Meerut Jail
September 7, 2014
I lie in this dingy high security barrack watching the
sunlight creeping out of the small window on the top right corner. Every ray of
hope seems to deflect and making a point not to touch me. I hear the jail
officials talking about getting a brand new rope for my execution. The
execution chamber is being cleaned after 4 decades.
Knowing the proximity of your death is more frightening that
not knowing the time of death. Trying to prepare myself, I am haunted by the
ghosts of the children and girls I killed. Yes I know I turned Nithari into a
hamlet of horrors. Yes, I know I mercilessly raped and murdered young girls. Can
I have a wand to erase my past? It's way too late now.
Traumatised by the thought of impending death, I cant but
come to terms with the crimes I have committed. Enmeshed in the vicious trap of
cannibalism, I had felt kafkaesque. Fearlessly ignoring my moral sense, I didn’t
mend my ways. The act of assaulting and killing had grown on me to such an
extent that the urge to transform myself never struck me. I used illegal ways
to hide my crime. Escaping conviction twice, I felt as if I had mastered this
deed of mine and complacence overtook. As if no one on earth could now point
fingers at me. Little did I know that wrong doings can never be forgotten but
can only be veiled temporarily. And once the row of killings began, I became
more and more thick skinned.
Today, my fellow Nithari residents rejoice at my death
sentence, but I have no alibi to resort to.
As the clock ticks and I go closer to my last few breaths, I
can only but ask for forgiveness for having made many families childless. Yes,
but I too have a story to tell. I am but
a victim of my own urge to take revenge. My past forced me to spoil my present
and completely annihilate my future. I had faced sexual assault in school by my
own seniors and my spirit had hardened after the incident. My emotions as if
vanished into a void. What are humanitarian concerns? What is brotherhood? All
false euphemisms. Some of the CBI officials, while interrogating me, concluded
that I was a psychopath. But it didn’t affect me because I know that acrimony
developed in my mind during my formative years.
God as if had taken away all my moral sense for all this
while and gushed it back when I was thrown into jail. Tortured by the heaviness
of guilt and remorse, I am in a catch 22 situation. Knowing that death will be
more peaceful than living the life of a mass murderer, I still cant bear my
breath being snatched away. How could I but suffocate kids to death? Was I also
not dreaming of earning honestly, raising a family and living happily when I
was an adolescent? Alas, I m the only one responsible for nurturing the criminal
in me. Such has been by deeds that I cant muster courage to ask for God's help!
Well, even God would accuse me of blasphemy and would curse his creation.
R.J. Palacio once said that, "When given a choice between
being right or being kind, choose kind!"
Probably, I found it right to murder those young children
considering my callous past. But I not only made many families childless but
also nipped the lives of our future leaders. Fellow countrymen, fight for a
cause but don’t rebel against it! Because the more you take revenge, the more
it runs after you. Being a living testimony to this statement, I apologise to
all the victims of my killings with a bleeding heart. But so shall it be for me
for I deserve no better.
Amen!
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