A strange case of filicide

Why do people do the things that they do?

There is this guy in my village. He was a primary school teacher once, perfectly nice, very decent to talk to, always in control and what you would hope for from a teacher of your little kids.

One day he took up his little girl in his lap and cut off her head. She was just one and half years old.

He said his goddess asked him to do it. He had a temple in the house and he was the high priest there.

He was set free after being treated for temporary insanity in one of the government institutions for a year and was not convicted. He then used to come to see my father almost every day to get his job back. My father was then holding the charge of Deputy Director of Education in the district the man was employed.

He told us that he is not under medication. He had the certificates to prove that too.

He appeared perfectly normal, only enough remorseful on the outside, used to address me in the same manner as before, asking about my studies and things like that.

My father was a kind man and wrote a favorable report citing the man’s temporary mental instability and recommending him to be re absorbed in to the service as he was cured of it.

But the Parent Teacher association at the school would not have any of that.

What if he has another attack of insanity, it was their children’s life at stake.

He is still in the village and has not shown any further problems, only people are a little wary of him.

I often think of him, I may have written of it before too, I would try to divine his state of mind at the time of the act and afterwards.

I can’t get any clue, does he rue the deed? What was this ‘direction’ of his goddess that he is talking about, was the action brought on by something else, like the unfaithfulness of the wife for example , he was comfortably well off, he did not even have to work to survive, so financial problems could not have been the cause.

Was he schizophrenic? (Don’t laugh, I don’t hold a doctorate in psychology and I have point to make) Did he see the goddess and hear her words? Schizoid personalities are said to experience such states. How is he coping up now with what he did? Does he feel a deep and continuing remorse still?


I am baffled, how does a sane man go and do something like that without showing any traces of it on the outside ever, or was he always ill and was shrewdly covering it up?

How can a man live after such a deed, is there something which erases such records from the mind?

Who knows!