I was a 19 year-old student in Delhi when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated at the end of October 1984.  In the days and nights that followed, thousands of Sikhs were massacred. The city burned.  Like many other people, I worked in the relief camps, transcribing postcards from widows to their relatives, writing down their stories of the horrors that had taken place. It was unforgettable.

In 1987, due to a personal tragedy, I left India and came to America as a graduate student. There I got involved with an Indian organization, spearheaded by my future husband, that organized around the issues of the denial of rights. The state terrorism unleashed in 1984 was a subject we particularly felt strongly about and kept alive. Because “1984” was a watershed in the Indian polity.

Many years later, after graduating from film school when I was ready to write my first feature film we knew that this was the story I had to write, the film I had to make and show, to a world that didn’t know the suppressed history of that genocide.

Working as an activist outside my home country one of the issues I became acutely aware of was the painful questions of identity that affect second-generation youth: their yearning to be accepted both here and there, to know their history, to place themselves.  Kaju, my protagonist, was created out of my empathy with young people facing this poignant crisis.

By the final draft of the screenplay much more had happened. India and the world had gone through Godhra, Gujarat, 9-11, Afghanistan, Iraq -- and I wanted to incorporate it all. In finalizing the shooting script, though, I had to whittle away many side plots. That’s why I am glad that Penguin approached me to convert the screenplay into a novel and I could put into the book the thoughts, events and complexities that the 100-minute film had to sacrifice. 

Amu was born because of the collaboration of many people. She is the child of a collective. Perhaps that was the biggest learning experience for me, since I came from the trenches of documentary filmmaking, where I shot, interviewed, edited, and was more or less the entire crew! To then lead a team of nearly a hundred people, with all their personalities and opinions, and to make sure the vision was one… I think more than film school, my training came from mothering two boys!

When I first came up with the idea for Amu, our older son had just started kindergarten. As the film is finally ready for release, he is in fifth grade! It’s been a long, hard, eye-opening battle to raise the money and get the film made. A battle I could never have fought without my husband, who is also the executive producer of the film. Amu has been our most difficult child together. We would have given up long ago if it weren’t for the pain of Shanno Kaur and her many sisters, a pain that is very much alive today, since not a single perpetrator has been punished twenty years later.

I can still hear the angry voices from the relief camp echoing across the years: “Minister hee to thhe. Unhee ke shaye pe sab hua” (It was a Minister. It was all done at his direction). “Saare shamil thhe… police, afsar, sarkar, neta, saare” (They were all involved … the police, the bureaucracy, the government, the politicians – all).  If I ever had doubts that a cover-up of history had taken place, they were set to rest when the Censor Board removed these two lines of dialogue along with other politically motivated cuts and gave the film an “A” certificate, because “why bring up a history which is best buried and forgotten?” I accepted the cuts and thought it an even more powerful indictment for audiences to see the widows silently moving their lips.  Silenced, even after twenty years…

My only hope for Amu is that she make us think.