I Accuse…

After ten days when life began returning to normal, we were allowed to go and play in the park again. We were tired of staying home. The park was our life. All three of us went to play and we found the other kids in the park were in the middle of a game of touch ball—where you have to hit the other players with the ball. The ball used to cost just fifty paise but the hits really hurt. The three of us took a while to realize that we were being hit the hardest and most often. It dawned on us that the other boys were making us targets. It was not a game; it was a form of making us scapegoats. None of the other children were being treated that way. The balls thrown at them were ones they could catch easily; the ball wasn’t being thrown at them with the intention to hurt. Perhaps we should have just stopped playing—but we were children too. We were not in the habit of running away. Swiftly, the three of us targeted the others, one by one. It was a war, not a game. The hits were painful, but we three pretended they didn’t hurt. We didn’t stop playing with the kids in the park—we had played with them all our lives. But that day we all realized that the question of being a Hindu or a Sikh had entered even children’s games.

We were all in the same age group and went to the same school. We spent our free time together and plucked Ramchandra Aunty’s and Roshini Aunty’s guavas together. We used to fight earlier too but now we became the objects of taunts, ‘Sardaron ke barah baj gaye,’ they would shout. They'd said this to us before, but this was different; this was not a joke, but a taunt. One of the boys, Titu we called him, said, ‘If you fight too much, I will call the same people who killed Sikhs on 31 October and 1 November. Your house got saved in the riots but this time I will tell them the correct address.’ Titu was in my class, his mother and my mother were friends. Children have fights, it’s natural; but it was also natural that we started reacting aggressively too. Today I am still friends with many of those boys; we don’t speak of that time. When I was younger, I thought I would forget. I know now that things will never be the same again.