The Bystander (part-2)

(contd from previous blog)

Tina looked up and realized that the man who handed her the cell phone had left the room. She was terrified. She picked up the landline to call for the police. The landline was dead. Gathering some courage she rushed towards the backyard of the Chemistry building to see Maria.

The corridor was always filled with students. This was the first time Tina was alone there. The bats hanging on the arches frightened her. The only thought in Tina’s mind was that would it be safe for her to go there alone. Should she just leave for home? After much contemplation she decided to go because she simply couldn’t let a dead body rot in the backyard of the college. Also, she’d seen in the video that the three men had left the place.

She reached the backyard. There wasn’t a sign of Maria. She looked around and found nothing. At a distance she saw a man walking towards her. He was holding the same machete she saw in the video. She panicked and turned back to run towards the main gate. Her hands were firmly caught by two hands which appeared mysteriously from the dark. The machete man came closer. He had blood smeared on his face. He closed his eyes and pointed his knife towards the moon covered behind the clouds, and shouted a staccato of words in a language she failed to recognize. Tina hysterically screamed for help.

From a corner of her eye she saw that a man was walking towards her. He’d worn a hat and a tattered blazer. She recognized him. He was the man she met in her office. He stopped at a safe distance from her and he removed his cell phone from his breast pocket. And he stood there recording everything using the camera of his cell phone.

She helplessly looked towards him and pleaded to help her from this insanity. She felt a strike on her neck. She could hear her voice dying out. She looked down and saw streams of blood violently oozing out of her arteries. She could feel the entire world blackening in front of her eyes. Her white kurta was now blood-red. The last thing she saw from her peripheral vision was the man was still standing there recording every second of the insaneness with his camera.
A minute later her mind dived in blackness.



This year’s winter isn’t as cold as last year’s. And everybody has left Wilson College for their Christmas vacations, except Miss Snehul, from the Physics department, who is still waiting in her office for her student to return to collect his lost cell phone. And a person wearing a hat and a tatty linen blazer enters her office…

The Bystander (part-1)

Genre: Noir/Thriller

The first semester exams were over and it was time for Wilson College to shut down for Christmas vacations. It was the last working day of the college when the results were to be put up on the notice board. It was unusually cold that day. The winters in Mumbai aren’t supposed to be chilly. But, that day was different.

It was time for parents-teacher meeting and all the students were wearing a nervous look, maybe pondering about the fate of their winter holidays. This was a common sight for the 175 year old college. The rusty gates and dilapidating walls of the college had heard each and every kind of alibi offered by the students to their parents for their inexplicably low marks. With promises for a better performance in the other half of the academic year the students returned home.

All the students had collected their mark sheets from their respective department office and most of the parents had met the teachers. A few late comers were still pouring in. But, the teachers in Chemistry department had completed their job of addressing the parents and counseling the students. They were retiring for home when Tina, a lecturer in organic chemistry, received a call from an unknown number. The caller was Maria, her student from the first year B.Sc class. She said over the phone that she’d left behind her cell phone under her table. And that she was on her way back to college to collect it. Sensing that this might take some time, Tina signaled the other teachers to leave and wished them merry Christmas and a happy new year.

The teachers left. Tina put her bag down and sat on one of the desk to read the book she’d issued from the library that day. Tina started reading Atlas Shrugged. She had read a great deal of books on Ayn Rand’s objectivism. She was also an ardent reader of theories of life and the world proposed by other philosophers. It’s funny how both, Kafka and Rand made it to her favorite reading list. The combination of existentialism and objectivism is quite uncanny.

Tina had been preoccupied with the book for a very long time. She glanced at her watch and realized that she’d been waiting for Maria for a really long time. It was seven in the evening. It was time for her husband to leave from his office. Hoping that her husband could pick her up on his way to home she called him. The call was disconnected. When she restarted her phone to check what the problem was, she realized that there was no network in her office. Tina wondered how Maria’s call got through her when there was no network in her office. She reached out for the landline.

Her husband said that he’d be working overtime that evening as his boss was leaving for the board meeting in Bangalore and he had to submit the project report to his boss by the end of the day. She browsed through the caller list on her cell phone and dialed Maria’s number from the landline. The dialer voice said that the number was not in use. She sensed that something was wrong.

As she put her books in her bag and hurried to leave her office she heard footsteps in the doorway. She hastily searched for the door keys of the office in the drawer. The noise became louder with every footstep. She found the keys and picked her bag and got up to leave.

A man entered the office through the dark corridors. Tina could only see his silhouette. She could see the outline of a tallish figure walking towards her. As he came nearer to her, she could see his face illuminated by the tungsten bulb hanging over him. He was a shabby looking man, in his thirties, he had dense stubble. He had worn a tatty linen blazer and a black hat. The shadow of the hat covered half of his face, and only his scarred chin was visible.

Even before Tina could ask him why he was there he raised his right hand towards her. He held a cell phone. ‘What is this for?’ questioned Tina with a trembling voice. The man said in a friendly tone that he was a relative of Maria, and she had a message for her. Then, he played a video in the cell phone and put the cell phone on Tina’s table.

The video recording was blank. She could see nothing at all. After some minutes she heard the voice of a girl relentlessly crying in the video. The video showed a dark and shady area, which looked liked an empty parking lot. Adding to Tina’s bewilderment she was familiar with the place in the video. It was the place behind the Chemistry building. She could see four hazy figures in the video. Two men were holding a girl and a man had a machete in his hand. The man holding machete sliced the girl’s throat with the precision of a seamstress. The girl struggled for her breath. Each time she tried to gasp, oodles of blood poured out of her throat. He poked the edge of his machete in her stomach as if carving some religious drawings on her. The girl was dead. It was clear to Tina that this was a part of some religious sacrilege. The men left the scene. The video zoomed towards the girl’s body. Her face still wasn’t seen because of the blurry recording. After a few seconds of the shaky camera became still and Tina caught a glimpse of the girl’s face.

It was Maria.


(to be contd..)