“Crime” and “Punishment”

Haven’t blogged for a long time. Happy times make one feels content and inactive. I. was generally enjoying my break from work & work & work with my son chinks who is on a vacation here and also reading a lot. Just completed Orhan Pamuk’s White Castle and am now glued to another of Pamuk’s; My Name is Red. I had also enjoyed Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee. So was generally in a reading mode.

Now I had this urge to break the routine comfort and write about the little boy Dilson who is no more. I do not know Dilson personally, I have only this newspaper reports lying before me with a photograph (obviously hurriedly sliced out from a family photo; may be this is the only photograph of the boy the family had) of this little boy. The report made me sick; like any other human being would be.

Dilson from Indira Gandhi Nagar slum was shot dead by a retired Lt. Colonel on the 3rd of July. The `crime’ that Dilson committed was that he sneaked in to Army Officers’ Enclave, the residential complex of army personnel, to gather badam nuts. 13 year old Dilson is a child worker; a 5th standard school dropout. It wasn’t, exactly, his choice. His father fell ill and Dilson was forced to step into his father shoe - provider. (Despite the tall claims of the Government and the NGOs after the Right To Education Act, there are a large number of working children. A national shame in the era of scams and black money running into several thousand cores of rupees).

July 3rd, being a Sunday, Dilson and two of his friends, thought of having some fun and also collect something edible. He sneaked into the Army officers’ enclave while his friends waited outside. He began to pluck the nuts and had thrown it to the friends across the boundary wall. This joyful ride did not last long. Somebody got irritated for obvious reasons. [1] The child trespassed [2] he made a noise. He would have disturbed the peaceful sleep of a retired Colonel in an AC room (his wife initially said they did not hear any shot being fired since they were sleeping in an AC room). The infuriated Colonel decided to silence this “nuisance’ forever. He shot at the child from a close range.

Unfortunately it was not an accident. The shot was fired with an intention to kill. Not to scare them away. A responsible army officer would know as to what such a weapon can do and more so when fired from a close range. The Colonel, trained in weapons, would not be that naïve to not know that aiming the head of the child from such close quarters will kill the kid. He admitted to the police that he committed the crime since he was infuriated as the children ignored his repeated warnings in the past. If he really wanted to live in serenity he could have selected a place far from the crowd in after his retirement. The newspapers do not explain as to why this man was living in the quarters in the army enclave even a couple of months after he retired? Was he a squatter himself?

This guy himself has three sons and I am sure that these children would have irritated him at many points of times while they grew up (otherwise children are not children). Children are not always angels. They sometime give you such hard times which will make you think the old saying that “your enemies in your last birth are reborn as your sons”. But you don’t kill your children just because they irritate you: you don’t kill them just because they are noisy. But you can kill a slum boy because he is after all a slum boy; no money, no power, no real connections. We all know whenever something gruesome happens to one of them, the slum people get restless for a day or two and they stop the traffic for a day or two. The police know how to handle such developments: a lot of cajoling here and a bit of pressuring there, etc, etc. They get to normalcy soon. They cannot strike for long as they have to think about their bread for the day.

Getting back to the situation, you will not shoot at children just because they trespassed in to your area and plucked some nuts. You don’t even do it to crows. I remember my childhood. Those were times when children were not hooked on to computer games and the SMSs . Of course boys were naughtier than girls and they plucked mangoes from others’ trees (not because they were hungry but just for the fun of it). This irritated the owner of the trees to no end. But they either shooed away the children or shouted at them or complained to their parents (that was the highest punishment). Once my twin brother (please forgive me bro) and his ‘gang’ went for a night show and while coming back, middle of the night, these teenagers attacked our one and only Mary Chechi’s mango tree. Those mangoes were very special as these were not sour even when they were raw. She heard the noise but did not open the door as it was mid night. However she switched on the light and peeped through the window to see who the culprits were. Knowing very well she would be behind the curtains, these boys shown their buttocks to her. Just imagine the state of poor Mary Chechi; all of a sudden seeing quiet a number of naked buttocks. Of course shell shocked! Needless to say she could not identify the face of any of those buttocks. We knew the story as my brother narrated it to us exclusively. But my mother heard the version of Chechi next morning and she cursed the boys, without knowing the active participation of her own son.

Dilson was killed for a lesser “crime”. Though this was a defence enclave, it was just another residential complex where there is nothing classified. Nor is this place situated anywhere near a sensitive installation.So much so, the security to the enclave has been outsourced to some agency and poor men from Orissa guard the compound for a pittance. And Chennai is not a conflict zone like Kashmir. There is a sentry at the gate who can intercept the trespassers and ask for an explanation about their presence in the area. Even the sentry was not under the instruction to shoot at the intruders.

Now I write this because I got angry with the sympathetic reports that have begun to appear in the newspapers; that the Colonel and his wife did not eat anything for a day when he came to know that the boy was dead (as if he did not know when he fired from a close range) and such other reports that ``he was under depression” and that “he dedicated his three sons to the nation’s security”. Such stuff made me angry. If a person is depressed, he should have taken treatment for that. And in that case it was important that he did not keep a lethal gun with him.I am ‘infuriated’, but of course not enough to kill someone but to write this to overcome my anger!