Ahmedabad is still a city divided, say activists.

Byline: Shabnam Minwalla

: Newspaper headlines may have moved on to golden goals and ailing industrialists.

But in the makeshift camps and charred shanties of Ahmedabad, life remains frozen at that sickening moment when the mobs charged, knives flashed and hope was butchered.

"A few weeks ago, while we were teaching songs to the children in the Sundaramnagar relief camp, some eight-year-olds offered to put up a skit,'' recalled Maju Varghese, a student of Mumbai's Nirmala Niketan College of Social Work.

"The boys divided themselves into Hindus and Muslims. They threw bombs at one another, stabbed each other, then everybody fell down dead. This is the level of trauma that the victims of the Gujarat riots are undergoing.''

Mr Varghese is part of a group of eight Nirmala Niketan students who spent their summer vacations assisting NGOs and working in the relief camps of Ahmedabad. Over a month they pushed reluctant policemen to file FIRs, helped sodden refugees dodge the monsoon and realised that, even 100 days after the ghastly massacre of Naroda-Patia, normalcy remains a distant dream.

"Basic issues like compensation, rehabilitation and livelihood are still unresolved. Many of the refugees are just sitting and rotting. They have no jobs or homes to return to,'' said Stuti Prasad, who worked in the Peershah Ahmed Camp.