He loved visiting his father’s shop, as a child. He would return home from school and then rush to work in his father’s shop, selling woven fabrics and materials of vibrant colors. Ivan’s father had a fabric shop in the local market. Fred was a well-known and respected cloth merchant in the town. His business was thriving and he earned enough money to give himself and his young family, wife, and three children a comfortable existence.
Ivan, at the age of ten, was a mischievous child at school and enjoyed teasing the younger children. He was called to the principal’s office on several occasions. One day, he threw ink on a boy’s uniform just to see if the blotches of blue ink, would look good on a white shirt. The children were studying the Rorschach test that morning, so it was Ivan’s experiment. That evening Ivan was scolded by both his parents and he was sent to bed without dinner.
The next morning, the family woke to the sounds of people screaming, “Fire, Fire, Fire!”. The father and mother rushed down to find that their shop beside the house, was in flames. It was burnt to the ground. All those lovely colorful fabrics were burned to cinders. Fred and his wife Rita were devastated. It took Fred another five years, of working for other people as a salesman before he could restart the cloth merchant business. Ivan’s paradise of colorful fabrics, his paradise was in ashes.
Two decades later, Ivan was thirty, and he was married, to Susie. He had a small job working in a shoe factory. Ivan was dissatisfied with his job. One day, he shipped a large parcel of shoes to the wrong destination. It was to be sent to Europe and he posted it to Asia. The boss fired him from his job. The next morning, Ivan was shocked to see that the shoe factory, was set on fire and it was said to be an arson attack. The number of cases of arson had increased over the years.
That evening, Ivan went to his toolshed. He enjoyed the time spent in his mancave. He needed to find another job soon, as his wife Susie was expecting their firstborn child. He was going to watch the latest boxing match on his laptop in the work shed. He removed the large petrol can that was in the way. At the back of the shed were several filled cans of petrol. He loved the colors of flames and they always reminded him of those multi-colored fabrics in his father’s shop, which was paradise for him. Whenever Ivan looked at flames, his personality changed, it was the shock of him losing paradise as a child. He became a different person and he took on a new personality and started fires just to capture paradise once again. There were two Ivan’s now, the one who had lost paradise and the one who would create paradise.