The following story by Vidya Bharti of B. El. Ed III Year won the first prize in “Kaaghaz”, the Bilingual Creative Writing competition organized during the Literary Fest of Keshav Mahavidyala, University of Delhi on 27^th March, 2018. The topic was “the broken guitar” and was given on the spot.

The Broken Guitar

After another hectic day I was back sleeping on my cozy bed. It was around 4 am when my phone rang. It was my Junior Assistant. I jumped out of the bed when I heard there had been another mystery case and this time, around the death of a young girl. I rushed to the site and saw her lying on the floor. They had put barricades around her body. A beautiful girl, in her early twenties.

I wondered what it could be. Robbery? Conflict over money? Suicide? Murder? Love? I started examining the body and observed something very strange— there was no sign of wounds, no sign of protest before dying, nothing that seemed unusual except her heart, which was not beating anymore. I wondered what had happened to her. A possible culprit could be poison. I sent the body for postmortem, and asked the doctors not to destroy the body. I don’t know why I did this. On the investigation site there was nothing that seemed unusual, nothing! It was just the hall of a music club. There was nothing suspicious near the body except a guitar, sorry, a broken guitar. I wondered what she might be doing with a broken guitar, did she break it herself or did someone else do it. Who knew?

Next day, I eagerly awaited the postmortem report. And what I found in the report was unimaginable... nothing was found in the girl's body, no poison or anything which might lead to death. I was shocked as that was the first time I was struggling to find the cause of death instead of the murderer. The next thing I read in the report was even more unbelievable, no one could think it possible—the body was not decaying! It had been 36 hours after she died and still there was no sign of decay, she was as fresh as she was when alive. This pushed me into a world of shock. How was this possible?

We started to look for the girl's family and after talking to them found nothing amiss. Just that, she was a lovely girl and nothing seemed wrong with her life. I was sitting in the office and thinking about the case, when suddenly that broken guitar struck my mind. I immediately asked my assistant to fetch me that guitar. I observed the guitar closely and found it strange that there was no company or brand name written on it. Next day I went to the victim’s house to find where she got this guitar. Her parents knew nothing about it, although they confirmed they saw it with her, but she had never mentioned where she got it from. The mystery was getting denser day by day. If I remember correctly it was around 2 am when I was examining the guitar again in my office. I thought of using UV light to check for radioactive matter or fingerprints on it, but what I found was a series of dashes, like the ones which are printed on the back of items we buy, mainly for identification.  I got a fishy feeling about these dashes, why were they on a guitar? And that too, imprinted with a radioactive material that was surely not from earth.

I called my friend who is a scientist in NASA. I had lost track of the time. I didn’t realize it was so late in the night. I called him and asked him to help me out on this because I was sure these were not mere dashes but a code, a binary code. I asked him to crack the code and immediately sent him the scan of the image. It was so kind of him that he understood the urgency of the matter and started working right away.

After two days he called me back and without wasting a second I picked up the call. And what he told shook the ground beneath me. He said “Lucifer, you were right, these are not mere random dashes! This is a binary code, a code which can bring revolution to the humanity, which can give human kind what we have never experienced before! Lucifer, hold your breath because what I am going to tell you is unbelievable. My friend, this is the code of Singularity!” I just forgot to breathe. Code of Singularity! Lord was I hearing right? This code can bring revolution to human kind, it can open doors for parallel worlds, it can make time travel possible!

Now the question was, what was this code doing on a broken guitar that was found near the body of a dead girl? The only possible explanation is, someone had bought this guitar or sent this guitar a long way from another world. This guitar had travelled through time and made its way to this girl, but why? Only the girl or the sender knew this answer. To know the answer we have to wait, and let the time give the answers itself. The body of the girl is still not decaying and I asked her family members not to burn her as she may not be dead, she might be traveling through time and I believe one day she will return and provide us with all the answers and open the mystery of the broken guitar.

END OF PART 1