The Village Still Waits

News that the apex court has stayed serial killer Surinder Koli’s execution is greeted with shrugs in Nithari

Far from the flurry of activity in the wee hours of 8 September, when the Supreme Court stayed serial killer SurinderKoli’s hanging for a week, the white building at the end of the street bordering Nithari village in Noida remains quiet and decrepit. D-5, as the house is known, in sector 31, skirts the village that is home to migrant workers from Bihar and West Bengal.

The building belongs to Noida-based businessman Moninder Singh Pandher. Surinder Koli was an employee of Pandher and is accused of raping and brutally murdering 15 children and one adult. Koli reportedly cut the bodies into pieces and disposed of them in a drain. The horror first came to light in December 2006. Koli was given death sentences for four of the cases.

Today the banality of life seems to have taken over the horror the village saw. Ashok Kumar, whose six-year-old son Satender, fondly known as ‘Max’ and killed by Koli, owns a shoe shop right next to the house. “He would have been about 14 by now,” says Kumar. Max was the eldest of his four children and had been missing for over seven months before the murders were discovered. “I see the house everyday but it doesn’t bother me, I have other children to look after,” he says.

Jaggu Lal, 60, used to iron clothes right opposite the house when his 11-year-old daughter Jyoti went missing. After eight months he got to know that she had been killed. He has heard of Koli’s reprieve. There has been no verdict in Jyoti’s case against Koli or Pandher. Lal, whose ironing stall has been pushed to another spot a few metres away by construction projects in the area, says he has no hope of justice. “The police refused to file our complaints [when Jyoti went missing], and even though Koli has been convicted, Pandher is nowhere to be seen,” he says. Pandher’s death sentence was overturned in September 2009 and he was acquitted by the Allahabad High Court.

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