“You have any photo of the target?”
“You don’t need one; you are looking at him right now.”
“You mean it’s your identical twin?”
“No. It’s me. I want you to kill me. Ten years from now.”
“Why? If you really want to die, will not it be easier if you just shoot yourself in the head? I’ll give you a gun.”
“I don’t want to do a suicide.”
“You are practically doing a suicide by hiring me!”
“Heraclitus has said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man”. Our body replaces all of its tissues over a period of time. Blood gets destroyed and recreated. All the hormones and fluids, our whole body will be different than it is now.”
“What about soul?”
“I don’t believe in soul. It’s just our mind. My mind, my thoughts, also won’t be same after ten years. So it’s a completely different person who I want to be dead.”
“Bullshit!”
“You believe in soul? Soul is immortal isn’t it?”
“I mean you are full of bullshit! Real reason is you can’t pull the trigger on yourself.”
“Think what you have to.”
“My job is to kill people. I’ll kill you. But I’ll choose the day, within six months after completion of ten years from now.”
“That’s fine by me.”
Salil. 25 year old corporate employee. Follower of ‘work hard, play hard’ culture. A planner who had worked out everything from his schooling to MBA and job. Salil had impeccable knowledge of project planning and skills to execute plan of any scale. He could foresee and mitigate all risks and deliver projects in defined time window. He had same approach towards own life. Plan; execute. He kept weekly, monthly, quarterly, even annual targets and met them. He had plan for everything – his income, things he wanted to do, games and concerts he wanted to attend, books he wanted to read and places he wanted to go. But life is a project without fixed end date and death is a risk one cannot mitigate. This uncertainty always bothered Salil. He believed if he planned things from his bucket list to complete ‘as early as possible’, he would not have enough things to do for rest of the life and would get bored to death. And if he planned considering average life expectancy, he would die before experiencing it all.
“Why do we live anyway?” Salil asked himself. He thought people dedicated to social work, researchers and teachers were the only people who live for a cause. He wasn’t one of them. He considered himself kind of people who lived because they were born. Who only passed time doing things that entertained them. He considered himself a person for whom ultimate aim was to put a ‘check’ mark on each item in the bucket list. So he made a plan to fulfil all his desires. It turned out he just needed ten years to live. He knew he could still die before completing ten years. But that’s a risk no one can avoid. Salil followed his plan knowing the hitman would end his life on any day in six months window on completion of ten years, without informing him, without seeking further confirmation. Uncertainty, rather a certainty, he could live with.
Love is something that cannot be planned. When it happens it takes you by surprise. It happens when you least expect it to. Love happens and you only know it when you suddenly find yourself inseparable from a person who was once a stranger. Nine and a half years later; Salil was in last phase of his plan. Last six months to live in Goa and be sosegado. Jennie, Salil first met her at a bar. She was joyous and playful, in her early thirties. Jennie was also a traveller and a reader like Salil. They almost instantly hit off. They were similar in so many ways and where they differed, they complemented each other. Unlike Salil, Jennie was almost impulsive. She lived in the moment and did what she felt like. While Salil spent time on reading reviews of books before he read them or planning extensively before going to a new place, Jennie could just pick a book because she liked its cover or could just lift her sack and start the journey without prior arrangements. They started going out often, then spending all their time with each other and eventually they moved in together.
Jennie and Salil used to talk about everything and anything that exists or that can be imagined. They used to tell each other stories from their lives. Embarrassing events from childhood to deepest darkest secrets from their adult life, they could share everything without fear of being judged. Once during such discussions Salil suddenly remembered about hitman. Ten years were over. He had lost track of his plan for the first time since his childhood. In his life it was also the first time he was truly living. Sudden thought being unable see Jennie saddened him. He stopped talking and kept staring at her. His face covered with expressions of love and abyss created by the thoughts that his life would come to an end anytime now. He didn’t want to stop living with Jennie. She probably sensed his thoughts. She broke the silence with words that shook the ground beneath him. “I have Huntington’s disease.” Jennie would start losing muscle coordination. She would suffer from psychiatric problems. Slowly she would lose all her physical and mental abilities and torment endlessly until she was dead! Salil didn’t want leave Jennie like that. Unfortunately there was nothing he could do. He could get killed without a warning anytime.
Phone rang. Salil left the room to receive the call almost mechanically. “Ready to die?” Voice on other end said. “No! Please don’t.” “Thought so.” Hitman had listened to their conversation. When Salil asked the him, how come he called, when he had told there wouldn’t be any confirmation call, hitman replied, “I have changed in all these years. I am not the very same person you hired ten years ago.” He thanked hitman and returned to Jennie with a smile. He hugged her. Held her hands, told her his last secret and thanked her for giving him a new life, for showing him how to live. He told her, he would be there for her all their lives. He told her that he loved her. He told her he loved her because she made him human. Jennie kissed him and said, “I love you too.”
