Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

In Amritsar this statement was debatable, but I was impressed by his confidence. No one would have said that thirty years ago. Yet in order to say such things you have to ignore the mangy cows, the stalled traffic, the squatters, the beggars, the crowds, the dirt, the squalor.

It was a relief to me that Amritsar was not very different. I liked it as it was—progressing, obviously, but so immersed in its past and its pieties that it could not change much. Because it was a holy city, its visitors put up with more inconvenience: dirt and distance and noise were the price of sanctity and blessings.

I had walked for quite a while, but then hailed a taxi, and it was Amar Singh who drove me slowly through the crowds. We passed a sign saying Service to Humanity Is True Service to God.

I wrote it down in my notebook.

Amar Singh said, "You're a journalist?"

"Sort of."

We went to the Golden Temple, but the crowd was so large there was no way a car could get near. I left Amar Singh and walked the last half mile with all the skipping pilgrims—good-humored and frisky yatris, because they were near the object of their long yatra. Some were stepping out of their shoes and sandals and tiptoeing on the scalded bricks this hot day at the entrance to the temple; others were flinging scarves into a big barrel, or selecting scarves from it to put on their heads.

"What is this?" I asked.

"It is the system," a man said.

"What is the system?"

"Cloth on head for temple."

"No open head," another man elaborated. "No exceptions."

He meant: No exceptions for ferringhis—foreigners. But I was wearing a hat.

A Punjabi woman interrupted to say, "Your hat is acceptabubble."

The label of my hat, a style called the Traveler, said Locke's The Hatter, St James, London W1—surely suitable headgear for the Holy of Holies?

I walked with a tramping crowd through a trough of water meant to purify our feet, but because it had been walked through by thousands of pilgrims, the water was foul—green and viscous, like swamp water. This was the usual thing—if a pool or a tank or a trough was considered sacred, it didn't matter whether it was stagnant. The holier the pool, the more foul-smelling it was.

Never mind. This was the India I remembered, and I was grateful to be here. The Golden Temple looked golder, brighter, more effulgent. I walked down the hot marble causeway with the happy pilgrims, but because I didn't have the faith, it was just a glittering palace of roistering Sikhs, a feature, a sight to see—the crowds interesting me more than the gold domes and chanting priests.

"Get over here!" and "This is so neat, Ma!"

Sikhs with American accents, Sikhs with the west London whine, Sikhs from California, Sikhs from Scotland and Canada. I glided around the hot walkways for a while, made a circuit of the sacred pool, found my way back to the entrance and my shoes, and then hiked to the car.

"Do you know Mark Tully?" the driver Amar Singh asked.

Mark Tully, known in India as Tully Sahib, was for many years the BBC correspondent in India—a much-loved man for his sympathetic but scrupulous reporting, his truthfulness, his love for the country.

"I met him once," I said. "He's a great journalist and a friend of India."

"I took him around here during the Blue Star action," Amar Singh said.

So this taxi driver whom I had met by chance at the railway station turned out to have been one of the resourceful operatives during Amritsar's crisis in 1984.

Operation Blue Star was a military assault by the Indian army on the Golden Temple—an unspeakable, unjustified defilement of the holiest shrine in Sikhdom, Sikhs said. It was disastrous: heavy artillery in a small overcrowded town. It came about because Sikh militants had occupied the towers and cellars and kiosks of the temple. They were part of a revivalist movement that had also called for a separate Sikh state, to be named Khalistan ("Land of the Pure"). Led by a Sikh preacher named Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, this action was watched closely by Sikhs worldwide. Bhindranwale (a prophet to some Sikhs, a pest to nearly everyone else) was disruptive; he called for the murder of Hindus and moderate Sikhs. His beard reached to his waist, he was said to be charismatic, he was well armed, and he wouldn't budge from the temple he occupied with many of his followers and an arsenal of weapons in May 1984.