Must Read: Paradox Of Abel - Season 1 - Episode 44

7 years ago

Must Read: Paradox Of Abel - Season 1 - Episode 44

He took his mind off Daniel’s biography and his own personal challenges to think about the investigation at hand. There was not much to think about though, except for the fact that there was a murderer gone loose among the Maliks who had committed two murders and would do more if he was not stopped on time – or was it a she? The real investigation had not begun, he knew. There were still hidden secrets about the family to be explored, confessions to be made, and most importantly, a murderer to be apprehended. All these, he was sure, would come in due time. But even after the first day he was beginning to suspect that the case could turn into one of those which all detectives happen to abhor: the inquiry where the murderer is known but the evidence is sufficient in the eyes of the law to justify prosecution. But he knew better than most that what condemned a man was the inability to keep his mouth shut. There were two sides to the coin of the investigation; the head and the tail. The head concerned what would come out of the mouth of every member of the family; the head was like a mathematical equation, like sequence and series; where the first term, assisted by the common difference of an Arithmetic progression, might lead indefinitely to the last term, depending of course on which entity was required to be found, and the formula to be applied in solving the case. To Lot, every murder case required a particular pattern to be traced before it could be solved. This pattern was usually mathematical, and the investigative formula to be applied depended on the method of the crime. The crime could be fundamentally quadratic or simultaneous – as the case was currently; it could also be hypothetical, using theories and theorems, like the Pythagoras or Newton.

Lot’s intuition had been enhanced by part of his life’s work in Physics and Mathematics, in each of which he held a doctorate. Briefly, he thought about the number 29. It was a prime number – it could not be divided by any number except itself and 1 – but otherwise it was not very interesting. The only unusual thing about it was that 29 plus 2x² was a prime number for every value of x up to 28. He calculated the series in his head: 29, 31, 37, 47, 61, 79, 101, 127… One of the things that usually baffled him in the significance of the number Pi. Why should the ratio of circumference be three point one four two? Why not six, or two and a half? Who made that decision, and why? Indeed, Mathematics is a weird psychology. He knew that Pi, being an irrational number, meant that it cannot be written as the ration of two integers. And consequently, its decimal representation never ends and never settles into a permanent repeating pattern. This means that any number you can think about is in Pi. Recently, Lot read that the value of Pi had been calculated into 2.1 trillion decimal places. This would take a person roughly 266 years without stopping, going three digits per second.
But the tail of the coin – the significant tail – involved Daniel. The explanation Famous had given him was quite bogus; it held no liquid.

There were loopholes in his defense that even a retard would notice. Lot knew that Daniel was hiding something very important from him. He didn’t know yet but he was bent on finding out what it was. He knew certainly that Daniel’s refusal to divulge that which was hidden was not done out of selfish intents but of plain stupidity. He seriously hoped that it wouldn’t be too late for him to find out what that secret was. But he knew the secret – whatever it might be – involved a woman. With Daniel, everything always involved a woman. He sighed. He was all too aware of Daniel’s impetuous proclivities; always had been an accident waiting to happen.

They arrived at the cemetery; overhead, two magnificent birds with four-foot wings glided in intersecting gyres. The ventral feathers of the first were white with black wing tips. The second was boldly barred in white and brown – they could have been hawks, but Lot wasn’t sure. The detective was surprised that they’d walked kilometres to the cemetery while four empty limousines rode along. He wondered why he’d followed the procession in the first place; everything was sickening from the start. The trumpeters, the street-dancers, the hearse – everything was madness. Now he was about to witness the most maddening part of the madness – he was about to behold the dust-to-dust. A section of the cemetery had been acquired and labourers had done their job of digging the grave. Lot looked around the cemetery, there were over a thousand graves which ran down to the thicket beyond. The gravestones were almost like rows of books bearing the names of those who had been blotted from the pages of life, who might be forgotten elsewhere but remembered here. Lot was wary of his environment; he had no intention of whistling in this graveyard, either literally or figuratively. He knew he’d one day be dead too, but he had sworn he would never be a resident of a graveyard. Most of the graves sheltered corpses assumed to be many years dead. Close by, as they walked towards the exposed new home of Jamal, Lot saw a tombstone whose epitaph amused him.

PAUL OBI, DIED MARCH 17, 1974, AGED 74. The epitaph read: Beneath this stone, I rest my full body in sweet slumber; Christ bless the bed and my generation that lives on.
Lot shook his head, Paul Obi had died almost forty years ago. He wondered what would remain of the full body by now. Everything would probably have turned to sand. He noticed that this particular grave was without weed, unlike most of the others. This really interested Lot, Paul must have lived a very holy and fulfilled life to have his descendants tending to his grave for the past thirty-nine years. As they walked on, another tombstone made him raise eyebrows.
JOHN THOMAS, DIED FEBRUARY 14, 1982, AGED 46. The epitaph on his stone read: when ladies cross my grave, I smile.
Lot smiled, John was definitely a crook in his life. His grave was nearly covered with weed, the tall grasses only left enough view of John’s grave for the epitaph to be read. The detective wondered what he was doing when he died on the Valentine’s Day of 1982. Lot was sure that whatever it was, it had nothing to do with evangelism. John Thomas was dead thirty years ago. In this recent age, no parents in their right minds, with a Thomas surname, would name their son John! It was – it was well, too risqué!
There were spirits all around this burial ground – spirits from another century, from an era long gone. He wondered if, like Paul’s grave, Jamal’s would be cared for in the next forty years – he strongly doubted it. No one really missed the man. At least, he hadn’t noticed the grief on any of the family members’ face. Perhaps it was only Hannah who grieved, but it was hard to tell because the blind woman was wearing a black sunshade.

She was assisted towards the open grave by her daughter – the one with the sharp tongue. What’s her name? Is it Ruth? Or Naomi? The others were also gathered around the open grave. The mourners streamed across the plains of the cemetery and among the headstones for the longest time, but the presiding minister, an imam, did not begin the graveside service until all had assembled no one here showed impatience at the delay. Indeed, when the final prayer was said and the casket lowered, the crowd hesitated to depart. The priest reeled out verses out of various chapters from the scripture. These chapters were read as much as could be compressed into five minutes.

When he turned his head to speak to Daniel the young man was not there. He thought it would be hard to find famous because everyone was wearing the same colour. But when he raised his eyes he saw the footballer beside the deceased’s oldest grandchild – Ruth or Naomi’s daughter. Famous was holding the young lady’s hand as they all watched as the coffin was lowered to the ground.
The labourers slowly placed the casket in the hole. These four men who performed the task were muscular, they seemed to have been specially hired too. They had meaty hands and necks and faces that looked like the fission of Bash Ali and Samuel Peters.
As soon as the coffin reached the depth of the hole, every member of Malik’s household tossed a shovelful of dirt onto the casket, except the little baby of David Malik that was too young to notice what was going on. But nonetheless, the mother poured a small quantity of the earth into the baby’s palm and allowed the sand to fall into the hole. Lot knew that most mourners enjoyed this part so much, except the few who always broke down on the pile of earth crying to be buried with their beloved corpse. But in the case of Jamal, no one wept.

After the dust-to-dust ritual had been performed, the mourners slowly dispersed the graveyard, leaving the rest of the burial to the four muscles who had already begun covering the hole with the sand. I’m lucky I’m not dead and buried in some unmarked grave, with worms making passionate worm love inside my empty skull.

As they all headed to their various homes, on one – not even Lot or Daniel – noticed the tall dark-complexioned woman with a black veil over her black gown and wearing black sunshades that covered a large part of her face.
It was the woman in the photograph.