"It's like living in a graveyard."

In Haryana, we couldn't find decent chai. The tea we were served at the district court and the dhabas were sweet, milky variety. And we couldn't refuse. So, by the time we finished with the interviews, we were stuffed with the chai that locals descibed as "takatwar". And then, at a dhaba we stopped to file the story, we had them make our kind of chai and they were pretty amused.
"That is no tea," the guy said. "That's boiled water."
When my editor told me he wanted me to go to Hisar to track down Relu Ram Punia's surviving family members, we thought Hisar was just two-and-a-half hours away. As it turned out, it was almost a five-hour drive and then getting to Litani took another hour. When we saw the house where the daughter killed eight members of her family and is now on death row in the Ambala Central Jail, we could feel the chill. It was an eerie feeling.
An edited verion of the article appeared in the Indian Express on May 31, 2009.

Chinki Sinha
Hisar, May 30, 2009

From a distance of 400 meters, from where the road cuts into the narrow Litani bend, the Punia Farmhouse looms large, perhaps the only thing you could see for miles.
This is the dream house that former MLA Renu Lal Punia built for himself. He wanted to retire there, see from the terrace the sprawling 100 acres of farmland that he had bought with all the money he made in the oil business, though illegally.
And this is the same kothi where he was beaten to death along with seven other family members by his own daughter Sonia and son-in-law Sanjeev on the night of August 24, 2001.
Now grass grows tall in the lawns, the chandeliers inside the house have layers of dust on them as if someone forgot to switch them on in years, the swimming pool has no water, and the paint is peeling off the walls. It’s the same kothi that his daughter, who Punia named after his favourite politician Sonia Gandhi, wanted, and killed for. She and her husband killed them one by one, at first sneaking on the terrace where Renu Lal slept, then killing the mother, and then others. The murders went on for hours, locals said.
Except for the ground floor, the other parts of the house are seldom used now. The rooms, where the brutal killings took place eight years ago, are latched.
Ram Singh Punia, who lives here now with his son and nephews, didn’t repaint the house. Nor did he take down the pictures of Lokesh, the one-and-a-half year old grandson, who too was clubbed to death while he slept with his grandmother on that night.
“It is like a graveyard,” he said. “She (Sonia) turned it into one. She wanted this house. Renu Lal didn’t want to give it to her.”
As he opened the room where Shakuntala, the daughter-in-law, was murdered with her two daughters Shivani and Preeti by the same iron rod, Jitender Singh Punia stopped by the door, reluctant. A faint smell - that of old clothes, of old pictures and of dried, rotten blood - lingered in the room. Yes, the bedcover that was soaked in blood when the three were killed as they slept on that August night lay on the floor, bundled. The smell was the strongest there, perhaps it emanated from the crumpled covers.
For the nephew, who was in Class X the year the murders send shockwaves around the region and made headlines, living in the same house is like inhabiting a graveyard. Memories and visages of the past do not leave you so soon, he said.
On the ceiling of the room, blood stains are still visible. On the bed, amid thousand other little things that Lokesh played with, a soft toy stands out.
“We can’t forget it. Sometimes, a little noise here and there, in the middle of the night, scares us,” he said.
On the winding steps, Mala, the domestic help, stood, watching.
“I had been with the family for years. That year, I had taken off. After the murders, I was scared of coming here for almost a year,” she said. “Imagine ... eight murders ... all in one night.”
For three years after the gruesome murders, the house, famous in the parts for its stylish architecture, complete with a ramp where you could drive a car on to the first floor terrace, was closed. When it was opened in 2004, Ram Singh Punia, the only surviving brother, moved in. They threw out the rotting furniture on the ground floor and burnt all of Sonia’s possessions, including her pictures. They called it purging.
The wayward daughter, who married the man of her choice, and who smoked and drank whiskey and beer, is only present in the house through others, through what she did on the night of August 24.
On a table in the hallway on the first floor, photographs of Renu Lal Punia, his second wife Krishna, son Sunil, his wife Shakuntala, and their three children, and Sonia’s sister Pammi, who were murdered in cold blood, with a toplink Sonia picked up from the garage on that night when the servants slept outside, and the crackers burst, to drown the shouts of those who were being clubbed to death by the daughter of the house, are stacked. Sonia’s pictures were disposed off long ago.
“She took away everything from us,” Ram Singh Punia said. “We have kept nothing of hes. She has left us nothing that belonged to us.”
The milkman had come running to Ram Singh Punia’s house, around three kilometres away from the kothi, panting, out of breath on the morning on August 25. When nobody had responded to the knocks, he had ventured inside the house. On the first floor, he saw blood on the floor. He didn’t wait. The chowkidar Amar Singh, a key witness who also filed the FIR with the police, too had seen the blood splattered on the floor before he rushed to the get the police.
When Punia and his elder son Nonia Singh rushed to the kothi, around 30 people from the area had already assembled. Police was there, too.
Sonia too was there, frothing at the mouth, a suicidal note in hand. She claimed she had killed her father because he didn’t love her. After all she was a stepdaughter.
“We would have killed Sonia if we would have known. But she was already in custody,” Nonia Singh said. “She came with her husband Sanjeev to kill them. Then she dropped off Sanjeev and he caught a bus to Saharanpur.”
Ram Singh had met his brother the day before he was murdered. They had talked about work, and other usual things. Of course, none of them knew.
For many months, the Punia deaths were the talk of the town. Eight years later, villagers in Hansi, 87 kilometers away, still remember the killings and are curious to know what happened to Soina, who is lodged in the Ambala Jail, waiting for the President’s decision on her letter.
“In our parts, we love our daughters. Then a daughter does this and other girls start to threaten their families that if they don’t get share in the property, Renu Lal episode would be repeated. It set such a bad example. How can we trust daughters now?,” Ram Singh Punia said. “She should be hanged. We need to show them all that bad deeds don’t go unpunished.”
Sonia was the daughter of Renu Lal Punia’s second wife Krishna, who he married after his first wife Om Devi died. He had a son with Om Devi. Krishna had two daughters – Sonia and Pammi.
Family members said Renu Lal loved Sonia but when she married Sanjeev who she met on one of her sports trips outside the city, he was upset. Sonia kept demanding money from her father, which he obliged at first, but then as his business suffered, he had to say no to Sonia.
The tipping point reached when Sonia asked for the Punia Farmhouse, Ram Singh said.
“Most of this stuff is in Sonia’s confessions, too,” he said. “As family, we too know.”
Allegedly Sonia and her mother Krishna didn’t want Sunil to inherit all of Renu Lal’s property, pegged at crores of rupees, including two houses in Delhi and Faridabad.
They had even filed a court case against Punia, Lal Bahadur Khowal, who knows the family well and even fought the case with the prosecutor SK Pandhir in the high court, said.
It was Khowal’s first case as a legal assistant Pandhir, who took up the case when the Panchayat urged him to get the eight victims justice.
Sonia had been claiming she was not of sane mind, yet another one of her ploys, Pandhir said.
The Punia murders was perhaps the toughest case because it was based on circumstantial evidence and all loopholes had to be covered. They had more than 109 witnesses and they examined 66 of those. The files too ran in hundreds of pages, Pandhir recalled.
“We had clinching arguments that why Pammi was called from her hostel that night. Only a family member could do it and Sonia brought her home that night. The chowkidar had seen them both come in,” he said. “It was an emotional case. Sonia had killed the suckling child of Sunil.”
Pandhir had first anticipated that the court might extend a life sentence to Sonia because Sonia had a young son.
“But we countered it by saying Shaunktala too had a suckling baby. Ek baccha ko teen bacche se kata,” he said. “And then she was a female who killed three other females.”
For Khowal, who argued the case in the Supreme Court for almost 17 days that it went on for, it was the case that made him the lawyer he is today.
“It was an unusual case, a high-profile one, one that was charged with too much drama,” he said. “No, Sonia wasn’t schizophrenic as she pretended. She was weird and she was wild.”
On trial days, Sonia would come to the court decked up in matching salwar kurtas and jewelry, her lips painted red with lipstick, and she would laugh, Pandhir said.
“As a prosecutor, I never met her. But I saw her. She was beautiful. But looking at her, you wouldn’t know she was accused of murdering her own father. She laughed and smiled,” Pandhir said.
Sonia had left her son at Saharanpur where her in-laws lived and had come that night to Litani to celebrate Lokesh, the one-and-a-half year old grandson’s birthday, with crackers.
“It was all planned. Why would she leave her son otherwise,” Khowal said.
Sonia was just out of school when she married Sanjeev. A beautiful woman, who trained in Judo and Taekwondo, Sonia was known in the town for her wild ways. In fact, when she was in jail in Hisar, she picked up fights with other inmates. A case was booked against her, too, the lawyers said.
Now that Sonia has written to the President asking her to expedite her death, the lawyers are happy. So is Ram Singh, who doesn’t want to talk about the murders anymore. It is enough living in the tomb, he said.
“All I want is that she should be hanged for what she did,” he said. “I lost my brother. The village and all of us want justice. It has been eight long years.”
The house, where death descended one night when a daughter struck her own, remains in a limbo. There are five dogs, but they too are silent as the family.
The cobwebs hang in the rooms that once housed the dead.
In the foyer, servants loiter around. Inside the main hall, family members sit and chat. But nobody takes the staircase to the first and the second floors where Sonia had once roamed, iron rod in hand.