Ambiguity

“Have I killed him? Have I not?
Have I? Have I not?”

Delnaz was seated on a garden bench murmuring these words to herself, as she plucked the petals of a withered yellow rose.

Delnaz had no idea what to think of herself. Was she schizophrenic? The doctors could not tell; not yet!

Her life story was pretty complicated. She believed she’d killed someone named Karan Agarwal. She was affirmative! She herself reported her crime to the police, in the wee hours of the day. She was frantically running around the police station pleading to the inspectors to arrest her.

She said she’d been having a rendez-vous with Karan since the past 4 months. She even started developing affection for him. Karan usually dropped by her house to say hello! Theirs was a perfect love story to one’s eye. But there lay many dark secrets underneath.

Karan was a fraud. He developed relations with Delnaz to coax her into assisting him in his crimes. He was a smuggler and he needed Delnaz to hoard all the smuggled goods in her house till they were delivered to their destination.

Delnaz, though reluctant, was pulled into this gamble. The everyday hellos were actually a means to drop bags full of smuggled items in her house.

She’d become weary of being used. She wanted Karan’s love, not these illegal things he would stack up in her room.

One day when Karan visited her with a new load of smuggled goods, Delnaz pulled out an elephant tusk and stabbed Karan in the stomach.

This is what she confessed to the police.

Upon investigation, the police was left clueless. No body, no ivory tusk and not one bag of smuggled goods. The police interrogated the neigbours if they had seen a particular man frequent Delnaz’s apartment. But each one denied!

The police looked up the criminal records but they didn’t find any record of Karan Agarwal.
So the questions that arose were such:

Did a smuggler names Karan Agarwal exist?
If he did, was this his real identity?
If it was, was it given that he was a smuggler?
If the answers to all these questions were negative, was it wise to believe that Delnaz was Schizophrenic? Or was she just taking the police for a ride?

What was the truth behind this story and the woman?
No one could tell, not yet!