[A piece of mine came in at second place at a flash fiction competition
held by Reading Hour as a lead-up to their March-April 2014 crime and
mystery special issue. The challenge was to write a criminal case that was
concise (500 words) yet complete. I wanted to capture in words a serial
killer who would never be caught. Once I knew who that was, the story came
easily enough.]
There is a serial killer on the loose on the streets of Mumbai. He is known
to prowl around the slums of Dharavi and near the State Transport bus stand
at Nehru Nagar and beside the railway tracks at Tilak Nagar station. Some of
his victims have been found strewn all the way across town on the isolated
beaches of Madh Island. He mostly murders homeless children below the age of
fifteen and on rare occasions, goes for the odd octogenarian vagrant. Police
have yet been unable to procure any information that might lead to ascertain
the killer’s appearance or his intentions, and eyewitness accounts from
parents of the victims have been sketchy at best.
They say he would strike three times a day earlier, then he came down to
striking twice a day, and in the last few days, he struck just once, at
nights. His modus operandi is to sneak up on a sleeping child, grab her by
the throat so she couldn’t scream and crush her stomach till it caved in.
Often the parents wouldn’t realise their child had been slaughtered till the
dawn broke. The assassin is silent and leaves no clues. Nor does he drop any
tell-tale signs of who his next victim will be and where. Fathers have taken
to staying up all night watching the construction sites near their shanties
and mothers cite the killer to scare their children into eating their meagre
meals.
Mohsina is one such mother who lost her daughter Saira Bano to the serial
killer eight days ago. The dirt on her cheek mixes with her tears and falls
into the bowl of rock salt and rice she is trying to feed her four-year-old
Asghar. She fears for his life and wishes the killer kills her before he
takes her son. The worst thing for a mother is to survive her own children;
she knows this because she has been through the brutal butchery of her
daughter. She also knows that the Government and the Police are apathetic to
her situation. She has not received any assurance for the safety of her son
nor is the administration taking any measures to arrest the serial killer.
Policemen have told her they are happy something is wiping the muck of
migrant workers off the slums and streets of Mumbai.
...
Beat Constable Jadhav of the Nehru Nagar police chowky was on his early
morning round of the ward when he stopped by a circle of construction
workers. At the centre of the crowd was Mohsina wailing over a sleeping
Asghar, prodding him to wake up from his slumber. Jadhav did not need to
move closer to the corpse as it was lifted into the air by the men to
comprehend that the serial killer had struck again. A post-mortem analysis
would not be required to determine the cause of death; Jadhav did not even
file an FIR. Hunger is hardly a killer that a constable can catch.
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