On October 31 this year, which happened to be the 30th anniversary of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, I visited Trilokpuri, an area which has witnessed some of the worst episodes of the anti-Sikh riots. I was accompanying a friend who is working on the riots as a part of her PhD thesis.
The days leading up to the anniversary had been tense. There were reports of communal upheavals, brawls and stone pelting which had just started after Diwali and the police had imposed a curfew which was lifted for about six hours every day. So it didn't come as a surprise when we found a large number of cops parked outside the gurudwara in Block 31. Contrary to our expectations, they let us through without even asking for ID cards.
As we made our way across the gurudwara's courtyard, my friend told me how in 1984, hundreds who were trying to hide in the gurudwara premises from the massacre on the streets, had been locked inside and set afire. The sanctum sanctorum was being renovated, in preparation for the three-day long remembrance ceremony or Shaheedi Diwas as they call it. This year, of course, it has been postponed to late November because of the prohibitory orders that are in place as the Sevadar's son informed us.
The first thing the Sevadar wanted to know was which media house we were from. My friend told him that she was only a student and wanted to know about the remembrance ceremony and when it would be held. We sat in a corner and the Sevadar told us what happens during the Shaheedi diwas. He spoke about his life before the riots and where exactly he was on that fateful day when the rioters gathered outside his house, how his uncle cut his hair and his neighbours saved his life and how afraid he was to even go to work days after the riots were over. He spoke of all those who had lost their lives and property and homes and the inhumanities unleashed. It is one thing to read about it in books and another to hear a first-hand account from a living person of flesh and blood and bone.
We told him that we knew how hard it must be to talk about such brutalities that one has lived through and that we had absolutely no intentions of making him relive painful memories. My friend wanted to know how they were getting on and the kind of help the government was providing. But he seemed intent on telling us more stories from the past. We were shown family photographs over cups of chai and given more details about burning tyres, charred bodies and orphaned children. When we were about to leave, he asked us again which media house we were from. He said that he was simply asking because a lot of journalists visited the gurudwara around this time of the year, wanting to hear stories from when it all happened, wanting to click photographs of him, wanting more details to furnish their 1984 special articles. Apparently right before us, some journalists had come and he had told them exactly all the things that he had told us.
I have always maintained that Ghalib has an appropriate couplet for everything and he certainly has one for this occasion: