All muddy lanes of this village in Northeast Delhi lead to scenes of mourning today. Almost every locality has reported a death. Inside a small room, a mother wails with her children, in another, a young boy cries for his dead sister.

With five girl children dead and 29 injured in a stampede that took place at a higher secondary school in Khajuri Khas, the village wore a gloomy look as dead bodies arrived one after another and fresh wails of anger and hurt rose from these rundown rooms.

Newsline visited the homes of the five dead children; all told similar stories of loss. The mourning started when a flock of children came back running from the school in the morning bearing news of death to the concerned doorstep.

* Monica David was 16. Her mother, Yagesh doesn’t know yet that her daughter died a few hours earlier on a dark narrow staircase inside her school. Nor does she know that her husband is not in the casualty ward with their daughter but in the mortuary waiting for the postmortem.

“She left home at 8.30 am today. Her friends came running more than an hour later, saying there was a scuffle between boys and girls and some girls were taken to the hospital,” said Yagesh. “Now my husband is at the hospital with her and everything is going to be fine,” she says while asking her relatives not to cry.

* Lalita Nagar’s home is locked. The family has already left for their village in UP, with close relatives following them in buses. “We are going to the village. The last rites will happen there,” says a neighbour. Another neighbor said she hardly came out of her home and never played much. “She didn’t have many friends, she only used to study,” the neighbour added.

... contd.