Choreography of Murder

Sanil V.
Translated by G. Arunima
Michel Gregorios Critique of Criminal Reason is an unusual detective novel. This
revolves around that great thinker, Immanuel Kant. There are a series of murders in
Kants little town, Konigsburg. Hanos Stephanis who arrives to investigate this lands
in the midst of Kants novel, The Critique of Criminal Reason. This book deals with
the inner sources of a mind that indulges in the sheer ecstasy of pure violence. It could
have been Kants scribe, or maybe Kant himself, who could have been behind the
killings in Konigsburg. The detective himself, fearing the potential effects on readers,
tears the book into little shreds and flings it into a nearby canal. Then he departs, after
disclosing that it was, in actuality, the local supporters of Napoleon, poised to attack
Prussia, who were behind the murders.
Immanuel Kant was the thinker of the Enlightenment. He placed knowledge,
obedience and pleasure within the limits of reason, and for whom only the
courageousness of thought mattered. The ascetic who found freedom and goodness in
the agility of reason alone. The one who maintained order and method not merely in
his thought and beliefs, but even in the punctuality accorded to his evening walks. So
how could someone like Kant, who insisted that one should not lie even to save a
friends life, derive pleasure in murder?
What is the principle that drives the murder, and the detective who follows alongside
to investigate this? Kants attempt in the story is to lay the foundation of the science
of criminal investigation by reconstructing the inner logic of murder. To put it in
simple police language, behind every murder there are one or more murderers. The
murderer will have some goals. Property, power, revenge, hatred, or something like
that. The investigation must proceed on some concrete bases such as these. This is the
police logic rejected by Kant in this book that none of us have read. No science can be
sculpted out of such logic.
For common sense and conventional morality, violence has only been a means. There
may be a difference of opinion on whether this means is right or not. How much
violence is permissible for a good cause? What should be the precautions for such
permissible acts of violence? Such issues are within the ambit of discussion. But a
general common sense does not accept killing for the sake of killing. If there are
murderers who are such purists, then they must be mentally ill. The murders in
Konigsburg did not have any other goals. The victims did not have money, fame or
power. And the murderer the epitome of reason! The victim and murderer were
separated merely by the onrush of sheer pleasure in anticipation of the pure murder.
And all the inner forces of agency are drawn into this pleasure. This is not an
expression of suppressed recidivism. This is murder that is planned and executed. The
sharp whalebone is the Konigsburg murderers weapon. The victim is seduced into
submission and brought down to his knees, and then is stabbed sharply with the bone

through the back of his neck, killing him. The joy of the killing lies not in the
helplessness or screams of the victim. As the sharp bone pierces through the neck,
man experiences an almost bestial surge that seems to raise him to the heavens. The
success of the murder lies in the roar that drowns both the hunter and the hunted.
Such extraordinary rushes of the human mind, and its connection with rationality,
was a constant theme of Kants inquiry. But such rushes are not restricted only to
murder. And the starry heavens up above and the voice of conscience deep within
would have filled Kant with the same awe. It wasnt the beauty of the skies or the
certainty of moral law that caused this experience. Instead it was the pleasure that one
derives from the realization that the striving that takes us by leaps and bounds to the
limits of knowledge and experience is indeed that, which renders knowledge and
experience possible. But this realization is not mere cognition. It is pleasure. It is a
surge. It is galloping thought.
Why are we overwhelmed by the sight of a mountain soaring towards the heavens?
Maybe because we are insignificant in front of such grandeur. Our eyes tire after
gazing for long at such Himalayan heights; but perhaps there is some delight in such
fatigue. Could it be the defeat, even inertia, when faced with measuring the
immeasurable? The murderer recognizes and enjoys exactly this kind of delight and
fatigue. The animality that bursts forth, shattering all moral prohibitions, catapults
man to the heights of the gods.
Those who have ridden the roller coasters in theme parks would be familiar with the
inner tremulousness that we feel when tossed around at an extraordinary pace. Roller
coasters sweep us up to great heights and then chuck us down with an equal ease.
People shriek in terror. This shrieking is what is pleasurable. It is almost akin to a
masochist who pays good money to buy a Rottweiler who terrifies him constantly.
This little amusement gives a kick only to those undeterred by cowardice.
However such play is conditional on complete safety. So do people buy tickets to
plunge themselves into the dangers of roller coaster rides in order to be able to say,
thank god, we escaped near death? No. If that were indeed the case then one would
have yelled out only after the roller coaster had finally descended to the ground. That
terrified scream is possible only when the delights of safety are wiped out of ones
mind when being swung wildly through air. Some theme parks even have cameras
that can capture one whilst navigating the most exquisitely dangerous spins. Just try
that once. Your face will reveal a look of indescribable bliss even as you jump out of
your skin in fear. The fear and frolic possible within the security of the roller coaster
is what the killer experiences whilst wielding his murderous knife.
Let us return to Gregorios novel. It was Kant himself who had invited Stephanis to
investigate the murders in Konigsberg. And there was a reason for that. It was after all
Stephanis who had introduced Kant to the pleasures of pure murder. Stephanis had
been in Paris at the time of the Revolution. He had then, along with the multitudes,
witnessed Louis the XIVths execution. Upon seeing the blood spattered head of the
executed Emperor rolling down from the guillotine the crowds shrieked like children
on a roller coaster. The murderous roar that made History tremble. It was this roar that
resonated as the renowned French Revolution slogan - Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

In Kants view the French Revolution was a messy event. The Royalist Kant could not
accept the manner in which the people had disposed off the Emperor. That University
Professor could not stomach the crowds or bloodshed. The taking of human life was
beyond the conception of that devout Christian. However Kant was forced to read the
signs of both the public use of reason, and ideas of progress in the Revolution, that
were integral to this event. These signs were seen not in the validity of revolutionary
ideas, the determination of revolutionaries or even in the victory of the Revolution
itself. Instead, it was the terrifying roar of the masses, witnessing the Emperors
execution that attracted Kant. This roar was not a joyous expression of having
achieved the revolutionary goal. Having been a part of the murderous mob was what
gave Stephanis the eligibility to investigate these crimes. Other investigators may
have been distracted by such red herrings, like the killers petty acts, or even his great
objectives. It is only one who has known the sheer delight of a horrific murder who
can see such a crime from a murderers viewpoint.
Kant was neither praising violence, nor providing respectability to what psychiatrists
have foolishly characterized as recidivism. As I said earlier, he was laying the
foundation for the future science of criminal investigation. This science must not be
founded either on the egotism of the killer, or the pathos of the victim. One should not
even follow a system of justice that distinguishes right from wrong, or mandates the
punishment for a crime. Kant is not searching for a technique for understanding either
the calculations, or the guilt, of a criminal. Stephanis is not a policeman; he is a judge.
Murder is wrong in the eyes of the court. If investigation is to become a science, there
must be Enlightenment even in the courts. Kants quest was beyond good or evil,
rights or covetousness; he was looking for a system of justice that could track those
residual signs that outlasted acts whose agency was constructed through violence.
This idea of justice is unsustainable in a legal system where only the victims pleas
find voice. That is why Stephanis destroyed Kants manuscript on criminal justice
before it could reach anyone elses hands.
Now the real Kant could never have envisaged such a murder mystery. The fictional
Kant wrote that book. Yet it was conclusively finished off within the novel itself.
SECTION II
Now we have a Malayalam edition of the treatise on criminal reason that Kant never
wrote Anands Book of Murder. The Gardener, The Hotelier and The Tailor are the
three stories in this collection. All three are to do with murder. In all three the killing
is almost a Spartan act, committed for its own sake. The Book of Murder is about two
issues. One - murder; the other the book. Violence has always disturbed Anand.
However, until this book, Anand had always seen violence only through the
piteousness of the victim. Both the murderer and the murdered are victims. From the
victims point of view, the main issues regarding violence are brutality, suffering and
death. From the scars of the whiplash is born the alphabet; and from the scream,
meaning. Anand had been searching for the relationship between endurance, justice
and language. Yet the Book of Murder shows the determination to explore violence
through the excitement, and almost purity of purpose, of the murderer. These stories
capture the energy and exhaustion of the murderer. These are centred on the act of
murder itself. The killers cruelty and the victims wretchedness are somewhat shifted
to the margins.

Both text and action alike are a problem for Anand. After all text and action trace their
origins back to the same root.1 In Anands stories not only individuals and ideas, but
texts themselves surface as characters. Incomplete books have been floating around
for a long time in Anands writing. The book in Govardhanantte Yatrakal is rendered
incomplete by a protagonist who crosses the boundaries of Literature to be let loose
into History. The main characters in Vyasanum and Vighneswaranum too are two
incomplete texts Nishadapuranam and Nagaravadhu. Udayakumar has
demonstrated that such incompleteness in Anand is neither erroneous nor a sign of
his inadequacy. 2 Such incompleteness is the foundation of Anands notion of justice.
Anand believed, until Vyasanum and Vighneswaranum, that the infinite source of this
incompleteness lay in the relationship between text and temporality. In the story
Nalamatthe Aani [The Fourth Nail] Jesus says, There is a law that is bigger than you
and me, the community that I created, and your tribe that hunts down that community.
The law of time! The last nail must never be cast. The Book of Murder examines the
limits of this incomplete relationship between justice and time. In a situation where
the cross itself morphs into a pickaxe, how can one imagine that the ironsmiths self
restraint in casting a nail could possibly protect the little lamb. What are then the
possibilities for incompleteness beyond the desire for rebirth? These are the questions,
thus, that arise from killing.
The main characters in the Book of Murder too are books and letters. The protagonists
in some are writers in others. In The Gardener and The Hotelier, it is books, and
letters about books. However, in The Tailor, it is the practical, and unquotable, Book
of Cutting and Tailoring that is the character. The Book of Murder is the grand tome
that engulfs all these other works. It is distinct from other books in that it does not
have their relationship with the authorial voice [or the narrator I]. So this I
restores the tattered Nishadapuranam to its place on the library shelf. And then
abandons Nagaravadhu on the railway tracks and escapes. 3 However, the
incompleteness of the Book of Murder is paradoxically more demoniacally tangible
than the other books. You cannot abandon this book in a library or by the way-side.
Like a murder, it will follow the reader and encounter him. This book is beyond
deterrence. All the other books are mere pathways along which this races unfettered.
This book does not pander to the readers aesthetic pleasure, but aims to create, and
foster, fear in them. Postmodernists love the idea that all works are incomplete. They
have even popularized the motto of the death of the author. They undermine those
interpretations claiming authorial intention on the grounds that books are open to
limitless numbers of readings. The writer has no monopoly over the production of
meaning. The difference and deferral in meaning within language will always lay the
text open to multiple readings.
But it is not the dead author who renders the Book of Murder incomplete. Instead, it is
the murderer found in any work. The writer is the one who seduces the reader into
submission. He is at once the slayer and the slain. Here Anand makes two important
1

In Sanskrit and in Malayalam kriya means action, and krithi text. Both originate in
the same root, kr.
2
See Udayakumars preface to the English translation of Anands Vyasanum
Vigneswaranum, Anand and the Poetics of Incompleteness, an Afterword to Anand,
Vyasa and Vighneswara, tr. Saji Mathew. New Delhi: Katha, 2000.
3
See Vyasanum Vigneswaranum, ibid.
4

moves. He shifts the focus regarding violence from the victim to the killer; at the
same time he also recentres the writer, from the reader, as the site for textual
contemplation.
Let us revisit some of Kants views on murder once again. Anands subjects here are
not recidivism, habit or unconscious desire. Nor is it the fear that violence is on the
increase in the world. It is also not a kind of revisionist history writing that sees
violence as the foundational trait for characterizing certain castes, communities or
cultural types. He focuses on the act of killing. On the one hand murder is the kind of
act that, like research, protest, writing and love, has its own processes and protocols.
On the other, violence is the archetype of that action which by being an intrinsic
feature in all of mans acts provides a syntactic intelligibility to all of action itself.
This is not an attempt to either impose order or disarray, forcibly. This is a bolt of
lightening that cuts through law and justice to, at once enable and disable, the
sociality of the act.
Anand attempts to understand murder by linking action, text, and temporality. This
link has always been one of Anands concerns. Yet the act of murder upends our
commonsensical understandings about this relationship. So until this book, what was
Anands idea of the relationship between text and action? Things are not as easy as
first the act, and then the narrative that records it. Writing, and speaking about action,
is but a part of action itself. Unless written about by someone, events will never have
the ebb and flow of action. Narrative, by ordering nonsensical acts into a beginning,
middle and an end, makes action conform to both good and evil, and to law and
justice. One could say that mans actions are characters in search of an author. Behind
every actor there is a narrator. The text is the one that liberates action from the
idiosyncrasies of the actor, and opens up afresh the possibilities for a spatio-temporal
relocation, as indeed of new interpretation. From another perspective, language itself
is action. Language is rooted in the practices of community life. Therefore, text and
action are mutually complementary.
The Book of Murder questions precisely this mutual complementarity that is
acknowledged by conventional poetics. Anand had earlier believed that no certainty
marks finality that led him to deem that time and narrative are always open to justice
and freedom. It is this belief that is under jeopardy in The Gardner, The Tailor and
The Hotelier. Every murder has a certainty. Yet it isnt that one day everyone must
die. After all its pretty sure that one day everyone will cop it. However when that will
happen is beyond prediction,though that is no failure. It is the certainty of mortality
that frees man into the future, into freedom, and into possibilities. Mortality is the key
to eternal life. In Heideggers words, to die like everyone is my ownmost
possibility.4 It is this possibility that murder snatches away from me. It reduces my
death to a mere event in my life (my death is not event in my life, Wittgenstein).
Thus, murder snatches not only life, but even death away from man. Therefore,
murder cannot be studied within the duality of life and death. There is no point in
either hanging on to arguments regarding the value of life, or denouncing the
destruction wrought by murder. We need to unpack the relationship between time,
action and the text.

Heidegger, Being and Time, Blackwell, 1978.

5

Just in the manner in which murder toys with the idea of death, so too does the
science of genetics play with the idea of birth. The claim is that cloning makes it
possible to pre-determine the character and behaviour of a baby prior to its birth. If
this were indeed to become a possibility then the startling wonderment in birth would
be lost. After all a child born through natural processes does not choose its own
character traits. Then what is wrong with cloning? It is the knowledge that I am a
contingency outside choice that gives meaning to my right to choose. This is the idea
that cloning distorts and manipulates. This science allows me to make copies of my
own self. I can outlast death. Yet I would perceive cloning as the means of controlling
my life. In sum, both cloning and murder point towards that contingency, beyond birth
and death, that gives me my selfhood. Murder cannot be accommodated in a balance
sheet that has only two columns birth and death. The Book of Murder is an attempt
to understand this excess as that which is articulated by the relationship between
action, time and the text.
Vyasanum Vigneshswaranum ends by complicating Anands own earlier
understanding of time and narrative. Vardhamanan, the author of Nagaravadhu, reads
the events of tomorrow in todays newspaper. Yet he is not a clairvoyant possessing
the ability to prophecy the future. In fact, the future, when faced by him, loses its own
prospects and becomes a supplicant to the present . Vardhamanan experiences a
twisted sense of dj vu in this mixing up of the future and the present. He can
imagine the future only in the shape of words and sentences. This nullifies both the
distinctions between the future and the present, and that between literature and the
broadsheet (He is like the Wittgensteinian character who compares several copies of
the same paper to check the veracity of the news printed in his own copy). His is a
timeless and inert present. It is the repetitive time found in Vyasanum
Vighneswaranum. In this time of madness and suicide, the text becomes an
impossibility. Vardhamanans suicide in front of the train he was traveling in reveals
the impossibility of action. In the abortive second part of Nagaravadhu, the author
abandons the text alongside the blood spattered, and palely sunlit, railway track. Until
that second part returns to encounter him as the Book of Murder.
The Book of Murder is written like a flashback from the future. As Sheshadri in The
Gardner says through every page and event a piece of the future is read, ripped off.
Once the events mentioned in the book occur, those pages are torn off. This is not a
literary work that roosts again and again on past events, or keeps printing new
editions again and again. The Book of Murder is forever pure.
It is not accidents, or mischief-makers, who tear off the leaves of this book. This book
is born out of these slashes and scratches. Anand has named this act where destruction
itself become creativity de-writing. The book of violence is possible only through a
language that can annihilate meaning and signification inherent in writing.
What would be the contents of a book that lacks both past and present, and has only a
contingent future? Would its tone be like a weather forecast speculating on whether or
not it would rain the next day? When today becomes tomorrow, one of the two will
become a certainty. With that one can scratch off those lines. Like lottery tickets that
can be torn up once the draw is over.

So, unlike yesterday and today, what is so uncertain about tomorrow? Whatever is
ordained will take place. Whatever happens was meant to be so. It is just that we
could not predict it before hand. This is one claim. There is no space here between
human freedom and intervention. Freedom is but the shadow in the valley of
ignorance. There is an argument to the contrary too. Anything can happen in the
future. The light of a thousand sunrises experienced does not ensure that one will see
the next days dawn too. Experience does not provide any such enlightenment. Yet,
human activity is impossible in a completely uncertain world. Life would become
impossible if the sun were to rise in the west tomorrow. Language too would have to
shut shop and depart. Of course the sun will most certainly rise in the east tomorrow.
Yet neither reason, nor experience, or their combined forces can provide a prior
assurance about this. This assurance becomes impossible not because of any human
limitation, but because of the split between truth and time. Then what certainty?
The fears and hopes of the future are embedded in action. Take, for instance, a man
who is caught in a dilemma about whether or not to do something. He has equally
powerful reasons for both options. Let us suppose he suddenly decides to this thing.
This move from dilemma to doing is not prompted by some new justification (if there
is such a justification, then his was no dilemma; just plain unawareness). He does not
move to action through a justification that forecloses the option of dont do it. And
it is not as though hes leapt into it by shutting his eyes to reason. He can progress to
doing only by fulfilling the possibility of the not to be done by engaging in endless
thought, fears, confusion, quirks and quibbles. As soon as the thing is done a reasoned
explanation is also produced pronto. Things move from doing to certainty and not
from certainty to doing. Fundamentalisms proceed to perform prior certainties. The
revolutionarys optimistic excitement is based in the certainty born out of action.
Literature has always been interested in the moves, certainties and excitement of
action across temporal spans. Literature befriends falsehood in order to face the tussle
between time and truth. It makes the world of make belief credible by linking the
negation of truth with contingency. These are some of the fictional sweet nothings
uttered by a literature that is sheltered by truth.
Borges and others have experimented with yet another method. Do away with the
dependability of veracity. Affirm all future possibilities equally. Like grasping the
myriad meanings of rain, and its uncertainties will it, wont it in one fell swoop. In
his story The Garden of Forking Paths Borges explains this method. ..{fill with
Borges quote} Will this not become a pointless tale, entrapped in conflicts? Will not
the revolutionary, who accepts all possibilities at once, sink into confusion? One does
not proceed into action after resolving confusion. Whilst pursuing endless
descriptions and details, he stumbles upon some detail or description, and falls into
action. In the way that the waters of a river can act both as an obstacle or a bridge, in
the same way the text itself becomes action. But because this text attempts to combine
too many contradictions at once, it fails to communicate any meaning. Words and
phrases, divested of their multiple meanings, begin to function like proper nouns.
In Borgess story a German spy picks out someone called Albert from the telephone
directory and shoots him dead. When this news is printed in the next days paper, the
Germans realize that the British army is encamped in the town called Albert. Murder
is that act which, on the basis of a name, enables the possibility of a future event. In

Anands Hotelier, many contingencies are strung together on the basis of some names
that float around some books.
There is another story by Anand that clearly spells out murders temporal cadences.
Three Murders. The first takes place in a hotel room. The dying mans scream rises as
the soprano in the next room hits a high note. Only the soprano hears the cry that
penetrates through the subtle spaces between the songs notes. But she can do nothing.
You can hear the cry only if you concentrate on the song. If you stop singing the tonal
sieve created by the notes too is destroyed. The second murder takes place at a traffic
signal. This murder is the result of distraction, and many mistaken identities. The first
exemplifies an inert concentration. The second reckless excitement. In the first there
is the subtlety of musical notes. The second is a cacophony of contingencies. The
third embraces all these contradictions, and resolves them. The victim here is half
dead almost like a living corpse. An iconoclastic crowd stones a man to death who
poses as a statue in the midst of a towns cross roads. The real face of violence that
had been under wraps in the first two stories reveals itself in the third one. The
coming together of the inert concentration of the statue and the crowds crazed
exhilaration makes murder a mere ritualistic stab at the corpse. Sacrifice, martyrdom
and other faces of violence occur within a future possibility of repetition and
remembrance. Yet murder is untimely. So it is untimely death that happens in the
conjunction of coincidences, omens and sacred numbers.
Murder and de-writing wrests actions from meaning and righteous time and
transforms them into events. The stories in the Book of Murder are born out bizarrely
contingent events. Yet this contingency does not surprise anyone. These stories are
about a world that happens only within the fictional realm like computer games.
Events are born out of anomalous conjunctions. No one will give a toss whether you
believe it or not. Theres no staving off of the events that are destined to happen.
These stories are like thrillers without suspense.
We have already said that murder retrieves events by dislodging action from its
coordinates. If this is to be possible we have to remove the agent, like unscrewing
nuts and bolts, from the description and explanation that provides unity to action, thus
necessitating a dissembling alongside de-writing. Anands characters are not self
conscious agents like members of a class or civilization or even individuals, but are
faceless refugees and crowds. This stream of faceless people is not a procession of the
alienated. It is not the flight of the victims. It is not even a march of marionettes or the
infantry in response to someone blowing a whistle.
The crowd in The Tailor is visualized as a slow motion X-ray picture. The stitched
clothes leave the shop in search of bodies that can fit into them. Clothes join the
different limbs together in order to create a body. What flows down the roadside are
not well-formed bodies, but instead organs without bodies. The clothes soar down and
cover these disembodied limbs. The clothes transform the limbs into individualized
bodies, and provide them with homes, streets and relationships. According to the
manner in which the clothes descend and establish themselves the limbs shrug off
body and mind, and the accompanying relatives, desires and lovers, and seek out new
relationships, desires and partners.

The Crowd is the symphony that arises from these withering limbs. This is however
not postmodernist agency that is splayed or splintered. This is also not a simple
assertion that individuality, or identity, is constructed. So how can there be organs
without bodies? It is after all the body that endows its parts with their form and roles.
Clothes are born bearing the shape of the body. So how can the organs declare their
independence from the body?
Like History, Anatomy is the other subject that fascinates Anand. Anands stories are
like an anatomy laboratory replete with wasted fingers, gouged out eyes, abandoned
corpses and the mortuary. In an old story, Angabhangam, there is a man who
experiences pain in his phantom limb. Anands subject at that point was the victims
body, that extending beyond the unity of the limbs, internalizes the pain of the other.
By the time he reaches the murderer Ali Dost5 Anands attention shifts to the
ineffectual sixth finger that jutted outside his palm. This bodily difference need not
make him fundamentally dissimilar from others. Such fundamental differences need
not even be the reason behind Ali Dosts inhuman cruelty. A mere sixth finger would
distinguish him from the otherwise ordinariness of the body (this finger was what was
in excess in Ali Dost, and lacking in Ekalavya).
Take, for instance, the manner in which The Tailor describes the disembodiment of
the organs. your description of human beings dismembered into little bits is
terrifying. For instance, in such a situation one may never realize that the hand that
stabs one while leaning on anothers shoulder, may in actuality be ones own hand.
From the killers point of view, it is the victims well-formed body that is in a
dismembered state. Outside the cover of the body, organs have their own logic and
unity. According to this logic, murder is the stitching together of the organs. Mira, in
the old story Mira, tells her cobbler Guruji the secret behind this kind of suturing. On
being asked why he is called Guruji, Mira replies to the cobbler,
Blood will splatter if you tear this Mira whos caught in the web of full blooded
relationships. You, on the other hand, are the ascetic who sews together dead leather.
To whom else would I go to seeking knowledge. (Anands Mira, Euripidess Medea.
Murders lovers? Or its mothers?)
Organs make contact across the totalizing relationship between the body and mind.
My hand floats over to anothers shoulder. The hand that wields the knife, and the
downcast neck, separate from you and I, and gambol along the roadside. Not just
hurting, but consoling too is the enjoining of the organs free of the body. It might be
anothers hand that someone places on the others shoulder in order to provide
consolation. Hatred and compassion, distancing themselves from the killer and the
victim, seek expression in withering limbs, and in sixth fingers. This is the intense
asceticism of murder. The idea of alienation, allegedly central to O.V. Vijayans
Arimpara6, is not what is of interest to Anand. Even if symbolically, the mole
[arimpara] absorbs into itself the shattered unity of the body. Anands organs leave
their bodily home and transmigrate. They are extraneous in any body.

5
6

In the short story by the same name.

O.V. Vijayan, Arimpara, [complete reference to be inserted]
9

Cut and paste is the stylistics employed in The Book of Murder. The tailor has the
book explaining the methodology of this writing The Book of Cutting and
Tailoring.7 The unblemished [innocent] tailoring book written for the dangerous
games played by human beings. Those who imagined The Book of Murder to be a
book of horror were wrong. It is just a textbook without an authors, or a publishers,
name (Another puzzle by Borges: what is the absent word in a puzzle whose answer
is chess? Answerchess).
Until now, we have been trying to understand the aspect of action in murder as a
relationship between text and time. Yet Anand is no grammarian. Anand studies action
in order to find a solution to [the problems of] justice, duty and power. These
questions that saturated the other books is somewhat hidden in The Book of Murder.
Murder is not the action that can be recognized by the extant methodology and codes
of morality. This is not a sweeping statement that claims that mans every action, look,
word, thought or love is murderous. It is not even a plea for non-violence or a
denunciation of contemporary politics that is meant to nurture violence in war,
punishment or revolution. Equally, it is not even like the resistance NGOs offer to the
idea that the state must retain the monopoly over necessary violence, while leaving
dialogic and consensual discussions to civil society. The new mutations of violence
have made such responses redundant.
Anand begins his writing from the rupture of the cooperative society of Yaman and
Chitraguptan who aimed at linking mathematics with justice, and science with duty.8
The scribes who were Chitraguptans followers split into two the time-keepers, and
the duty keepers. With this the strategy to articulate duty within time, collapsed.
Anand is writing in opposition to the puranas that venerate the boon granting Shiva
while reviling Yama, the guardian of duty. Anand was attempting to audit the
certainties of time-keepers by exploring the conflict between justice and power. Stand
by the victim. Yet reject the mythology of the victim. This was Anands method. Yet
there is a sudden switch in this method by the time we get to the Book of Murder.
Anand turns to Yamas murderous sense of justice and method by stepping aside from
the conceptualization of gifts and distribution.
Sheshadri, the thuggee in The Gardner invites the author to a debate on murder.
Sheshadri begins by qualifying the debate between the dead hunter and the live
victim. He then upgrades this to a debate between the dead and living hunters. It is a
debate but in name. In all three stories the murderer speaks to the writer. Yet the writer
can only be a mute listener, without any occasion to offer a reply. What is happening
between them is not a debate, but an event. Communication is not the murderers aim.
His speech must turn the listeners world upside down. The writer will no longer be
able to write the way he has been writing so far. The debate aspires to generate, and
breed, fear. Debate and consensus functions within the rationality of non-violence.
Sheshadri skillfully sidesteps this. It is only through this side-stepping that one can
think seriously about violence. Debate is founded on transparency, not terror. So,
what is the subject proffered by Sheshadris fear inducing debate the transparency of
violence.

7
8

From the story The Tailor.

From the short story Kayastar [Scribes].
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Until recently every murderer killed only secretively. The causes, in the case of
ordinary murderers, could be fear or a sense of morality. The thugs were inspired to
kill stealthily because of religious belief, or a fear that a society that considered
violence evil would be unable to see the purity of their act. Yet the coming of
terrorism has destroyed the secret nature of violence. Unlike the old revolutionaries,
the terrorists have no interest in beheading the Emperor. The gawping, ordinary,
bystanders are their victims. Capture as much of media attention as possible; spread
fear; this is their aim.
The killer of yore, after having committed murder, went into hiding. And now terrorist
organizations, all saying moi, moi, are queuing up to accept responsibility for mass
murder. Actually the real murderer dies alongside the victim. Art, cinema and
computer games have rendered violence into a kind of publicized childs play. In fact,
one could even say that there is a public sphere of murder.
On the one hand violence is becoming rampant. On the other it becomes an
adjustment between the murderer and the victim. Literature, public health and
population control are adjustments of this kind. Murder becomes public and
transparent. Which child, who spends his time in front of the TV and computer
playing killing games, has the luck to see murder, nay even a joust, in real life?
It is not surprising that the new forms of violence unsettle an orthodox killer who
follows in the grand tradition of murder. Sheshadri attempts to extract the duty of
murder from its pristine essence one that is without avarice, selfishness or
sentimentality. The austerity of violence cannot be characterized as an attribute of the
value system of a caste, group or civilization. Violence has neither morality nor
ideology. It only has a methodology.
Within moral codes, the only acknowledgement that violence gets, and that too
hesitantly, is as a means. In an attempt apparently to contain violence, even modern
societies with the aid of the police and the army actually end up nurturing it (human
beings must have invented ritual sacrifice in order to avoid the retaliatory madness of
revenge and vendetta. Theres a big point in the orthodox perspective which sees
violence merely as a means). Violence is merely means without an end.
Violence is never its own end, whether used against itself, or when used to further its
own ends. Killing for killings sake does not imply some pleasure in the act of murder.
Pleasure that is pursued purposively towards such gratification, like any other aim,
will destroy the purity of murder. Pure murder is divorced from all aims and is the
ritualized performance of means alone.
The thugs embezzle everything belonging to their victims. Yet this is not the aim of
the killing. To appropriate without killing is sin. Even when merchants are targeted it
is not the possibility of victory, but coincidences and omens that draw attention to the
victim. The end is a mere excuse for the means.
Instrumental reason lies in separating the means from the ends, and then finding an
appropriate means for the end. In humanist practices, the means and ends are not
separate from each other. A good doctor can rake in the moolah. Now making money
is only an extraneous aim of medical practice. Health care has certain virtues and aims

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of its own. A good doctor is one who can practice recognizing these. However, the
practice of murder does not submit to either of these reasons. It extracts the means
from practice, distills, and purifies it.
For Ali Dost, who gouges out eyes and hacks off necks, murder is not merely a play
of five-fingers. Murder is the art performed by that limp, flaccid, sixth finger that
hung on like a mute, corpselike, witness. Isnt Ali Dost the wilting sixth finger,
swinging between Humayun who seized power by manipulating community ties and
Kamran who tried to do the same through the use of sheer brute force? Ali Dost, after
committing murder in an entirely dispassionate manner, runs to the borders of the city,
throws up and wanders around disconsolately. Those who are passionate about
truthfulness and goodness will not be able to comprehend this listless creatures
sorrow, heaving and fatigue.
SECTION III
Anand, in his letter to M. Govindan about the publication of Aalkoottam, wrote: If
this is to be published, could we not bring it out unnamed, without even a pen name?
[I ] have no desire to be a litterateur. This question is not prompted by humility or
shyness. If he had wanted to remain anonymous, a pen-name would have sufficed.
The name itself is the problem. After all The Book of Murder is a methodology text
book lacking in both the authors and publishers names, isnt it? Yet when the
characters in the book ask, the author does not hesitate in replying that they may call
him Anandan.
The history of cinema has a similar flirtation with the name. The famous Danish
director Lars von Trier, along with his friends, founded a group called Dogma 95. One
of the vows they took was not to add the directors name to a film. By sheer
coincidence, Von Triers first well known film was on murder The Element of
Crime. This film is bathed in the sepia tones of sodium vapour lamps not unlike the
expressionless lethargy embodying the killers in Anand and Borgess stories. The
detectives, Fischers, hypnotic sleep is the place where the story takes place. He is
pursuing a serial killer who has been killing girls vending lottery tickets. His guide is
The Element of Crime a methodology book written by his teacher, Osborne.
According to this the detective must be able to inhabit the mind of the killer, and be
able to transform himself into the murderer. The murders take place on the corners of
an H, the first letter of the given name of the suspected killer, Harry Gray. Fischer
reaches the place where the next murder is to take place by walking the streets
trodden by Gray, sleeping with his girlfriend, and by taking on even his headache.
There the detective, awaiting the killer, himself transforms into the murderer. Who
knows, maybe Harry Gray was himself the teacher Osborne who wrote the Book of
Murder. The murder shows that action is transferred across people whose
individuality is pegged on to mere names.
The breathlessness about the name lies in the discovery that the clue to the link
between action and time lies in the name. We have said earlier that murder is not an
action that can be pointed out from existing moral conceptions, but instead is the
excitement of any action which embraces all possibilities. Names are the obstacles
that are planted in language in order to stem the violence of action. This obstacle may
itself be the source [of violence]. Vardhaman asks why we go hunting for the past

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when we need names. These timeless names may be a way of trapping action outside
time. The mirth invoked by nicknames is the bodys response to the connection
between name and violence.
On the one hand there is the author creating texts in which time is woven together
seamlessly. On the other is the murderer who sees time only as an aspect of action and
makes an untimely use of the text. And then the name that is common to both but is
lacking entirely in time or meaning.
(The author of the Critique of Criminal Reason, Michel Gregorio, was not one man
but two people. It is one name combining the husband, Michel G. Jacob, and the wife
Daniella D. Gregorio. And gratitude to Udayakumar, Radha Goswami and Shaj
Mohan, who provided books, arguments, and the space for writing).

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