Death on the River

(A)

Jadunath was walking along the river bank. It was a wintry afternoon. A lazy sun was slowly sinking into the waters. Above him were clouds of every possible colour. Jadunath felt he wanted to go into a deep sleep from which nobody would wake him. He saw layers of thin mist veiling the other bank from his eyes.

A boatman came up to him and asked him if he wanted to go to the other side. Jadunath stepped into the boat and the boatman started rowing his boat away from the bank. Soon they were in the middle of the river. Jadunath looked into the boatman's eyes, mumbled something inside his mouth and then turned his head away.

The sun sank one inch deeper.

(B)


Jadunath had been in the police department for thirty years now. He had joined Homicide but soon his seniors realised that he had a keen sense for what 'goes on inside the killer's mind'. At any crime scene, Jadunath would be more interested in analysing its three-dimensionality than in collecting evidence. He tried to place himself in the shoes of the killer and the victim a few minutes before the crime. It was a gift. He had skills nobody had taught him.

Soon he was transferred to Forensics on the orders of people higher up. Over three decades, Jadunath built up a formidable reputation. He even stopped going to crime scenes. He would sit and wait for his juniors to come back with the bits and pieces and he would spend the whole night trying to fit them together. More often than not, they would hang together in the picture he would build up inside his mind. That was a picture only he could see, whereas others detected nothing but fingerprints and coincidences.

Three decades into the job, Jadunath realised one morning that somewhere along the line, something had snapped. The city police had been on the track of a serial killer for three months. The killer had struck six times within that period. Jadunath spent sleepless nights going over the details that had been collected from the crime scenes. The victims were always women in their teens, who were students and who smoked cigarettes. There was nothing much he could do with that : there were thousands of such women in the city on any one day.

And then one night, it all fell together in together. Jadunath saw it. The previous murders had been just a ploy to send the police running along a false track. He knew where the killer would strike next. The killer had been sending him messages through the earlier crimes about who his final victim would be.

(C)

But ... But Jadunath did not do anything. He felt a strange alliance with the killer. He did not want to be a spoilsport. He wanted to let the killer finish the job. He realised that he was so much inside the mind of the killer that he had become the killer himself. He and the killer were now the same, and there was nothing he could do to prevent the next strike. The killer he had been tracking was a master at his job and he did not want to catch him before he had finished his masterpiece.

The next morning, Jadunath knew he had been correct. He picked up the newspaper and the headlines told him that the police commissioner had been killed the previous night.

Jadunath began to feel that he did not know anymore the difference between good and evil. A strange malaise began to haunt him. He began to re-read the reports of earlier crimes that he had solved and felt that they had been all too naively executed. There was no criminal with an imagination to equal or challenge his. He had reached the stage where he could himself plan the perfect crime. He spent another six months tracking down killers and felt disgusted at their lack of finesse. He began to wish that criminals would have a talk with him before contemplating the next crime. That way, life would be at least a little bit more interesting inside the force.

(D)

The boatman had reached the other bank now. Jadunath slowly rose from the boat and jumped onto the sand. He looked behind him. On the other side, he could see the faint figures of a cowherd taking his cows home. The dust from the cows' feet and the sand had become one.

Did he find the Other Shore a strange place? Well, it was too early to say anything. He felt that something inside him had died when he was on the river. What would take its place? He did not know. However, at least he felt that he was walking on solid ground here. He did not want to spend the rest of his life debating over what was good and what was evil concerning every single incident inside his tired mind. He wanted to be liberated from that incessant cycle.

The boatman had now reached the middle of the river again. Behind his boat, a few ripples shining in the red sun.

Jadunath walked away.

His thick boots left deep footprints in the moist sand.