Kolkatta: Suspected of being a spy or a China sympathiser, nine-year-old Indian-born Monica Liu and her family were loaded into railway cars for a detention camp in the Rajasthan desert.
Liu was one of about 3,000 people of Chinese descent, most of them Indian citizens, rounded up and held at the fenced camp without trial after India's month-long border war with China in 1962.
During her five years at the Deoli camp, built in the 1800s by the British, Liu remembers the heat, lack of schooling and the sound of her mother crying "from morning till night".
But her strongest memories are of her family's desperation once they were finally freed without charge by the government.
"We didn't have a single penny," Liu said in Kolkata, recalling sleeping in a bus shelter with her siblings and parents.
India's Chinese community, whose ancestors flocked to Kolkata and the northeast to do business, bore the brunt of India's war with neighbouring China -- fought 52 years ago this month.
"The wounds haven't healed. The suffering has to be acknowledged first for the wounds to be healed. This has never happened," said Paul Chung, president of the Kolkata-based Indian Chinese Association.
Most of the 3,000 detainees accepted deportation to China, and were the first to be released. But several hundred who wanted to stay in India, or feared China's communist rulers, languished in the camp for years.
They eventually returned to their homes in India to discover property and belongings confiscated, auctioned or looted.
Past governments have justified the camp on national security grounds.
"I don't foresee a formal apology or even an official explanation for what happened," said journalist SNM Abdi who is writing a book on the Deoli detainees. "It's a closed chapter for both governments."
The community was once tens of thousands strong, after Chinese arrived in India from the 1700s as traders or carpenters and to set up sugar refineries and tanneries.
According to Chung, it now numbers about 4,000, most of them in Kolkata, which was hit hard in 2002 when a court ordered the city's tanneries, largely Chinese run, to move out for pollution reasons.
A daily Chinese-language newspaper is still printed there and temples have been restored. Plans have been mooted to revamp Kolkata's Chinatown and preserve its heritage, but nothing has been finalised.
