An edited version of the two stories on Sikh riots of 1984 appeared in the Indian Express on Nov. 1.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, October 28, 2009
They chose to return
On that day, murder leapt up from the ground, it was unleashed from the swords the men carried, it cavorted with the mob, and it danced shamelessly in men’s eyes. That day murder came a long way, making its way into small alleys, spilling blood, dismembering limbs, and broke all rules. It was October 31, 1984, the day former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated.
In the 25 years since the carnage, the worst the city experienced, the families have picked up the pieces and moved on. Many relocated to the resettlement colony in Tilak Vihar in Eest Delhi where the government allotted housing to them, but a few remained, returning to the area where the neighbors turned against neighbors, and each block bore the marks of tragedy that cut short many lives, killed dreams of going to college, and heaped them with a life where they woke up in the nights shrieking, angry, afraid and hurt.
The journey was littered, as was the neighbourhood with remainders from the past. But the few families had made their choices and tried to make the best of it – the nightmares, the stereotyping, everything, changing and adapting, often willing but mostly reluctantly.
Sardar Harminder Singh’s neighbor Bheem Singh who sheltered him in his house urged him to chop off his hair.
“For a Sikh, it is like dying,” Singh, 67, said, who has since grown back his hair. “But did we have a choice?”
His two sons – Charanjit Singh,39, and Inderjit Singh, 36 – too had to cut their hair for fear of being recognized as a Sikh. For their mother Kulwant Kaur, the sons died that day, and what remained were two boys who had no religion, no faith.
“Now I think I should have pushed them through the door and let the mob run their swords through them,” she said.
The 1984 carnage turned Kaur into a bitter woman. She had watched helplessly when the mobs knocked at their homes. And she first felt fear, the raw, gripping, and numbing force taking over all the anger that had built up inside her. She revolted. Till date, she is shameful of the day she hid, and let them cut her sons’ hair.
But then, life moves, in spurts and in bits. There’s regret but there’s hope, too.
When the grandchildren were born, she made sure they wore the turban and some of the guilt wore off.
“This is our legacy, this is our identity. They are Sardars,” she said. “We can’t let it all go. We need to claim our past and future.”
On the third day of the massacres that killed more than 450 Sikhs in Trilokpuri, an army truck picked up the family and took them to a refugee camp in Vivek Vihar and from there they went to Chandigarh to live at Guru Gobind Singh Bhawan but were later asked to leave and were given Rs. 500. The family with their two sons and a young daughter then went to Kapurtala in Punjab and lived there for around two years. The sons had to give up their education, and learned to stitch clothes like their father. If life had to go on, the dreams would have had to wait. So education was the first luxury the family had to toss away.
“We returned two years later and went to Tilak Vihar but the houses were small and it felt as if we were cowards,” Harminder Singh said. “Besides, I had been a tailor in Trilokpuri for years. How could I start all over again? I had a family to provide for.”
The tailoring shop in Block 29 of Trilokpuri, a a trans-Jamuna resettlement colony in the east of Delhi in set up in 1975, opposite the Madina Masjid too underwent a cosmetic change. From Sardar Tailors before the gruesome killings that went on for three days, it was rechristened “Happy Tailors”.
Charanjit Singh and Inderjit Singh could never go back to school. Even though, the situation had stabilised, they were teased, and even threatened. So they worked on the sewing machines in their space.
The sons went to the government senior secondary school in Block 27 but post riots, they didn’t find many of their friends there. His other friends who were with him in school have gone on to become journalist, and teachers and he often curses the day the tragedy struck.
“Who knows what I could have become,” he said. “Now I want my children to become engineers, or doctors, do what we couldn’t.”
The shop is doing well. But it is not like before when so many of their clients were from their community. After 1984, many in the area stopped coming to their shop.
“They discriminated against us because we were Sikhs,” he said. “Some people are nice but some are not. We still can’t laugh freely or crack jokes because you never know. We didn’t know then. We still live in fear but we can’t live. We can’t start afresh.”
Singh was married in 1996 and has three sons who attend the local government schools now.
Inderjit married in 2003.
Their sister Sukhwindar Singh was married off to a man in Gandhi Nagar in 1998, years after the family started looking for a groom. She was past the age but no family wanted to marry a girl from Trilokpuri.
It wasn’t a good marriage, Charanjit Singh said.
“She never went to school. She used to go to school in Block 27 but left her studies after the riots. We didn’t let her out of the house,” he said. “Her husband does some embroidery work and is uneducated. Nobody was willing to come to this area. They said who knows if they are mentally stable or if they are traumatized. This match was the one we didn't really like. We wanted an educated family. Even in our marriages, we encountered difficulty. No families were there in Trilokpuri. No families wanted to send their daughters to this area.”
Even 25 years later, fear hasn’t receded into a forgotten corner of the mind. Their own neighbors had helped them, packing three sardars into a tin trunk where they had poked holes for fresh air to get in, hiding them under the bed. Bheem Singh, a rickshaw driver, who had told the mobs to back off and guarded Harminder Singh’s house when the riots raged, is an old man now. Both men often sit outside the shop, reminiscing about those dark days.
And then several other neighbors drop by. In many ways, like the family, the neighborhood too transformed, its demographics changed and its spirit, too.
In Block 32, where Sardars owned more than half of the houses, the worst happened. In fact, it was the mob’s first stopover in a string of organized killings, where men had voters list in hand for reference. No Sikh family lives there now. Almost all those who remained, the widows and the children, relocated to the resettlement colony.
Houses that were not occupied were sold off for peanuts. Now, many Muslim families are settled there.
In other blocks, a few families chose to return. And so they have, battling the odds.
Parabjot Singh, nine-year-old grandson of Harminder Singh, often refuses to go to the nearby Municipal Corporation of Delhi school.
“They call me ‘joori’,” he said, shyly. “The teachers and the students call me names.”
But then, the family has limited options. Private schools are out of bounds for their limited means.
“They have to cope with it. They have to survive,” Charanjit Singh said. “We can’t turn our backs this time. We have to go on.”
On the door, a gash is still prominent. When the angry mod had come, shouting, torches in hand and brandishing swords and knives, they had struck the door. But then someone shouted “Come here, there are more Sardars here” and the mob turned, and that’s when Harminder Singh knew life would go on.
“It’s the pole.”
Nazar Singh can never get past the electricity pole outside his tenement in Block 36 of Trilokpuri.
At least not without going back 25 years when an angry mob had pulled out his father from the house, stabbed him, and then burned him alive. He had been away at his workshop in Mehrauli, and later when he returned, he had stood near the pole and wondered why it happened.
The family’s dog Jackie had not left the spot for three days, and while the city burned, the family debated whether they should leave like the rest, or if they should stay back, and fight the demons.
In the following days, his mother Naseeb Kaur sat outside their corner house and started at the pole. She hardly spoke, and she cried often.
In 1992, she died, too.
“She couldn’t take it. You couldn’t move on because the pole was right there in front of your eyes and it held you, stopped you, forced you to think about the tragedy,” Nazar, 46, said.
He had been only 22 at the time. And suddenly he had felt old, and without hope. But moving on wasn’t a choice. It was survival that was at stake. There was his family to be taken care of, his sisters had to be married off.
The house in Block 36, tucked in an alley near the gurudwara that was a site of many ghastly killings in 1984, was their only property. If they moved to what the government offered them in Tilak Vihar, it would be admitting defeat, and forsaking what their father had built.
So they lived on, with the pole in front of their house, trying to not look at it. But in denial too, the memories didn’t leave the family alone.
Now, Fauji is a sevadar at the gurudwara earning a mere Rs. 2,200 a month. The government’s promises of jobs and compensation never came through. And over the years, he felt too tired to pursue it. That would mean more humiliation, and it would hurt, he said.
“We are like beggars now and for no fault of ours,” he said. “They shouted when they came to kill us that Indira Gandhi was their mother. But we loved her, too.”
His young daughter Kirandeep Kaur stood near the door, watching her father as he recounted the horrors and narrated the family’s journey in the 25 years hence.
Fauji never discussed the gruesome and gory past with her. She is in high school and she didn’t need to know, he said.
But as she grew up, the past came to her in neighbour’s tales, haunting her, exciting her, and disturbing her. They pointed to the pole and told her this was where her grandfather had been killed, and she asked questions, uncomfortable, painful questions from her father.
“He told me little things and he sat in front of the pole when he told me how death came upon us,” she said.
In the same block, yet another victim is trying to shut out the past. But she can’t because forgetting is betraying her husband and her community that were punished for no fault of theirs, she said.
“The world forgot us. The government forgot me. When the tree fell, and the earth shook as Rajiv Gandhi said, we were buried in its cracks, we became zombies,” the 59-year-old widow said.
Gurcharan Kaur was in Karol Bagh when her husband Naik Teja Singh was killed outside the Gurudwara as he walked home with his three children. The children watched in horror as their father fell, blood colouring the streets, and his shouts piercing through the raging mob that wielded sticks and knives, and their eyes shone through the fire and the smoke.
The neighbors brought the children home and kept them in their house until the mother returned. Gurcharan was picked up in an army van that also carried her slain husband’s body. Four children were in her brother’s house at Karol Bagh when the curfew was imposed.
“My husband’s body was burnt, his one hand was cut off. It was terrible,” she said.
She opened a chai stall in the front verandah of her house and brought up her seven children. She married off her first daughter when she turned 16. The youngest is now studying in Australia, the son is employed in a private firm and lives in the apartment upstairs.
Kaur chose to stay back because her neighbors helped her get on her feet, helping with money, food and everything else. The gurudwara where she spent a lot of time in the aftermath of the riots helped her heal, and move on.
Her husband’s medals are now displayed in her house and so is his photograph in all his army glory. The young couple had moved to Delhi in 1982, hoping to bring up their children in the city. But then riots happened.
Kaur tided through her life with a meagre pension of Rs. 365, and her earnings from her tea shop raising her seven children on her own.
“There was no time to think, no time to point fingers,” she said. “I was too busy getting by.”
At the gurudwara in Block 36, the Sikhs, the few families that remain in the area, will organize a Shahidi Diwas beginning Oct. 31 through Nov. 2 for the men that were murdered during the three days of the carnage.
The tradition started in 1985 and has gone on since. For three days, the granthis will read the sacred texts and remember the “martyrs” and pray for them.
They haven’t forgotten. Because if they forgot, the betrayal would be too much to bear, more than loss itself.
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