Vinod Dhar's entire family was massacred when he was just a teenager. He now has a government job and a flat allotted by the government in a township for Kashmiri Pandits in Jammu but almost a decade later, the horrors of that night remain with him.

Archana Masih reports on the trauma of exiled Kashmiri Pandits, which remains contemporary India's worst tragedies. Part II of a special series.

I t is a Saturday morning and Vinod Dhar's door is locked. Children play cricket in the alley outside while a woman washes a pile of clothes outside her door with water from a rubber hose. "Do you want a chair to sit while you wait?" she asks politely with a shy smile.

Dhar, a wiry young man, who has by now got word that he is being looked for, comes from behind the bathroom block with a bucket in his hand and clothes on his shoulder. Excusing himself till he finishes his morning ablutions, he disappears briefly.

On his return he borrows two chairs and a stool from the neighbours and sits down outside as the children continue to play cricket a few metres away.

Dhar is 27 and has been through a tragedy so gruesome that he hasn't been able to recover from that trauma, that grief. He works as a clerk in the state secretariat and feels life is a struggle from birth to death.

He has a government job that many Pandit families in the camps look upon as the ideal employment, one that provides stability, a steady income and pension. Something that many young men who arrived from the valley two decades ago did not have access to, because they had either crossed the age limit or did not qualify.

But Dhar seems some place else, far away, unaffected by the routine, the ritual of everyday living. As if cloaking his immense pain by going through the motions of a daily schedule -- get up, go to work, come back, eat, sleep, move to Srinagar when the government secretariat shifts there during the summer months, stay at the hotel, get into the vehicle that takes the staff to the Srinagar secretariat in the morning, eat at the hotel...

"It has jolted me for life. It has left me scarred. People say I am lonely, that I should get married but I am not mentally prepared for marriage. No one can help mitigate your pain," says Dhar, haunted by January 25, 1998.

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Read Part I of the special series here: A Home for Mr and Mrs Raina

Read Part III of the special series here: 'Wasn't what Pandits experienced a genocide?'