The Indian Express correspondent Joseph Maliakan was the first to unearth the massacre in Trilokpuri during the 1984 riots. He returns on the day the Nanavati Commission report was tabled in Parliament, 23 years later.
The area witnessed one of the most gruesome carnages in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. Today, the sprawling Trilokpuri resettlement colony in east Delhi has only one Sikh family, that of the Granthi at the gurudwara in Block 32.
It was this block that threw up some of the most horrifying scenes during the riots. Nearly 400 Sikhs are believed to have been hacked to death and set on fire. More than 200 women became widows and twice the number became orphans. For months after the carnage, survivors lived in refugee camps housed in various government buildings and gurudwaras.
Post-riots, the families shifted out —— they did not want to return home. The granthi, Gurinder Singh, 37, came here much later, from Dehra Dun. His three children are the only Sikh students at a local primary school.
The victims sometimes return for prayers. The gurudwara had been destroyed in the riots, it has been rebuilt over the years. On November 2, survivors and families of victims gather here to pray for those who died. Of the Nanavati Commission report, the granthi does not seem to know much. Other area residents do not seem too concerned. The ones who would be are now all in Tilak Vihar, having sold their houses here at throwaway prices, some as low as Rs 30,000. The plots today fetch several lakhs.
Tilak Vihar is where victims from Trilokpuri and Kalyanpuri in east Delhi and Mangolpuri, Sultanpuri and Nangloi in West Delhi were allotted Janta flats by the DDA in 1985. For education, the government opened a Punjabi-medium primary school in Tilak Vihar.
But students reach a dead-end after class five, unable to move on to secondary schools where the medium of instruction is either English or Hindi.
There is also a centre for basic training and medicine in the colony , but children are not admitted there, according to the residents.
With nothing meaningful do in life, many children in the colony have taken to drugs and alcohol, says colony pradhan Mohan Singh. A de-addiction centre for the children at DDU Hospital has even been shifted, he adds.