Kuldip Kaur

(Punjabi)

From her residence then and now, near the posh South Ex market in New Delhi, Kuldip Kaur recounts how Sikh stores there were systematically burnt to ground in 1984.

Fearing for their young turbaned son’s life, the family sent him to Bidar, Karnataka for college. But in 1988, as anti-Sikh sentiment was used for political gains in that state, her son was killed. She narrates the family’s turmoil that followed, and how difficult it was to even honor his memory: they tried to print notices of remembrance in the newspapers on his death anniversary but were not allowed to use the word “riots.” So every year, they had printed ads in memory to “those precious lives lost in the madness of the world.”