The Boy Who Died

It is a dark night, and I am looking into ebony eyes, surrounded by the eerie of demon, and my mind penetrates through the soul of my lover. I feel as if I am her, I feel as if the light beneath me has hidden in her crime.

“What have you done?”, I yell at her, she is holding a knife colored in red, and a child lay in midst of the road.

She is speechless, trying to shake her head trying to communicate her past, but all she can do is slip the knife of death from her hand and try to understand her conscience.

I check the pulse of that child, I knew him, he was my neighbor’s son, and a frolicsome one. Pakhi used to complain about his mischiefs, even she slapped him once when he destroyed the chocolate cake she made to surprise me for my birthday. I know her, she can’t kill anybody, but my eyes tell different, the reality seems different than my expectations.

He shows no pulse, he is dead, a boy of 10 lying on the road, forfeited with the truth of immortality that he hasn’t yet understood completely. I bring my colored fingers to my nose, and feel the essence of blood recently entered in the outer world of cruelty. His neck is parted, bringing forward the gush of blood whispering to me, ‘give me justice’.

The smell of my love’s fear teams with the blowing wind. Her hair points toward the dead boy’s direction, as in defending their host, and the leaves of the trees fights to communicate the truth of the killer.

She can’t do it; someone has played her, and I need to find the killer.

My hood is covering my black hair, my hands in my jacket’s pocket, my eyes down on the moving pavement, blocking my sight to the busy crowd, and my mind on the night when my love was tethered by crime.

It’s a busy day in Mumbai, similar to every other day, but different for me. I have devoted myself to emancipate Pakhi from the crimes she hasn’t committed.

When she was having a battle with the game of life, I was scrutinizing the dead kid. A mark on his hand, some brawny person forced him to walk his way, the murderer should be male. The shoe of his left leg was missing. His eyeballs didn’t look at Pakhi’s direction, but straight ahead of him. He was first strangled but and then cut by a knife. Whoever killed him, didn’t have a heart. He was just 10, didn’t even know how world works, all he knew was love and honesty, not the two-faced personality of human beings.

My journey from the jail to the boy’s house was accompanied by my thoughts dire of justice. I walk in the house of my neighbor, uninvited and despicable, but all I want to do is investigate his father.

All are in white color, the color of loss and agony, except me. Until I bring justice to the boy and my fiancé, I am not going to mourn for him.

I am like a tenebrific storm in midst of a haven farewell. The boy’s father, Vinit, threaten me through his teary eyes, curse me and bestow me to stay away.

I step back, walk in my hollow-hearted row house right next to his, run upstairs and snuck through his verandah. Everybody’s downstairs, praying for the boy’s soul, while I am in his room, rummaging through his personal stuff. Lots of comic books. Playstation. School books. Diary. His personal diary!

I turn the Batman’s hard-cover to find the boy’s photo. He is happy and shining through the sunlight of love… “I told you to stay away from my son and his belongings”, Vinit comes in front of me, yelling at me, his eyes filled with rage, and his voice finding a way to strike its heaviest.

“Pakhi didn’t kill your boy, and I am going to prove that”, my chest matches his, and my eyes pointing straight into his.

He snatches the boy’s diary from my hands and shouts, “Get out of here before I call police”.

I choose stairs and fly between the fake mourners. I throw open the gate of my house, again, sit on my couch and bring the boy’s photo from the covert to the real world.

His mother was a beautiful lady. She is in a blue shirt and black pants, kneeling on the ground, and his boy is kissing through her black falling hair, on her cheeks. The sunset is proving itself to be the witness of the truest love of all.

I wish you could tell me who killed you.

It’s been four taciturn days, and I don’t have any clue or source to be able to bring justice. It’s 12’o clock in midnight, and I am trying to listen to the blowing wind at Marine Drive, hoping that the force of universe won’t let my Pakhi to suffer for anyone else’s deeds. Her atonement will be her death after tomorrow’s trial.

I searched through my memories, Pakhi’s statements that she tried to save the boy, Vinit’s background check that he is not the biological father of the boy, and the crime scene all too well. One thing I didn’t check well was the photo that was left behind with me of the boy.

Like a bolt, I take out the photo and scrutinize it, with the same joyous past of both the souls. They would be together now, but with the fire of revenge for their murderers.

I buy a cup of tea from a young chaiwala, who is struggling to live in the city of dreams, I glance at the college students, their innocence, and think about the boy’s mother. How did she die?

I take out my cellphone, call my best buddy, Avinash, he is a detective with all the inside sources I need.

“Dude, she killed herself… Wait, let me find her suicide note”, it took 2 minutes for Avinash to search the database of criminal record and find all the files related to her death, “Here it is,

‘Dear Vinit,

I am leavin my son in ur hands… Pls take good care of him. I cant live in the world where I was raped and insulted and tortured by the society. You have always supported me in my bad times… It is time for u to support OUR son.

GoodBye’

This is a strangely short suicide note”.

“I know why this is short. Gotta go pal, thank you. See ya”, I rush my phone into my pocket and race with time to the police station.

“I know who killed the boy!”

“The boy hate his father, that’s why he is such a pesky little nuisance for the whole street”, the sweet melody of a female has changed to a frustrated high pitch.

As Pakhi complains and Aniket, her fiancé, swigs omelet down his throat, the boy strolls the street planning to escape his father. It has been a hard summer for the boy. The suicide of his mother, his father’s beatings and he is disliked by every neighbor he look for a getaway to.

“You know, I was a detective, I can go straighten this boy”, Aniket reach for the basin to keep my dirty plate.

“That boy is having a tough time. You know, his mother killed herself by eating poison, and all he is left is his father, who doesn’t seem good with kids”, she clutches the cleaning cloth and start dusting the entrance room, with his lover as her follower. She continues, “If you want to straighten someone, go teach a lesson to his father. He seems a maniac to me. He keeps coming here, not asking for any household requirement, but sympathy. He invites himself inside, sits on the couch, and cry unflagging”, she throws her dusting cloth and faces angrily towards Aniket, “Once he asked for a hug to me. That is so disgusting”, she looks so cute when she is disgusted.

“Stop looking at me like that”, she gets distracted.

The lover hold her from her waist and pulls her close, where they can inhale each other’s Carbon Dioxide, “It’s not his fault that you are the loveliest creature of the whole world”.

I have been oblivious to the everyday facts of my life.

“The boy’s father killed him. He is not even his biological father. I don’t know why Vinit killed that little boy, or his mother, but I can prove you that he murdered both of them”, I am thrashing on the wooden table of the police officer, and he is looking at me as if nothing has happened, the look of a professional, bored and sleepy police officer. Since I am equipped with the power of sources and my past in police duty, he cooperates with me and walks with me to Vinit’s house, as I asked him to.

Night time is the best time to investigate anybody, because that somebody will feel ethereal for some time, until that somebody will realize that what a commotion the real world is creating.

When the police, accompanied by me, asks Vinit to take them to the boy’s room, he couldn’t think as fast as we run upstairs and find the evidence that I needed to prove Pakhi innocent and bring peace to both the boy and his mother.

When I breached the boy’s room on the next day of his death, I glanced through his drawings on his drawing books. There was a man, a woman and a child, the man was killing the woman by making her sleep with the poisonous snakes, and the child was hiding under the table, protected with the unseen armor of love by his mother, but he knew everything, he felt helpless and suppressed. He tried to escape his murderer stepfather, but every time he got caught and was beaten inhumanely.

I tell the story of the gloomy boy and my observation to the police. “Mr. Della, we want proof. We can’t rely on your observations”.

I walk from the door of the boy’s room, to his cupboard, cover my hands with the pair of gloves, open the doors and take out the black leather belt of the boy. “Run this in the forensics, you will find the boy’s blood”, I hand the belt over to the officer, “Not only this, you will find the personal diary of the boy in his room, and I am sure that the boy himself will tell you all about the eerie things of this man right here”, I point my index finger to Vinit.

Vinit’s mind start running its course and he starts to back away to brace to run, but he couldn’t get away with his karma and he gets caught and put inside the rods of punishment. Since he is a maniac, he blurts his obsession for Pakhi. He used to fantasize making love with her, and hated to see me with her. Whenever he used to ask for a hug or any other type of physical closeness from Pakhi, she used to say that he was married and had a son, so he killed them both just to make way for his love to reach to Pakhi. And for that, he raped his own wife, plotted a suicide note, and made the Cobra bite her.

“I raped her and played with her genitals so bad that even she wasn’t able to recognize her underneath. Hahaha… It was fun to see the poison change her color, like a chameleon, and see her in vain like she used to give me by fretting that I don’t love her and all those crap talks. I used to love her, but when I saw Pakhi, my love for my wife turned into hatred. So I decided to insult her in the society, and the best way to insult any woman in India will be to rape her and spread the news of her bad luck”, he laughs like a giant God of darkness.

“Why did you plant the boy’s murder to Pakhi if you loved her?”, I ask in repugnance and curiosity.

“It was meant for you, rascal. You were meant to take that knife, not her. She might have gone looking for you, found the boy and pulled the knife out of him. That useless and vicious boy would have been died right in her arms”, he laughs again.

“You know you chose the wrong man’s fiancé”, I leave him in the police’s hands, they beat him up and throw him where he deserves to be.

Pakhi and I are standing in a church. We lit candles for the peace of the souls of the mother and the boy. Since they were Christian, they are buried next to each other, staying besides one another before and after death, as it is said that there’s no truer love than the love of a mother.

L.C.