The only child to the Crabtrees, 14-year old Matilda, was away to a friend's for an overnight stay. The parents had as such a patch of time to enjoy themselves and came home late from a party. Matilda had in the meantime changed her mind and got back home with her friend in tow. The two heads Joined in devising a practical joke to be played on the Crabtree seniors. They made appropriate noises to lead Mr and Mrs Crabtree to suspect lurking burglars in the house. When Matilda Jumped on them from her bedroom closet, the father cut her down with a single pistol shot. Matilda died with the fatal words on her lips. "I love you daddy” — fatal for Crabtree senior.

What went into building such an impossibly cruel, such inconceiyably ludicrous mistake? A state of perpetual Insecurity forcing entire populations to be hung on unrelenting tenterhooks, even in places like an American provincial township, one of the sleepiest possible retreats in the world,' does fashion such horrors as the Crabtrees are In now. The local police chief, supposed to arrest them and deciding not to, said it showed how scared people were. in their own homes these days.

Can we imagine the state of mind families, are in violent Dhaka or in a village — any village — in the interior, immersed in a hopelessly bottomless ’abyss of insecurity?