7thAprill, 1921; Dhaka Bangladesh. It’s 2:20 at mid night. Her favorite Tagore song is playing on the sound box:
“All my lamps of sorrows I offer and light as day ends, my worship of sorrows is yet to end”.
She’s dipping a size 12 Raphael Kolinsky series 8404 color brush into a pot full of black-but-still-not-black-rather-a-bit-red color. It’s her 8th portrait with blood of her 8th victim.
She believes in “One man, one portrait” theory. And the process of her killing a person is quite clean. Firstly, she makes the victim senseless with Flothen. Then she takes a very big syringe, one of those that is used for cows and penetrates the needle exactly in the synovial node of the heart. That’s how she drags the blood. Syringe by syringe, Corpuscle by corpuscle. After collecting 2/3 liter of blood, she takes a syringe full of Potassium-floro-oxide serum and pushes it into the same node. The serum helps to clot the blood of the cardiac veins within 2 minutes and the heart stops beating. Quite a creative way to murder and very easy for a medical student like her. The cops still couldn’t find it out and the dumb forensic declare it as a massive heart attack. Vacuous people:
Yes, she is a serial killer, except the fact that she denies the title. Rather she claims herself as an extraordinary-artist. Ancient people used to sacrifice lives for the sake of God’s satisfaction. Now she’s satisfying the thirst of white canvas, her type of God. What’s wrong with that? She still remembers her first prey and the warmth of his blood, the scent of rawness. Everytime she puts a stroke on the canvas, it feels so soothing. It tranquilizes her mind and nourishes her mental stability. The color lures her so much; that discrete shade of red, the one that runs through your veins from the atrium to ventricle. It’s an orgasmic feeling that none of her boyfriend could give. Oh, and she has killed most of them.
It’s 3:04 at midnight and she got an urge to finish the painting. The exhibition is within 2 days. She has to spray Formaldehyde and put some perfume on the painting so that it won’t emit any uncomfortable smell. The manager of Dhaka Gallery is much more excited than her. He was telling the other day, ‘trust me Sabrina, we are going to get more hits this time! Doing the whole artwork with just one color in such allured way- tell me, how do you do that?’ ‘By sacrificing’, said Sabrina presenting him with a delicate smile.
It was her mother who taught her the perfect using of light and shadows on canvas. She was also an artist. She liked to work with bright colors unlike red-obsessed Sabrina. Sabrina used to finish the red from the color box so fast and the other colors remained untouched. She knew all the shades of red and each of them bore different meaning to her. She was so disgusted acknowledging her classmates’ knowledge about color. “No, Ariba. You are not supposed to use the same color for the sun and the apple. Use Crimson, Tangerine, Apricot for the sun and Maroon, Scarlet, Garnet for the apple. And NO.
All of them aren’t ‘just-red’”- she tried to teach some of them. That’s what made Sabrina’s mother so disappointed thinking that her daughter can never be a good artist. Knowing all about just one color is not so righteous. But Sabrina knew she’s going to be a greater artist than her mother. Only she needed was the perfect shade of red. Searching for it was driving her crazy. She searched it in the sky of dawn and in the petals of spring roses which didn’t work; until that day…
It was a winter afternoon and Sabrina and her parents were in a motel in Sylhet for their vacation. She was in her couch playing with her toys. Suddenly some people wearing some weird looking mask came and dragged the 9 years old Sabrina in the rooftop. She could see her parents all tied up there. Her mother was weeping and begging them, ‘Please not her. She’s just a little girl. Please not my child. Please…’ Maybe the tears of her mother could melt the heart of those armed people a bit. They didn’t hurt Sabrina. They did worse. Sabrina can still see vividly the vapor coming from the tides of blood from the veins of her parent’s throat. There was a small pool nearby and the dead bodies were thrown there. 12 liters of blood mixing with the pool water created quite a scene. And that’s when Sabrina found out the thing, that her heart was searching for so long- the perfect shades of red…
Lamea Tanjin Tanha is a student of Dhaka University, Bangladesh. Find her on twitter: @tanjin_tanha
