In the midst of darkness light persists. When the flames rose as they never had in the towns and cities of England and newspapers such as The Telegraph could not resist the temptations of alliteration and promptly called Birmingham ‘Burningham’, I thought of Tagore’s line in “Jana Gana Mana”, excised understandably in its official version: “Ghora timira ghana nibirha nishithe, pirhita murchhita deshe, duswapne, atanke, raksha karile anke…”

And despondent I would have remained, like millions of others, until I read about Tariq Jahan.

This British national of Pakistani origin lost his 21-year old son, Haroon, with two other Asian youths on August 9, as they protected their community in Birmingham, when a speeding car mowed them down. Tariq was not far from the site when he heard a commotion and rushed there. When giving CPR to the first victim he saw, someone told Tariq that his son was lying just behind them. Tariq swapped positions to help his son but it was too late.

Twenty-one, son, gone.

Speaking the next day to the media who wanted him to bare his heart, Tariq did that but in a very different, unexpected key. “Blacks, Asians, whites… we all live in the same community. Why do we have to kill one another?” he asked. “Stop this rioting and looting… you are not achieving anything.”

The prime minister, David Cameron, paid Tariq Jahan tributes in parliament.

There can be no doubt many in the Asian and African communities in Britain will disagree with Tariq Jahan’s response. But many more, especially in the host community, will be chastised and chastened by it.

Host community, I said. And I said it wrong. For when one is a national of a country one is a national of that country, not a guest. And if one is not a national but a visitor with a visa, one is there courtesy the country being visited and, as such, entitled to the protection of its laws even while subject to them.

Attack and retaliation, offence and revenge are inextricable when the cauldron is on the boil.

And so, while there may be those who demur and those who even decry Tariq Jahan, there can be no doubt that his voice of surpassing sanity will help still the fires of ‘Burningham’.

Unconnected to these events, so reprehensible and in Tariq Jahan’s response, so redemptive, there occurred another transaction in human relations that belongs to the same genre. Qais Hussain, a 70- year old resident of Lahore, sent an email to an Indian woman after tracing her coordinates through friends and, perhaps, the internet.

And what was it about ?

In the 1965 India-Pakistan war, the Pakistan air force shot down an Indian civilian aircraft that had drifted for many miles and showed up on Pakistani radars “going up and down over the border area of the Rann of Kutch for quite some time”. The plane was being piloted by one of the three famous Engineer brothers in the Indian air force. The man who shot the aircraft down under the orders of his controlling officer in the line of duty was Qais Hussain. The recipient of his mail last week, Farida Singh, is the late Jehangir “Jangoo” Engineer’s daughter. Qais Hussain sent his condolences to Farida Singh and explained the circumstances of the incident. We do not know the details of Farida Singh’s response and we may not presume them to be of any particular kind.

There can be no doubt that there will be some reconstructions of the episode that run counter to Qais Hussain’s portrayal of them, and that the gesture made by the retired Pakistan air force officer will be questioned and delved into for ramifications beyond those that are manifest.

Be that as it may, his act shows the place of humanity in the proceedings of war.

We cannot but recall here the late Lal Bahadur Shastri. So spectacular was India’s success in that conflict and so pre-eminent our then prime minister’s leadership of the nation in those critical days, and so stunning the wholly unexpected death of the leader in Tashkent during the post-war summit with Pakistan’s president, Ayub Khan, that we forget what Shastri’s aim in Tashkent was. A clue is provided by a letter he dictated, among his last, from Tashkent.

But before I come to the letter, a small backgrounder: C. Rajagopalachari, then leading the Swatantra Party from his base in Madras, wrote in Swarajya on October 30, 1965: “Our military answer to Pakistan’s challenge was as right as it was successful. Let us never bend our necks to brute force… But let us ever be loyal to fundamental first principles.” In the meantime, Shastri was working at a broader Indo-Pak détente. “Do not take a short view,” CR wrote. “Look far ahead.”

As he prepared to go to Tashkent for the summit convened at the initiative of the premier, Alexei Kosygin, CR sent to him his fervent best wishes. The author of the 1943 ‘Rajaji Formula’ also tendered in 1965, as was his wont, some detailed advice. If, he suggested, Kashmir was to be kept out of the discussion to prevent it from becoming contentious, he urged Shastri to “raise a bigger issue”. And that, in CR’s words was the creation of “two cooperating units in Asia, without tariffs or duties or customs of any kind separating the one from the other”.

After signing, with President Ayub Khan, the Tashkent Agreement rejecting war as a means of resolving disputes, Shastri’s comment was “Achha hi ho gaya” (The right thing has happened). Kashmir had been kept out of the agreement.

On returning to his dacha, the prime minister, wearied but as ever duty-driven, sat down to dictate some letters, including one to CR. “I have seen your article,” he said in it. “I am sure you agree with what we have done in Tashkent and it would get your full support.” Dictation over, Shastri retired from his exertions. The rest does not need recounting.

It was given to his secretary, L.K. Jha, to send the unsigned letter from the departed prime minister to CR in Madras.

In the midst of death, life persists.

When Tariq Jahan says in Birmingham ‘No revenge, please’, when Qais Hussain writes in contrition to condole, when the chief minister, Omar Abdullah, dodging a shoe hurled at him on Independence Day (last year) says, ‘Better a shoe than a stone,’ and orders the hurler to be freed, and when the foreign secretary, Nirupama Rao, speaks of “the vocabulary of peace”, we see the redemptive power of Tagore’s other line from the unexpurgated “Jana Gana Mana”: “Ratri prabhatila udila robi-chhobi purba udayagiri bhale...”