Kent is home to Sikhs for a century now: Mr President, don't destroy this

I used to go to Seattle a lot; working at Microsoft for more than six years ensured that. Every 16th of every month, if I happened to there, I would cab it down to the local Gurdwara. The 16th of January, ten years ago, was when my mother left us, to become another star in the galaxy; and every month on that day, I would go to the local Gurdwara, wherever I happened to be - India, Sydney, Leeds, Seattle.

Kent is a small town, 20 miles South of Seattle on the way to SeaTac Airport. It has always had a vibrant Indian community, many of them Sikhs. Many decades back, it was a prosperous agriculture area, and that is what perhaps drew the Sikh farmers from their fields and orchards thousands of miles away. Now it is a thriving industrial area, counting Boeing, Alaska Airlines and REI as its star employers.

The Sikhs there are both blue and white collar workers, an educated and peaceful community, with a couple of Gurdwaras. For a while, during the Punjab problems, the Gurdwaras had become hotbeds of insurgent sentiment. However, that bothered the far-away Indian government much more; there was no effect on the local community.

Many of the Sikhs living there drive cabs for a living, and it was not unusual to see a Green cab being driven by an elderly Sikh driver with a flowing white beard, and an American twang lining a very pronounced Punjabi accent. Those Green cabs were owned by another Sikh, a former taxi driver himself, who called his company Farwest – perhaps reflecting on how much distance he had travelled from his homeland.

If my cab was from this company, the cabby would usually be a Sikh, and would reverently take me there. One memorable trip, I had a Muslim cab driver, from Afghanistan, who refused to take the fare, once he learnt where I was going, and why. It was “haraam” for him to accept money for a good deed, he said, despite my protestations.

More often than not, I had White cabbies, who would cheerfully take me to the “Sikh temple”, and wait patiently for me to come out, without extra charge. On the way there and back, they would talk about their bearded friends at Farwest, and how hard working and gentle they were, and how they would often share a beer together.

They were curious about the "temple", the country with its software prowess, and most about arranged marriages. But every time, they were gentle and respectful, because all people from the Pacific Northwest were…

And then, last week, Deep Rai was shot at by a masked assailant in Kent, in the very neighbourhood of the Gurdwara.  He was at his house, on his driveway. As he shot him down, the masked six-foot man shouted at him to "Go back to your own country".

I do not know when the masked man came over to the beautiful Seattle; the city itself is about 150 years old. The Sikhs, they came there, 110 years back. This was their country now; for more than a century.

I have been to the US many, many times. As I prepare to go there again, a fortnight from now, I am filled with trepidation for the very first time. It will not be the same again.

Mr President, you do not know what you are deliberately destroying.

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