Confessions of a murderer

Maybe I wasn't destined to be a murderer, but I became one. We are told that sin sits like a boulder on your heart. We are made to believe that blood clots stain your hands, and your eyeballs turn into the dark, insomniac districts of big cities. We are told that grief and compunction lurk like a phobia in the silent hours of your existence. We are told that killing another is hard, that it’s a brutal act. They have announced that promiscuity is a burden, a disease, difficult to live with, to live for. It is nothing but a thick pile of lies. Each one of us has a murderer within us, and if we train ourselves well, killing is a pastime like none other. I am talking about killing humans. Killing as a hobby, as an art, as a science! I will now tell you why I am both an artist and a scientist.

This is my true story. I write this to denounce the myths associated with murder. I am not here to praise myself or my acts. My anonymous existence points to the fact that I don't care for your applause or comments. I want you to listen to me. Suspend your prejudices and listen to me. I may come after you and kill you too, but there is no hurry.

Killing for pleasure is my hobby. Like a prostitute who enjoys the variety and the range in her customer base, who works not just for material pleasure, whose loins are like ravenous hearths thirsting for more wood, I am always fantasizing about spurting blood, slashed veins and strips of flesh peeled out like onion skins. But murder is the end of ecstasy; the real pleasure is in the foreplay.

First kill is like losing virginity. It introduces you to a new realm of pleasures. I was only fifteen when I discovered the essence of this simile. Rashq, my mortal twin, consider himself as the stronger and the smarter one. Our mother, the bitch, never figured who our biological father was. Rashq had arrived a few seconds before I did. I arrived in anger, and unlike usual babies, I arrived with just a single tear on my cheek. One tear for losing the race to Rashq, one tear to be christened as Ashq!

I tolerated him for fifteen years. I let his six feet, stout frame tower a few inches above mine slim, bone and flesh, dilapidated body. I let his scores at primary school overrun mine; I let myself bear sores after every battle we fought. I resented him with a bitterness that I openly flaunted. I tolerated him till the day I saw him extract a smile and blush from Rashmi. She sealed his fate.

I think I was a little inexperienced then. I did not know human anatomy enough. I choked him with a pillow, and he struggled like a horse trying to swim across a swamp. He fought hard, but in the end, his despair, his astonishment swamped him. I was much weaker physically, but my intent was as taut as my grip. We lived next to Yamuna, in a slum basti. It took me only a few minutes to wrap him in a bed sheet and leave him for the fish to feast on. My sweaty self was strained to the limit, and yet I felt an exhilaration one feels after scaling a mountain. What followed in Rashmi's room was like jumping off a cliff for paragliding!

I did not know enough human anatomy then. I did not know how erotic pain is for woman, how injury urges them on, how darkness turns them into a force that contain pleasures that bleed as they proceed, that soar as they swing, that flatter as they fetter you. I approached Rashmi, who was only thirteen then. She bit me, punched me, hit me, and writhed in my grip like a snake, trying to escape from a mongoose's grip. I hurled her down on the floor, and held her breasts so tightly with my fingers digging deep into them, that I feared my fingers would start to crackle. Before my fingers could crackle, her fierceness began to exude a fire that I had never thought possible. We both burned like turpentine oil, screeching and spurting as we exhausted every drop of our intention. When we stopped an hour later with teeth marks and bites all over each other, I rose with a freshness one feels after an extended bath. Ashq, the man, was born.

Unfortunately, Rashmi had to die next. The only murder that brings a sigh to my lips was hers. The murder itself was a fascinating affair; I have no complaints about the act itself. In fact, it was my first masterpiece. The sigh is for the body that was first to anoint me as potent. The sigh is for the teeth that first roused the animals in my languid flesh. I killed her one evening, of course, after pounding her with my exploding ego. I killed her, just at the moment, when she closed her eyes, moaning as she climaxed. Blood sprinkled out of her veins, as it does when suddenly someone steps on a garden hose and it just bursts out. The red liquid rose like a fountain, and drops fell like rose petals on her face. As I walked out, unnoticed at the early dawn, I left a raging fire to gorge her, to finish her with the last rites a Hindu deserves. Then I took a plunge in the Yamuna to clean off the stains of my first romance.

Rashq and Rashmi must have united in hell, for all I care. I was sending them more company. I worked at a garage owned by a Bengali family who had risen in fortune, through a series of shrewd real estate investments. They still kept the garage, as they believed it was their Kaamdhenu, the holy cow who ushered in all blessings and prosperity for them. I was sixteen, and the Maalkin, the Memsahib, the Mistress of the house was nearly forty. Some itch induced her to take a liking for me, and she started to insist that I learn a few things from her. She made me take Class X board exams, and ensured I spent enough time on my lessons to get through a five year gap in my education.

It was on the day my results arrived that I got my first chance to teach her a few things. I don't know what beast I roused in her, but she began to obsess about me. I patiently played in her hands for three months, then one day plunged her into her own bath tub; she shat into it as she screamed under water and left the world floating in her own mess. A servant, the only person who suspected me, for he knew of the hours I had spent in a closed room with the Mistress, found out a few days later, that his death was to receive him tongueless, armless and headless.

The Bengali babu fled to the banks of Hooglie in distress. I went with him. New language moaned at my advances, new bodies arrived at my table, to disappear like dreamt ideas do when the poet finally picks his tool. I learnt every means of dissection, I procured the cadavers I needed for this study by hunting them, I honed my knowledge of anatomy by practicing my touch, my bite, my thump on every specimen who interested me. Like a good experimentalist, I learnt from my every mistake and moved on.

This isn't Dostoevsky folks, so there is only Crime and no Punishment. Pardon me, for using the language of fools in calling murder a crime. It is a hobby. A hobby must be retained as a hobby, and then your pleasure is guilt-free. I became a homicide artist. Bodies would appear in drains, in Hooglie, in bathtubs, on rooftops, in heaps of rubbish. Bodies captured in their own state of ugliness, released from the slavery of breath! There is an erotic element to how the last breath oozes out of a writhing, alive being, from the same being, who minutes back, was writhing in sensual drunkenness as your master strokes filled her with color. But as I said before, murder is the end of the ecstasy; the real pleasure is in the foreplay.

You need to decide on how long the foreplay needs to be. Your start must be measured, slow. Did you ever watch how a tiger hunts? Prancing like a true hunter, noiseless and focused, you must pounce on your prey, and no matter what horns and what muscles embattle you, you need to hold on the neck of the prey in your ever hungry incisors, till you are victorious. No half measures. No sentimentality. Plane, simple act! Execution. Perfection is another name for carrying out a task to completion. Folks, I have sought and wrought perfection!

Here I stand before you, without face, anonymously. My lips are being licked by new desires, my hands are as eager for fondling you as they are for dismantling your intestines. I am as natural with the knife as I am with assuming the character of a weakling, a man of no importance, trying to fight big and small torments of life to survive the system. I am a Van Gogh, unknown to the mankind, a Picasso you haven't yet learnt to appreciate. I am a Casanova, who incarnates as Jack, The Ripper, and walks the nights as Dracula, without the flourish of the Count. No Gods bother me, I bother with none. We ignore each other. I don't subscribe to any cannibalistic tribe. I am a pure vegetarian (can you beat that?). I am no devil worshipper. I am just a simple man, with simple needs and a great panache for killing. I kill so elegantly that you will never suspect me as the killer.

Try it. The ecstasy of destruction, the ecstasy of death! Death is more profound than life. All men and women are born with a specter of death within them. We all can be Gladiators, the executioners, the Hangmen, the Knights who kill in name of God or country or dreamt up romances. Isn't it the ritual of survival that leads a man and a beast to invent all daily habits of existence? All this existential angst, and a lone warrior, a craftsman, Me, to release and relinquish it! A messiah is the one who leads you to nirvana. Am I not your new, anonymous messiah? I won't disclose who I am, for I have no urge to climb a cross, and be worshipped when I am gone. I do not speak to anyone, I mean no angels or demons exist for me. I will not be an identified prophet; I won't work my miracles in public. I will just do my public service; lead you to your demise, your freedom. In any case, I don't care about fame much. I don't believe in sinners and saints or Messiahs either. I do as I please. I reign supreme in my craft.

Is it going to be you next?