She checked the time. She had fifteen minutes before she had to meet Chandani for lunch. She picked up her wallet, grabbed her keys, swung the door open. She paused in the doorway. There was one more person she knew who had a Partition story. He was from Rawalpindi. She knew both his first and last names.

She sat down before her laptop, opened the search bar for Rawalpindi, typed Harjeet Singh. Seven results appeared. Halfway down the page, she came across the exact same black-and-white photo from Chandani’s pooja room.

Her beloved husband had recorded his story.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Amritsar

August 12, 1996

Harjeet wiped the sleep from his eyes, peered out of the dusty, oval airplane window at the new Sri Guru Ram Dass Jee International Airport. The last time he came to Amritsar, he had to take a train from New Delhi. Now the bustling city had its very own airport.

The tarmac teemed with airplanes, passengers, rows of luggage. Businessmen and women filled every seat in the airplane, their briefcases perched on their laps, black pens scratching yellow steno notepads. The plane’s engine cut off and with it the air conditioner. Amritsar in August was a fiery sort of hot. He felt it immediately, the way the heat seeped into the seams of the plane, how it rushed through the cabin when the flight attendant propped open the door. Each inhale brought a lungful of burning air.

He’d grown accustomed to life in the United States, to indoor spaces cooled to near frigid temperatures, to the endless stream of electricity with no interruptions. He had forgotten what it was like to bake, to steep in sweat, to soak through layers of clothes in mere seconds.

Seven years had passed since his last trip to India, when he came to say goodbye to Lacchman, who was dying of end-stage hepatitis. His strong-as-an-ox older brother, who sired four sons with his wife Neema, had taken his first drink soon after Simran’s death, and spent the rest of his life attached to a bottle of some sort. At the hospital, Harjeet knelt by his side, kissed his hand. Lacchman forced open his mouth and uttered the last words he would ever speak, before he slipped into a coma and passed away three days later.

I should have protected Simran.

It wasn’t merely the words that haunted Harjeet on his way back to New Jersey. It was his brother’s anguish as he spoke them. The raid in Attari was not Lacchman’s fault. And yet, his brother’s very last emotion before dying was guilt over that night.