customs security and was now displayed on numerous buildings. A little research informed us that the picture represented freedom and such ideals the country stood for instead of a dictator I thought it to be.
Radisson Blu stay was comfortable, so was our ride back to the airport and the next flight. Soon, our footsteps landed in Amritsar, our destination on the 23rd. At customs, my littlest fell. His lip bled profusely and swelled up. A fellow passenger handed me a box of tissues she asked me not to return. We reunited with Nana, Nani outside. We met our Mamaji and Mamiji before entering the city center – a constant destination in Amritsar where we pay our respects at the Golden Temple each time. Our agenda was slightly different today.
As we parked and emerged, making a chain with our clasped hands and beating hearts, we went past the temple into side alleys, where the alleys shrunk smaller with each turn, the potholes larger, and the piles of garbage and dogs sleeping over them higher. You see, life does not live in the posh neighborhoods of the outskirts of any city, or at the Lawrence Road of Amritsar alone. It bustles in the city center. My oldest expressed his feeling of being out-of-place again, his biting desire to be home with his friends. I empathized, but it was not a goal to shield realities from my children about India, not about the poverty, not about the pollution that seems to top itself with each of our visits, and certainly not about the city center where so much history took place. We were a street away from Jallianwala Bagh where 1600+ people were massacred and additional 1100 injured by the British Indian army on April 13th, 1919, 99 years ago. The Golden Temple too hid scars of an attack summoned by the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi who was later shot dead, unfortunately. The city hid these wounds in its bosom and bore the burden of history, a place where a lot had occurred, lots of phenomena were still unexplained, and it bustled forward with energy for more to come.
A twenty-minute trek brought us to our destination, the Kesar da Dhabha. Dhabha is a fancy name for street food in Punjab. My son ate his paratha as I savored the Paratha Thaali, and the taste of the cholla and daal has still to leave my palate. We checked off a bucket list of eating at an authentic dhabha in Amritsar.
Moments later, we were shopping, and our last destination was the temple itself. Wind grazed my son’s hair as his face lit up in the auto rickshaw. He said, “Mama, I am better now. It is the wake-up time in America.”
We were feeling the energies and as we stood outside Golden Temple, knowing that we did not have the time to go inside this time given our adventure in the interior streets of Amritsar, we steepled our hands and closed our eyes as children recited the Japji Saheb. It was my quiet moment of the day, a precious one, a rare one.
Last stop was getting jalebis from Jalebi Waali Gali – street of jalebis. We got them to-go.
As we drove to Kapurthala that night, fifteen minutes before destination, around eight o’clock when we reached Kanjli where crop fields are abundant and a river cuts through it all, the dreaded fog seeped in out of nowhere. Nothing was visible in any direction. Everyone was sleeping as my eyes widened and the car screeched to a speed close to zero. I glared at the snow-like, soft white vapors gliding across the street amazed the driver could drive, period. I worried we would drive into a tree or the river itself! I felt like in a dream, where the car ride was unreal but the fog was real. Like, in a moment, we had been transported elsewhere, not where we were, but in an unreal world. I grabbed my heart wondering what would follow. To know more, stay tuned for more of my India chronicles to come.