COLOURS OF CRIME

Kasab's hanging has got me rather down in the dumps...I remember hating his snarling face as he shot down the unwary hapless passengers waiting at the CST station. I remember how close a shave it was for the spouse, whose office is bang opposite CST and who was in the office as their windows were shot at by the terrorists as they rampaged over Mumbai. I remember him wearing something in blue and black, something incongruously normal when everything they did was so out of the normal. I remember sitting in front of the television transfixed for hours and days, poring over every detail in the newspaper...hungry not for sensation but for something to erase the sense of churning and violation and anger and horror and, yes, sheer fear. I remember this unease fading gradually as days, months, years passed....as Kasab became a bewildered, misguided, even pathetic youth living on borrowed time. Did he deserve to die? I don't know....but then, it would have simply incomprehensible if he did not....how could India have allowed him to live on after what he had done to India, to us, in that one crazy, scary night? But he is a scapegoat....the masterminds are laughing, scot-free and out-of-range. They will twist even this punishment...they will say it was martyrdom. Maybe it was....Instead of wishing Kasab dead, I wish that no more such Kasabs are born at all....

Actually I had wanted to post something different...a poem written years ago:

Colours of Crime

Red, of course, the victim's blood, the culprit's curse,

(It's always the red that leaves a trail).

Red for passion and danger and flash of the ambulance.

Green, for lust and envy, for the jealous snake

That crouches and watches, striking in passion.

Green for the knife-stabs, and the 'throttled to death'.

Yellow for gold, glinting, tempting, dazzling,

Money makes the world go round and round in the criminal's head.

Yellow for the pre-mediated poison, the bespoke bullet.

Blue for the loneliness which crimes can erase

The flashbulbs and the grainy pictures in the papers.

Blue for the attention-seeking lonelyheart machine-gunner.

Grey for the victims under the never-more-to-be-seen skies

The blood-drained corpse lying on stained steel postmortem tables.

Grey for the flaccid-rigid body-map the detective must decode.

Black for death, and the dark-room of suspense where the criminal lives

Always alert, groping, looking behind, pre-empting with the next murder.

Black for the nightmare imploding the murderer's mind.

And, then, if it is a book, white for the day of reckoning

The Judge's wig, the blindfolded marble, the courtroom walls.

White for the widow's peace as she closes the curtains.

Crime's an art, painted in sordid-lurid paperback shades;

Cross the threshold and pick up the brush.

What's your palette?