I had been overambitious, as young journalists are. But I had also underestimated India, as the British tend to do. Sitting on the corner of the bed in my filthy hotel in Delhi, I abandoned my well-intentioned, well-funded reportage on an approved and well-reported subject, sufficiently relevant to Western audiences, and booked a flight to the city of Amritsar, in the Punjab.

Amritsar’s Sri Harmandir Sahib, or “Golden Temple,” remains undulled by a tumultuous past. It is a most sacred place in the Sikh religion: a reconstruction of the first Guru’s vision of heaven and earth, as he had witnessed them in a dream. In the temple’s first few hundred years, the city sprung up surrounding it.

Arriving in Amritsar, I checked into the most comfortable accommodation that I could afford. Then, straightaway, I went to the temple gates. Entering the precinct—and leaving one’s earthly possessions at the door, covering one’s head, and washing one’s feet before moving among the pillars of the vast entranceway—I felt a kind of lightness.

The temple proper, set in a silent pool of contemplation, shines in contrast to the darkness of the entranceway. Gleaming turrets reflect in the still water, just as, according to the Sikh faith, heaven is reflected on earth. This glittering illusion is maintained by British Sikhs who pilgrimage to specifically polish the turrets’ surface, a process that takes the best part of a month. I watched the men on the scaffolding, four or five suspended above the water, somewhere between heaven and earth.

All this was explained to me by Kajinder, as we walked a circuit around the lake’s shore, watching people fall to their knees at the sight of the structure. Some of the men stripped and submerged themselves in the reflective waters.

I had met Kajinder the previous day, when I’d become lost in the alleys around the temple. The cloth merchants had closed, and the alleys had rapidly taken on a thick gloom. Still dazzled by the brightness of the temple, I hardly registered the market becoming the dominion of stray dogs and shadow, until I was lost. The driver of one lonely auto-rickshaw stopped, perhaps noting the late hour, and pointed me to a Dhaba, a place where people eat together in the Amritsari way.

The Dhaba had a distinctive green-painted sign and was set in a knot of streets behind the Golden Temple. Over wood fires, pots roiled billowing steam up to where paratha was tossed between deft hands with a soft slapping sound, followed by a concluding slap onto the blazing walls of a tandoor (or clay oven). Ghee was generously splashed over surfaces strewn with that morning’s Hindustan Times, the pages becoming translucent with grease.

In the next room, groups jostled to be seated in the white-tiled canteen. The tables were communal, shoulder-to-shoulder, with the lonely filling any gaps. I felt like mortar in a mosaic. Lone travel is not unusual in India, and I often find myself surrounded by truck drivers, students, artists, cobblers, copper beaters, and shop owners. This was how I came to meet Kajinder, who was opposite me when I sat down that first evening.

At first he was lost in the raptures of his meal, but my clumsy ordering drew Kajinder’s bright, spectacled eyes. He watched me from under a burnt orange turban, holding a folded newspaper in one hand and eating with the other, carefully pulling strips of paratha, dipping them into a blood-red tadka dal, and placing them thoughtfully between nervous lips framed by a wispy mustache.

When Kajinder had finished eating, he removed a handkerchief from a pocket and carefully wiped his mouth and then his hands. He then removed his small half-moon glasses from their perch on his nose and place them in a case, which he returned to the breast pocket of a neatly pressed, yet well-worn blue shirt.

I don’t remember how he started the conversation, only that Kajinder offered me a cold and delicate hand, a bird’s wing, which I shook lightly. His manner convinced me that he was a teacher, a guess that turned out to be accurate. I used my hands to scoop gracelessly from my thali, as Kajinder told me that he taught English at a school in Mumbai. He had traveled 25 hours by train to return to Amritsar to visit his parents, who lived in the suburbs. Between mouthfuls I asked him if he had a family of his own, but he flushed and changed the subject, and I did not raise it again. Kajinder suggested that we walk back toward the temple. It was spectacular in the dark, he said.

During our walk, he often grasped me by the hand, eager to present the wonders I might have missed. He led me back through the alleys by a faster route than that by which I had arrived. Inside the temple, Kajinder began to demystify the buildings, pointing out the hostel where one could sleep for free and the ornate women’s bathing house.

Most exciting of all, Kajinder said, were the kitchens where the Langar is prepared. The Langar, a meal provided to around 40,000 people a day, is consumed in a dining hall surrounded by a colonnade of thick tree-like columns. The space was filled with the din of clean thalis being clashed like cymbals as they were distributed to a queue of eager diners. We sat between columns and shared a cup of chai, overlooking a crowd of seated volunteers chopping vegetables on well-used boards.

I was positioned for my first sip of the chai when a young man of no more than eight years was led up to me by his mother. Carefully wrapped in a humble but neat sari, she carried at her waist the boy’s younger sister, who peeked with shy brown eyes.

The boy wished to introduce himself, translated Kajinder. I froze before the formality of the situation and Kajinder, seeing my discomfort, assumed his teacher’s persona. He seized the lad’s shoulders and spoke sternly. In response, the boy stiffened and his expression became obedient, framed by the wrapping on his tidy knot of hair.

The boy had seen my camera, explained Kajinder, pointing at the lens that I’d purchased for my failed story in Delhi. He wanted a photograph. Agreeing, I tried to focus in the poor light of the portico. Meanwhile, Kajinder continued to talk to the boy’s mother, and his tone became more concerned.

The boy was almost comically stern for the photograph, but at the snap of the shutter he relaxed and Kajinder boxed his ears, commanding him to recite his one to ten in English and to show his muscles. Kajinder then told the boy to lift his shirt, which he did without hesitation, revealing his torso while simultaneously turning his head away and shutting his eyes.

The light brown skin of the boy’s stomach was bisected in the center by a smooth, thin scar, like a neatly plastered crack in a wall. There was another exchange between the boy’s mother and Kajinder, during which he clasped her hands and gave her a number, inscribed using a tiny notebook and pencil, which he produced from the same breast pocket as where he’d kept his glasses. The boy tucked in his shirt once more, took a piece of paper, and carefully wrote a phone number on it. He handed it to me as the family moved on to join the vegetable chopping. The volunteers had moved from chopping cauliflower to herbs, and the whole portico was filled with a brilliant aroma. The boy looked back and waved every minute or so.

His family are from near Delhi, Kajinder said. The boy was very sick when he was a baby. Kajinder replaced the tiny notebook in his breast pocket, giving it a little pat. His mother wanted to pray for his health, but they had to wait until he was well enough to make the difficult train journey. The boy is the man of the family, since his father passed the year before. I watched the boy lead his mother dutifully amid the chopping volunteers to find a spot. I watched the boy’s wordless sister still clutched at his mother’s side.

The ingredients were collected from the choppers as their baskets filled and made their way to the potbellied cauldrons at the back of the kitchen. Here, they would be incorporated into dishes with long metal poles wielded by broad-shouldered cooks. The cooks worked standing above the furnaces, hosing the surfaces that they stood on with cool water to keep their soles from burning.

The cauldrons were used to fill buckets, which were carried with dignity between rows of seated diners and ladled to each waiting thali in the dining hall. Chapatis were tossed hot from a vast machine, which roared like a juggernaut above the dining hall. The mechanism pressed, rolled, and fired twenty chapatis a minute, then a group of waiting women brushed the breads with ghee.

Outside, on the white marble of the temple steps, I thanked Kajinder; he insisted on presenting me with a plastic image of the gurus, purchased from a roadside vendor. It had a tacky frame and the figures were blurred from a photocopier. Weeks later I developed the picture that I took of the boy, also blurred, owing to the slow shutter speed. I kept the objects together, the heads of the gurus exploding with vibrant yellow halos against an orange background, bearded and magnificent, wearing earnest frowns not dissimilar to the young boy’s.

The day after meeting Kajinder, I found myself once again wandering the cloth market as the sky darkened. In the cool twilight, a little breeze disturbed the cloth hanging from vendors’ stalls, reminding me to find some food before it became too dark. I came to a street with a familiar green-painted Dhaba sign. The boy at the door recognized me, and I was seated swiftly in the same place as the day before. I almost expected Kajinder to be opposite, peering over his spectacles.

But instead, I found a younger man engaged in jovial conversation with his two friends, all of whom must have been in their mid-20s. I was ready to concede to a lonely evening when they introduced themselves. The man’s name was Amir, his friend was Vihaan. The third member of their party was Aisha.

Amir was departing to a new job in Canada the following week. He had, together with Aisha, his girlfriend, and Vihaan, taken a trip from Bangalore, where they worked together. Vihaan had recently had his heart broken, though Aisha assured me that it was for the best. The trio ordered food for us to share, addressing the boy in short snappy sentences. He rushed to fulfill their order with remarkable eagerness, while I noticed how well-dressed my three new friends seemed, in simple but designer clothes.

Passing the imperial railway station, where the British would have arrived on different, faster trains to their Indian subjects, I considered how the railway line itself partitioned off the “white” city.

They’d read about the Dhaba on a food blog about Amritsari food. I asked them if they had come to Amritsar only for the food and Amir replied that they had been driving to Leh, in the northernmost reaches of India’s Himalayan territories, and Amritsar was a good pit-stop on the drive.

We ate the thali with the same buttery paratha, torn for sharing with the waiter’s bare hands. The trio radiated hope and unromantic ambition. Amir was moving to Canada, where he had trained for an in-demand software engineering role in order to obtain a visa. Eventually, he would move his family, marry Aisha, and they would settle down. They shared their lives, enjoying my shock when Aisha told me they shared rooms with eight other people to cover rent at the university. To solidify their futures, they’d already worked as cleaners, beauticians, security guards, and auto drivers.

I finally asked them why they had tried to drive to Leh, and Amir replied simply: None of them had ever seen snow. They looked at one another like bashful children for a moment, before telling me how they’d driven a rental car from Delhi through the Punjab and up to the foothills, past Shimla, and eventually to cloudy mountain passes and tumbling scree slopes. The three interrupted one another to fill in forgotten details and poke fun at one another. They’d seen their first snow on the roadside, said Amir, and ran together into the brownish slurry. The farther they drove, the higher the snowdrifts, and they would often leave their car at the roadside to leap into a patch, returning to the car in fits of giggles with frozen eyebrows.

Together we lost the evening, sauntering between two or three more Dhabas to sample their food. My three new friends fed me Amritsari chole, fried fish, and succulent chicken tikka; they were patient with my questions; and they refused to allow me to pay for food. When the time came to say goodnight, I felt certain that they would make good on their promised futures, including seeing me again.

The next day, I set out again to the Golden Temple, in hopes of seeing in daylight the things that Kajinder had pointed out in the dark. It was still early enough that, through a dark doorway, I glimpsed a large vat of cream being boiled to make the day’s ghee.

Lost, I found myself in a beautiful brickwork alley, which I later learned was conserved as it had been in 1919. The alley led to a neat garden, walled and silent but for a few small groups of families moving between the shade cast by the trees. I felt eyes upon my sunscreen-painted face.

All along the interior walls of the garden, little dents in the brickwork were carefully circled in white: bullet holes, bored by the gunfire of soldiers a century ago. For this garden was the Jallianwala Bagh, where, in 1919, Reginald Dyer commanded British troop to fire 1,650 rounds continuously for ten minutes into a crowd of thousands of civilians. The majority of the community had gathered in the open stretch of land for the Baisakhi, a Punjabi spring festival.

In a small exhibit, pictures of the soldiers stared at the camera with the sincerity of the boy in the Golden Temple. The faces, from the 54th Sikh and 59th Scinde Rifles regiments that enforced British colonial rule, wore impressions of duty and discipline. As I looked into the photos, I felt more eyes on my sunscreen-painted face.

This was Amritsar’s other sacred place, and perhaps, I thought—unlike the Golden Temple—not all were welcome. I felt this in the air, limpid, heavy, and so I went to leave, walking swiftly past the well where I learned later that many threw themselves to escape slaughter.

I was almost at one of the gates when a young boy approached me. I anticipated that he might want a photograph and so started thinking of exposure settings. Then, he shouted in my face. He was shrill, his voice cracking with emotion, so that those who were not already staring looked up, and I felt a warm rush of embarrassment. The boy ran back to his family with a scowl, as if to ensure that I knew not to seek reconciliation.

I felt an initial rush of indignance, less at the seemingly intentional shaming than the impoliteness. I wondered later if I’d come to expect politeness, deference, even. In the accusatory stare of the boy, I found myself rushing to the defense of an identity that I did not believe in: a glassy corner of the British psyche that reflected a shadowy figure under a pith helmet. Rushing past more holes in the wall, I felt the scars—made by bullets fashioned in the Royal Small Arms Factory in Enfield—impressing themselves in my memory.

I approached the exit, another passageway that, a century ago, had been blocked by armored cars. Then, a Sikh man gripped my hand. Fear ran through me again as I searched his face for anger. Instead, I found kind, humorous eyes, and he asked in quiet and politely clipped English for a photograph. Relieved, but still flustered, I tried to decline. Yet even as I turned to leave, his wife pressed a small child into my arms. I looked down at the child in bewilderment, face still flushed, as the man ushered his parents behind me and took out his mobile. The man frowned, tapping the screen to capture us, he looked up at me expectantly. I realized that I still had a bewildered expression and, to my horror, I felt myself smile.

Satisfied, the family clapped me on the shoulders and I returned the baby to its mother. The man’s elderly father, a short man with a blue turban and an astonishing mustache, took my arm. He spoke quietly so that I had to stoop my ear closer. He remembered the British, and he shook my hand, leaning heavily on his stick to do so. The man asked me where I was from, and instead of telling him, I simply blurted that I was sorry. The grandfather watched me with heavy-lidded eyes. After a moment he shut his eyes, and a shadow of pain darkened the deep furrows of his brow. He placed an arm on my shoulder and told me in a gentle tone, with beautiful English, “It is past. It is past, but that does not mean that we can forget.”

Amritsar’s Sri Harmandir Sahib IS set in a silent pool of contemplation, shines in contrast to the darkness of the entranceway. Gleaming turrets reflect in the still water, just as, according to the Sikh faith, heaven is reflected on earth.

I escaped into the wider streets beyond, crossing the railway bridge back to the comfort of my hotel room. I felt anxious and stripped my clothes, standing in the shower for a long time. I’d learn later how the paranoia of mutiny had grown in the Punjab before the massacre, the over-the-shoulder-glancing stoking rumors and crackdowns that in their own way led to a kind of “massacre as precaution.” Fear and suspicion created a frenzy of conspiracy, out of a desperation for legitimacy. I wondered if, when I checked that I had my wallet in a bustling market, or felt the weight of the crowd pressed about me, or when I heard stories of food poisoning, of water, fear of people touching me in the street, fear of beggars, dirt, whether I’d found a nasty little lump of darkness, something genetic, a cellular toxicity with vile potential.

When I finally pulled myself from the hotel bedroom, compelled by an ache in my stomach, I found myself paying more attention to the city. Here were the street corners where soldiers enforced “crawl orders” forcing Indians onto their knees before the British on the road toward the center. Passing the imperial railway station, where the British would have arrived on different, faster trains to their Indian subjects, I considered how the railway line itself partitioned off the “white” city, which would once have been comprised of a colonial club, tennis courts, and villas, and was now occupied by luxury hotels. The British had even built a separate church, so that they shared only the sky with the rest of the city.

For the third time, I found myself in that familiar tangle of streets around the cloth market, but some illusion had shattered. I looked for the green-painted sign, yet, when I found it, there was no crowd, the air unscented with cooking. Instead, the Dhaba’s shutters were tightly drawn, and from its front step there spewed a torrent of gray water. It sprayed into the street like a ruptured vein.

People had fashioned stepping stones from litter. They moved nimbly across the flood, as the water swilled down the street.

An auto-rickshaw driver stood by picking his nails with his keys. He hopped eagerly into his cab when he saw me. “Hungry?” he called out. I ignored him at first. I had learned to act reluctant; the price of the ride would fall the longer I thought about my destination. But I felt eager to leave, so, almost immediately, I said I was hungry, and climbed into the auto, too quickly to get a good price.

We roared along the streets away from the city center, and I learned that my driver’s name was Parmod and that his brother had a shop in King’s Cross, though he had never been. He had a little Union flag on the bumper. Parmod asked what London was like and I didn’t know what to say. He told me that it rained there, and I agreed. Was I married? No. I ought to be, a happy wife, happy life, you know? He turned from the road and made me say it with him. Happy wife, happy life. He slapped my leg and turned back to the road, chuckling to himself. We shot out of the cloth market in the pink light of the dusty evening.

The kulcha stand was under a dehydrated rosewood tree at the roadside. It shared a stretch of powdery sienna wall with an old man’s barber chair and a chugging mechanical sugarcane press. The kulcha were rolled and thrust with worn fingers into the drum of a little tandoor at the end of the stand. The stall owner shook hands with Parmod and then peered at me over his stainless steel potlids. I felt as though he were reading my needs, assessing me.

There were five or six other autos pulled to the side of the road and their drivers puzzled over me too. One was wearing a Ralph Lauren polo and came over just as a kulcha brushed with rich ghee and sprinkled with parantha masala was pressed into my hand. The vendor slid a pot of chole adorned with a flourish of chopped onions over the counter toward me.

The polo man told me that he was friends with Parmod’s brother, the one with a shop in King’s Cross. I nodded through the warm tang of the masala and the yielding layers of buttery dough. Polo man said that he would go to see him in London and hoped to work in his shop. Between mouthfuls, my cheeks flushed with chili, I told him that I hoped that he would get what he wanted.

Later, I wondered if I should warn the drivers against that old capital, the impenetrable river mist and moldy underside, but I was reticent to ruin his contentment. Instead, I watched him walk over to the whirring engine of the sugarcane press, returning with a green plastic cup of juice. He handed it to me, and I gratefully drank in gulps, observing that he had asked for a cup without ice.

We stood at the roadside, the auto drivers exchanging gossip, and I felt some spirit go through me, as I watched the bright green rosewood leaves flutter against a flawless sky. 

Featured-image photograph of Amritsar by Max Walker