Duration: 00:07:49

(00:07:20): Maya Kaur: We woke up in the morning and had just had tea when my husband said he was stepping out to check why there was so much commotion outside. As he went out, I started preparing my small eight-month-old daughter for a bath. Suddenly, I looked up and saw groups of people carrying burning torches moving towards us. They were calling out for the Sikhs to be killed. They were shouting ‘kill them, kill them.’ My husband was running back in panic from the opposite direction. I didn’t have a stole on my head. It was cold as winter had set in. So my husband held me from my forearm and told me to run. He said people have come to kill us. I asked him why they were going to kill us and what had we done. I told him to wait for me to cover my daughter at least. He said forget about it and dragged me quickly to his maternal uncle’s house close by. We lived in a shack. It was a hutment, not a room. He said they were going to burn our dwelling and we were all going to die in it. So we went off to his uncle’s house and hid ourselves. Our uncle, by this time, had left home to go to work; he was a carpenter who knit and repaired cots. We wished we knew that there would be a clash, we would not have allowed him to leave the house. Our other relatives also came by to that house. So we hid ourselves here and there and saved our lives. But once the assault started, it kept growing bigger and bigger. By about 4 pm on the 1st of November, my husband’s maternal uncle returned in a bad shape. They had torn off his clothes and he was badly bleeding from his head. He just had a small piece of his turban cloth left on him which he used to cover the lower part of his body. He was crying and screaming in pain. He was pleading, ‘for God’s sake, please let me go, please spare my life, please have mercy’. All of us cried when we saw him in that state. We had no means of getting him any medical aid. So we used our stoles and eye kohl to bandage him and stop the bleeding. Outside, the mob was dragging Sikhs from their houses and assaulting them. I thought we were not safe in this house too and they will kill us also. To safeguard our menfolk, we emptied our attic and hid all three of them there and covered them with household items. All of us ladies kept sitting down. My brothers-in-law were still small, so we opened their hair and turned them into braids, and changed them into frocks, to give them a feminine appearance. In the meantime, the marauders entered the house opposite ours and picked up a lady and raped her. Earlier, they were only killing the men. But now they had started raping the girls and women too. So we felt very scared and trapped and couldn’t think of anything else we could do to safeguard ourselves. But we held out indoors. Then on the 3rd November morning, we thanked God and thought the worst had got over and three of our men had survived. But then those guys came back to our lane and asked us how we were still around. My mother-in-law anticipated trouble and thought we could be picked on next. So she wiped her hand on the black soot of the clay hearth which we had used to cook our food and smeared my face with it to ward off the attention. She also scrambled my hair open to give them a disheveled look. So when they came to our door, she folded her hands and pleaded with them to leave us alone. She told them that there were only women and small children in the house and all the men had already been killed. They said nothing doing. You can’t be here. They abused us thoroughly and started moving away. We again thought we had survived. Then, one of them, a non-Sikh man, said we couldn’t be sitting around just like that, something was definitely amiss, we should search the house. So they all came back and forced their way in. They got on to a stool and removed the curtain of the attic and saw my father-in-law. He was a tall man. They then grabbed him from his hair and pulled him down. As he fell, he began to scream because he was in great pain. There was a rainwater drain at our entrance, covered by a stone slab. He slid under that to protect himself from the assault. But they hit him with bricks and poked him with sticks and iron rods. They killed him there itself. Then they pulled down my husband and his uncle from the attic and assaulted them with sticks. There was a three-wheeler scooter parked outside. They took out petrol from its tank and poured it over them. My husband folded his hands and began pleading. He told them, ‘you kill me but let me meet my daughter one last time for two minutes, talk to her’. But they didn’t listen to anybody. They then hit him with a baton. While he was falling down, he was still telling me, ‘you have my swear, run away from here. They are killing me, they will violate you also. Please go away and take my daughter along and take care of her’. So we were pushed away from there. It was a long lane. While moving away, we kept looking back. They poured my husband with more petrol and set him on fire. As I stepped forward in that lane, I found the burnt and puffed body of my cousin brother who lived nearby. There was no space in the lane to put our feet on, it was strewn with dead bodies all over. I had four brothers and an uncle. All of them had been killed and lying there. They killed my whole family. (00:15:03)