Chapter 1: Red against White - a Mukt & Jia scoop

One would think that red against white is something that a keen eye could never miss. Add to that however, snow falling in balls of cotton, and all signs of the blood would vanish, red buried under layers of white. Be that as it may, there was enough blood and quite freshly spilled, to leave dull brown marks that Mukt could only stare at in amazement…it was clearly the scene of a crime, a high passion one at that, given the amount of blood all around.

Mukt had missed it all in the beginning as he had kept his bags down and rushed in to the phone booth he saw at the corner. Cooped up in the small box trying to call his sister Jia to tell her that he had reached Paris safely, Mukt had stopped short of dialing the one telephone number he didn’t have to look up his phone diary for. He had finally noticed the red marks on the notice stuck next to the telephone receiver. The red stain was at his eye level and quite remarkable, if you actually come to think of how uncharacteristic its presence there was.

It wasn’t just any red mark either, but clearly blood that was just beginning to dry up. There was more, further traces of the red on the phone booth’s door knob, on the floor inside the box, and extending all the way out in the direction of the building Mukt was planning on entering after his call, a clear trail of a body having been dragged, a body that was losing or had already lost a lot of blood.

Having just reached Paris a few hours ago on a connecting flight from New Delhi via Dubai, Mukt had been cursing the airline ever since he landed, for messing up his bags. It had taken him nearly a couple of hours after all immigration formalities, just to sort his luggage out. He was at his wit’s end, irritated and as was usual in his case, gritting his teeth. As soon as he finally stepped out of the terminal though, he couldn’t help but loosen up and smile at the weather that greeted him. Unlike his sister Jia who was the more practical of the two, Mukt would often lose himself in his environs, watching raindrops patter against the window-sill or simply feeling the breeze in his hair.

Today, it was snow…a lot of it. It wasn’t the usual time for snow in Paris, almost the beginning of October as it was. Mukt knew however, that it was just the beginning of what everyone was predicting could be a prolonged, cold, and harsh winter. Jia had literally forced him to pack the heaviest of woolens, knowing fully well that Mukt tended to ignore such things, busy as he was in preparations for the real reason he was going to Paris.

The India House at Cité Universitaire or as the French would call it, Maison de l’Inde at La Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris had invited Mukt to perform at the annual India day celebrations on campus and be their guest in-house consultant for a couple of months thereafter. Mukt was an artist…well, sort of. He specialized in Mass Hypnosis and was also a trained hypnotherapist, not only performing spectacular shows that amazed large gatherings but also working with individual subjects facing deep psychological problems and helping them deal with those problems and often, recover.

There was a lot that Mukt had to thank Jia for, least of them the shape his career had taken. Mukt had initially started exploring hypnotherapy only as a tool to help his sister recover from the loss of their parents who had passed away in a plane crash five years ago. Jia had taken the loss pretty hard, hadn’t uttered a single word for nearly a month. Even when she started talking, she would hardly initiate a conversation; speak only when spoken to and even then, in monosyllables. It was extremely difficult for Mukt to see his livewire of a sister like this, especially when he didn’t have any one else in the whole world, he could call his own. He had lost his parents, too. Indeed, he had taken to the eventuality much better but it didn’t mean that he wasn’t impacted.

It was Jia who had indirectly given Mukt the idea of studying and using hypnotherapy. She had been reading a book on the subject, more like flipping through its pages, hardly paying any attention to what she was reading. Mukt had just come back from his day at work, advising a big-ticket client on her advertising strategy, something that was more routine for Mukt now, as compared to the excitement he used to feel when he had started out as a rookie in the creative agency that he now headed Creative Strategy for. Mukt was bored, and while he didn’t know it just yet, a new life for him was just there for the taking.

Jia had finally flipped the book shut and had started staring into nothingness, possibly remembering how her parents used to laugh at one of her many jokes. There was the hint of a smile at the corner of her lips, a smile that had none of the mirth that it was trying to remember, a sad smile and even that was not developed fully, lurking yet not showing.

Mukt had learnt to read the signs, knowing when he could leave his sister to her memories and when he needed to shake her up. Assessing that she was fine by herself that day, Mukt had left Jia to her thoughts and taken up the book, unable to leave it till he finally finished a couple of hours later. Jia was still staring at the fading lights of the city skyline but Mukt’s eyes were gleaming, reflecting the last of those twinkles that signify the end of another day but more importantly, the imminent beginning of a new dawn. He knew he was on to something, something that could not only help his sister but something that could bring back meaning to his own life as well.

While it wasn’t exactly the same time of the day in Paris, what with its longer days, but the lights had just been turned on, all around the part of Cité Universitaire that the India House was located in. For Mukt, perhaps those lights had triggered memories of the day he had taken up Hypnotism for the first time. It was also possible that all the blood and signs of violence had taken him back to when he had seen his parents’ bodies for the last time, permanently still, and made him remember what it took for him to not lose Jia, the one thing he had in his life that could still make him smile.

Regardless of what was the cause, Mukt seemed to be lost for the moment, able to appreciate but unable to act on the urgency of the moment. He could feel the need to act, do something about the situation he was in, what with all the blood around him. He couldn’t move though, not for the moment. It was as if the snowflakes outside the booth were telling him something, as they fell in slow motion, only to be absorbed by the thick layer of snow on the ground, losing their existence and yet becoming part of a larger consciousness. Mukt could feel his own body floating with the snowflakes, falling to the ground, slowly. Unlike the snowflakes however, he didn’t just smoothly become part of a bigger being. His was a sharp fall, metaphorically jolting him out of his reverie.

One of the things his study of Hypnotism had taught Mukt was the importance of process. Having often practiced the same mechanical step hundreds of times to get it right, Mukt was used to breaking down any problem into a number of steps and then diligently executing each of those steps, one after the painstakingly similar other.

The first step for now, of course, was to call the emergency response number and tell them what he had seen. Thankfully, Jia had done the requisite online research and prepared a list of important information and contact numbers for Mukt for his Paris trip. The pan-European emergency response number ‘112’ was marked in red, right at the top. As Mukt dialed the number, he tried to mentally brush up on his basic French, assuming that would be the language he would have to speak in.

Fortunately for him, the operator on the other side was comfortably able to switch to English once she realized that Mukt’s French wasn’t adequate for him to clearly explain what had happened. Mukt gave a brief note of what he was looking at and where he was. While he kept his suspicions to himself, the facts were telltale enough for the operator to ask Mukt to not touch anything, move out of the booth and without stepping on anything, stand by for the emergency response team stationed at the Cite Universitaire Campus Police station.