"One Hindi teacher we had, who was absolutely Indian -- he had a Chinese name or something like that -- somehow ended up in the camp," Cheng says. "You'd see people who didn't look Chinese at all -- they looked completely Indian."

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The Deoli camp was originally set up by the British to house prisoners of war in the 1940s. Following independence, the Indian government converted Deoli to a prison for Chinese- and Tibetan-Indians, many or them children or infirm. Trains ran from Makum, an area near the Burmese border with a large ethnic-Chinese community, to Assam. It was there that Michael and his family joined hundreds of other "potential spies" for the long trip west to Rajasthan.

The trip took over a week, in a cramped train with the word "enemy" scrawled on the side. In "Deoli Diaries", a collection of interviews with camp survivors, Wong Ying Sheng recalled how the internees were kept under armed guard at all times. Once, when the train stopped near a town, locals threw stones and hit the carriages with sticks, yelling at those inside to "go back to China". Other internees, small children at the time, spoke of being separated from their families during the trip and shoved into carriages alongside other youngsters.

Upon arrival at Deoli, internees endured the notoriously inefficient Indian bureaucracy as they were processed, one by one, into the camp.

"They were not prepared to deal with 3,000 people," Michael Cheng says. "By the time they were finished it was cold and dark in the desert."

The poorly-prepared camp spoke to the chaotic nature of the entire internship program. The camp was unable to house all those it had been sent, and many internees were forced to sleep outside, some without blankets. Food too was a problem, as camp guards had no idea how to prepare meals for so many people. Cheng says internees were often served food that was half-cooked.

"The rice had lots of gravel and dust in it, so when you bit into it you would bite stone."

The Red Cross provided only temporary relief. In one of only two visits to the camp during the six years it was in operation, Red Cross workers noted that hygiene was substandard and food provision lacking. But while internees said that conditions improved while the Red Cross was there, they soon deteriorated again once the aid workers left.

Life in the camp improved somewhat when the Indian authorities began transporting internees who were willing to go to China. The Chinese government, as it later did during the height of anti-Chinese sentiment in Indonesia, sent ships to India to collect "its people" and return them to the motherland. Some 2,400 internees then headed to a country many had never been to, and one that had just emerged from the hardships of the Great Leap Forward and would soon dissolve into the insanity of the Cultural Revolution.