Thiruvananthapuram • A suicide note left behind by a goldsmith says the deadly cyanide “tastes acrid and burns the tongue”.

Perhaps this is the first-ever real-life account of a person tasting cyanide. No one who had got the real state ever lived to tell the tale.

Here too the victim is gone but he had caught a few fleeting moments before his first accidental taste and final gulp when he penned his findings.

The incident happened on June 17 at a hotel in Palakkad in the mid-north Kerala district, near Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu.

The goldsmith, M P Prasad, 32, a bachelor, checked into a hotel, ordered liquor from a nearby bar, mixed cyanide powder in the liquor with the butt of his pen and casually bit the butt while penning the suicide note to the district magistrate.

That he had carelessly bit the pen butt is of his own account in the letter addressed to the magistrate. He had followed it up with fatal peg, according to police surgeon P B Gujral and sub-inspector P Pramod. But having realised the fateful folly from the acrid taste, he ventured in haste to record his discovery.

In the note addressed to the Magistrate, Prasad said that he didn’t want to end his life but petty gold merchants from Maharashtra who had supplied him spurious gold had cheated him of Rs300,000.

Gujral, who had conducted nearly 4,000 autopsies, believes Prasad’s version that he had “accidentally” put the pen into his mouth.

The note in Malayalam, addressed to the magistrate on the reason for his suicide, pauses a while leaving a gap when he bit the pen, and then shouts:

“Doctors, Potassium Cyanide, I’ve tasted it. It sears the tongue. It’s hard, acrid. I’ve read in some novel how to kill a person who reads a lot. Sprinkle cyanide dust on pages and he’ll lick the dust as he turns pages with his fingers, moist with saliva. Now I know that you can kill a person without leaving a trace of suspicion this way,” the note said.

Dr Gujral calls it a naive inference since the person who tastes the lethal substance in very tiny doses would be repelled by the taste and start throwing up. In this case, the pause in the letter to magistrate explains his first taste of the tiny bit of poison.

He had written more than a foolscap page between the first taste and the final cocktail of cyanide and liquor.

The police broke open the door and recovered the remaining cyanide and the alcohol bottle from the room. They have registered a case of unnatural death. The door was found locked from inside, indicating no one from outside had a hand in poisoning him to death.

He was found dead in bed, with hands twitching at his stomach, indicating the terrible burning of the insides.

Dr Gujral said he could smell almond of typical cyanide intake the moment he opened the stomach. “In fact when cyanide is suspected, we open the stomach to catch the smell which fades sooner,” he said.

The other indications are “bright red hue of blood and internal organs”.

These observations were true in the case of Prasad but Dr Gujral is awaiting the examination of the contents sent to the Regional Chemical Lab at Kochi for confirmation of cyanide and the particular compound in which it was consumed.

The question whether the taste of liquor had masked the real taste of cyanide is relevant but the almond smell which an experienced surgeon gets on opening the stomach corroborates Prasad’s observation.

Potassium cyanide is the usual form in which it’s available to smiths to purify gold. Some 200mg to 300mg is enough to kill a normal adult.

“The suicide note is a document. The autopsy report and the chemical examiners’ findings would complete the scientific validation to prove that this is the first ever case in black and white of a personal account of what cyanide tastes like,” he said.

“No authoritative document is prevalent anywhere in the world, proving the taste of cyanide. I’ve searched some 600 sites but nowhere is it as true and clear as in the note left by Prasad,” says Dr Gujral.