The honour of killing

Until I realised at a matured age that those tiny lifers were not much different from us. A life is a life, difference being in the size of the container. Compared to my teeny-weeny victims, humans are life in bigger space. It somehow works like a house or an apartment. The more the space, the bigger the rooms, dining areas, balconies, toilets, so on and so forth. The tail of a whale weighs more than an elephant's rump. The trunk of elephant weighs more than all the limbs of a single man taken together.

Perhaps humans are the most efficient size of life and that is why they are so intelligent. Think of the elephants and whales, you would think much of their space has been such a waste. But then it is the work of nature. We have government officials occupying spacious offices, doing little work. Don't' ask why. Every thing is part of a grand design.

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Although I haven't been able to stop killing altogether. Once in a while a nagging mosquito still comes between my hands, but rats I haven't killed for a while. It's not because my killer instinct is gone. I fail to keep up with those feisty animals.

But I had a new realisation last week, when they killed a father and his son, then chopped their bodies as if a large order of meat waiting delivery from butcher shop. These luckless men were skinned, their flesh separated from bones like kernel of fruit scraped from the shell. I just thought of one thing. How could men so brutally kill other men, if killing rats and mosquitoes bothered me?

I have tried to think about it in my mind, recreating the gruesome acts, which reduced two full-bodied men into oodles of meat. It wasn't enough to take their lives, it wasn't enough to cut them up. They had to be hacked into many pieces and then scattered around the city, the skins of their heads and faces, their hands, heels, intestines, heads, ears, two human lives disarticulated and distributed as if to bring offerings to some wicked spirits.

How could they do it? It was eviction of life from its abode, two lives from two abodes. But then why would they pulverise the house once its occupants were gone? The forensic experts found no blood in the flesh, because it was removed from the bodies after the victims were dead. We would like to believe so, because that would ensure they weren't cut up until they were dead.

I have also thought of the moment when the killers first sank the knife into one of the victims to peel off the skin or carve out the flesh. How could they not have felt part of that knife sinking inside them as well? How could they not have been reminded of their own futility by the futility of lives, which perished in their hands? May be it has to do with the nerve; some have it more than others. The pest control guys kill roaches all the time. The butchers cut animals, and forensic experts dissect bodies.

Yet Lady Macbeth couldn't handle it. She lost her mind wiping the stains of blood, which kept recurring before her eyes. The pilot of Enola Gay, the American plane, which bombed Hiroshima, went insane when he learned about the horror, which was imprecated by him. There was a time when people believed that it was inauspicious to kill, because the ghost of the victim haunted the killer until he took his own life or went crazy. Taking a life was its own nemesis.

It perhaps doesn't work for the professional killers. They are like a spaceship; they crash over the gravitation of guilt and then cruise in the orbit of cruelty with a natural speed. I have a theory about the whole thing. I think amateur killers go insane because they lose their sanity. But professional killers have nothing to lose because they are insane already.

So they tore up those two bodies with the ferocity of hungry wolves. They never thought how the family of those two men was ever going to reconcile in their minds that their loved ones were thrown in their graves like two piles of sacrificial meat. I have thought of it time and again. It bothered me.

One of the reasons why taking a life unsettles the mind is that it bares the secrets of one's own flimsy mystery. And taking the life of another man strikes even closer to home. It is like smashing a mirror and then looking at your own fractured image. It is the same blood, flesh, skin and bones that constitute the lives of the killers and their victims. How could anybody take apart another body without having the sense of being broken up himself?

May be professional killers are desensitized people, who don't feel it when they kill. They are compulsive killers, who proceed to kill with the hunter's instinct. They kill under the same impulse, which engages acrobats in highwire acts. May be the fear in the face of the victim, the tears in his eyes, and the cry in his voice put the killer in frenzy in the same manner an artisan is driven by his work.

Guilt, like beauty, is a relative thing, which lies in the heart of the beholder. What I feel in the death of a mosquito isn't what others feel in the death of a human being. So killers kill with the same zeal which makes me avoid swatting a fly. The world has evolved by revolving around this contradiction, one man's virtue being another man's vice.

Killing has been an integral part of living, let us face it. George Bernard Shaw said that nothing was ever done in this world until men were prepared to kill one another if it was not done. The wars, revolutions, feuds and hostilities have propelled history as the victor killed the vanquished, the strong killed the weak, the clever killed the idiot, the rich killed the poor, the armed killed the unarmed, the intolerant killed the tolerant, and the conservative killed the liberal. When a Japanese warrior was defeated, he used to perform seppuku to take his own life by kneeling on the ground while asking a confidant to behead him to finish the job. It was honourable for both men, one who died and one who killed.

Killing will never stop until the end of the world when the last star falls from the sky. But what has happened to the honour of killing? Last week that question haunted me as if it was the voice of two discontent souls, who were brutally killed and then disposed of like slaughterhouse rubbish. Man is like a gift that looks intriguing until it is unwrapped. To kill him might hold fascination because it destroys a mystery. But that mystery is given away if you undo his body. It dishonours him both as killer and victim.

A least man deserves that honour from man, while we may ignore rats, roaches, flies and mosquitoes.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.