Folly of Wise Men

The Killing

When I stepped out of her home, I felt it again - a unified frown that bayed for my disappearance. Feeling that my mere presence would create unnecessary problems, I rushed to my precinct.

"You, boy!" exclaimed a guard. I stopped and stood frozen. "Where were you last night?"

I came up with a false alibi, claiming that I had spent the night in a brothel within our precinct and had gone to work early in the morning before their shift. Fortunately, the guards didn't cross-check my return with the evening shift, a stroke of luck that ultimately spared my life. Uttering those words felt repulsive, as the very thought of involving myself with the exploited was deeply abhorrent to me.

"Your sister, boy, she was killed while you were rutting in the brothel."

"What?" I

"Your youngest sister is dead, killed as a punishment for breaking the curfew,"

I had the responsibility to accompany her home as Devika was unwell and couldn't make it, but consumed by my own selfish desires and lost in my aspirations, I completely neglected her. As a consequence, she met her demise. In a single day, she was no more.

I walked in silence, uncaring of everything around me, numb with shock and pain. I did not run, too afraid to see the words shaping themselves as true.

I even entertained self-deceiving thoughts that not running would prove the truth as untrue. I was wrong, my sister was dead. All because I dared to dream.

One could never expect their dream to be the eternal rest of everything that makes them flow proper in this disarray. The perfect irony was what made me feel alive feasted upon it, exposing me to the lies of the wearisome winsome that mandates an inequitable levy to revert the balance to imbalance.

And that sight of the levy is something I wish I could erase from my memory.

I've tried to forget it many times, but Mythri's broken body forever haunts me. My parents didn't cover her body as people watched; the guards explicitly instructed them leave it be for three days to make an example.

Among the crowd, some expressed sympathy, but most blamed her, the victim, instead of the fiends who murdered her. That is what it is to live in fear. Injustice is a flaw of victim not the sinner.

My mother lowered her face into her hands and cried in quiet, hopeless sobs. My father in shock kept on mumbling as tears rolled from his eyes 'silly girl, its your fault, silly girl its your fault'

Upon sighting me, Devika ran towards me, grabbed me by my tunic, and repeatedly slapped my face, calling me a selfish bastard and I deserved it.

In her anger was broke my nose, and I remained lifeless, purposefully avoiding the unfolded tragedy. No one stepped in to defend me as she relentlessly battered me to a bloody pulp.

I deserved every slap, every punch, every cuss word uttered at my expense because in the end, it all comes down to my failures. My failure as a brother, as a son, as a human being.

I wasn't ready to accept it, but the world doesn't wait for you to digest its inhuman and unamiable cruelty.

"Do you know what they did to her?" My sister asked as I lay on the ground. "While she waited for you to arrive, those men found her and kidnapped her."

"Stop it!" I cried out, shaking my head in denial. "This is all a dream, this is all a nightmare,"

"They shattered everything pure and innocent,"

I put my hands over my ears but she used all her strength to remove it and yelled. "They cut her so viciously that they tore her skin all the way to the bones,"