Lal Bihari – Murder by Paper

Lal Bihari – Murder by Paper – by Liam Sweeny.

We do our best to bring you the strange, odd, and bizarre news of the world. That’s what we’re scouring the Google machine for. And sometimes it’s a bird picked clean to the bone, and sometimes, once in a great while, we have before us a weird feast. This, we believe, is just such a feast.

What is it to be dead? Well, you start stinking. Everyone that loves you is devastated, and those thousands of Facebook friends kick out thoughts and prayers. Funerals, readings of wills, getting your ashes dumped on the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. But you, my friends and neighbors, are dead, so none of that’s your problem.

Lal Bihari died in India. Sort of. His uncle bribed an official to have Bihari pronounced dead in the government records, which he did so he could inherit ancestral lands. So from 1975 to 1994, he was dead to the government.

He didn’t take this lying down, lest he be mistaken for actual dead. He gave himself a funeral, tried to get his widow a pension, even contested election results to try to prove he was alive. No luck.

He didn’t even know he was “dead” until he tried to get a bank loan.

There was an episode of MASH where the army mistakenly declared Hawkeye dead, and this reminds me of that. Like Bihari, Hawkeye wasn’t all that pleased. And also like Bihari, he had a service, in his case, a wake.

As if this couldn’t get weirder, Bihari is now trying to get an AK-47, illegal for civilian use in India. He claims people are after his life. The real one. And the courts not only threw out the petition, but charged him 10,000 rupies for wasting its time.

Time to move, brother. You can get AK-47s in gas stations in Texas.

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