Nehemiah Dhariwal

A Diary  ·  Pir Mohammad, Punjab  ·  1984 The Night We Did Not Leave Pages from my brother's diary — October, 1984 My elder brother never spoke much about that night in our village of Pir Mohammad. But somewhere, in the quiet corners of memory, these are the pages he must have written — even if only in his heart. I was born eight years later, in 1992 — long after the dust had settled. But I grew up inside the silence of a family that had lived through something they never quite found the words for. This is my attempt to find them. ✦ October 1984  ·  Evening Tuesday, October 1984 Dear Diary, Something is very wrong today. I could feel it even before the men from the panchayat came — a strange stillness in the air, the kind that arrives before a storm but heavier, more deliberate. When they knocked on our gate...

 I was twenty-three when I first stood outside an airport and wanted in. It was Jaipur. I had brought some teenagers with me — young, curious, full of energy — and I thought, why not show them something they had never seen up close. A plane. A real one, landing or taking off, the noise and the size of it. I went to the security personnel with the most reasonable request I could think of. The kids just want to watch, I told him. Just for a few minutes. He said no. I looked at the kids. They looked at me. And then someone spotted a tree near the boundary wall and without much discussion, that became our plan. We climbed it. A group of people with nowhere else to go, pulling themselves up branch by branch outside an airport in Jaipur, squinting over a wall that had been built too high for anyone to see over from the ground. We could see one plane on the ground, just barely. It was far away, half hidden, not taking off or landing, just sitting there. Not quite the magic I had promised....