A 17-year-old girl was allegedly involved in the killing of her parents. Her 8-year-old-brother was initially sleeping, later locked up in a room after he woke up to the murderous commotion. The twelve-year-old maidservant helped the killers drag the dead bodies to the bathroom. If the guest killers were friends of the girl, we suppose they were also of her age. It was like an adventure of Peter Pan spending his never-ending childhood with his gang of boys on the island of Neverland.
The gang leader in our story is the girl herself, who put sleep-inducing drug in the coffee of her parents. She prepared them for their imminent death with the diligence of an anesthetist preparing patients for surgical procedures. This girl told the police that she didn’t kill her parents in the sense of actually stabbing them to death. But it’s suspected she was the one who masterminded it and invited her friends as hired hands. She could have acted in vengeance to eliminate two adult obstacles to her footloose freedom.
Now we know the girl is an addict and so are the accomplices who brought their butcher’s skill to help a friend. This girl had an undisciplined life and she was disobedient and reckless. She stayed out of the house until late night, failed in her studies and gave her parents enough reasons to restrict her movements. That was when she planned to kill.
Newspaper columns and television talk shows are screaming how this one grisly tale showed that our society had lost its mooring. They said we have neglected social issues while being overwhelmed by political squabbles. One talk show host even asked parents to be friendly with their children, too late for parents already dead.
But is that so? What about developed countries where politics is more streamlined and peaceful? What prompts kids in those countries to bring guns to their schools, mowing down teachers and classmates in blood-curling fury?
Once, poverty was the number one culprit for all things wrong. Everything was blamed on the stomach growling with hunger. It has been either due to poverty reduction or improvement in the behaviour of the poor, or both, that penury-led crimes have gone down in this country.
Most crimes nowadays are connected with solvent, affluent people. Most of these crimes are prompted by sex, money, turf control and political showdowns. It’s no longer about satisfying hunger or basic needs. Cholera, malaria and smallpox are killing fewer people than arteries clogged with clumsy cholesterol. This society has moved one notch up in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs where security, family, health and property are the new priorities.
The double murder at Chamelibagh has hit us close to home. It has exposed the risks involved in these new priorities, families slipping away in the frenzy of building fortune. No, it’s not about bashing the rich and the fortunate. It’s not about the unbreakable cycle of greed to sin to death. It’s about that monster living in the dense layers of our genes. This monster does its own bookkeeping, exacting usurious interest for its gifts.
How that works in juvenile minds is a complex thing. Scientists tell us that teenagers respond to the world differently from adults. Not because of hormones, but because teens and adults use two different parts of the brain to think. Teens mostly use the amygdala, a small almond shaped region that guides instinctual or “gut” reactions. Adults rely on the frontal cortex, which governs reason and planning.
That doesn’t apply to every teenager though. Some are born defective like toys coming from factories. They aren’t normal, malfunctioning due to flawed wiring. In our days we grew up with autistic kids in the family, some had physical or mental deformities. We saw naughty kids, violent kids, many of whom were incorrigible bullies. But how many of us remember growing up with juvenile addicts?
If drugs are messing up children today, what is ransacking their part of the brain? Why do they have to smoke or drink to give them a fix? Psychiatrists argue that children get high to cope with the lows in their lives. These lows can come from many sources, but almost always starts from the family. Our Peter Pan made that evident when her mother’s body received eleven wounds and father’s received two.
This nine-wound difference gives the measure of it. It gives the motive but it also deepens the mystery. The girl hated her mother more, which must have been why she was also hacked more.
It brings us to the fundamental question. Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Are drugs pushing the children to despair or are we pushing them to drugs? Food for thought: In pursuit of rumbustious material merriment, are we adults making our children sad?

The writer is Editor of weekly First News and an opinion writer for The Daily Star.