Blood always leaves traces

'General Dyer conducted soldiers for firing on an innocent crowd of Indians through this passage.'

I read those fifteen words a couple of times before glancing to my right, where the passage began, and then to my left, where it led to the Jallianwala Bagh. I tried to imagine the sounds of Army issue boots that would echo if an entire battalion marched down the narrow corridor, then turned to my left and walked into the Bagh.

There was a slight drizzle but it had not discouraged people from flocking to the place. A little to my right was a stone in the shape of a pyramid, with the same inscription on each face, but in different languages. ‘People were fired at from here.’

I stood near the stone and looked as far as my eye could reach, imagining men, women and children gathering into the Bagh on Baisakhi, decades earlier. Then I thought of muskets being loaded at Dyer’s command, imagined the sound of the guns being cocked, pictured the uniformed soldiers raising their weapons to their shoulders. For a brief moment, I found myself thinking about what would happen if a squad of soldiers opened fire with M4 assault rifles at the crowd that was so happily going around posing for pictures and pouting for selfies on the ground where blood had once been shed.

Shaking my head, I turned my back on my morbid daydream and saw a memorial under a small canopy. Called the Amar Jyot, the perennially burning lamp was placed on a black stone platform to pay tribute to the over 1000 people who were mowed down by guns that afternoon. People were lining up to pose for pictures or selfies in front of the lamp. At least they were taking their shoes off before entering the inner sanctum, I thought before turning away.

A path led from the pyramid shaped stone to the inner part of the Bagh, and as I walked forward, the cold droplets of the drizzle on my skin seemed to be in sync with the tiny pinpricks I was feeling underneath, as I trod the ground where the blood of thousands had been spilled once.

On both sides of the path, the shrubbery had been trimmed and shaped to look like soldiers armed with rifles advancing into the Bagh, signifying the progress of Dyer’s soldiers as they continued their march of death. I walked slowly down the path, stopping at three walls of the Bagh, where the pockmarks made by bullet holes had been carefully preserved for viewers. Each mark was highlighted by a white square, which, in my opinion, was hardly adequate to convey the horror. 

  

While people were busily clicking pictures of each other and of themselves with the walls in the background, I was imagining bullets tearing through the flesh of the innocents before lodging themselves in the bricks. Faint cries of desperation echoed in my ears as I thought of the helpless men, women and children trying to scale the high walls, only to be cut down by the soldiers' bullets. My mind began conjuring visions of people trying to climb the heaps of dead bodies in a last ditch attempt to get out alive before being cut down by the barrage of lead coming from behind them. 

As I walked along the walls, I had to chuckle, although what I saw was far from funny. A stretch of wall between the two bullet-mark riddled ones was covered with graffiti. Declarations of love scrawled across the walls or initials carved into heart shapes decorated the walls which might also have been riddled with bullets had the helpless innocents tried to climb over these walls as well. Similar graffiti covered scores of other pillars that I saw while walking to the next destination on my grim pilgrimage. I saw it from afar before I reached it. The Martyrs Well.

The well into which, when left with no other option, the gatherers at the Bagh had jumped in a desperate attempt to save their lives. The same well became their crypt. A signboard over the well says that 120 bodies were later pulled out of the well. A grill covers the well now, and I pressed by face to it, trying to gauge its depth. Walking around its circumference, I finally found an open spot in the grill and managed to take a picture. Absurdly, I kept peeking to see if I could see any traces of blood. I couldn't but I somehow knew they were there. Blood always leaves traces.

A museum of sorts near the Martyrs Well has a heart rending account of an eye witness, Ratan Devi, who ran to the Bagh after hearing gunshots and ended up spending the entire night among the victims, some of them alive and slowly bleeding to death, due to the curfew imposed in the area. “I found a bamboo stick and used it to fend off the dogs, while sitting beside my husband's dead body. I saw three men writhing in agony, a buffalo struggling in pain and a boy, about twelve years old, entreated me not to leave the place,” Ratan Devi recounts.

The same space also has a painting depicting the massacre. I tried to take a picture but gave up. There were too many people taking selfies in front of it.

I walked silently towards a souvenir gallery near the exit. It contains framed photographs of newspaper articles about the incident, and the ashes of Shaheed Udham Singh, who later shot dead General Reginald Dyer in London. Photography is prohibited inside this gallery, which is a pity, as it also has on display a curiously basic example of how life can be snatched away without a moment's notice. A coin, one of its edges bitten off by a bullet, recovered from a victim's pocket. “The victim later succumbed to his injuries,” the plaque reads.

An old man tried to sell me selfie sticks as I walked out of the Bagh.