Devendra Singh

“Double-six, double-three, nine-three.” To this day, Devendra Singh remembers the phone number of his elderly Bengali neighbors whose house he dialed in November 1984 so he could tell his family he was safe, hiding with his nephew in a friend’s transport for five days while mobs filled the streets of Calcutta. He narrates how relatives across India suffered – from a young nephew who cut his hair himself to survive, to his sister who was protected from mobs by her Hindu neighbors, to an aunt whose family’s factory was set on fire. “Babaji di mehar naal,” he says, they slowly rose out of the fear cast by the shadow of 1984.