"1984" (excerpt)
by Sunita Puri
What I remember most vividly about the party is the colors.
I could not have been more than five years old—in fact, I was definitely five because I remember jumping off of my father’s lap when he began yelling and pointing at the television, shocked beyond belief at the horrific images of mass executions of Sikhs following Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984. Sikhs, a religious group marked visually by their turbans and beards, were targeted in numerous riots across Delhi because Gandhi had been assassinated by previously loyal Sikh bodyguards. I remember much of my father’s anger and frustration during that year—the year that the Delhi he knew collapsed under the twin threats of India’s second Partition and the advent of terrorism in Punjab, our homeland.
The colors on the television set were both conveniently foreign and eerily familiar. Above all, shockingly frightening. I had never seen the bright red that I saw spilling out of a murdered Sikh sprawled facedown in a dusty Delhi street. The dark blue of his cloth turban, now unraveled beside him, lay somewhere between the sky blue of the Smurfs that I knew and the deep blue of deep sea trenches that threatened to swallow me when I examined pictures of the ocean. The camera suddenly zoomed in on the face of one man who, exhausted, backed away from the Sikh man that he had helped to beat to death. I remember the color of his eyes: a strange, possessed yellow, immediately reminding me of the time I took too many B-vitamin tablets (the chewy, fruit-flavored Flintstones kind) and urinated a thick, deep yellow fluid. I had known only comfortable colors: the fluffy pink of my bedroom, the inviting gray of my cat, the soft black of my mother’s hair.
I looked desperately for any sort of familiarity in the room. But the room, full of only my father’s friends (who were necessarily male, in keeping with the unspoken Indian tradition of segregating guests by gender at large gatherings), was unfamiliar to all my senses: sight, sound, touch. I grabbed my father’s arm and pulled at it, exclaiming, “Daddy! Daddy! I want apple juice!” His arm was strangely cold, and he yanked it away from me, murmuring “Choop karo!” to silence me. Usually, I would get some reaction from another uncle in the room when I acted cute, but this time not even my tinny child’s voice could unglue the pairs of eyes in the room from the television. I saw the dark brown eyes of my father’s friends lighten slightly as tears welled up and were promptly blinked away. A teardrop flickered in the dim yellow light as it fell from Gurdeep ji. I watched it drop to the lush brown carpet, memorizing its exact location.