Thursday, March 13, 2008

WE COME ON THE SHIP THEY CALL THE MAYFLOWER, WE COME ON THE SHIP THAT SAILS THE MOON: Like, I suspect, a lot of people (those that read People, for example), I have an uncomfortable fascination with certain crime stories, the most recent being the terrible story of Eve Carson, the University of North Carolina student-body president who was murdered last week in a late-night robbery. I don't know why some stories are more engrossing to me than others, except that the first part of this sentence is a lie. What I know, but hate to admit, is that it has something to do with an innate vanity -- an increased interest in stories where I shared or sometimes wish I shared some distinguishing characteristic with either the victim or the perpetrator. They came from my home town; she was a high-achieving college student; he was a lawyer; etc. I suppose that's the instinct that makes me scrutinize every snapshot the media posts for some kind of recognition of myself and that I can pretend legitimizes idle questions like "what if I knew her?" or "what if it were me?"

It felt a little like an accusation, then, to learn that the men who murdered Eve Carson had another victim about whom I had never heard. His name was Abhijit Mahato. He was a grad student at Duke, just a few miles up the road from Carson; he came from India after doing his undergraduate work at IIT; and, knowing what I do now, his earnest, self-deprecating, optimistic, unfinished web page is just unbearably sad. It's not surprising to me that the media would be more attentive to the death of a pretty blonde achiever or that I would miss or ignore a story about the murder-robbery of a Bengali grad student (or that Duke and UNC's basketball teams would observe a moment of silence for one but not the other), but the fact that it is and I did (and they did) makes me feel pretty dirty right now.

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