I walked up the broken steps of the Guru Ram Dass Serai, which as its name suggests is a hostel for travellers and pilgrims named after the fourth Sikh Guru. At the first level was a battered room, strewn with rubble and glass fragments, its windows blasted to pieces. It had been a place where some of the militants had been based before they were driven out by fierce fire from the security troops. A few spent cartridges were lying around.

As I bent to pick one up, a small dark booklet lying nearby caught my eye.

I picked up the booklet; it turned out to be a passport. A Bangladeshi passport; or, rather, the jacket of one. The passport owner’s identity was missing, all those pages which sketch a person’s life in bare outline—date and place of birth, identifying marks (‘if any’ as such documents invariably say), father’s name, home address—had been ripped out and thrown away. I looked elsewhere in the room, without luck, for the missing pages.

An examination of the jacket turned up other basic and important information. It turned out that the passport had been issued in the Bangladeshi town of Comilla, about 1,300 kilometres south-east of Amritsar. In fact, Comilla borders on Agartala, the capital of the distant state of Tripura in the Indian North East.

The passport had been issued on 24 March 1988, barely six weeks before the operation at the Golden Temple. Even at that time, the Punjab was a transit point for Bangladeshis in search of work and seeking a future in Pakistan. Some were keen to travel on through Pakistan, especially via the port city of Karachi, to the Middle East where they could secure their dreams and perhaps even become rich. That was the ultimate goal of their desperate rush to leave behind the impoverishment of their homeland.

I do not know what happened to the passport holder. Perhaps he reached Pakistan or whatever destination he was seeking. Perhaps he died while crossing over. Perhaps he died in an exchange of fire in the Golden Temple itself.

There were occasional media reports at the time of Bangladeshis being shot while trying to cross the international border between India and Pakistan along the Punjab. Later, during a visit to Rajasthan in 1992, security officials spoke to me about scores of Bangladeshis dying in the Barmer and Jodhpur/Jaisalmer sectors every year as they sought to enter Pakistan. In the space of four years, the area of transit had changed from Punjab to the deserts of Rajasthan.