It was a bright morning during the summer of 2011 when Mr. Raghunath Varma, chief investigating officer of the Jamnagar mass murder case, woke up from his sleep to find his train leaving Ahmedabad Junction. In a panic that would take over him, he would run out of the train with his bag containing details of the investigating case, twist his leg as he gets out and fall heavily on the 1st platform of the station thereby scattering the papers contained in his bag which shall bemuse the people who themselves were lying down on the station floor while leaving the seats vacant.

‘I beg your pardon’, he said to the audience who gathered around him as he picked up the loose papers. They lost interest after he picked himself up from the floor and seemed alright. Raghunath winced at man’s desire to be part of a disaster, but it was short lived as he saw pictures of Sarfraz Mahmud, the person whose death sentence was withheld until Raghu finished his investigation. The fact which made him stutter was that underneath every picture of Sarfraz, whose image instantly portrayed notoriety, there was a call for justice, which suddenly weighed his shoulders down with rampant force.

Sarfraz K. Mahmud, the 34 year old mass murderer, who raped and killed more than 20 young children, who was also held accountable for 14 more child kidnappings and whose crime history shows an inhumane and a rather demonic scar of cannibalism. It was a case whose judgement was known even before its investigation began – ‘To be hanged till death!’ was the verdict of every court Sarfraz went, and yet with just 27 days remaining to carry out the verdict an appeal had to come up in the Supreme Court to revoke the sentence and Raghunath was asked to find whether Sarfraz deserved death. It was a thankless job, Raghu remembered himself being a 24 year old civil service aspirant whose topic for GD was on the cruelty of capital punishment, he remembered himself shunning the rest of his group with his eloquence and finally bringing out a conclusion that the government whatever their powers an prowess maybe is never justified in taking a life. And now, he was here in Ahmedabad to make sure Sarfraz was hanged.

‘Sir, kahan jaana hain, Sir?‘, came the voices of taxi and rikshaw drivers luring incoming visitors all for to enrich their subsistence. Raghu accepted the offer of a person who already had a grip on his bag, which moments before rejected its contents on the station. In fact, even before Raghu said where he wanted to go to the rikshaw was brought alive by pulling the starter lever and was racing to get outside the station.

‘Jamnagar’, Raghu said. In a furious twist of the accelerator the rikshaw slid past the heavy traffic of a busy Ahmedabad morning. Raghu settled down and dozed of for a while, in his shot sleep he saw the picture of Sarfraz, he was demanding justice.

As he stepped into darkness there arose a particular dissent, which created a polarization of thoughts. It was rather a frantic outcry from his opposing personalities to earn primal consideration. It is true that there is always an intrinsic similarity between calmness and profound chaos – both are identical if you look at it from a broader point of view; he appeared in sincere calm even when a serious battle enraged within him!

He accumulated all the events of his life and decided to play it out. In a state of overbearing dubiety, he could understand the chain of events which made him take this walk. It seemed like an erratic protest against a society which constantly fed on his insecurities and aggravated his hostility to such extremities that it reached a point where he could not maintain a relationship without experiencing repugnance. In a city with a vastly reproducing and heavily breeding population he was a natural standout. At an age when a man begins to show his animal instincts and is in search for a potential mate, he immersed himself in a haven of books, dreams and soliloquy. His brain was restless if it was separated from a book, whose unending hunger was quelled once it tasted the intense ideologies of Ernesto Guevara, Bhagat Singh, Subhash Chandra Bose and Mikhail Gorbachev, all with equal vigor and passion.

Even during the days of professional studies, his mind could not leave the inflaming ideals and rest patiently. There was an unruly trait, a misalignment within him, which created a separation from ordinary living. It was what he called, a ‘search for identity’, which beguiled him with desperation. After obtaining a first class from campus, he never pursued for a job, nor tried to earn a living. His parents rejected his purposeless life and constantly buried him in showers of wrath. It was then that he first moved out, and settled in his hereditary home with his grandmother, who later died due to tuberculosis.

It was a period of constant instabilities. His life was caught amidst suffocating tension and intense hunger which seemed to dissolve all casuistry. He was aware then that the limitation to all advanced human thought was hunger; an endpoint to all human desires! He took up a job in a bank as a clerical officer, unwillingly, and for 2 years tried to adapt to a more human lifestyle. He trimmed his beard, dropped smoking and wore a more professional outlook. The period greeted him with many marriage proposals, all of which was plainly rejected with the words, ‘Fuck off!’.

The phase contributed more to his arrogance, and little to routine. He began the habit of jotting his misbehaviors and also an explanation at its deep physical implication. He questioned authorities and transcended a feeling of rebellion. His mind, deeply in-congruent, tried to diverge from all instances of sanity. It reached a pinnacle of sinuous speculation which mocked his existence. He quit the job on the same day that he sat perplexed by the window. He drafted the letter in the form of a poem:

‘Human or sheep,
Both familiar
I detest none,
I yearn to be free,
And to live in insanity,
I quit this false costume!’

He laughed at the world. He saw the skies turn faint orange, and thought of a humanity which would wake up, wash their eroding body, eat breakfast, rush to office and work for some imbecilic capitalist for an income which is rationed! The fight within him was ending. He heard the crows of roosters, flowing through ether and into ears of people who exist by habit. There were birds soaring through skies, searching for food that would keep them alive. He wondered why poets, artists and thinkers in world history associate freedom with birds but not thoughts. He watched their flight to the end of the horizon and somehow got an answer. There arose another poem, which he could not find an apt place to pen down. He would now search for a perfect object to announce his poetry, he would ask the world to rebel, he would make them think through his poem, he would call the poem ‘Anarchism’!

My mother, the great Savithri Amma of Ramanthali, a Communist during the great Indian freedom struggle and an authoritarian during the post-Independence period; when she was left with three children and a husband with no particular source of income, was for me a living example of the many lives an Indian woman lives. Her many fables surrounded our village like some strange and persistent virtue, which made me and my siblings live a life which commanded love and respect.

I was 10 years old when my father was diagnosed with dementia. At that time, my brother had finished his schooling, my sister began the same and I was caught in the middle. My father constantly complained of his fading memory. He used to keep inquiring whether we got independence or not, for which my mother used to reply sternly,

‘We drove them out, those pack of dogs!’

I used to think that my father admired my mother’s fierceness, and if it wasn’t for dementia I would have thought forever that my father kept asking those questions just to hear the poignancy of her words, the lost fervency of a Communist.

My father, Velayudhan, was a farmer since 12. He had no experience of schooling and had no particular interest to leave us for the same. Schools were associated with a bizarre fear for him.

‘It is how they shackle us, through schools!’, he used to say.

Years later, I share the same ideology as that farmer, but it took me 14 years of schooling and 40 years of worldly experience to know what my father knew as if by common sense.

I always thought it was strange for my mother to fall in love with my father. It was strange because she was educated, and Communism for her was not a stick for a blind man, but the light that pervades all men and women on Earth. For my father it was the opposite – he was a Communist as long as they fought for the oppressed, as long as it brought bread to his stomach. It remains a mystery as to why my mother gave out her heart and later her ideologies for a man who could promise her very little. Many years hence, before my father’s body was carried away by my brother and certain relatives, I remember how my mother wept. It was as if she was answering all my innumerable questions through her bouts with tears.

It was a fragment of her which I rarely saw, the emotional one. She had always been stubborn and adamant. She took up the role of a dictator in the house with adroit ease. It was a task which at the time demanded zero tolerance. She gave specific duties for each of us to perform, which if we failed to accomplish attracted stringent punishment.

I recall a time when my brother planned to drop out of college and find work to support my mother who at the time worked as a maid at 3 different houses to make ends meet. It was a decision which made us face the flinty woman we have heard so much about but never saw in action. She brought the house to an impasse and announced an indefinite strike till my brother revoked his decision.

‘School is money which we receive tomorrow. Be patient today and you’ll benefit tomorrow.’, these were the words she used to spread the rebellion. And it echoed around the house like music, one whose tunes we could follow but the lyrics were in a language we never heard before.

Her words may not have been as commanding as the hunger we felt that day. When the smoke finally escaped from the chimney of our kitchen, marking the end of the strike, every last person in the house had a smile but neither thought intently about my mother’s articulate wisdom on education. We – my brother, sister and me – though miles away from each other today would agree upon one thing, that whatever our mother’s expectations were, the balance we hold in our banks and the shelter within which we sleep each night in comfort is a direct agreement to my mother’s beliefs.

Mother’s beliefs were deeply rooted to her exposure to Communist ideals. She always taught us to serve rather than rule, traces of which still survives within me. It may be the reason why I still cannot manage people without concerning myself profoundly with their problems. The fact which made her a legend in our village was indeed her open defiance over all social and cultural prejudice. She was the only woman in our village who could challenge a man if he was wrong, she was the only woman in our village who believed in gender equality and announced she would not give a single penny as dowry to marry off my sister.

Yet when I think of her I always remember the day she confronted my father’s order to let my grandmother die of small pox in her makeshift tent outside our house. Savithri Amma, euphemistically took the blame, but in the end saved my grandmother from certain death. It was the first time a person escaped alive from small pox in our village, a list which bore many names henceforth. The event still rests within the chambers of my memory as if it were some untold epic.

When I last visited my mother, she seemed weaker than before. Yet, she was relentless in providing me with the best porridge she had to offer.

‘People fall in love with my porridge. Last day I cooked one for Ramesh, the carpenter, and he didn’t ask for money but asked for another helping of it.’, she said proudly while she cooked.

The house she resurrected was indeed falling apart. Ramesh became a frequent visitor, the only one during those days. It was a period when her health was gradually deteriorating. Ramesh took her to the hospital for one thing or the other, yet, whenever I called her, all she complained about was of a part of the roof falling down or the electrical circuits faltering at places. She continued to hold the entire crumbling reminiscence upon her shoulders as if it were some priceless treasure, and all I could feel was a guilt which held no source and no destination.

‘Amma, come live with us, why do you struggle on here?’, I asked as I finished the porridge.

With a wave of her hands, she washed away my question so that not one word would reach her ears. She stood defiant, behind her she had a lifetime of solitude, of perseverance, a tale of never ending suffering. A story she never shared, a story which would have sunk to the deepest expanse of her memories – which probably would have lost its sustenance so much so that it could never be reignited. Inside the four corners of her house she relived every fable, within this house she was free. Many years later I would come to realize that it was for this freedom she fought for, and it was something she was unwilling to give away till death came by. She gave me a glass of tea, which tasted awkward with a furious addition of sugar. She always did that, as if she could annihilate a deepening sorrow simply by adding more sweetness to her tea!