Lack of motive

1

“With the overwhelming evidence piled up against you, I consider myself to be a lenient man when I offer you a chance to explain your act. Do you have anything to say before I read my verdict out?” The judge had a cold look in his eyes when he looked at the defendant, a look that is generally reserved by men for something as vile, irrational and lethal as a man-eating tiger or a rabid dog. Even so, the defendant looked anything but irrational.

As the guard stood next to the door, he looked at the defendant who had been in his prison under his vigil for the last month with some curiosity. He was surprised to feel the curiosity within him, knowing that he had had a month to size this man up. The defendant, soon to be a criminal, was calm. His face was gaunt and haggard and pits of malnourishment went deep into his cheeks, making his already prominent cheekbones even more so. He had a beard that had grown around his face like wild weed grows in a neglected swamp. The guard did not really notice these things, though. Nobody did. Everyone in the courtroom, for reasons their own minds could not express to them, sat there transfixed by the defendant’s eyes. Literature is filled to the brim with romantic descriptions of soft brown eyes of passionate lovers, lit with pure sensuous love for their partners. The softness, the lust in these eyes has inspired many a verse. Perhaps it was also partly because of this seasoning of the mind that it was so incomprehensible and extraordinary to see a man such as the one in the court. His brown eyes had pure, unadulterated, powerful frigidity. They were piercing, cold and hard. They were listless, lifeless and yet, they were beyond death because death itself would shrink away in fear, shivering at the calm, cold unbridled evil power that lay in those immovable stony eyes. The guard was still mildly amused at how difficult it was to shift one’s gaze away once it had been fixed and held by them. He had, however had weeks of practice and so he had the liberty to observe the defendant, nonetheless, a little bemused by his composition.

The defendant was about to be sentenced to death, thought the guard. Anyone in their sane minds, no matter how heinous their crime might have been, would react to it. The guard had seen more than his share of criminals. He had spent nights sitting and chatting with criminals on death row – murderers, rapists, serial killers. Most petty criminals in the prison, waiting for their terms to get over, would even consider this guard as one of the few people in this world who would call them his friends. They were the scum of the earth, they were filled with pretention, deceit, treachery and mercilessness, but the guard held a special position in their hearts for he regarded them as human beings. He had been around prisons enough to know that biology could never fully encompass what the term human being really meant. He had seen murderers and cold hearted serial killers go weak in the knees when the verdict was being spelled out. He had seen people wet themselves, cry for mercy or even foolishly try and escape the courtroom. He had also seen the staunch ones who held a brave emotionless face but the guard did not have to make much effort to sift through that cover and see the real fear inside them. This was the first time, however, that no matter how much the guard tried to dig into this man, all he found was cold, hard ice. The man sat there, calm and composed as if he was attending a funeral of someone he didn’t really know that well.

And yet, even in all this mystery that surrounded this strange man, the guard had to admit – this man was anything but irrational. Something in his manner, his body language, the way his shoulders easily stooped and his hands hung by his sides without movement, the way he slowly closed his eyes and quietly swallowed before he gave his reply, it all exuded the unmistakable existence of a rational, sane, even calculative mind that had been sharpened and honed over the years with indefatigable hours of learning, reading and study.

“I have but one thing to say. Since I am going to die, let me put to rest, the many hearts that I have caused pain to. I have been charged of murder, the taking of life. The charge is serious but I have more on my conscience. I have committed not one, but two murders. I have already provided the police with the names of the deceased before I entered the courtroom. I wish for the court to make these names public so that their closest of kin may finally have more than the intangible, incomprehensible, inexistent god to blame for their misfortune.”

There were collective gasps in the courtroom as the criminal calmly made this startling revelation. The judge too, for a moment, lost his cool but he quickly regained his composure.

“Order in the court!” the judge sternly announced. The murmurs reluctantly died down.

“Well then. This certainly comes as an unpleasant surprise. Would you do us all a favour and tell us why you committed the other crime at least?” The criminal sat motionless, as if the judge was talking to someone behind him.

“I must tell you, despite thorough investigations, the police have not been able to explain the reason for your crime. The lack of motive behind your crimes is not only puzzling, but unsettling and discomforting. I am forced to assume you killed two people without any plausible reason.”

“It is not why that matters. For those who I have wronged, let it be known it was me.” The criminal said to nobody in particular.

“In that case, I will not delay any further what you have deserved for more than a year. I sentence you to be electrocuted till you are dead. May the lord have mercy on your tormented soul.”



2

The evening sun lazily inched towards the horizon. The sultry air that hung motionless made even the sunlight seem as if it was yawning and stretching after a long day. The prison was doused in the dull orange and the bars cast hard, straight shadows in the cells. As the guard walked past each of the cells, checking and counting as he did every evening at the commencement of his shift, he saw the caged prisoners sitting in their cells like animals in a zoo. He paused briefly by the cell that contained the strange man who had been sentenced to death only an hour ago. It had been a different start of the day for the guard with the trial. He had patrolled this corridor for a month and passed by this cell many times, each time his curiosity growing ever so slightly; so much so that when the day of the trial came nearer, all the guard could think of was this mysterious creature.

The guard had a weakness for stories. He had grown up on stories and had witnessed many of them in his own life. Being the son of a jail peon, he had spent his childhood around prisons. When he became a prison guard himself, he had no difficulty adjusting to his duties and he quickly became at ease at this place as if it was home. He also had an eye for stories and had developed the disposition to get them told. He knew the story of every criminal who had a good one to tell. He knew the reasons for their crimes, he knew what made them so and he even knew a few stories that the world outside should never know.

He enjoyed this possession. These stories to him were more than just someone else’s experiences. He owned them as if it was wealth. He had kindness to share, he had companionship to give but nothing comes for free. His good heart came at a price, and the price was a story. He had no interest for the run-of-the-mill criminal, the thief who got caught because he was foolish enough to knock a glass over, or the pickpocket who lacked the nimbleness of the fingers. He even disregarded them as if they did not exist for him.

It was this insatiable and unusual need for stories that made it all the more painful for him to stay disconnected from this strange man. However, he was familiar with criminals only too well. He saw that prodding would only push the prize further inside the deep, dark, motionless abyss that was this man. And so it had been a month since he had first set his eyes on this man and yet not a word had passed between the two. Now, however, after the trial, the guard’s interest had been piqued beyond control.

He looked into the cell where the man lay on his bunk curled up in a foetal position. He looked at him for a long time, wondering about many things. It did not take his keen interest in stories for someone to be interested in the crimes of this man. The complete absence of motives in his crimes was known to all and it was almost ironic how something could cause so much unrest and strife by merely not being there. The guard wasn’t interested in the crimes though. His wasn’t so shallow and volatile an interest.

He knew when he saw this man that the hands that sculpted this life belonged to an extraordinary fate. That was what roused his interest more than anything else.
He saw the dimming sunlight fall on the bed. The man was lying on the bed with his legs towards the bars. The light lazily lit up the man’s bare feet, his prisoner’s uniform, the folds creating an alternating pattern of darkness and light like the bars themselves. The eyes shone even in this weak, diminishing light. The man stared blankly at the naked wall opposite to his bed.

The guard walked up to the bars and leaned against them. He looked down the long corridor, then looked out the window in the wall against the cell at the sleepy sun. He drew a packet of his favourite unfiltered cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one in his mouth. He prided in owning these. A man in the neighbourhood who owned a cigarette shop also hand rolled these cigarettes using the best quality tobacco himself. He made them as a favour only to a few select customers, one of whom was the guard. The guard had a knack for ending up on the other side of such favours.
He dragged twice to spread the burn evenly on the tip, inhaled deeply to feel the tobacco work its magic, and when he was satisfied he let the smoke out in a steady, long puff from the corner of his lips. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed the slight shift in the man’s shoulder when the smoke reached his nostrils.

“You want a light?” The guard offered the pack with a cigarette pulled out for the man.

The man didn’t move. The guard retracted his hand enough so that his elbow was out of the bars. He let his forearm rest on the upper one of the two horizontal bars that ran across the vertical ones, with the packet of cigarettes still extended into the cell, his offer standing. He stood there in that manner for five or six minutes as he puffed on through the whole cigarette. After a few minutes, he lit another one and put his hand back in position of offering. The guard was lost in his thoughts, looking down the long corridor and halfway through his third smoke when he felt a very light tug on the packet he was holding. The guard jumped with a start when he turned and found the man standing right next to him beyond the bars. Seeing that face, those eyes so close to his own, the guard felt as if he had been stabbed with a dagger of dry ice.

He saw the man’s face so close for the first time. The latent rays of the vanished sun lit the man’s face with tentative fear of a child roaming a new territory without its mother. It was lined more than only age. He was in his mid thirties but his face was that of a man ten years older. The shadows on his face were sharp, definite and imposing as if it were the shadows that caused the light and not the other way. His face was expressionless and stony. The man stood there with the cigarette in his mouth. The guard lit a match and gave it to him. The man smoked in silence; closing his eyes every time he took a deep, long drag. He finished it in not more than five drags and then went back without a word to his bed, resuming the act of staring at the wall, as if to burn a hole into it.



3

“You stand too close to the bars.” The guard didn’t show the shock he felt when the man spoke.

It had been a week since the day of the trial and only three days left before the man would be killed. For a week now, it had become a habit for the guard to stop by the cell and smoke quietly until the man came up to the bars, smoked one cigarette, and retreated back into his cell. For a week now, they’d shared five minutes of their day together but nobody had spoken a word. Now the silence was broken. It was his choice.

“I could steal those keys from your belt. You wouldn’t be any wiser until I was gone.” His voice was sharp and cold like himself. He spoke the words with the precision and measure of a machine.

“The difference between what a man can do and what a man will do is what defines him. I know a man with a death wish when I see one. You won’t steal my keys.” The guard said as he looked the man straight in the eye.

The man held the guard’s gaze for a while before he slowly turned his head to continue looking out of the bars and out the window that faced him in the wall of the corridor. He finished his cigarette in silence, snubbed the butt out in his pinch, and the guard expected him to retreat back into his cell to stare at the wall again. But the man stood there, looking out the window as the light finally gave up the battle and let the shadows take over his face. The guard threw his third cigarette butt down to the floor, crushed it and looked back up to see a gaunt, bony hand extended towards him, with its index finger and thumb sticking out. The man had slender fingers, and although they were worn and dirty right now, at least as far as the guard could tell from the forefinger’s nail loaded with dirt, he could see that these hands belonged not to a man who had struggled with everyday life for food, water and shelter, but to a man who had lived a respectable life.

“Can I have another?”

“Sure. I think I’ll have another myself today.” The guard gave one to the man and lit the last one in the pack for himself, flinging the box on to the ground. Five drags later, the man was back on his bed, staring at his wall once more.



4

The guard looked at the amber sun as he walked towards the jail from his house. The evening sky was littered with childish streaks of orange, yellow and gray. He had always found the infinite patterns on the sky at evenings extremely fascinating. He had wondered ever since childhood, how it was possible that never did a pattern repeat itself. Every evening, and consequently, every day was different for him because he knew that the forces of nature were at work in a different manner today than they were yesterday or than they will be, tomorrow. On this particular evening, however, he dismissed the evening sky with a glance. His mind was preoccupied. Eleven days had passed since the day of the trial and last night at 11 pm, the strange man had died.

They had shared ten evenings together, smoking alongside those bars. They had hardly spoken to each other but the guard somehow had come to look forward to those few minutes of solitude. There was something about his presence that made the guard introspective. Being there, standing with this man who had the capacity and the matter to communicate but chose to be as closed as an inanimate, unyielding stone, the guard was helplessly pushed inside himself where his own self became loquacious, as if making up for the lack of it between the two.

It had all ended last night. The guard did not care so much for the mystery of this man as he did for those few minutes. His hand felt the bulge of the cigarette packet in his pocket as he entered the jail. He had not attended the execution. He never did attend them. Since childhood his world had comprised majorly of people who were sentenced to die and he found it much easier to omit that event so as to appease his mind by letting it feel only the mysterious absence of these people. That left the door open for possibilities. As he grew up, even if this lie was too feeble to hold its own against the prudence of age, the habit turned out to be stronger.
He waved a hello to a fellow guard who walked up to him.

“This is for you”, he said, handing him a packet of cigarettes. The guard immediately recognized the plain box with no label – it was the same kind as he always smoked, the hand rolled, unfiltered cigarettes.

“Why, I bought one of my own just three days ago. You can have them if you want.”

“No, it’s not from me. It’s from that crazy fella down in the death row cells you used to smoke with. You know the one they fried last night.”

The guard thanked his colleague and with a puzzled expression, took the packet. It felt too light to contain cigarettes. He realized the box was the one he had thrown away a few nights ago. He opened the box as he walked on through the long corridor of cells and by the time he saw what was inside it, he was standing next to the cell of the strange man, now empty.

The box contained pieces of white paper. Each piece was about an inch wide and three inches long. One of the longer edges of the paper was lined with black ash as if it had been burned. Each of these pieces, along with the insides of the box, was covered with words, written in very small, meticulous handwriting, written in black colour.

The guard had to sit down as he realized that these pieces were none other than the unfurled stubs of the cigarettes he and the man had smoked together for the last ten days. The words on the paper were written by using ash as the ink and burnt matchsticks as the pen. They were small, smudged and hard to read and they were written in a disconnected manner. The guard had to put together meaning from the sparsely connected keywords that the man had managed to put down. Sitting there in the empty cell, he began to read as the tiny pieces of paper covered in char threw out disconnected words that turned into a voice from beyond the grave.



5

“My name is irrelevant. I am a killer. Its all that defines me now. I have never explained my acts, because I am not sure I understand them completely. I will attempt to do so now partly because I want to die knowing what I have done in its entirety. I killed for life. My life. I killed so that I may live. My existence was a burden, a lump of flesh that was sticking to this earth and, even with all its revolution and rotation, wouldn’t come off. I had to change that. I was cursed to be alive and yet not know what it is to live. I was cursed to purposelessness. I lifted the curse.

I was born 37 years ago. I have lived for 10. For you, the person looking at me, I have lived a normal, happy, even a fortunate life. I was born to a principled father and a loving mother. I had no siblings and no needs. I always had what I wanted. Or so I was led to believe. Since I remember, I had been told what to want and had received it. I felt no sense of possession because I felt no want, only the knowledge of it. Knowledge, I found out later along my life, was not feeling. Knowledge was the one companion I had all my life. It was like a friend one does not like but keeps because the friend is relentlessly loyal. As I let years pass by, I was thrust into preschool, school, college, a job and a marriage. I never felt the thrust because by the time I could have, I was used to being pushed. I wouldn’t move otherwise. All along, the only act I did on my own initiative was to read. I have read everything. I read and read trying to pawn off the experiences of others. I did so because I had none of my own.

Experiences, I realized, became a part of the memory not because they happen to us. They become a part of us because we react to them. I never did and so, I was lost. I have read millions of pages on it but I have never understood this one word: Feeling. Feeling, just like anything else, needs initiative. I did not know I lacked it but I had always known something was different. When I was 15 and my father died of lung cancer, I was sure I was different. I felt sad and suffocated by the tears around me but I knew not why. I felt no sorrow for my father. I felt no sorrow because I had never felt happiness when I saw him. I had never felt relieved to know he was there, I had never felt respect for what he did, I had never felt angry at his mistakes because I had never connected to him. He was the source of decrees for me.

I married because I was told to. I thought my wife was beautiful because people said so. I thought I loved her because, well, why else was I married? She said she found me mysterious and attractive. After about a year, she said she found me cold. A few months later, I found her with another man. We divorced. My mother was shattered. My family expressed their condolences – they blamed my ex-wife.

I was 27. I had been sitting through 27 years of my life as if it was a motion picture, with characters brushing past me, trying to move me but I stood my place because I never thought I was a part of the story. I was never the actor, always the audience. Ironically, I had to act as if I was.

After the divorce, I lived alone. I felt mildly irritated by the looks of pity and sympathy I received from the neighbours. Then, one day, it all changed. It was the best day of my life – the day I discovered I was capable of more than merely mild emotions. I was sitting in my living room when the neighbour’s cat started scratching on my door and meowing wildly. May be it was hungry. I could not stand it. I felt irritated. As the noise continued, my irritation grew and for the first time in my life, it tipped over and became anger. I felt a surge of energy inside of me that I did not know how to handle. My heart started beating uncontrollably, my temples throbbed, my veins swelled and my eyes were covered with a white fog of drunken rage. I threw myself out of the chair and dashed to my door. In a single, unfaltering act I swung it open with one hand and swooped up the animal with the other. I looked at it and its form gave form to my anger as well. I had a tangible object to blame it all on. I felt all the frustration of 27 years, all the disappointments, all the sorrow surge into me as if a dam had broken. I started shaking with anger, frustration and all that is bad. I did not even realize when the energy shot through the tendons and muscles of my arms and my fingers. I did not feel my grip tighten around the cat, my fingers dig deep into its body. I never saw the cat scratch wildly and scream for help, I only felt the scratches which really did not help the fate of the cat. The pain I felt became real. It took the form of a monster. It was as if till now, the monster was only in the making with all the anger and the frustration but the pain brought it alive. And in that one moment I squeezed the animal so hard that I crushed it. I felt its bones crack, its internal organs crush and before either of us knew, the cat was dead. Only when the noise stopped, did I realize what I had done. I saw the blood on my arms and I did not know when it had appeared there. I threw down the lifeless body and staggered back into my chair.

I had found the way. I had found the key to my life. I felt alive for the first time in my life. For the first time, in 27 years, I felt. I had felt anger, I had felt emotions. It was the closest of my experiences to an orgasm. I was giddy with happiness, again a new feeling.

I had never owned a lot. It did not take me more than half a day to wind up my possessions and disappear from the city. I moved to another city and lived off the experience I had had for a few months. As the memory of the cat faded, I began to sink back into lifelessness. I could not take it. My mind rejected the dull gray of nothingness. It missed the definite blacks and the whites and the reds. It wanted to live, I wanted to live, to feel, to react, to finally be able to feel what I had always only read.

The murders:

The first.
The first one came shortly after I moved to the other city. One day as I sat in my room, reading, the maid swept my floor. By accident, she knocked a vase over and it shattered to pieces. I was jolted out of my reverie by the noise and the shock made me feel irritation. I instantly recognized that the irritation was slightly higher than I normally feel and like a hungry animal running after its quarry, I fanned my irritation. I looked at the vase and invented stories in my mind. I convinced myself that the vase was a gift from my mother who was now dead and that was the only link I had left to her. I made myself believe that I had attached myself to the vase more than I had felt attached to anything. The loss of the vase now made me angry. I felt it bubble in me and my pulse started to race. I realized I was going to approach that world of feeling again. I was once again, entering that paradise where I could feel, my heart would race. I wanted it badly. I looked at the perpetrator of the crime, the maid. I shouted at her at the top my voice. I screamed my lungs out. She made a mistake. She defended herself, saying I was overreacting. Her words fueled me and I stood up. Then I had an idea. I walked deliberately over the pieces of glass and felt the tiny jagged pieces tear through the skin and the flesh on my foot. I felt the sweet pain surge from my foot to my brain and the anger broke loose. Once more, my hands shot out, my body swung into actions that were not under my control as my mind reveled only in one experience – the experience of feeling pure, infinite emotions. When I regained control, the body of the maid was lying at my feet, lifeless.

The second.
I drifted on with that experience for years. Taking the life of a human being is strikingly different than killing an animal. The sense of authority and power that it gives is different from anything else. I relived that day in my mind over and over again. I even tweaked it a bit when I was bored with the real memory. I did that so often that by the time I was 33, I was not sure what had happened and what had not. I had completely forgotten how I had killed the maid. I realized that I was soon going to lose the feeling of life again. Like the ebb in the evenings, the emotions tickled the edge of my mind and quickly started to recede into the wide ocean, out of my reach.

That was the time when I stood in line at the supermarket. That was my mistake. I accidentally found my window to life at a place with witnesses and security. I am not even sure anymore of what happened there. I remember a child spilling his juice over my shoes. I remember the mother running away from me with her child gripped in her arms. I remember her lying on the ground with blood running down her temples with the child motionless next to her as I was dragged away. I didn’t even know which one of them was dead.

That was the time I felt remorse. It was a new experience, but not a good one. I felt alive but I felt sorry that I did. It was a strange paradox that I sat inside my cell and tried to sort out for a long time. Finally, one night, I cried. I wept like a baby as I thought of what I had done. They had told me I killed the child. I beat myself, I hurt myself, I banged my head against the wall and I cried and I screamed. I felt caged inside the body of this animal that was me and I could not bear it. I felt claustrophobic, smothered and painful.

The only purpose to my life now remained was retribution. I wanted to right the wrongs I had done. It was all I wanted. And I made a decision. I would not let myself have that. I kept quiet throughout the ordeal as people made assumptions, blames and the judge announced his verdict. All throughout, all I did was to remind myself of what I had done. Day in and night out, I lay in my bed, staring at my sins, letting them burn into me the ruthless truth. I am a murderer, an animal that did not deserve life. I felt agony when I heard what people said of me, as they invented stories of me causing the deaths even of my father and my mother. I let my soul burn in the agony. My story would die with me.

I have left this for you because you are my doppelganger. I knew you wanted to know, and so I am leaving this to you, my story. I know you despise me now. I have only one request. Burn these pieces of paper and plaster the walls of my cell again.”

The guard was numb with disbelief at what he had read. When he finished, he looked up at the wall against the bed. The criminal had, with the nail of his forefinger, clawed in the words, “Maid, dreams, family, love, life, child, innocent, loving, caring, harmless, finished.” Only in the end of his own had the criminal understood life.