The Full Moon

This piece of fiction does not allude to any real incident and in no way portrays a real protagonist.
THE FULL MOON
He picked up one of two army medals from the briefcase and directed it with a steady, nonchalant motion of his hand to flames of the Amar Jawan Jyoti. The fabric of the medal caught fire and the flames ran with ease all over it. He held it till the flames burnt most of medal; it appeared as if a pain was retreating from his eyes as the flames turned the medal into black burnt flakes. In his impatience he left the remains of the nearly burnt medal near the foot of Amar Jawan Jyoti Column and reached for the other medal lying in the briefcase. This too, he torched and held the medal on flames with an insouciant equanimity and a relief settling on his visage. He looked at the tall column of concrete that was Amar Jawan Jyoti with numerous names of martyrs of Indian Military written all over it, and then looked at his burnt medals. The relief on his face could hardly be mistaken: it was the relief of having immersed two idols of worship, possessed and held long in great respect, in the sacred river of Amar Jawan Jyoti, as in the impending stretch of his years of 'renouncement and atheism', the idols could become an unmanageable burden to him.
Some three months later, Amrinder Singh was, as usual, drinking and sitting before the TV with a news channel on. He was now a peripatetic man with hotels as his mobile home. He would send enough money to his family to carry on with their lives. The remaining he would burn in drinking and living extravagantly in costly hotels. When his funds would drain away, he would just lift his gun, scout for a victim in New Delhi posh colonies, study his routine for a couple of days and pull the job without much of fine planning and ado about the details. The cash, jewelry would last for footing his bills for another few months before he would be required to have to `work' again.
It was a day in his `holidaying' time that he was spending in a three star Bombay hotel. The liquor was good, so it was easing his mood as usual. On the news channel on TV, a newsreader and a government expert doctor were questioning and answering in their overly demonstrated tension about the authenticity of a possible outbreak of bird-flu in Bombay. Amrinder, amused, smiling at the stretched faces of the duo in TV, looked at what was left of a small heap of fried chicken pieces in the plate near him, picked one `deadly' one and ate it followed by a harsh swig from his glass. That was how life meant to him now: his own life; life of common masses of this land steeply depreciated in value for him from the times when he had fought for this very land in two wars.
He would watch all crime reporting shows on TV news channels every night. Once, he, heavily drunk, could realize only towards end of such a crime story reported on TV that it was his own real time story.
It was just another evening of his leisure days, he drinking and watching television. A live reporting was showing a man surrounded by a crowd. The man had a can of petrol which he presently opened and drenched himself thoroughly with the liquid. The reporter was explaining the reason of self-immolation. An old market was being demolished and relocated at a place of disadvantage to the shop owners. The man, a shop owner, had been protesting for a long time, and was never heard by the municipality. Now self-immolation in public, just in the center of the market destined for demolition in few hours from then, was his last resort. The man stood there surrounded by a mass of people, all of them dismissing his resolve of self-immolation as an improbability of extreme unlikely ness: he would surely not burn himself; may be at the last moment he would change his now adamant looking mind; may be at the last moment, he would wait for his friends or relatives to come stop him; may be he would wait for the policeman standing nearby to accost, rebuke and drive him away. They all looked at him skeptically with unbelieving eyes in the manner similar to that of a woman trying to single out the genuine one from an assortment of jewels all of which except one were good pieces of imitation; she dismissing the real one in the very first sight as it looked remotest promising, too `out of vogue' and ridiculous as it looked in extraneous appearance to be the genuine.
The man appeared to be saying his final words before setting himself on fire. He had taken out a matchbox and was opening it. As the public kept watching him hoping for the fakeness of his actions to eventually unveil, the man struck the match and set a corner of his shirt afire. Flames ran in all directions engulfing his body. Only then two or three persons, probably his fellow shopkeepers ran hollering towards nearby shops to find cans of drinking water. Till they returned with the water, the man had been almost eaten away by the fire. The dumbfounded spectators had been jerked out of their inaction and indifference; but funeral of a living person was almost over. The man succumbed to his burns en route to a hospital.
And this had taken place in a small town of Punjab, belying the general opinion that materialistic inertness in public had spread only in metros. The man who burnt himself, certainly deserved the coming forward to stop him of those who were his fellow shop owners. They were not just shopping machines of western super markets where one inserts a coin, and the article requested is thrown in the delivery spout of the machine, or, were they? But why was he asking this to himself? Was human life yet of any value to him? After his treating people as worms when he killed them? But those were strangers. He had never spent any moment of his life with them. He had just reached their places and killed them. But what did that matter? How could a murderer justify his being responsive to extreme human pain of the ones he knew, and be arrant callous to the many times multiplied pain of strangers that the murderer himself was inflicting? He didn't have an answer; well, he didn't give a damn to not having an answer to all the damn questions.
Moreover he had fought to defend his country and thus done all acts of goodness in the past; but even after fighting his case in the court and winning the court's decision in his favor, he was denied pension by the administration of Army. He was continuing to do at least one good act in present also in that he was providing for his family. But there was a clear, wrong and unreal element adhering to his extrapolation of past actions into his present actions. The two didn't in the least compare. Rather he was diverting privation and ill luck of his family, multiplying it enormous times and inflicting it on strangers. But earlier too when in service he was paid for killing and his family survived on his pay. If equating his past to the present this way was ridiculous, let it be so. He would go his own way. But this was the time since when dreams started torturing him.
The dream arousing him every night would invariably be a replay. Soon after sleep would come, the dream would commence showing himself walking past the cowered visages, hung in air, of the ones he had killed in the two wars and now recently in Delhi flats in his new 'profession', he knowing without seeing that eyes on those faces were staring at him- eyes quivering in fear of death like unsteady, oscillating pointer needles on dial-gauges of some giant machine. Further in his dream those miserable faces would clear away making way for a zooming in face with a pair of eyes with a difference. He would immediately know these as the eyes of that old physically handicapped soldier who at the time of Amrinder's fatal assault on him in that posh colony flat of New Delhi, just stared laughingly on his murderer without any trace of fear. Those fearless, scorning and knowing eyes with the lacerating laugh in them for Amrinder- laugh born of old man's knowing Amrinder as a former army man now turned a 'professional' killer for a living- would not need too long a presence in the dream to arouse Amrinder from his hard won sleep.
Guilt had invaded his mind and he could no longer think with his infected mind- infected like a severely infected throat for which speech was a terrible torture. The night before when the dream knocked him out of his sleep, he had thrown his guns in the same briefcase in which he carried his medals to Amar Jawan Jyoti, and once again he set out for another `immersion'. This time he had walked to a bridge over a river and thrown the guns in water.
The fire of penitence like the heat of a fever had caught his soul. He must cleanse his soul and would go to a place for this if there was one in the world. And then he saw the photograph on the front page of a newspaper of the holy bath being taken by the devotees in The Ganges at Haridwar.
They all stood waist deep in the holy and crystal clear water of The Ganges; their eyes closed in devotion; their hands folded together in prayer to almighty; their consciences laden with weights of evils crept in their souls; and then for purification from their worldly sins they all took a dip in the holy river to emerge exonerated. Amrinder standing amid them, yet in some indecision on magic healing by the holy dip kept this time his resolve intact as the congregation prepared to take another holy dip, and he too, in unison with them lowered his un-soaked body in the river, wondering how it would occur should there be actually any healing of soul. His mind remained in a blankness for a while with water all round his submerged head and closed eyes, then catching from the surroundings that it was time to complete the ritual by rising up, his head broke the surface of the holy water and he stood there dumbfounded; some where something inside his soul had grown larger or refreshed itself into a fullness; something that was like a slice of moon before the holy dip with the unseen segment of the circle dark with gloom and guilt of his sins that had grown into a full moon at emergence from holy waters- a full moon of a holy rebirth and flawlessness of a new beginning.