REVISITING 1984 – RIOT AROUND A POLE

The Comfort of Objects – Walking the streets of Trilokpuri

SP Singh

SP Singh

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Senior journalist SP Singh recently shared a piece about 1984, published in the Punjabi Tribune a couple of years ago. It told the story of what happened on the streets of Delhi, the denial of justice and its interconnections with the ‘Mela Gadri Babiyan Da,‘. Most importantly, of the abyss between the two.

You can read SP Singh’s column by clicking here

Punjab Today reached out to SP Singh and requested him to narrate in detail his experience to which his article alluded to in passing. We bring you this saga of the inanimate objects in the streets of Trilokpuri in Delhi and of the people who lived there, and some who stopped living in 1984 all of a sudden.

– Editor, Punjab Today

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IN HIS SCINTILLATING BOOK, “The Comfort of Things,” Daniel Miller explains how objects are constitutive of identity. Objects create subjects more than the other way round. He even suggests that the closer our relationships with objects, the closer are our relationships with people.

Well, if you some day visit Nazar Singh Fauji in his tenement in Block 36 of Trilokpuri, and are nice enough to listen to how his mother died in 1992 after years of not just crying silently deep within, but also of complete silence, you wouldn’t know how to deal with your own predicament.

Should you seek more details? Are you making them re-live their pain? Are you reminding them of something they have spent decades to forget?

And what will you do after that? Go and write a piece in some newspaper?

Nazar Singh Fauji’s daughter Kirandeep spent her growing up years listening to the gory tale, stone-faced. There is one member of the family you really, really want to speak to. But it does not speak. It does not extend a hand, does not blink. And you had just passed it by. You cannot recognise it if you had not been properly introduced to it.

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Meet the Electricity Pole outside Nazar Singh Fauji’s house. If there are any questions that Nazar Singh Fauji feels reluctant to answer, please ask this pole.
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It is one family member who stood by the family through much of what you cannot even imagine. For years, it remained a rock solid witness to what happened in Delhi when the Indian establishment refused to stop the marauding hordes from burning Sikhs alive in their tens of hundreds.

TrilokpuriMeet the Electricity Pole outside Nazar Singh Fauji’s house. If Daniel Miller’s arguments could not convince you, Nazar Singh Fauji’s simple wisdom will.

If there are any questions that Nazar Singh Fauji feels reluctant to answer, please ask this pole. Nazar Singh was often reluctant to even tell his growing up daughter what the pole knew.

Gradually, the tale started to trickle in. A few neighbours told her bits and pieces of it over the years. It was with the pole that her grandfather was tied, killed and burnt. Death came upon the family as the pole watched.

When, years later, Nazar Singh was to finally tell her daughter what had happened, he let it slip in little snippets, but first insisted that they all sit near the pole.

In her most poignant moments, the daughter would often stare at the pole, sometimes almost silently talking to it. She knew one fact for sure — that the pole knew much more than even her father Nazar Singh Fauji does.

In the alley next to the gurdwara, a number of Sikhs were killed by the marauders. A reporter of an English national daily had visited the family and written a very poignant piece about it. I had visited the family after reading that piece. As I stood near that pole, I wondered if it will some day break out of its inanimate identity.

Nazar Singh was away at his workshop in Mehrauli when an angry mob had pulled his father out, stabbed him and burned him. Since then, he said he had often stood near the pole and wondered why it happened.

TrilokpuriAt 22, Nazar Singh Fauji lost his mother. He refused to leave the house next to the pole and move to Tilak Vihar’s resettlement colony. He told me he could not have left behind a family member.

I could understand.

It wasn’t a safe area to leave a witness, that, too, a family member, to the horrors of an apathetic state all alone at the mercy of blood thirsty hounds.

The pole was there. It held you. It had a story. It was the story. It was a story that arrested the family. Moving away would have meant shattering the memories. Truth be told — it was a pole who knew other poles. And other poles knew other stories.

They were never summoned by any court to stand witness. When investigators pulled out the scientific innovation of Touch DNA to examine if the golf club belonging to Dr Rajesh Talwar had any evidence to settle the Aarushi Talwar murder case, I wondered why no one ever took samples from these witnesses.

When I met Nazar Singh in 2009, he was 46 and was a sevadar at the Trilokpuri gurdwara, getting about Rs 3,000 per month. He seemed a tired man. He had chased the government’s promises of jobs and compensation but felt frustrated with the hopelessness of it all.

They lived on, not sure about their relationship with the pole. Initially, for a few years, they tried not to look at it. But in denial too, the memories did not leave the family alone. Gradually, he mustered up the courage to touch it.

Soon he found himself pressing his head next to the pole and crying. I am not sure how the pole responded to his overtures but I know that a stage came when they became buddies. He spoke to the pole, silently. I believed the pole, too, reciprocated.

TrilokpuriIn the streets of Trilokpuri, houses have grown taller over the years, and sun’s slanting rays reach sporadically in the forenoon. The shadows of poles chase you wherever the rays find an opening and a concrete witness to 1984.

Trilokpuri used to be on the edge of a jungle in those days. Residents used to walk about 50 metres and enter the forest to defecate. Water supply was scarce. The young ones of the families used to fetch water from the Yamuna, more than 3 kilometres away, even as toddlers went to a school in the colony where they learnt about Jack and Jill going up the hill to fetch a pail of water.

These residents had seen the apathetic face of the state earlier. In fact, that’s why they were there. A young man called Sanjay Gandhi had a brainwave that the capital of India must present a better picture of the country, so he had the slums razed and people evicted. As a result, this resettlement colony came up in 1976.

Muslims from Turkman Gate, Valmikis from the area near Birla Mandir, and later, some working class Lubana Sikhs came to reside there. These Sikhs had come from Rajasthan where they had originally moved from Sindh in the wake of Partition. It was a cluster of a thousand families of poor, hardworking people living in single storey houses with no schools, no toilets, no hospitals and no water.

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In her most poignant moments, the daughter would often stare at the pole, sometimes almost silently talking to it. She knew one fact for sure — that the pole knew much more than even her father Nazar Singh Fauji does.
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All they had was togetherness. The festivals were always celebrated together, till the riots came visiting. By then, the electricity poles had come up, but these were used for purposes other than intended.

I had met Gurcharan Kaur also. She was around 60 at that time and knew an electricity pole intimately. Outside the gurdwara stands this pole, next to which they killed her husband, Naik Teja Singh. For years, Gurcharan Kaur ran a tea stall next to this pole, earning a measly income, and had six or seven children. (I’m so, so sorry for not clearly remembering some of the details.)

When I met her in 2009, it was the 25th anniversary of the anti-Sikh massacres. I do remember that one of her sons was studying in Australia and another was working in a private firm.

TrilokpuriI had tried talking to her about her relationship with the electricity pole, and she had cried so much that I was afraid the pole will burst out. Made of concrete, electricity poles of Trilokpuri have a heart slightly less stony than of the Indian justice dispensing system.

I wanted to touch Naik Teja Singh’s medals and his uniform in her quarters, and remember how she reminded me if my hands were clean. I knew these weren’t as clean as are required before you touch someone’s memories.

I have spent many evenings in the streets of Trilokpuri, often a camera bag slung over my shoulder, a notebook in hand. But if you do that in the last week of October, or the first week of November, you will hear people walking behind you, murmuring: “Reporters!”

TrilokpuriThere was a “Happy Tailors” in Trilokpuri. Somehow, I ventured into that shop and asked the Sardar ji inside why had he named his shop “Happy Tailors.” Harminder Singh told me how his shop sign used to announce: “Sardar Tailors.” Then, 1984 happened.

Memories are found in bits and pieces in the streets of Trilokpuri, as I am sure they do in Muzaffarnagar and any other place where the state acts in ways that its citizens start othering their neighbours.

In a distant country from which flows much of the capital, weapons, knowledge and culture, and these days, the idea of hatred, too, there is a more than critical mass of people stepping forward to defend the actions of a man who openly spews venom, relishes being an autocrat, insults intellect, is happy yanking away toddlers from parents and putting human beings in cages.

His actions impact our lives. In such uncertain times, it is a wonder if you can even convince an electricity pole to continue standing rock solid as a witness.

If you ever find yourself in those streets of Trilokpuri, look for ‘him’. Say hi. Be nice. It may not be the same pole, but it will have stories to tell you, may be tears to cry.

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Also Read:

1984-2020 — Politics of bestiality

Three Women of 1984

SAD-BJP rumblings: what about Sikhs who live in India but outside Punjab?

 

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SP Singh

SP Singh

The author is a Chandigarh-based senior journalist, columnist and television anchor, with interests spanning politics, academics, arts, and yes, even trivia.

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