“I remember the day you were born, how after your mother passed, Simran held you in her arms and rocked you to sleep. I remember the way she looked into your eyes, how she whispered that she would always take care of you, that she would never leave your side. That’s what I hear in my dreams. Your sweet sister making that promise to you.”

“I didn’t know that, Papa-ji. Thank you for telling me.”

His father reached out his trembling hand, laid it on Harjeet’s knee. “I’m so sorry about that night, my son. You’d already lost your mother. You needed your bhenji.”

“It was my fault she died,” Harjeet said. His throat tightened on the words as they left his mouth. This was a confession he’d been holding in his entire life, the guilt that kept him from returning to Amritsar. He had been running away from this truth, and in the decades since, it had eaten away at his very soul.

The screams from that night—they never left him. They invaded his dreams every night for years. Had one of those screams been Simran’s? Could he have rushed down from the hill to save her? The day after the raid, the train never came. Papa-ji and Lacchman had to drag Harjeet through the desert for several kilometers until a military bus agreed to transport them to Amritsar. Harjeet pled with them to leave him at the camp with Simran, to let him die with her.

“If I hadn’t gotten sick, we would have left to Amritsar a few days earlier,” Harjeet added. “We would have made it safely. We wouldn’t have spent the night at the camp. Simran would have lived.”

His father’s mouth dropped open. “Is this what you’ve thought all these years, my son?”

Harjeet turned away. He spotted a small rosewood bench wedged against the wall. A faint memory came to him then, of him and Simran playing hide and seek in their old home, her hands covering her face, him crouching behind a similar bench, the same hiding place he used every time, her pretending she couldn’t find him anywhere, pretending to cry over his continued absence, giving up, collapsing on the bench, him springing up behind her, giggling.

“Of course, Papa-ji,” Harjeet said. “It was my fault.

His father covered his eyes. A low moan escaped his lips.

“Are you in pain? Shall I call the nurse?”

“Harju, is this why you’ve stayed away from all of us these years? From India?”