A Dead Mind... or is is the mind of the dead?

Sometimes I wonder about people who kill – kill other beings, kill innocence, kill childhood, kill hope, kill peace, kill humanity.

What makes these people the way they are? Their faces bear eternal abhorrence, their gory eyes – I thought I had seen the same gory eyes somewhere in a pictorial display of the Ravana. The ferocious power they seem to contain – power to do what is rebuked by every religion, every faith, every culture and country. Their inexorable power to kill is traumatizing in itself. I look at the pictures. Maybe I am searching in the dark – searching for a trace of empathy, of compassion. Searching for whatever it takes to be a ‘human’.

Searching for a child.

It was in 1990 when I first witnessed the mayhem caused at the onset of a war. My family lived in Bahrain. I thought the word ‘war’ seemed a little strange and over exaggerated. Dad explained to me what war was when he was watching a BBC documentary of Hiroshima. I thought that’s where it belonged – to documentaries, to Hindi movies Dad liked to watch, to history. It was puzzling to me how Afghanistan and Palestine were still at war. I found it somehow interesting to see the pictures on TV and in papers. Now, it was going to be in real. I was wrong about my silly ‘war belonging to history’ theory. And that fact came to me as a rude shock. The Gulf War had already begun.

I was only five then. Yet some reminiscences refuse to just leave my mind at the pretext of child development. Reminiscences of worried faces, of scurrying packing, of my anxiety and confusion to a sudden ‘vacation’ back to India. Why were only Mom, my brother and I on a vacation? A distinct memory, of the Bahrain International Airport, of my face pressed to the glass shield that borders checked-in passengers, looking with tears in my eyes at Dad waving with a faint smile. I knew we were not on a vacation. For, from then on topics like ‘missiles’, ‘American troops’ and ‘Saddam Hussein attacking Kuwait’ seemed like hot favourites – even years after the war ended.

I was now amongst my ‘happy’ cousins and within the comfort of my extended family in Bombay. I missed Dad and secretly and quietly sobbed. Everyone was quietly watching news one day, something about ‘missiles hitting Bahrain’. It caught my attention. I didn’t quite know whatever that meant, but the mere mention of my birthplace and the place where my father now was, just captivated all my senses. The news was followed by coverage on Kuwait war victims. I asked Mom then why are they fighting, not even sure who the ‘they’ actually were. I quiet remember Mom bursting into tears.

At 23, I still don’t have the answer. Only, I have seen more wars and more killings.

“Why are they so angry?” my niece asks me effortlessly as I tune to a news coverage of a riot somewhere in the country. There were people running around screaming and creating chaos. I wondered if my niece knows who the ‘they’ are. It amazes me – how children stumble upon asking the ‘right’ questions so artlessly. Or are they wrong? I read Peter Drucker somewhere as saying “the most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong questions”.

I now know what may have crossed my mind while asking a similar vivid question when I was almost her age – a vivid innocent ‘wrong’ question from a five-year old was perhaps an outburst to everything that had crossed my patience while I waited to be back with Dad, school, my friends and with Bahrain. Although knowing something was wrong somewhere, the reason was incredulous to me – like playing hide and seek. My wait seemed to be unending and aching.

Maybe it was an expression of angst to the fact that perhaps, it’s all not worth making a child wait to be back to her ‘normal’ life. To be back with her family.

But these people who kill – what do they think? How do they cope with such distress? Do they even ask these questions to themselves? Has the thought ever crossed them? If they suffered, maybe they wouldn’t have hurt others. So, maybe they don’t suffer. Because they have created the problem. The war ended. Life returned to normal. While all the grown-ups around me were busy talking about the aftermath of the war, my mind was caught in a web of questions.

That’s what it takes, perhaps, to be a human – to be a child. I have always held on to a personal belief – that we all have a child somewhere in the world of our subconscious mind. A child who wants his family and parents around him so that he sleeps happily and feels secure; who simply cannot figure out that if its not a game and there is nothing to win, then why are people conflicting; who thinks that his best friend is more important to him than the cast. Alas! It is the ‘matured’, the grown-up who has learnt to differentiate – learnt to bury the child under ‘socially acceptable norms’. The child is, after all, just a child – who continues to question. Waits. Lost. Dead.

Is it then that these people are born? People who are angry – who fight – who kill.

Perhaps… Yes.

The first killed… is the child.