Photos below - first and second from bottom: The Kalsi brothers, Ravinder Singh and Paramjit Singh. Thumbnail - Gurpartap Singh.
History
Chardi Kalaa Against All Odds
by VALARIE KAUR
The new year has begun in blood.
Kenya is seized by violence. Benazir Bhutto is assasinated and Pakistan is consumed by riots. More soldiers are killed in Iraq.
And, here at home, terrible news spreads through the Sikh community - two Sikh brothers are shot to death at their restaurant in Richmond, California.
Two men shuffled down San Pablo Avenue on a wet December night. They passed a burger joint and doughnut shop before pausing at the door to Sahib Indian Restaurant.
One banged on the window. "You open?" he mouthed to his quarry inside.
It was a few minutes past 9 on Thursday night. Ravinder Singh Kalsi, who owned the place with his brother, had locked up minutes earlier. Perhaps hoping to hear better, he turned the lock.
Opening the door became his last act in life.
The killers shot the 30-year-old dead in the doorway. They stepped past him and moved quickly. They touched nothing, said nothing. They found 42-year-old Paramjit Singh Kalsi in the kitchen and shot him.
[Inside Bay Area, December 28, 2007]
The Kalsi brothers came to Richmond from Patiala, my mother's hometown in India. They had run their restaurant for five years.
Over the years, I had spent time in Richmond, filming interviews for Divided We Fall after other shootings of Sikh-Americans. It began in June 2003, when two Sikh cabdrivers, Gurpreet Singh and Inderjit Singh, were shot in Richmond within three days of each other.
The morning after Gurpreet's murder, his fiancee in India, devastated by the news, committed suicide.
Inderjit Singh was shot in the face and survived. Nothing was stolen from either cab.
Weeks later, another turbaned Sikh cabdriver, Davinder Singh, was murdered across the bay in Redwood City. Taking into account the murder of Sukhpal Singh Sodhi, brother of Balbir Singh Sodhi, there were four shootings (three fatal) of turbaned Sikh cabdrivers within one year in the San Francisco Bay Area alone. None of these were classified as hate crimes.
On Christmas morning 2006, Gurpartap Singh was murdered in his cab in Richmond, California. He was a turbaned Sikh cabdriver, the fifth to be shot in the San Francisco Bay Area since 2002. The police called the murder an attempted robbery; local Sikhs saw it as part of a pattern of violence against their community since 9/11.
And now, almost exactly one year later, two brothers have been killed in the same streets. What makes these murders different is that their killers sought them out in their restaurant, without a clear motive. The FBI is now investigating the murders as hate crimes.
Driving from interview to interview in Richmond, I remember coming across stop signs riddled with bullet holes. The Kalsi brothers' killings pushed Richmond's annual homicide total to 47, the highest since the early 1990s.
"Something has to be done. If the police can't capture the monsters who did this, they should just dissolve the police department and let people fend for themselves", Gurman Singh Bal, the brothers' former roommate in Berkeley, told the San Francisco Chronicle. "It's nearly like that now - lawless".
This is how the new year begins - in blood.
And I think about what the news does to us.
When we hear about car bombs and coffins coming home, civil war and acts of terrorism, or the latest murders in our own community, the world feels like that - lawless - the sense that no one is controlling the situation, that no one can. It is a debilitating feeling.
And yet it is a new year. It is meant to be a time of hope. A new beginning.
How then do we listen to the bad news? Do we ignore it? Become numb to it? Pretend not to despair when we see the bloodstains on the ground?
As I listen to the presidential candidates speak the word "change" these days, I feel the cynicism rise up from the part of my heart that is tired - the part that is afraid of hope.
And yet hope is the only way the world has ever changed in the past. Hope is what made Martin Luther King, Jr. organize and fight and speak of his dreams. It is how women won the vote, we won back India from the British, and my turbaned grandfather won the right to be a legal citizen of the United States.
A baseless, radical, impossible hope that envisioned that it could be otherwise. It is the only way anything has ever gotten done. It is how I have come this far in my own healing.
Change can only happen if we first believe that it is possible.
And so, somehow, I must hold onto my hope that brown faces will one day be recognized as equal Americans and live their faith without fear. I must continue to hope that our country can become a moral leader in the world, for it cannot be done without that vision. And I have to hope that what I do in response to the news, however small, counts for something.
I am afraid of hope.
And that fear is a sign for me to sharpen up all my critical thinking and - in the spirit of chardi kalaa - surrender to it absolutely.
February 20, 2008
Conversation about this article
1: Rosalia Scalia (Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A.), February 24, 2008, 10:42 PM.
My deepest sympathies to the families of the slain Sikh brothers. I am so sorry to read about this crime; their families must be devastated as all of us who believe in the sanctity of life are. This is such disturbing news, particularly since it repeats the kind of hate crimes of post 9-11 and also demonstrates that ignorance about Sikhs continues to reign. It saddens me that Sikhs - or any community in the U.S., a country that prides itself on being that so called melting pot - must still battle fatal hatred, born of ignorance and fear, of the "them vs. us" mentality. Hope for a better, safer, more secure future (for all of us) is important, but to achieve that, it appears that hope needs to be paired with action. Perhaps it's time for a national or even an international public awareness campaign to raise Sikh identity, the kind of campaign that requires serious money for TV ads, radio spots and media relations - that would be best executed by a good marketing/ad/PR firm. Maybe something similar to the National Italian American Anti-Defamation League - except the Sikh version - would go a long way in educating people about who Sikhs are, about Punjabi culture, music, art, literature and maybe even one of the messages could be "Sikhs are cool", maybe lobby more clothing designers, movie makers, etc. to use positive Sikhs in thier work, maybe such an action paired with hope may stop the carnage of innocents. Once again, my deepest sympathies to the families of these men. I am not Sikh, but I grieve for them and for their loss and pray that those responsible are caught and punished to the highest extent of the law.
2: Shama (Bay Area, California, U.S.A.), April 13, 2008, 10:44 PM.
I just moved back to the Bay area. I knew the Kalsi brothers very well. They were such good people. Ravinder had a heart of gold. I am just devastated. I can't believe this happened. Does anyone know how I can pay my respects?