By Sanam Sutirath Wazir
Published by HarperCollins India, June 2024.
Book excerpt
Lakshmi Kaur, who has been living in Tilak Vihar for the past thirty years, was fifty-eight years old when I met her, but she looked much older. ‘Stress has aged me,’ she said. ‘My husband was killed right in front of my eyes and we were looted of all that we had. Our boys’ hair were cut off and our women were raped. They lit rubber tyres and threw them around our homes.
Thirty years have passed since then, but I still panic sometimes.’ Lakshmi’s words testify to the suffering that the victims of the 1984 massacres have had to endure.
‘Our families have been butchered,’ she continued. ‘We are still caged in the memories of 1984 while the people responsible are still free. Ask the women who had to jump over their family members’ dead bodies in order to save themselves, ask them what they feel when they remember such incidents. No one came to empathize with us in our time of suffering and grief. All I ask is for some closure. Can anyone direct me towards my dead husband’s
ashes? Where are his remains? Was he buried or was he cremated? Am I not a citizen? Who will answer my questions?’
Lakshmi Kaur’s questions reverberate across generations. The children of 1984 have grown up with trauma and violence being their first memories. With fathers and brothers lost to the killings, many of these children have had to abandon their studies and take on the roles of breadwinners. Indeed, the rate of school dropouts substantially increased in the aftermath of 1984, yet no official linkage has been made between the massacres and the number of children who dropped out. I filed an RTI seeking answers to these questions. I haven’t received a response so far.
The year 1984 remains a shadow on the lives of even those who were not old enough to remember the killings. Those who were babies in the winter of 1984, for instance, confess to hazy feelings of loss—they don’t remember their fathers. For their mothers, widowed in the pogrom, the insecurity and stigma of living in Widows’ Colony in Tilak Vihar has never left.
Following the tragic aftermath of the 1984 anti-Sikh massacre, Sikh children became targets of relentless racial slurs and discrimination. In the wake of the community’s profound loss,
these innocent children endured the torment of derogatory remarks and hateful taunts hurled at them solely because of their Sikh identity. These scars of massacre were not just physical but also deeply psychological, as these children faced a hostile environment where their very existence was met with scorn and prejudice. Such targeted verbal abuse inflicted further pain on a community already grappling with the trauma of violence and loss.
Raja, thirty-five years old, told me, ‘Everyone used to talk about their fathers in school. Other students used to call me Seekh Kebab. They would say, “He is from the fatherless Widows’
Colony.”’
These children, who are adults now, have lived with the perpetual fear that like their fathers, they too might be killed one day.
Surjeet Singh was seven years old in 1984. His mother dressed him in a frock and hid him inside their house in order to save his life. When I asked about his father, he started to sob. His father was killed in Sultanpuri, Block C. ‘I have studied till Class X, but I did not appear for the final matric examination. I was in depression throughout my schooldays. We never had enough money to support our education or even to buy books or uniform,’ said Surjeet. His childhood was traumatic and filled with the memories of his father’s brutal killing.
‘People used to donate clothes and we used them as our uniform.’ Surjeet was worried about the family’s financial condition and to support his mother, he started working at the age of fourteen.
‘The only thing I miss the most is the presence of my father in our lives. We have lived like orphans.’ He remembers when they were at the Farash Bazaar Relief Camp, six to seven families were accommodated in those small rooms. ‘Food was also not properly
available for all of us. Discussing 1984 is like opening a painful wound,’ he said.
‘All of a sudden, our lives were ruined and our family setup became unstable. If you lose someone in your family, it shakes everyone. Imagine, I have seen my father being burnt alive.
‘I was angry yet helpless. We are five siblings and our mother was the sole breadwinner in our family. Today, after thirty-two years, I am again helpless. I can’t provide for my kids. I have spent half my life fighting against these odds and my memories of 1984. I am undereducated, but I am trying my best to make ends meet.’
The current generation of youth living in Tilak Vihar have inherited the scars and trauma of the anti-Sikh massacre. Nothing much has changed here.
In 2019, when I visited Tilak Vihar, it was the second day of the three-day prayers that are held annually for the victims of the carnage. Women and children of the locality gather near the Tilak Vihar gurdwara and prepare langar for everyone who visits. There is a photo museum in the gurdwara that the survivors of 1984 built in the memory of those killed in the massacre. This museum is a bridge between the young and the old, and it is the only way
for a third generation to meet their relatives.
There were many different emotions on display when I visited the gurdwara. Some had tears streaming down their faces. Others had bowed their heads in tribute to the lost ones. In a bittersweet gesture, some of the younger generation were introducing their friends to photographs of their grandparents—people now gone but never forgotten.
