Editor's Note
One hears of the long arm of the law. Long enough, at times, to even merit being called a probing tentacle. But no proverb exists about the arms of the accused. They have short arms, one presumes. But what if the accused have no arms at all! What can they be accused of having perpetrated then? In Mozaffar Hussain’s A Confession to a Murder, translated from Bangla by Noora Shamsi Bahar, the answer is: everything. The dialogic scene that forms the core of the story is as absurd as it is terrifying, and the accused’s fatalism reveals itself as belonging wholly to a country’s bloody history.
— Tanuj Solanki
The Bombay Literary Magazine
‘Why did you murder him?’ A sub-inspector asked Khogen at the police station.
Khogen listened quietly and did not respond. He had been arrested for the murder of Chairman Habib. According to the case details, the murderer had broken into Chairman Habib’s home in the dead of night, used some kind of anesthetic to put the sleeping chairman into a state of unconsciousness, tied both his hands to the bed frame, and slit his throat with a sharpened boti, a knife with a long, curved blade. The boti was yet to be found, but the prosecutors had described the murder weapon as such. The prosecutors were the chairman’s own two sons.
Khogen’s home was adjacent to the chairman’s home, on the other side of a wall to its right. The wall had been extended to the point that it had more or less devoured all of Khogen’s yard. Another push and his home would fall into the ditch. There was a time, not too long ago, when the land on which the chairman’s house stood, along with a vast area of surrounding plots, belonged to Khogen’s family. This was when Khogen’s grandfather was still alive. Some of these memories were still fresh in Khogen’s mind. He would habitually sharpen them the way a farmer hones his sickle.
Every morning, Khogen woke up swearing at the chairman. With his stick under his armpit and his satchel hanging on his shoulder, he would then head out. By the time he returned in the evening, he would be swearing no more. He would weep, thinking of his long-lost family and his unborn children. The sound of his wailing could be heard long into the night. However, at the break of dawn, Khogen’s persona would change again. He would swear at the chairman, saying all kinds of nasty things. He would also quite often express a desire to murder the chairman. In fact, on the day of the murder, he had been heard saying, ‘I will kill you before the night has passed’. Five of his neighbors had heard him utter these words. When the chairman’s corpse was discovered with a slit throat early in the morning, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Khogen was the perpetrator. The chairman’s sons did not have to think twice before pointing their fingers at Khogen; in fact, it was rather convenient. Khogen did not object either. The police had come looking for him and with confusion smeared on their faces, they had asked him, ‘Are you Khogen?’ ‘There’s no need to cuff me,’ Khogen had told them. ‘Just help me get into your van. I have no intention of running.’ And without delay, they had taken Khogen with them.
Khogen knew he had been expressing the desire to kill the chairman for forty years. He had even dreamt of committing the murder many times. Upon waking up every morning, he had pitied his own inadequacy. But when he came to know that the chairman had actually been killed, it did not even occur to him that he had not committed the crime. He just could not remember how he had done it.
Therefore, he was not able to give a direct answer when the sub-inspector asked, ‘Is this your doing?’
‘It could be,’ Khogen said.
‘What do you mean “it could be”? Do you have any doubt?’
‘It is me who is supposed to kill him, but I just can’t remember doing it. In the night, I stepped out to take a shit. It was pitch-dark. There seemed to be a fight between the chairman’s two sons, about the division of inherited property. So, I changed my mind and came back inside. There was a cool wind blowing; I felt so relaxed that I fell asleep instantly. I woke up at dawn to the sound of the commotion coming from the chairman’s house. What happened during the night – I can’t remember, Sir.’
‘Try to remember. You had to take a shit. You went out with the water pot.’
‘It is possible. Because when I woke up in the morning, I could feel that my stomach was completely empty. What did I do next, Sir?’ Khogen asked, eagerly.
‘You went out, you took a shit, and you came back inside. The boti was in close range and you picked it up,’ the sub-inspector replied, putting words in Khogen’s mouth.
‘Yes, I remember. But I don’t have a boti at home. It could have been a sickle…’
‘Since the case details state boti, you should just say that. As you have committed the murder, who cares if the murder weapon was a boti or a sickle? You’ll suffer the same punishment either way.’
‘Yes, boti is better. As it is, I have been meaning to buy a boti from the bazaar. It’s difficult to chop vegetables with a sickle.’
‘Then you took the boti and went inside the chairman’s house. Do you remember?’
‘Yes, I have had a dream like that.’
‘You went into the chairman’s bedroom and held a chloroform-drenched handkerchief against his nose and drugged him. You did that, yes?’
‘Yes, I did,’ Khogen said. He paused, and then asked, ‘What is chloroform, Sir?’
‘You need it to drug someone. You don’t need to know more than that.’
‘Yes, that’s right. If a little knowledge can serve the purpose, there’s no point in knowing more.’
‘Then, when the chairman was unconscious, you quickly tied his hands with the goat-tethering rope. You’re an old man, after all. Best not to risk him breaking free, you thought. Am I wrong?’
‘No. At my age, it won’t be right to take any risks.’
‘And once the hands were tied up, you slit his throat with that boti. Isn’t that right?’
‘Yes. Everyone in the village is saying so. And you are too. Then it must be right.’
‘That means you are admitting to having committed the crime of premeditated murder against the chairman last night?’
‘A long-term plan, Sir,’ Khogen said in a distracted tone.
Before locking Khogen up in jail, the sub-inspector asked a constable to get Khogen’s thumb print on the witness testimony.
‘But, Sir, both his hands have been chopped off,’ the constable said. ‘He doesn’t even have elbows, let alone fingers!’
‘You’re right! Okay, lock him up,’ the sub-inspector said. He seemed quite satisfied.
On the way to the jail, the constable asked Khogen, ‘How did you get your hands cut off? Did you get caught during a burglary attempt or some such crime?’
Khogen did not respond. During the Liberation War, Khogen’s hands had been chopped off by Pakistani soldiers. The chairman had been a young man then. And he had tied Khogen up by his feet tightly to a palm tree. After the war, he had taken over Khogen’s lands, plot by plot. Khogen did not mention any of this. ‘What’s the point?’ he thought to himself. ‘The only thing that matters is what the court decides.’
Author | MOJAFFOR HOSSAIN
MOJAFFOR HOSSAIN is a Bangladeshi fiction writer and journalist, currently working as a translator in the Bangla Academy, Dhaka. He has published seven anthologies of short stories. His awards for his short fiction include the Anyadin Humayun Ahmed Award, Abul Hasan Sahitya Award, and the Arani Sahitya Award. His debut novel, Timiryatra, received the prestigious Kali O Kalam Literary Award (2019).
Translator | NOORA SHAMSI BAHAR
NOORA SHAMSI BAHAR is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of English and Modern Languages, North South University, Bangladesh. After completing her MA in English from Western University, Canada, when she began her teaching career in 2010, she was the youngest lecturer in Bangladesh. She has presented scholarly papers at academic conferences in Oxford, Prague, and Dhaka, which have been published as book chapters and journal articles. Despite her Iranian parentage, Bahar finds pleasure in reading short fiction in Bengali (her third language) and translating them into English. Her translations have appeared in dailies, literary journals, and anthologies, at home and abroad. She won the 2021 Tagore Award for Translated Fiction, organized by The Antonym Magazine. She used her translation skills to work as the subtitler of a critically-acclaimed, award winning, independent film, The Golden Wings of Watercocks (2022). Most recently, she co-translated The Mynah Bird’s Testimony and Other Stories by Shahaduz Zaman, published by The Antonym Collections in India in 2024. Bahar is an occasional poet; she also writes essays and op-eds that voice her outcry against societal ills.