Well here it is:Act 2.I'll come out with Act 3 as soon as I can!

"All the world 's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts" - (As You Like It,Act II, Scene VII).


Act 2: The Doctor and The Patient

9th June,2006

Scene 1:

10:19 pm

Dr.Ramgopal was in his study. His wife , Roma had just tucked their daughter,Avantika to sleep.Ramgopal pondered over his daughter as he sat in his armchair,smoking a cigar and reading the file of patient 66. But his thoughts were preoccupied with his daughter. She lay in her soft bed,tucked under the warm woolen blanket ,cuddling her teddy bear.A cherubic smile on her face. She was beautiful and he adored her.

They had had dinner at Le Château that night. Ramgopal,his wife and their child.Every part of the evening had been enjoyable from the food,the music and the mystical ambience at the European restaurant to the long drive home. It filled him with a sense of completion, of satisfaction, a feeling which was about to be shattered.

His study was a large room with five shelves full of books dealing with a range of topics from psychology to literature to travel guides. At the centre of the room was a glass table imported from Sweden and a leather armchair which the rich doctor had purchased a few months ago. Ramgopal was comfortably seated in his well padded chair and was dragging on a Montecristo cigar. There was a light drizzle outside and the only sound which penetrated the silence of the room was that of water on glass. He picked up the plastic covered file placed on his table. Nandy had dropped it off an hour ago. He turned the pages.It contained the cases of patients 50-70.He finally reached patient 66.

Patient Number: 66
Name : Prakash Singh
Previous Hospital: Kerala Psychiatric Hospital
Symptoms : Convulsions,fits of violence,writing on walls, sudden outbursts of Shakespearean language.

“Hmm” Ramgopal already knew all of this.He wanted to know more.He wanted to know what made this man tick.He wanted to know who this man really was.He proceeded to the next page..

HISTORY: Little is known about this man. All we know is that he used to be a stage actor in the mid 1990s.He specialized in Shakespearean plays and worked for the Lucknow Film and Theatre Troupe. However, he was sacked one day after he failed to remember his lines during a play. That very night, he killed his wife with a kitchen knife and poured poison in his daughter’s ear while she was sleeping. He then wrote a series of numbers on the walls of his apartment: 12, 22, 23,31. The police never understood what he meant by these numbers and on interrogation he always screamed lines from Shakespearean tragedies. He was tried in court for double homicide but the defense proved that he was mentally sick and therefore could not be sentenced. He was sent to our institute on 6th June,1996 and transferred to the Delhi Institute on the 24th of May,2006.-Dr.Kumaraswamy,Head Of Department Of Psychiatric Studies And Mental Disorders ,Kerala Psychiatric Hospital.

The cigar dropped from the brim of Ramgopal’s lips, he felt the file slip through his fingers. He was not dealing with just a lunatic. He was not dealing with just a mysterious patient. He was dealing with a man who had murdered his own family..


Scene 2

10th June 2006:

11:14 pm

“So you killed your own family, eh?” Ramgopal whispered to Singh in his small little compartment.”Get off my chair” , Singh managed to reply despite the sedative. Singh like all the other patients at “The Fortress” had been assigned “special rooms” or compartments which were more like cages than anything else. Each compartment was about 700 cubic feet in volume and each compartment housed a bed, a table and chair and a toilet. At this time,Ramgopal was sitting on “Singh’s chair” in “his” compartment. Singh had just been given a small dose of valium,just enough to dull the senses without inducing sleep. A guard was outside the room just in case. Ramgopal knew that this man was a killer but he wanted to know why would he murder his own wife and daughter.Was it done out of sheer rage? Was it revenge? And what about those numbers…? Ramgopal didn’t need to know all this. No,he wanted to know all of this.

There was a single light in the room and beside the bed there was a shelf full of books. These were Singh’s personal “belongings”. Ramgopal got off his seat and walked around the room. He came right up to Singh and asked “Why, why did you kill your wife and child?” Singh’s face was upturned,he was looking straight at the bulb that dangled from the ceiling. He grinned and without looking at the desperate doctor, whispered “Wouldn’t you like to know?” The doctor’s patience grew thin. He strode behind Singh’s chair and took a syringe and a vial of temazepam out of his pocket. He filled the syringe and plunged it into Singh’s neck. Singh whimpered for an instant,the needle took him by surprise. Other than that his face was expressionless. After 5 minutes, Ramgopal went to the shelf and asked again “Why?” Singh answered this time but his answer was barely decipherable. His wavering gaze still transfixed on the bulb,he said “Shakespeare…”. Ramgopal rushed towards Singh and cried dramatically “What? What on earth has Shakespeare got to do with a double homicide?!” He was enraged. This man was toying with him. But it was futile. Singh had already entered “a state of complete sleep”.The dual effect of the valium and the temazepam was probably too much, the doctor mused. He calmed himself and went back to the shelf. It was a small wooden,make shift shelf cramped with dusty,thick books.He hunched on his knees and perused the titles: Paradise Lost, The Works Of Shelley, Sherlock Holmes,Short Stories by Oscar Wilde, Hannibal Rising and at the end of the stack –a very old,hard bound book,it read “Shakespeare”.

Scene 3:

11:49 pm

Ramgopal read the title. “No, he couldn’t possibly mean..”.He pulled the book out of the shelf and stole a glance at Singh. He was still under the effect of the drugs. He looked innocent in his sleep-almost childlike. Ramgopal stealthily crept out of the room. He was a doctor at the hospital, taking some thing out of a patient’s room for examination was completely justifiable but still he felt like a thief under a scanner. He hastily tucked the book under his coat and rushed back to his chamber.


The doctor opened the book and started flipping the pages. The pages of the book bore the tinge of age but it wasn’t covered in dust. The book had been read recently. There was nothing odd about the book except the fact that a number of pages were marked. They were marked in the sense that speeches from particular plays had been underlined. The curious doctor began reading the speeches, one by one:


How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!-
Hamlet
Act 1,scene 2.


O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I'll no longer be a Capulet.
-Romeo And Juliet
Act 2,scene 2


There's daggers in men's smiles: the near in blood,
The nearer bloody.
-Macbeth
Act 2,scene 3

"Love sought is good, but giv'n unsought is better" .
- Twelfth Night
Act III, Scene I

Dr. Ramgopal stared long and hard at these lines. They were the only lines underlined in the entire book. Ramgopal like any young lad of the twentieth century had read Sherlock Holmes in his high school days and had idolized the genius of the detective who never existed and the case before him tantalized his senses. He was no ace detective but he wanted to try and find out what Singh was trying to tell him. Singh had mentioned Shakespeare and it was perhaps no remarkable coincidence that he managed to find a book by the same name on Singh’s shelf. “Hmmm” ,he grabbed his fountain pen and tore a page off his prescription pad. What were the lines about? They were all from Shakespearean tragedies-1st similarity. The first set of lines represented a kind of despondency,a profound depression. The second set of lines was about a woman’s relationship with her lover. The third set was about betrayal. The fourth was a conclusive argument about love. Ramgopal chewed the nib of his pen, he scratched his head and thought as if his entire existence depended on unveiling Singh’s secret. Then it struck him. He scribbled down the act and scene numbers of the lines but not like the usual act number,scene number but rather together-two numbers side by side,one denoting the act and the other the scene.The numbers read 12,22,23,31. Ramgopal had seen this series of numbers before. He felt an adrenaline rush,he seized his briefcase and rummaged a bit to come out with the file Nandy had handed him the night before. He turned over to Singh’s history. The numbers mentioned by the Head Of Department were 12,22,23,31-an exact match.




Scene 4:

2:01 am

Ramgopal couldn’t believe what he saw. A girl in a pink frock stood in his chamber. She had short ivory hair which covered her eyes and she viciously clutched a doll to her side. With her other hand she clasped her ear and cried. She was crying but her cries weren’t human. They pierced his ears and filled his entire being with a sense of cold dread. He stumbled back. “Who, who are you??” He whimpered at the little girl.

The girl who behaved as if she had not noticed his presence there before smiled. Her smile was crooked yet surprisingly sweet. But her teeth, something was wrong, her canines were pointed, jagged like that of an animal. She spoke “Hello daddy”. Ramgopal could not believe his ears. “Av..avantika?!!” Now the girl started laughing. Her laugh was as unnatural as her grief. It echoed throughout the room, it haunted the world in that little chamber. “Come closer daddy” She drew closer to him. “No, no stay back!” Ramgopal screamed. He could hear a faint ringing sound as she drew upon him but he could not discern the sound.

A minute later he awoke in his office. He checked the time. It was past 2 in the morning. The prescription pad with the numbers and Singh’s case history were still on the table. There was no sign of the girl in the frock. There was no doll. There was essentially nothing at all. “Aah probably dozed off..” He checked his cell phone. 3 missed calls and 1 text message from his daughter “Hello daddy. Where are you?” He massaged his head. He had been up at work too late. The stress had probably been getting to him. He had figured out the meaning of the numbers but he still had no idea as to what they had to do with the murders. “The girl…no it was just a dream..” He packed his briefcase and left his chamber. The Fortress and the Hell Hole would be relegated to his dreams that night. He would sleep at home. But as he drove home the girl in the frock predominated his thoughts and he pondered, “She was just a dream..a hallucination. Wasn’t she?”