I happened upon a huge crowd of Indian students walking up the Baghramyan Street. I thought it was one of their national holidays; they are always accompanied by processions and music. Well, I thought, the procession would be a great part of a new project, Indians in Armenia, that Hetq photographer Onnik Krikorian and I have launched recently.

But as soon as I approached, it became clear that the crowd gathering at the National Assembly building was not celebrating a festival at all; it looked more like a demonstration.

"What's the gathering about?" I asked one of the students, expecting to hear some common Armenian university problem.

His answer was beyond all my expectations. It was something horrible. Later in the several hours that I spent with them at the National Assembly others added their stories to his tale, and gradually the whole picture emerged.

Today (April 20, 2006) at around 13:00 pm, a third year student at the Medical University, 21- year-old Prashant Anchalia fell out of a sixth floor window in Building #7 of the Zeytun Student Dormitory. How and why he fell are not yet clear. The students who rushed to him found him lying on the ground covered with blood, screaming in pain. They called an ambulance and their dean's office.

Dean Anna Sarkisyan arrived fifteen minutes later. Although she is a doctor, she made no attempt to provide emergency aid to the student, and even forbade the other students to touch him or take him to hospital in a taxi, rather than wait for the ambulance, which was slow to arrive. Instead, she ordered them to wait for the police to get there.

The Police arrived and took some witnesses to the Kanaker Police Station for questioning.

The ambulance arrived some 45-50 minutes after the call. According to the students, it was in very poor condition and had no medical equipment, not even an oxygen mask.

On the way to the hospital, Prashant Anchalia died.

The students went to the Medical University and asked to meet with the rector, seeking an explanation for why their friend had been treated so negligently. The response of the newly- appointed rector, Gohar Kialyan, came as a shock. Out of the blue, she referred to Indian girls as prostitutes, and showed the students the middle fingers of both her hands, a gesture whose meaning is well known to even five-year old kids.

Astonished by her behavior, the students decided to seek help in higher places.

Several hundred students marched to the National Assembly, shouting, "Help, President!" and "We Want Justice!" They were immediately surrounded by the police, who forbade the students to move to the Presidential Palace, faces frozen in dumb indifference.

"Man, I was supposed to go get my tooth fixed today," one of them yawned, as he glanced significantly at the pavement. All the police cared about was not letting the people cross the line between the pavement and the street. I tried to find compassion in anybody's eyes, but in vain.

"What you want exactly? Tell me," said a policeman, apparently of some high rank, not even bothering to wipe the ironical expression off his face.

"We demand that the rector resign."

"Justice."

"Let them act like human beings, not like nationalists."

"If it had been an Armenian lying there, would he have been treated the same way?"

I heard it from all sides. They would ask and answer this question a hundred times within several hours, to the politicians who appeared from time to time, to the journalists, among whom there was no one from the National TV.

"We will stay here until we get the rector's resignation. We will boycott our classes; we will go back to our country. Let her at least be worried about losing the money she makes from 800 Indian students," the Indian students said.

An elderly passer-by read their posters, which said in Armenian, "We do not need her apology, we need justice!" "Shame on the rector!" "The rector must resign!" Learning the story behind them, she said, "My dears, what you are doing makes no sense. She won't go-don't you know who her husband is?"

A young man shrugged his shoulders and said, "Guys, this kind of thing happens all the time. You're not going to accomplish anything."

The students formed a group of four representatives and sent them to the National Assembly to meet with the vice-speaker, Tigran Torosyan.

Some time later, the vice-rector of the Medical University, Victor Sahakyan, and the second secretary of the Indian Embassy arrived.

"Let them come to the University and speak there. We don't solve our problems on the street," he said.

Told that they had already been to the university, where they had been insulted by the rector, Sahakyan explained, "They aren't representing it to you correctly. They did not interpret it the right way." He was immediately interrupted by the Indians, who wanted to know how else the gesture could be interpreted.

Earlier a policeman had told the students, "Guys, don't worry about it. She's a woman. Maybe she didn't know the meaning of the gesture."

The Embassy representative, Mr. Bali, advised the students to disperse and let them settle the matter the diplomatic way.

The Embassy told the parents of the dead boy that he had committed suicide, without even waiting for the investigation to be concluded.

The students do not believe it was suicide.

"He was a balanced person. He had many plans for the future. He could not have killed himself," they said.

The four-person delegation came back from the meeting with Tigran Torosyan and said that Torosyan had asked them for two days to get acquainted with the matter and decide what to do.

After that, Torosyan met with the Indian ambassador, Rina Pandei.

Ara Avetisyan, the deputy minister of Science and Education came to meet the Indian students. In his view, the National Assembly was not the right place for a protest, and oral demands were not the best method. He advised the students to produce their demands in written form. The most ridiculous thing was that no one could tell them who to write to.

And everybody kept saying that the students had to go back to the university to speak to the rector and get her apology if she had done something wrong. Completely ignoring the fact that that was not what the students were after.

Red berets appeared at the building of the Parliament, surrounding the crowd that was already surrounded by the police. As if the Indian students there were dangerous criminals.

A man in civilian clothes standing with the police looked at the crowd with frank surprise and asked, "There are more than a billion of them now, right? What they are fighting for, one more, one less?"

The one cause for optimism in the whole situation was that there were also few compassionate Armenians there - two young girls, two students from YSU who were with the Indians all that time and an old woman who, when she heard story, knelt down to the Indian girls, hugged them, and began to cry.

Some students brought lighted candles with them. During these hours I managed to talk to most of them. The students would come up to me and ask if I was tired, if I needed anything to eat.

"Look at this girl standing with the Chechen separatist," muttered a young Policeman. The man I was talking to, the "Chechen separatist", was a Sikh who while living here had to remove his turban and cut his beard (Sikhism does not allow to cut hair and shave off their beard), because the core of Armenian society, the " rabiz mass" or "real Armenian guys" as they prefer to be called, do not tolerate any other haircut but their own crop, no style of dress but their black trousers and shirts. The Indian students have problems with these Armenian guys all the time.

At around 10 o'clock in the evening the Ambassador, accompanied by Tigran Torosyan, came out of the parliament building and took the students to the Medical University. There, they had a private meeting with Rector Gohar Kialyan. Off course the meeting yielded no results.

"She said she was sorry," one of the students said. "She said it without any expression, any feeling. Then she suggested we arrange a delegation to meet our dean and talk."

Friday morning the Indian students went to the First Hospital to pay their respects to their friend. Iranian, Syrian and other foreign students joined them. No Armenians were there.

Photos by Onnik Krikorian