In Punjab, a pair of lifelong best friends are called jigri yaar: friends joined not merely at the heart but at the liver. The phrase suggests an intimacy so deep it is almost anatomical, as if friendship has passed beyond feeling and entered the body. Punjabi songs and Hindi films have long celebrated this kind of male devotion: two men eating from the same plate, sleeping under the same quilt, risking death for each other, calling each other brother because no other word is available. What these stories rarely make room for is what happens when one of those men leaves.

For those of us who came of age in the 1990s, before terms like gay, lesbian, and bisexual entered our vocabulary, these portrayals of fraternal love provided rare openings. They allowed us to expand our suppressed desires into the realm of fantasy. Queer philosopher Judith Butler has argued that fantasy is not the opposite of reality but rather shaped by it, filling in what reality so frequently denies. For queer men like me, such fantasies created possibilities beyond what was immediately available. Watching men on-screen display affection toward one another was not only an escape from the overwhelming weight of patriarchal expectations. It was also a glimpse of something else that might be possible, even if only fleeting: that love between two men could be imagined.

During my fieldwork in Indian Punjab, I began to hear another story underneath these familiar celebrations of male friendship. The story was not simply about desire, or secrecy, or the impossibility of naming certain forms of love. It was also about migration. Again and again, men spoke of friends who had left: for Canada, for the United States, for Australia, for the Gulf. These departures were described by families as success, as sacrifice, as a son’s chance to rescue the household from debt. But, for the friends left behind, they often felt like abandonment. Migration had transformed male friendship into a quiet epidemic of heartbreak.

Amar, twenty-seven when I first met him, had grown up cherishing films about fraternal love and male devotion. Off-screen, he had his own story of a deep, enduring bond with his childhood friend Lalli. Amar was born into a landless family on the outskirts of Firozpur, a city only twelve kilometres from the India-Pakistan border. From an early age, he was drawn to music and singing. “My family is from the Bazigar caste,” he explained, referring to a community historically associated with performance. His grandfather, part of a long line of Dhadhi musicians who once sang ballads of the Sikh gurus, had also been a poet. He became both Amar’s caretaker and his teacher.

Amar never knew his father. “He disappeared shortly after I was born,” he told me. His family still does not know if he was abducted by police or killed by militants, or if he simply abandoned his wife and children. In 1986, he left home for work one morning and never came back. More than eight thousand Sikh men across Punjab went missing during the years of the Sikh militancy. Amar’s father was one of them. The absence left the family in precarious financial straits. His grandfather’s income as a musician, supplemented by what his mother earned as a teacher’s assistant and seamstress, barely held them afloat. “We searched all over Punjab for him,” Amar recalled. “We hoped for years that he would return, but he never did.”

It would take nearly two decades for the family to obtain the necessary paperwork declaring his father officially dead. Amar’s relatives paid two hundred thousand rupees in bribes to local bureaucrats just to secure his death certificate. They paid more again to ensure his elder brother could inherit the clerical post their father had once held in the local municipal office. “Government jobs, even the most menial ones, are impossible to get without bribery or nepotism,” Amar told me. His brother’s salary now sustains the household. “He is in charge of everything and everyone.”

When I first met Amar at a roadside eatery, or dhaba, near Moga city, he appeared older than his years. He stood about five foot eight, with large, pensive eyes, a faded pink turban, and a partially trimmed beard. I asked if he had cut his hair or only his beard. “Just the beard,” he admitted, smiling faintly. “But the time is coming for the hair, too.” Amar’s grandfather was a devout Sikh, a follower of Guru Nanak. “I don’t want to disrespect him while he’s alive,” Amar told me. His grandfather was 91 and in failing health. “I’ll wait until after he’s gone.”

Yet, even as Amar spoke of waiting, it was clear that his connection to Sikhism was not the same as the one he had inherited. He identified as Sikh, but distantly. “I’m a member of the Tarksheel Society,” he explained, referring to a Punjab-based rationalist organisation that emerged in the 1980s in response to Sikh fundamentalism and militancy, promoting reason and scepticism over blind adherence to faith. “My connection to the Almighty is through nature, through poetry and music, not through temples or political parties that exploit people in the name of religion.”

Amar hoped to emulate popular Punjabi musicians like Diljit Dosanjh, though he struggled to conform to the genre’s dominant themes: glorifications of male violence, drinking, casual misogyny, and dominant caste (Jat) pride. “I keep writing songs about love and heartbreak instead,” he laughed. “But today’s youth aren’t interested in emotions. They just want escape.” When I asked Amar if he had ever been in love, he answered without hesitation. “Lalli,” he said. “He was the only man I have ever loved. And our love was not physical.”

The two men had grown up side-by-side on the same street, a year apart in age. Lalli’s house became Amar’s second home. “We ate together. We played together. We even slept together,” he recalled. Neighbours referred to them as jigri yaar, friends so close they were said to be joined by the liver, not just the heart. His mother teased him repeatedly. “You should have been born into Lalli’s family. God must have made a mistake.”

From the beginning, Lalli knew Amar’s secret. “He’s the only one I ever talked about my attraction to men,” Amar confessed. Amar had once watched a classmate be bullied out of school for being effeminate, and he was terrified that a similar fate might befall him if his peers discovered his secret. Lalli’s response was steady, loyal. “It doesn’t matter if you’re drawn to men or women,” he told him. “You will always be my best friend, my jigri yaar.” He never betrayed that trust. He protected Amar, made sure no older boys harassed him, and held his secret as carefully as if it were his own.

But Lalli, too, was carrying something unspoken. Without telling Amar, he had applied for a Canadian work visa. “One day he walked into my room, flushed with excitement and optimism,” Amar recalled. “I got my visa! I’m leaving next week.” Amar described the shock as a physical jolt. The ground shifted beneath him. He had never heard Lalli talk about leaving India. He had no idea the application had been in motion for years, requiring sums of money far beyond Lalli’s family’s means. “He had borrowed fifteen lakh rupees from his relatives,” Amar explained. “He promised to repay it with wages from construction work in Edmonton.”

By the time Lalli told him, everything was already arranged. Within a week, he was gone. Amar travelled with Lalli’s family on the long road to the Delhi airport. Watching his beloved childhood friend vanish behind the sliding doors of the international terminal, a strange sense of loss came over him. Amar realised that Lalli would never again be to him all that he had been in the past. Life had finally come between the two friends-of-the-liver.

The secrecy was not unusual. Families concealed migration plans to avoid sabotage. In Punjab, people whispered about neighbours who spread rumours, filed false police reports, or dredged up old accusations of militancy to derail a visa application. The fear even had a name: Bhani-marna, to cut someone’s fate short. In this climate of secrecy and distrust, departures often came as shocks, revealed through sudden goodbyes or social-media posts from the airport. “Nowadays,” one young man told me, “you only learn that your cousin or childhood friend has left upon seeing the selfie they post on Facebook from outside of terminal 3.” Amar, too, was left with the silence of absence. “Migration is very sudden,” he lamented. “One day you are enjoying a carefree life with your best friend. The next day, he is gone. It stirs up a violence inside you, a kind of violence that’s difficult to put into words.”

Amar’s story was not unique. I heard similar heartbreak echoed in different forms, by men who had also lost their closest companions to migration. Harjinder, another man I interviewed in Moga, still clung to the letters his childhood friend Mukesh had written after leaving for Canada in the early 1990s. Inscribed on prepaid envelopes marked AIRMAIL, with their red and blue borders faded from age, the letters were stored in a plastic box like family heirlooms. The words inside spoke of longing, of love, of promises to reunite one day. The letters slowed over time and then stopped altogether. Mukesh faded into the distance. The friendship was preserved only in the yellowing paper Harjinder still read and reread over glasses of whiskey while nursing decades-old heartbreak.

Angrej, a young man who emigrated to the United States in 2013, remembered his childhood friend with a grief that still startled him. Everyone in their village affectionately called his friend Kalu Pehelwan, the dark-skinned wrestler, a nickname that referenced both his dusky complexion and his broad, muscular build. The two men had grown up inseparable, another pair of jigri yaar, friends-of-the-liver. When Angrej left, Kalu Pehelwan cried for weeks. “He even offered me his land and wealth if I had stayed,” Angrej recalled somberly. Two years later, Kalu Pehelwan died of a heart attack. Angrej remained convinced it was not merely his body failing him but the heartbreak he had endured. “He died of sadness, of losing me,” he mourned quietly. Now Angrej sends money to Kalu Pehelwan’s widow and son, trying to blunt his own guilt for abandoning his beloved friend.

Across Punjab, these stories weave together into a larger pattern of loss. In the 1980s, young men disappeared into the militancy, leaving families searching for fathers, sons, and brothers who never came home. Nowadays, they disappear into migration. The departures are legal, sanctioned, even celebrated as success. But, for those left behind, they are another kind of disappearance. This sense of male absence has become a defining feature of life in Punjab today. The rivers that once named the land have been overtaken by other flows: of airplanes and airports and the relentless movement of men outward.

For those left behind, the absence is not easily spoken of. Punjab has songs and films that celebrate male friendship but few words for the grief of losing one’s friend-of-the-liver. Many men turn instead to alcohol or drugs to dull the pain of heartbreak. Others follow the same path their friends took, allowing themselves to be swept up by the same currents of migration that had once destabilised their seemingly routine lives.

Alongside economic strain, political unrest, and the pressures of patriarchy, young men in Punjab often described another force driving migration: peer influence, or dekha-dekhi. The logic was simple. If one friend left, another soon followed. Colloquialisms mocked these attitudes with precision: Bhed-chaal, herd mentality; Kabootar-bazi, pigeon play. What they disguised, in part, was the grief that lay underneath. Each departure meant another fracture in the web of relationships that held villages together. Amar spoke of it as an unacknowledged epidemic of heartbreak. “There are thousands of these stories,” he bemoaned. “Each one with its own thread of pain and sorrow.”

Lalli’s departure left Amar wary, less willing to risk intimacy with other men. “When I meet new people now,” he admitted, “I find myself asking, are you planning to leave too?” The question was not rhetorical. In today’s Punjab, it had become a way of protecting himself. Each new friendship carried the possibility of abandonment. For men like Amar, the pain of losing a best friend to migration was no less searing than the loss of a father to the militancy. It was yet another form of violence, albeit one unfolding more gradually and without much acknowledgement.

This essay is excerpted, with permission, from Harjant S. Gill’s forthcoming book, “Coming of Age in Macholand: Masculinity, Patriarchy, and the Search for Freedom in Indian Punjab” (University of Chicago Press, 2027).

Complaining about the media is easy. Why not do something to make it better? Support independent media and subscribe to Newslaundry today.