The events of the 1984 pogroms in Delhi against the Sikhs seem to be fading into the pages of history but they remain fresh in my mind.

I remember vividly listening to a live commentary from Lahore on October 31st, 1984, of a cricket match between India and Pakistan. I was sitting in class at school half listening to a boring lecture and half transfixed to the live commentary via a transistor radio I had sneaked in my lunch box into the school premises.

The live commentary was abruptly interrupted for an announcement. It was not an advertisement break. With a shaky voice, an announcer broke the news that the Prime Minister of India had been shot. The match was cancelled.

Within minutes, the school authorities announced closure of the school and all the students were on their way home. I was young, not even a teenager yet, but had lived long enough in India to know that difficult times lay ahead. Somewhere between the interruption in the live cricket commentary and my arriving at home, I came to learn that her Sikh bodyguards had shot Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

By the time I got home, the news had spread like wild fire and my mother was anxious about my father not being home from his office in downtown Delhi. My father arrived in the late afternoon and we all breathed a sigh of relief.

He brought the first news of mobs coalescing near the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, where the Prime Minister was brought for medical help, seeking revenge. Sikhs were being searched for in passing vehicles.

By the morning of November 1, the city felt as if under a siege. A cloud of mourning and revenge had settled on the city. My first images of that day are the curtained windows of our apartment. My parents, like thousands of Sikhs across the city, sensed an impending wave of violence and had drawn the window curtains as a first line of defense, not to expose oneself.

Late morning, I remember huddling with my family around a bedroom window. Through the crack in the curtain we saw policemen on a street next to our apartment building taking aim. I could not see what they were aiming towards.

After a while, I remember looking out through the cracks in a curtain of another bedroom's window. Guided by policeman, a mob of hundreds of men armed with bamboo sticks was passing in a very orderly manner right next to our apartment building. The mob was eerily, menacingly quiet.

Throughout the day we saw a stream of men returning in the opposite direction with the loot of the day. I remember seeing an old man, maybe in his fifties, carrying on his head a large metallic box container of Parle-G biscuits.

At some point in the late afternoon, my father's curiosity along with mine and my brother's compelled us to venture into our first floor balcony to get a better look at the looters. They had seemed benign enough, not seeking human blood, so we stepped out into the balcony.

We saw more men walking back with things that had resided not too long ago on store shelves. Then we saw a man, empty handed, fixing his slippers on a side street. He shot a glance at us and we felt exposed, devoid of our first line of defense. He started yelling obscenities at us as we rushed back into the apartment.

Within minutes a mob appeared around the apartment building. We could hear it yelling obscenities and asking us to be dragged out. I remember my young Hindu friends and the older kids in the neighborhood talking to the mob, telling them that this was a government owned building, which it was, and that they should go back for there was no point in trashing government property. They went back and forth.

My family - my father, mother, brother and I - sat in a little circle in my parent's bedroom and read verses from the Guru Granth Sahib. I heard the negotiations between the mob and my friends in the background.

Magically, the background voices disappeared. We carefully peeked out from the cracks in the curtain from a bedroom window. The mob had dispersed. The young ones had saved the day for us. With a few select belongings, we spent the following several nights at a neighbors' house.

The next day, we heard that all the Sikh businesses in and around our neighborhood had been ransacked by the mobs. The local Gurudwara had been torched, the caretakers surviving with bodily injuries.

While my family stayed indoors during the siege, television brought images to us. The nation was in a state of mourning and the Prime Minister's body was on display at her residence for people to pay their last respects. For the first few days of this fateful November, I remember seeing on the television an endless stream of people walk past the Prime Minister's body with a constant chanting in the background, "Khoon Ka Badla Khoon Se Lenge" (Avenging blood for blood) and "Jabtak Sooraj Chand Rahega, Indira Tera Naam Rahega" (Till the sun and moon exist, Indira your name shall live).

After about a week we started to venture out into the open. I remember seeing the cover of the latest issue of 'Surya' (Sun) magazine at a newsmagazine stand. Burnt and charred bodies of three Sikhs gaped from the cover. The image is still crisp in my head. Three bodies lying on the grass, almost completely charred with only a few tender spots visible by the light brownish shade of human skin.

The next day all the issues of Surya were pulled off the shelves, not to be found again.

I was to learn that thousands of innocent Sikhs had been burnt alive, thousands of women and young girls raped, some in front of their parents. Gurudwaras all across Delhi and many other parts of India were burnt to ashes, Guru Granth Sahibs defecated and urinated upon, Sikh owned businesses looted and burnt to the ground.

The first day back to school, Sikh owned and operated, after the pogroms I discovered my school had been ransacked as well and parts of it damaged by fire. I called my Sikh friends, and fortunately all was well except one friend who had lost his father to a heart attack after his house was burnt by a mob.

As time went by, it became clear there was a planned strategy behind the madness. The mobs were mobilized from the poorer sections of the city. The police worked in concert with the mobs, in many instances guiding them to Sikh households and businesses. In turn, the police was mobilized by the political powers to be at the local and central level. Lists of Sikh homes and businesses were prepared and handed out to the mobs.

The army was held back for three full days of the burning alive of innocent Sikhs and the rape of countless young girls and women before action was initiated to bring the situation under control.

The rage of poverty, the lack of literacy, the control of mass consciousness by the powerful few is an ever-ready mixture of ingredients, the constant variables at the disposal of the corrupt leaders who, at the touch of a few buttons on a phone can mobilize a lethal and deadly force and, just as quickly, sweep that force back into the errands of every day life.

The first few weeks after the carnage, as I ventured into the city, people gave me weird looks and passed comments but mostly the city was back to normal. The mobs had dispersed into individuals who had returned to the normal routines of their daily lives.

The new Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, son of the assassinated Prime Minister, was sworn in a few days after the assassination and I remember hearing him on television addressing a large crowd in downtown Delhi. I will never forget his words in response to the human tragedy that unfolded on the streets of Delhi and many other cities throughout India. 'Jab bara per girta hai to dharti hilti hai' (when a big tree falls the ground obviously shakes).

It has been eighteen years since the fateful days of November 1984. I was one of the fortunate ones who lived to write these words recounting the images of 1984. Thousands were not so fortunate. The survivors of the victim's families live with the scars, the memories and the fateful images.

I, like many, live with the unfortunate luxury to forget, the unfortunate luxury to live with a grand illusion, the illusion that death is not near, it is distant from the madness of human savagery.

Then again I pause. I wonder.

Thousands of men, who killed, burnt alive and raped thousands of Sikhs in 1984 roam free on the streets of India. None was held accountable for the 1984 pogroms.

I might brush past one of them in a crowded bazaar, sit next to one in a city bus, have one come home to fix my plumbing, breathe the same polluted air on a city crossing.

The politically programmed beast was let loose on numerous occasions since 1984 across India, Gujarat 2002 being the latest.

And the next one waits around the corner.