THE MURDER

The long wait finally came to an end. I got the signal that I had been waiting for, for quiet sometime by then. It was a nod of the head and he raised his index finger. I knew what it meant. The end had come for one of the many that we had been holding hostage . A curve seemed to appear on my face. I did not know if it was a smile, a simper or a shiver of my conscience. Nevertheless, I knew it had to be done if we were to get our ends met.

We had been shown many a times before how it was to be done- take away the head. It was supposed to be easier, less messy. With a frozen hand, mind and heart I stepped in to the room. It was dark, except for a zero watt bulb that burnt itself to show a ray of hope or hardly a ray- I do not know. There were a whole lot of them, sixty eight heads to be precise. They were all cramped in to that hell so that it would be easy for us. As the door creaked open, a killingly painful beam of light fell on some of them. It meant nothing to them, anything optimistic in the least. In the previous forty two hours they had been so crushed that most of them prayed and wished only that they be let to live in that Hades in whatever seemed to be luxury in comparison to what we had them to imagine.


There was silence, so cold that it felt like the slitting of my throat. I couldn’t look at anyone for longer than a glance. It would prick me. I knew from what they told me that I had to be quick, quicker than my mind. The silence wasn’t helping me either. A cry from one of them, a plea for mercy that I could have deliberated to be a roar of protest-nothing, dead as meat, they sat sunk. My hands went cold. All that I could hear was my own heart pumping. And its rhythm sang kill kill kill. I bend my head, closed my eyes, pulled myself together. I looked up. Fixed my eyes on her. I pulled out the chopper and pushed myself up to her. In the background of that cry for blood, something said,” at least not her“. I knew I had failed. It wasn’t going to be that one pinch easier now. I couldn’t even cry. I went for her. Stroked her. There was a female next to her by her left and a male, much younger than her, to her right. I kept looking at her. Slightly tightened my hands around her neck. And then in one split second in an yell I undid my grip on her, grabbed the younger male on her right, pulled by his neck and placed it on the wooden log by the door raised my hand high in the air, down went the chopper. There he was, another one of His creations bleeding to death.

I looked at him unable to cry, not even able to hate myself. And in his last cry of , I donot know, curse probably, he let out a paak-pakpakpak paak. Then he lay still. The soul had passed on. I quickly undid him, chopped him up completely in to bits, weighed him to see that he was a hundred grams more than a kilo. Never mind I thought, packed him up neatly, gave it to the guy who was still waiting. He placed a crisp new note of fifty with a smiling Gandhi on it,.