It’s 3.41:am and I am awakened by a gory nightmare. My sister’s foot is being ripped off by an overgrown beast. As if that were not enough, another beast  joins in to feast on the severed limb as I struggle to pull her off to safety. But   we are outnumbered. My body freezes at seeing us cornered by more gnashing beasts now. There is no way out. In a distance I hear some goats bleating loudly. That’s when I decide to end this nightmare, even if it was at the cost of jolting myself out of sleep. I felt my lips saying a prayer as I slowly opened my eyes. The bleating, now outside my window, got louder. My reality and dreams had overlapped. I dragged my cold body to the oversized window. On the long dark stretch outside, a few goats waddled along with their owners. Their pace was much slower than the men walking them.

“It’s Bakrid today. Did they know?” I wondered.

I also wondered about the ultimate sacrifice that Keenan Santos and Reuben Fernandez had made to protect their friends. These two great souls have absolved the world of its cynicism about the existence of true love. What was it, if not unadulterated love that drove these two innocent boys to put themselves in harm’s way? To not for a second think as they stood in front of those blood-thirsty blades, that those few minutes could be their last?

I salute such selfless brave hearts for renewing my hope in humanity but while doing so I can’t help but think of their mothers; all of their mothers, in fact. For is the pain and suffering of the two mothers who lost their sons any greater than the four mothers who might lose their sons too?

Keenan and Reuben’s mothers might try to find solace in the cause their sons sacrificed themselves for, but the mothers of Jitendra, Sunil, Satish and Deepak will forever be condemned by mankind. They are doomed to a lifetime of guilt, void and agony. And even as I sit here pondering over my own motherhood, I try to make sense of only one thing- Does any mother ever caress the life inside of her and wish for her child to be a rapist or a murderer? I am sure these mothers are wondering the same.

Keenan and Reuben will go down in history for their courage and I hope their spirits will guide me whenever I am faced with a situation that tempts me to choose the easy way out.

And even though my catechism classes taught me that ‘An eye for an eye makes the whole world go blind’; my moral science classes also taught me that one rotten apple can spoil the entire basket.

As for the four accused, my court of law hereby sentences them to a lifetime of agonizing pain and suffering. They  are guilty as charged on the following counts:

For brutally snuffing out two innocent lives before time.

For making this Christmas a miserable one for the Santos and Fernandez families.

For taking away the normalcy of their families forever.

For adding to the statistics of an unsafe Mumbai.

For taking away a woman’s right to hang out with friends at whatever time and wherever she chooses to.

And lastly, for taking away my right to a peaceful sleep.

I know those beasts in my dreams were you.

Insia Dariwala is a graduate from F.I.T New York (Advertising and Mass communications), loves to tell stories and is a filmmaker. ‘The Candy Man’, her hard hitting debut film on child abuse won her two ‘Best Director’ awards in India (2009, 2010) and also got nominated at Barcelona International Film Festival and the New York Short film Festival in 2010.