Killer Instinct

 I'm a killer - rather, I used to be one - professionally speaking. How I came to be one is another story. This is a story of how I stopped being one. I started my profession at an early age. I was quite successful and thus was able to be a family man and also a good provider. I married a beautiful girl from a wealthy family, we lived in an old bungalow in the hills of Vagamon, and the kids went to the best of schools. My son is now a doctor with a thriving practice and my daughter a successful lawyer in Thiruvananthapuram. My family accepted that I was a busy travelling salesman. Death is and has always been in demand - and I don't complain.

I am now retired with sufficient wealth that I don't need to work anymore. However, I found that retirement did not really suit me - I got quickly tired of watching TV all day or listening to my wife gossip with neighbours. I kept mostly to myself - a wise practice for one with my background. Being a person of limited other interests or skills, I decided to "remain in touch" with my craft -  I really didn't need to be paid for it. I was finally practicing it for its own sake and getting better at it than ever before. My speciality was staging  accidental deaths, suicides, medical emergencies with DOA, where no foul play was ever suspected. It was indeed a pleasant retirement once I'd decided to hone my skills and expand my creative licence.

Victims were often chosen on whim, when the urge set in. Some required meticulous planning and others were spontaneous masterpieces of utter simplicity and polished execution - I hope you caught the pun there :))

Now to the day it all came to an end. I was wandering near Varkala cliff one evening - having come here for a change of scene. Wife was looking at shops and I decided to take a brisk stroll along the cliff to the north. Odayam coastal road is dramatic with rugged cliffs of red laterite and the Arabian sea that's aquamarine to opalescent jade. It's then that I saw this young child, about 5-6 years old, running with a little kite near the cliff. My old heart lurched with a sorrow that's hard to explain. What kind of life could this beautiful child be expected to have - what a terrible world we live in, full of sorrows, injustices and misery at human level and ecological destruction with climate change as the fate of the natural world. I had found my next victim.

Two women were standing nearby in an intense and engrossed discussion. I casually approached the child, who was still running around with that silly kite - close enough to shove with all my might, while screaming loudly " Be Careful!!!!!" It was All over. Everyone believed that I had rushed there to stop an accident. However I am haunted to this day by the happy, innocent, and trusting  look with which the child had turned to me saying "thatha"(grandfather) with a smile. 

These days I have taken to painting. I often paint a child with a kite.