“Blowing the furnace, in the company of a work knife, hunched body...’’ were the lines that 66-year-old Bhagaval Singh, a resident of Elanthoor grama panchayat in Pathanamthitta, posted on his social media page for the last time. Written on October 6, these lines incidentally marked the culmination of a long story involving greed and violence.
The sordid killings of two women as ‘human sacrifice’ have now made the names of Singh, a massage therapist by profession and a poet by passion, and that of his wife, Laila, grisly infamous.
Residents of Elanthoor maintain that they suspected the couple were performing some witchcraft rituals. “Strangers had been frequenting their house at late nights and we knew that they were performing some rituals on their backyard. The details, however, were not known as their house is located in the middle of a huge, isolated property and we had no access to it,’’ said a person who lives in the neighbourhood.
A follower of the CPI(M), Singh is said to have had actively pursued the profile pages of Left leaders on social media and also spent a lot of time reading and creating haiku poetry. Earlier in February, he also conducted an online session on haiku poetry in Malayalam.
“The family had been well known to everyone in the village for decades. In fact, most knew Singh right from a very young age as his father had a celebrated career as a massage therapist. This is why the news of their arrest came as a shocker to many,’’ said Mercy Mathew, president of the Elanthoor panchayat.
After a couple of failed attempts to leave for Saudi Arabia, Singh decided to follow in the footsteps of his father and took to massage therapy. Popularly called Anjilimoottil Vaidyar, he married Laila following a break up of his first marriage. Singh has a daughter and a son, both settled in West Asia.
The family was never known to have experienced any financial crisis, say villagers. They, however, appear to have committed the crime driven by greed for excessive wealth.
The police are yet to completely piece together the bizarre story of the sordid killings. They have also not completely ruled out the possibility of their link to other similar crimes.
