In horror’s neighbourhood

The girl who won’t take your toffee

The rickshawpuller stops a little away from D-5. The bunch of DPS schoolchildren in it, all aged between five and ten, giggle and bully each other. “Do you know what happened here?” we ask them. Shivani, 7, daughter of a tailor, chirps up. “Yes, children were kidnapped.” Her parents have told her “not to take toffee from strangers.” She talks on: “Strangers give toffee, then kidnap a child, and then cut off her head.” She will not take toffee from anyone anymore, she says “but my friend is a fool,” she says, pointing to another little girl in the rickshaw, “she will take it from anyone.”

She couldn’t sleep at night when she first heard about the incident, she says.

Does she know where it happened? Yes, she says, she recognises the house. Where is it, we ask. “On TV” she says. Nobody has pointed out the House of Horrors, just a few metres away, to these children. There seems to be an unspoken effort by media, teachers, parents and strangers, to protect the children of Nithari from the trauma of the horrors that went on in D-5.

The man who lives behind the drain

Surender Singh Chauhan’s house almost touches Moninder Singh Pandher’s rear boundary wall where the skulls lay decomposing for two years. He is unwell and can’t come to the door. When he does come to the door, he says he saw nothing, he smelt nothing. “I have nothing to do with the rear of the house,” he says curtly. He’s used to these questions now, it’s when the police first came with them that he was in shock. “For two days, my family could not enter the house as the compound was blocked by police, diggers and forensic experts,’’ he says. There are also stories that Surendra Koli stood on the terrace, looking at the children playing near the tank close by, picking out his victims. Chauhan says nothing of the sort happened. He doesn’t want to entertain myths. He claims there was no odour for him to get suspicious. He just wants to get on with his life. When he feels well, he will go back to work as a mechanic in the Delhi Jal Board. He says his ‘not feeling well’ has nothing to do with the events of the last few days.

The man who can never forgive

Jhabbu Lal, the dhobi near the D-5 lane, was the man who was the first to sense that “something evil was going on” in the house, and the first to sound out the police on its sinister goings-on. However, when we meet Jhabbu Lal, he turns out to be just a broken parent and claimed no such special instincts. His daughter Jyoti, aged 10, was among the 40-odd victims. Jhabbu Lal would deal with Surendra when he came to his ironing stall with laundry, all men’s clothing, mostly white pajama kurtas and suits. “He seemed normal, almost pleasant, I could never have suspected anything,” he tells us. The children would be somewhere in the background. He recalls that fateful day when he’d sent his daughter on an errand and she didn’t return. During interrogation, Surendra said he had spotted her and called her into the house on the pretext of giving her some clothes for ironing.

Jhabbu Lal says that it’s unfortunate that the police would not let him and the other Nithari parents near Surendra. “Even hanging would be too mild a punishment for him, it would be over in an instant. He should be killed slowly, so that he suffers the way those children suffered.”

He answers the queries of strangers and the media politely and goes on with his job. The compensation has been prompt. He has no complaints with police investigations. It is coping with his anger that will probably consume the rest of Jhabbu Lal’ life.

The man who bunked office to see D-5

The bunch of policemen camped outside D-5 find that a large part of their job is shooing away curious bystanders. From local village folk, motorists stopping outside or even parents with missing children from other parts of the country coming to the spot, there are visitors throughout the day. Pravin Jain, who works for an electric company in Delhi, has bunked work to see the house that has caught his imagination for the last three weeks. “I have been following it on TV, but I just had to come and see this place. Now that I have seen it, I feel better about the whole episode,’’ he says.

He takes in the bougainvillea bush that shrouded the house from the rest of the world, the bell, now broken after villagers attacked the house, little details that the TV cameras may have missed. He wants to talk to some of the locals too. “I want to tell my family and friends tonight that I have visited the place,’’ he added. He peers into the dug-out drain, looks through the broken fence into the driveway. He gets too close to the sealed black gate before the police reprimands him. With one last, quick glance, he drives back to Connaught Place on his scooter.

The law and order lady who ‘understands’

Sub-inspector Geeta Singh was posted here on day one. She came the day after Surendra was taken into police custody and wonders what he looks like in person. She was there when the CBI got diggers to unearth additional 40 bags of bones. She has been doing her duty, keeping the crowd in check since she and her team was rushed from Ghaziabad as extra force since the villagers of Nithari descended on D-5 in their anger. As she now watches the house, she says, however: “In such a situation, where innocent children are clobbered to death, how can you not understand the anger of their parents?” This does not, however, stop her from shouting at a group of women to stand back when they get too close to the house.

The girl who got away

Surendra would come to Dharmendra’s grocery store at least once a week for his supplies of milk and eggs. “He was very pleasant and polite. Knew my daughter by name and even offered her sweets,” says Dharmendra. Today, what once looked like gestures of a friendly neighbour, have assumed enormous significance for this father as he fondly looks at his five-year-old daughter Pianci. “Anything could have happened. We were lucky,’’ he says.

Dharmendra lives in a house above the shop from where he can see the terrace of D-5—even if he does not want to. This is the terrace where, residents say, Surendra would stand and look out, even on a hot summer day.