The lie behind every sensational murder

THERE is an eerie word in English called ‘paramour.’ It means lover, but when I was a kid, to me it meant someone was dead. Indian newspapers used to invoke it only when a person and their ‘paramour’ killed the spouse, or the spouse killed them, or some combination of this sort of stuff. I don’t know why the media stopped using the word, even though murders involving paramours have not ceased. A lot of young English-speaking Indians may not know the word at all, like 20-year-old Siya Goyal who, the police say, conspired with her paramour and killed her fiancé. We don’t know the facts of the case yet, but when I first got the news of the sensational murder, my first reaction was why the deed wasn’t done after marriage, which is when these things usually happen. He seemed wealthier than she was, after all.

But then it occurred to me that my reaction was shaped by our long heritage of finding motives, and by the very idea that there is a perfectly rational motive behind a murder. In fact, motive is one of the most influential legal requirements in a murder trial.

So, we are told that Siya Goyal and Chetan Chaudhary, who is 22 and from a modest background, were in love, whatever love is. But Siya’s parents arranged for her to marry Ketan Agarwal, a 26-year-old from a wealthy family. Siya did not want to marry him but didn’t have the heart to revolt against her parents. So, the story goes, she chose murder; she led Ketan to the edge of a cliff as Chetan was waiting; she sat down, which was a signal for Chetan to push Ketan, who fell some 400 feet to his death. All this for love, we’re told. Love that would apparently go to pieces the moment her story of an accidental fall began to unravel. In police custody, she and Chetan allegedly started accusing each other of being the primary conspirator.

The murder has made Indians lament arranged marriage and parental dictatorship. These are real problems, but it is naive to consider them responsible for murder.

Motives are generally a misleading analysis of the reason behind any extraordinary human action. If a woman does not want to marry a man, all she would have to do after their engagement is to behave in a fashion that is not so unusual — fly off the handle every four days, weep for no reason, tell him she loathes sex. Wealthy men have cancelled their marriages for far less. That she would instead want to kill to save herself from marriage makes no sense if motives alone cause murders.

Motives are a useless way to understand a rare act. They are only triggers, if at all. Something else is usually going on.

Homicide is often a mental health issue. If two people have to kill a young man to prevent a marriage, then they are not thinking straight. Their motive then is not really saving a girl from a marriage she did not want, for that requires much simpler steps. Their motive is murder.

When I was a kid, my mother would exclaim now and then, “The motive-hunting of motiveless malignity.” The line is borrowed from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s analysis of Shakespeare’s play Othello. (She was melodramatic like that, or maybe she was taking a dig at my dad, whom she did call ‘Iago’ sometimes.) Iago claimed he had many reasons to destroy Othello. Those reasons would, today, be called “motives”. But Coleridge points out that Iago really had no motive. Evil needs no motive; it only finds an excuse. And evil is, at its very core, a mental disease.

The reason why the pathological nature of evil is considered a dangerous view in the justice system is that someone whose action springs from disease has to be condoned. This leads to an absurd thing that modern society does, which is to make a psychopath undergo tests by “experts” to determine his mental soundness when the very act of slaughter is proof that he is not. Society concocts a false analysis of mental health just to punish dangerous people. I do think evil should be punished severely even if it is a form of mental disease.

Extraordinary human actions spring from complex mental states more than circumstances.

Imagine a society in which parents do not control marriage. Would Siya or Chetan be harmless people?

More people are capable of murder than there are murders, but I don’t believe the difference is huge. Those who do such things always have ‘motives,’ problems that need solutions, people who need to be dead. You may argue that there can be two equal factors that make a murder possible — a person’s mental state and a motive. But this is another thing we have been trained to believe even though there is no evidence of it if we truly inspect our own lives— the equality of causes. The truth is there is, almost always, one reason that has an outsized impact on the outcome.

This murder is not representative of how normal people act in such a situation, but these situations do exist. I question only the significance of motives, not the underlying phenomena.

The richer the parents, the more they can control their children. The young, for all their yapping about rebellion, choose financial security over freedom almost every time. But this case highlights a deeper issue. Vast unhappiness on the path to marriage.

Marriage is followed by known traumas, but preceded by less known miseries. I’ve known people who were miserable before marriage, even after choosing their partner and claiming to be in love. There is always some issue. They don’t have the courage to break up, or something an astrologer said bothers them. The whole world is in the pursuit of happiness; half of its people have no talent for it.

(Manu Joseph’s latest book is, ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us’)