your bridge home
True Valor
They have fouled the sacred pool at Amritsar, and a seventy-five-year-old copyist of scripture is drawing a line on the ground.
He was seventy-five years old when he heard what had been done to the pool.
In 1757 Ahmad Shah Durrani came down through Punjab again, left his son Taimur Shah at Lahore as viceroy, and gave him Jahan Khan and an army to hold the province.
That May, Jahan Khan went to Amritsar. He pulled down Ram Rauni, the Sikh fort there. He destroyed the gurdwara. And he had the sarovar, the tank the city is named for, the water Guru Ram Das dug and Guru Arjan set a temple in the middle of, filled with the entrails and offal of slaughtered animals.
That last was the point. Demolishing a fort is warfare. Fouling a pool is a message, and the message was that the thing at the centre of this community could be made disgusting whenever the state felt like it.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.