Maayra Oberoi grew up in Balwyn, surrounded by the routine pressures of school, exams, and the steady hum of suburban life. Yet when her Year 10 English class at Fintona Girls School was asked to write a poem about conflict, she reached for a chapter of history that continues to echo through Indian families across continents. Her piece, titled Fire in the Garden, speaks in the voice of a Sikh survivor of the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre, one of the darkest episodes of British colonial rule in India.
Maayra was born in Australia to parents from Delhi, with Punjabi heritage and a family grounded in Sikh teachings. A visit to Jallianwala Bagh during a trip to India, along with conversations at home and exposure to Indian media, shaped her choice of subject. The memory of the site, still marked by bullet holes and a well where hundreds tried to escape gunfire, stayed with her long after returning to Melbourne.
Her poem opens with a quiet dread.
“The gate was closed.
No trumpet blew.
Just boots on stone,
And then…we knew.”
The writing does not shy away from the brutality faced by unarmed men, women, and children who gathered peacefully on Vaisakhi. Maayra lets the imagery speak with spare, unflinching clarity. Lines such as “A woman fell beside the well, her infant crushed beneath the swell” and “I saw a boy with half a face, still running, He asked for grace” capture the terror in a way that is direct rather than embellished. She shows the chaos of people climbing walls slick with blood, the crush at the gate, and the confusion of fathers reaching for children they could not save.
Later in the poem she shifts from the physical scene to the moral weight carried by survivors and by Sikh tradition itself.
“We are Sikh. Taught to serve,
To guard the line, to never swerve.
To see one in friend and foe,
To fight but only when we know.”
These lines echo the values taught within her own family, where service, restraint, and courage are central. Maayra wrestles with the tension between peace and justice as she imagines a survivor asking, “But what is just, when justice bleeds?” Her use of the Khalsa ideal, with its call to protect rather than retaliate, shows a maturity well beyond her years.
The poem ends with a reminder of endurance rather than surrender.
“Yet still we serve, and still we pray.
And still we rise to meet the day.
But don’t mistake our grace for sleep
A lion watches even in grief.
Bole so nihal…
Sat Sri Akal.”
For Maayra, writing the piece was a way of processing both history and identity, connecting her Australian upbringing with a past that shaped her grandparents. The work also reflects how children of the diaspora often carry inherited memory, even when that memory belongs to a place thousands of kilometres away.
Her poem has struck a chord with those who have read it, partly because it does not attempt to soften what happened, and partly because it views the event through the eyes of a teenager who is still forming her understanding of justice, responsibility, and cultural pride. It shows how young writers can bridge generations, bringing historical experience into present conversations with clarity and compassion.
Maayra’s family sees it as a powerful reminder that the past remains alive through stories, art, and the willingness of each new generation to face difficult truths.
“Fire in the Garden”
— From the heart of a Sikh who survived Jallianwala Bagh
The gate was closed.
No trumpet blew.
Just boots on stone,
And then…we knew.
The guns were raised
We barely turned.
The rifles screamed
The silence broke.
Vaisakhi should’ve been our bloom.
Once a garden, now a tomb
A woman fell beside the well,
Her infant crushed beneath the swell.
Men climbed the walls with bloodied hands,
And slipped back down like broken strands.
I saw a boy with half a face,
Still running, He asked for grace.
His father reached too slow, too late.
They died together at the iron gate.
No war, no flags, no trumpet song,
They fired, the line was long
We bled as one, the crowd moved strong
No time to run, no right, no wrong
Bullets fed, no cause, just wrong.
No mercy given, none to ask,
No time for tears, no face, no mask.
I crouched behind a stranger’s spine,
His chest gave out beneath mine
He whispered low, then lost the time
He gasped once more, then crossed the line
Heard my name in dying lips
Then silence broke in iron clips.
Thirteen minutes
None were spared
Unarmed and unprepared.
A thousand screams,
The soil drank our shattered dreams.
And when it stopped, I still heard a sound
My heartbeat pounding through the ground.
Then came the quiet.
And with it, war
Not theirs, but mine,
A deeper sore.
We are Sikh. Taught to serve,
To guard the line, to never swerve.
To see one in friend and foe,
To fight but only when we know.
But what is just, when justice bleeds?
When tyrants plow and call it seeds?
When saints are shot for daring voice,
Is silence still the higher choice?
The Khalsa rises not in hate,
But when the world desecrates fate.
The sword is love with sharpened edge
A vow, not vengeance, not a wedge.
I live. But each breath asks me how?
To walk in peace with this grief now?
To wear the turban, hold the steel,
And still know what it means to heal?
Dyer fled, but left behind
The garden burned into our mind.
And though my hands have never killed,
My rage—our rage has not been stilled.
Yet still we serve, and still we pray.
And still we rise to meet the day.
But don’t mistake our grace for sleep—
A lion watches even in grief.
Bole so nihal…
Sat Sri Akal.
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