I do not carry 1984 as history.
I carry it as vibration—folded into my breath, my silence, my prayers.
It is not something I revisit.
It is something that rises in me, unbidden, whole—like a sabad¹ stirring quietly within.

I listen.
Not with ears alone, but with the part of me that recognizes what cannot be spoken.
I hear the rustling of charred pages in the wind.
I hear the quiet weeping of stone.
I hear the Sovereign Call of the Guru—
unbroken, unburnt, beyond reach.

Forty-one years have passed.
And yet, it pulses.
Not as pain, but as Presence.
The Indian state tried to sever a people from their center—
to invade the sanctum,
to burn the ink that cradled the Song, the Thought, the Vision,
to fracture the spine of a sovereign spirit.

But the Spirit is not made of earth or paper.
It is Light.
And Light, once revealed, cannot be hidden again.

I do not stand in sorrow.
I stand in remembrance that touches the formless.
In the living thread of Ardas²—
woven by memory,
pulled by longing,
never undone.
In the breath of those who bowed only to the Eternal.

The violence was brutal.
But deeper than the bullets was the attempt to unname us—
to recast a living, breathing Path
into a compliant shadow.

But the Path is not made by human hands.
It unfolds under the gaze of the Guru,
in the rhythm of Sabad,
in the fire of those who remember without hatred
and rise without fear.

I feel it when the world still distorts our story.
When sovereignty is mistranslated as a threat.
When the truth is too clear, too unyielding to be tolerated.
Yet I do not harden.
I return—again and again—to the still point within.

I honor those who preserved, not out of plenty,
but in communion with the One who holds when all else falls away.
Their anchor was not visible.
Their strength was not loud.
But it was unmistakable—
like the fragrance of rain on parched earth,
like the ember’s warmth, waiting to rise.

I walk with those who carry the Guru’s vision forward—
not with spectacle, but with quiet fire.
Not with defiance alone, but with devotion—
to what is True, to what is Just,
to what whispers in the wind and moves in the unseen.

The Ghallughara³ did not end.
It moved into other forms—courtrooms, classrooms, headlines.
But so did the Light.
So did the Love.

I do not commemorate.
I commune.
I do not relive.
I reawaken.

My remembrance is not of a shattered past.
It is of an unshakable Presence.
It is a sacred inheritance that sings in my bones.

This June, I return again—not to mourn, but to rise.
To bow with love.
To speak with clarity.
To remember the fire that still warms our path.

I remember.
I resist.
I rise.

What holds us cannot be spoken.
What moves us does not begin or end.
We are still. And we are carried.
By grace, by memory, by something beyond ourselves.

Footnotes

¹  Utterance from the Guru Granth Sahib

²  Collective supplication
‍
‍³  Ghallughara, a Sikh term from the 18th century, denotes large-scale massacres and battles involving significant Sikh casualties, encompassing both non-combatants killed by opposing forces and those fighting back. While terms like massacre or genocide capture some aspects, they do not fully convey their meaning. Historically used for campaigns in 1746 (Chhotta Ghallugara) and a 1762 battle (Vadda Ghallughara), it now refers to events in June and November 1984, known as the Tija (third) Ghallughara or Charausi de Ghallughare (the Ghallugharas of 1984). Smaller massacres like the 1921 Nankana Sahib Massacre or the 1978 Amritsar Massacre are termed Saka, reserving Ghallughara for more monumental events, such as the June Ghallughara involving non-combatant pilgrims, Dharam Yudh Morcha activists, and fighters defending Harimandar Sahib Complex against the Indian army.