Daily Times

The readers of detective fiction are familiar with a subgenre referred to as the “locked room mystery,” in which a murder is committed in seemingly impossible circumstances in a closed room. Hyderabad, the second largest city of the Sindh province, has witnessed mysterious murders in recent months. In the first quarter of this year, newspapers reported the death of young couples with loud captions: “Suspicious death: betrothed couples’ bodies found in car,” “Couples’ bodies found in a car in a possible suicide,” and “Death of teenage girl and boy shrouded in mystery.” Confirmed facts in all cases are that dead bodies were found in cars, the deceased persons were young, and their reported social relationship was betrothed, married or lovers. These murders happened within the city’s radius, which may provoke a suicidologist to label the area a “suicide cluster.”

Last month, dead bodies of a young man and woman were found in a car parked in a residential colony. Similarly, a young man and his fiancée were found dead in Hirabad, and their bodies were found on the rear seat of a car. A young man and woman, both students of a university in Sindh, were found dead in a car parked in the Bhittai Nagar area.

In all cases of alleged double murder where one of the deceased is female, the attitude of the police becomes very derogatory. If someone asks them about the possible reason of deaths, they forward some ready responses, such as it was a case of suicide in which one or both were complicit, or the result of a so-called “honour” killing.

The Aurat Foundation, an NGO, reported that as many as 44 women were murdered in Sindh in July 2016. However, the murder of couples in Hyderabad compels us to think: why were the dead bodies found in cars? Why were all victims in their 20s? And why did the police avoid a proper investigation?

In some cases, relatives of the dead women are harassed and discouraged to lodge FIRs, and consequently, authorities pretend that the crime rate against women has reduced. However, ground realities reveal a different picture. The police in most such cases insist that parents and relatives have accepted it as an accident. However, in some cases, parents and relatives, especially of girls, are provoked in the name of “honour” and “insult to family.” These techniques are applied to stop them to pursue the cases. Even if they succeed in initial stages, a postmortem is avoided, a weakened FIR is lodged, facts are distorted, and parents are forced to settle the issue in a jirga. Finally, the case is closed, and no one knows who the murderer was, and what the motives of the murderer were.

Parents of mysteriously murdered boys and girls live in an agony throughout their lives about their loved ones who were snatched away from them in a violent manner. They try to suppress their feelings about the painful death their beloved child went through.

Some parents think that the murders must have been planned in advance, and there must be several accessories and abettors in the case. That reminds me of the type of a detective story known as the inverted detective story where the reader already knows the criminal.

Society’s silence indicates that somehow there is a consensus to create a monolithic society rather than a pluralistic one. One wonders if state institutions continue to ally themselves with the retrogressive forces and fail to make adjustments to changing times, what is going to be the fate of free will. And how an egalitarian society would be formed. It is really an important question for society as a whole.

The writer is a development practitioner and novelist