Jai guru deva om.... Nothing’s gonna change my world.  

            He crouched himself down quivering in a corner of his cell like a cornered animal, humming his favorite Beatles song. The sinister pulsations of the place had wrought him a sense of insufferable gloom: the walls, he senses, are decomposing like vegetable matter, the bars of hardened tool steel outstretched to choke him, the dull and single fold-up bunk diabolically immovable, and the coldness of the concrete floor swallowing him up. With only a lone iron barred window, he could helplessly stare at the fog-enshrouded outside of his cell, the oppressively dark night sky and a portion of the equally desolate gun tower. 

            Just like the others, he had only bread and water for this day and had to wait for three more days for a solid meal. Screams from someone being beaten in one of the penal bastions or the “disciplinary unit” reverberates throughout the cell block as though the sounds were coming through a megaphone. In his three-week stay here, he had already grown used to it; yet hearing them still feels like barbed wires squished on both eyes. He had seen a fellow emerging from that bastion after days, totally senseless and babbling to himself so that he had to be moved to a padded cell in the prison’s hospital ward. They were demoralizing to him. The sufferings were demoralizing to him. 

            Nothing’s gonna change my world. Nothing’s gonna change my world. 

            He had never been brought in there. It’s because even in prison, he had still brought his natural humble and submissive self, always yielding to rules and stooping for higher people. He was a connoisseur of it. His world was pretty much all the same since he started to have sense in his surroundings. He grew up in a milieu of laborers, slaves and plunderous land owners. He had toiled the same land his forefathers have toiled before, and still paid the increasing debts they have. When he was still at a very young age, probably six or seven, he was that scruffy little boy who moved around and insisted on helping his father work in the field. Since then, he had become his papa’s buddy and had a grubbing hoe as his sole property. 

            One thing that binds them together was their faith. His mother would always tell him and his other five siblings bible stories before sleep, and had them pray the rosary after dinner.  

            God has reasons, she said. 

            At least that was a lot long time ago. Since his wife, that lonely bitch, ran off with his comrade three bitter years ago and had left him and their son alone with all the town talks, the thought of taking his life away had become an obsession to him. Only thing that holds him back was his son, that dear little child. They had grown so close he had thought of him way too much. They are all they’ve got after all. God knows how much breath Jaime had drawn him whenever that boy chuckles upon receiving a box of Curly Tops or that white kite now torn and tattered in the garbage pit, or those  favorite back rides he always let him have even if his back was excruciatingly aching from a whole day’s work at the field. He thought he had nothing more to wish for except that they’ll forever be together. Jaime was the only precious thing that made him forget the bleakness of his life. 

            And when that poor child went ill with Malaria, lay bedridden for almost a week, seeing with his very own eyes the decay of his beloved son, he had but to succumb to the trance of that dull and soundless day and set off straight to that black pick-up truck with his grubbing hoe dangling on one hand and stuck it on the forehead of the Arab man who had asked him for ways. 

            He had filched the man’s wallet of course, and some jewelleries — two gold rings (one a university ring and the other probably his wedding ring), a silver Rolex, and a gold double link rolo bracelet, before hiding the body in the car’s trunk and dumping it down the bushes below one of the overlooks off LockCliff Drive a good kilometers away.  

He had done what a desperate man would do, what a desperate loving father would do. He had already made up his mind the night before the killing that he would do whatever it takes just to save his son. He had consumed a pack of cigarettes that night outside their grisly shanty. He won’t let his son see him smoking. He was never a smoker but circumstances had made him so. That night, he also burned those religious readings his mother had given him. 

After the killing, he had gone home with his mind in vertigo with the prescribed medicines and a brand new toy, a brick game, only to be greeted by the lifeless form of the child in his deathbed, the poor 12-year old boy’s once sweet face raked off by the mask of a cadaver, his hair left with no signs of luster, his eyes and mouth still open, and on one hand is a crumpled picture of the boy and his parents at church taken when he was still two years old. 

Now, who told him that his world can change through prayers? He had long since forgotten Him. Maybe he would still believe in providence. Yes, he was already doomed to suffer. Nothing’s gonna change my world. Nothing’s gonna change my world. 

With the broken glasses he had lifted from one of the inmates, he sliced his jugular and died still crouched on that corner of his cold cell. He had sought death himself triumphantly. After all, death was the place he had been calling home.