The overseers woke us a little after dawn, beating any man unfortunate enough to be asleep when they reached him. I was awake and ready, yet I too received a blow from a stick. I growled in anger and started up quickly, but Mahesh stopped me once again. We folded our blankets according to a precise pattern, and placed them in the pile at our end of the room. The guards opened the large steel gates from the outside, and we filed out of the room to assemble for the morning wash. The rectangular bathing area, something like an empty aboveground pool or a dry stone pond, had a huge cast-iron tank at one end.
As we approached, a prisoner opened a valve at the base of the tank, allowing a small jet of water to escape from a pipe that protruded at about shin-height. He scampered up a steel ladder and sat on top of the tank to watch. Men rushed for the pipe, and held their flat aluminium plates under the thin stream of water that issued from it. The crush of men at the tank was ten deep and ten wide: a huge knot of muscle and bone, straining and struggling to reach the pipe.
I waited until the crowd thinned out, watching the men wash themselves with the little water available. A few men, one in twenty, had pieces of soap, and attempted to lather themselves before returning to the pipe for more water. By the time I approached the pipe, the tank was almost empty. The trickle of water that I collected in my plate was wriggling with hundreds of maggot-like creatures. I thrust the plate away in disgust, and several men around me laughed.
"Water worms, brother!" Mahesh said, filling his plate with the squirming, thrashing, semi-transparent creatures. He tipped the plate of wriggling things over his chest and back, and reached out to fill another plate. "They live in the tanks. When the water gets low, the water worms come out of the tap so many, brother! But no problem. They can't hurt you. They don't bite, like the kadmal. They just drop down and die in the cold air, you see? The other fellows fight to get water with not many worms inside. But if we wait, we get plenty of worms, but plenty of water also. This is better, yes? Come on. Challo!
You better grab some, if you want a wash before tomorrow morning.
This is it, brother. We can't be washing in the dormitory. That is a special for the overseers only. They let you wash there last night, because you had a lot of blood on you. But you'll never use that washing place again. We use the toilet inside, but we don't wash there. This is your only washing, brother."
I held the plate under the ever-diminishing trickle of water and then tipped the seething mass of worms over my chest and back, as Mahesh had done. Like all the Indian men I knew, I wore a pair of shorts-the over-underpants, Prabaker had called them in the village-under my jeans. I discarded the jeans, and the next plate full of wriggling beasts went down the front of my shorts.
By the time the overseers began hitting us with their sticks to herd us back into the dormitory, I was as clean as it was possible to be without soap, and using worm-infested water.
In the dormitory we squatted for an hour while we waited for the guards to make the morning head-count. After a time, the squatting caused us excruciating pain in our legs. Whenever anyone tried to stretch or straighten his legs, however, one of the patrolling overseers struck him a vicious blow. I didn't move in the line. I didn't want them to have the satisfaction of seeing me give in to the pain. But as I closed my eyes in sweating concentration, one of them struck me anyway, without cause or provocation. I began to stand, and once again I felt the restraining hands of Mahesh warning me to be still. When a second, third, and then a fourth blow ripped into my ear, over the space of fifteen minutes, I snapped.
"Come here, you fuckin' coward!" I shouted, standing and pointing at the last man who'd struck me. The overseer, a huge and obese man, known to friend and foe alike as Big Rahul, towered over most of the other men in the room. "I'll take that fuckin' stick and jam it so far up your arse I'll be able to see it in your eyes!"
Silence imploded in the room, swallowing every sound. No-one moved. Big Rahul stared. His broad expression, a parody of amused condescension, was infuriating. Slowly, the convict overseers began to converge in support of him. "Come here!" I shouted in Hindi. "Come on, hero! Let's go! I'm ready!"
Suddenly Mahesh and five or six other prisoners rose up all around me and clung to my body, trying to force me down to a squatting position.
"Please, Lin!" Mahesh hissed. "Please, brother, please! Sit down again. Please. I know what I'm telling you. Please. Please!"
There was a moment, while they pulled at my arms and shoulders, when Big Rahul and I made the kind of eye contact where each man knows everything about the violence in the other. His supercilious grin faded, and his eyes fluttered their signal of defeat. He knew it, and I knew it. He was afraid of me. I allowed the men to drag me down to a squatting position. He turned on his heel, and struck out reflexively at the nearest man crouching in the ranks. The tension in the room dissolved, and the head-count resumed.
Breakfast consisted of a single, large chapatti. We chewed them and sipped water during the five minutes allowed, and then the overseers marched us out of the room. We crossed several immaculately clean courtyards. In a broad avenue between fenced areas, the overseers forced us to squat in the morning sunlight while we waited to have our heads shaved. The barbers' wooden stools were in the shade of a tall tree. Every new prisoner had his hair clipped by one barber, and then a second barber shaved his head with a straight razor.
As we were waiting, we heard shouts coming from one of the fenced compounds near the barbers' courtyard. Mahesh nudged me, nodding his head for me to watch. Ten convict overseers dragged a man into the deserted compound beyond the wire fence. There were ropes attached to the man's wrists and waist. More ropes were attached to the buckles and rings of a thick leather collar fitted tightly around the man's neck. Teams of overseers were playing tug-of-war on the wrist ropes. The man was very tall and strong. His neck was as thick as the barrel of a cannon, and his powerful chest and back rippled with muscles. He was African. I recognised him. It was Hassaan Obikwa's driver, Raheem, the man I'd helped escape from the mob near Regal Circle.
We watched in a tight, fast-breathing silence. They manoeuvred Raheem to the centre of the compound, near a stone block about a metre high and a metre wide. He struggled and resisted them, but it was useless. More overseers joined in, with more ropes.
Raheem's legs went out from under him. Three men pulled on each wrist-rope with all their strength. His arms were drawn out so hard from his sides that I thought they might be torn from the sockets. His legs were splayed out at an excruciatingly unnatural angle. Other men, pulling on the ropes that passed through the leather collar, dragged his body toward the stone block. Using the ropes, the overseers stretched his left arm out, with the hand and forearm resting on the block.
Raheem lay beside the block, his other arm stretched out by another team of overseers. One of the overseers then climbed onto the block and jumped off onto Raheem's arm, with both feet, snapping the arm backwards in a sickening crunch of gristle and bone.
He couldn't scream, because the collar at his throat was too tight, but his mouth opened and closed on the scream that we made for him in our minds. His legs began to twitch and spasm. A violent shiver passed through his whole body, ending in a rapid shaking of his head that would've been funny if it wasn't so frightening. The overseers dragged him around until his right arm was resting on the block. The same man climbed the stone, talking all the while to one of his friends, pulling tension on a rope.
After a pause, he blew his nose with his fingers, scratched himself, and jumped onto the right arm, snapping it backwards.
Raheem lost consciousness. The convict overseers looped their ropes around his ankles and then dragged his body out of the compound. His arms flopped and flapped behind his body, as limp and lifeless as long black socks filled with sand.
"You see?" Mahesh whispered.
"What was that all about?"
"He hit one of the overseers," Mahesh answered in a terrified whisper. "That's why I stopped you. That's what they can do."
Another man leaned close to us, speaking quickly.
"And here, there is no guarantee of doctor," he breathed. "Maybe you see doctor, maybe no. Maybe that black fellow will live, maybe not live. No good luck to hit overseer, baba."
Big Rahul walked toward us, resting the bamboo stick on his shoulder. He paused beside me, and brought the stick down with a lazy smack across my back. His laughter as he walked away down the line of waiting men was brutally loud, but it was also weak and false, and it didn't fool me. I'd heard that laugh before, in another prison across the world. I knew it well. Cruelty is a kind of cowardice. Cruel laughter is the way cowards cry when they're not alone, and causing pain is how they grieve. Squatting in the queue, I noticed with a revulsive flinch that tiny insects, lice, were crawling in the hair of the man in front of me. I'd been feeling itchy since I'd woken. Until that moment, I'd put it down to the bites of the kadmal, the rough blanket I'd slept on, and the many cuts I'd sustained in walking the gauntlet. I looked at the next man's hair. It, too, was crawling with writhing, white lice. I knew what that itchiness was, on my body and in my hair. I turned to look at Mahesh. His hair was alive with lice. I ruffled my own hair onto the palm of my hand, and there they were-white and crab-like, and too many to count at a glance.
Body lice. The blankets they'd forced us to use as sleeping mats were infested with them. Suddenly, the itchiness I felt was a crawling horror, and I knew that the filthy pests were all over my body. When my head was shaved, and we made our way back to the dormitory, Mahesh explained about the body lice, known as sheppesh.
"Sheppesh are fuckin' horrible, brother. The little fucks are everywhere. That's why the overseers have their own blankets, and sleep at their own end of the room. No sheppesh there. Come on, watch me, Lin, and I will show you what it is you must be doing."
He took off his T-shirt, and pulled it inside out. Holding the ribbed seam at the neck, he prised it apart and revealed the sheppesh crawling in the crease at the seam.
"They're fuckin' hard to see, brother, but you don't have any trouble feeling them, crawling on you, yaar? Don't worry. They're easy enough to kill. You just squeeze the little fucks between your thumbnails, like this."
I watched him as he worked his way around the neck of his T-shirt, killing the body lice one by one. He moved on to the seams at the sleeves, then, and finally to the hem at the bottom of the shirt. There were scores of the lice, and he squashed each one expertly between his thumbnails.
"Now this shirt is clean," he said, folding it carefully, away from his body, and placing it on the bare stone floor. "No more sheppesh. Next you wrap a towel around yourself, like this, then take off your pants, and you kill all the sheppesh on your pants.
When clean, put your pants with your shirt. Then your body-your arms underneath, your arse, your balls. And when your clothes they are clean, and your body it is clean, you get dressed again.
And you'll be okay, not so many sheppesh, until the night. And then you'll get too many new sheppesh on you from the blanket.
And no chance for sleeping without blanket, because the overseers will give you a solid pasting if you try. You can't avoid it. And then tomorrow, you start the whole business again. This is what we call sheppesh farming, and we are farmers every day at Arthur Road."
I looked around the open, rain-drenched courtyard beside the long dormitory, and a hundred men were busy farming, picking the lice from their clothes and killing them methodically. Some men didn't care. They scratched and shivered like dogs, and allowed the lice to breed on them. For me, the itchy, crawling violation of the body lice was a frenzy on the surface of my skin. I ripped my shirt off and examined the seam at the collar. The shirt was alive with them, squirming, burrowing, and breeding. I began to kill them, one by one, seam by seam. It was the work of several hours, and I practised it with fanatical assiduity, every morning that I spent in Arthur Road Prison, but I never felt clean there.
Even when I knew that I'd killed the lice, and rid myself of them temporarily, I still felt their wriggling, itching, crawling loathsomeness on my skin. And little by little, month by month, the horror of that creeping infestation pushed me to the edge.
For the whole of each day, between the early-morning head-count and the evening meal, we moved about within a large courtyard that was attached to our dormitory room. Some men played cards or other games. Some talked with friends, or tried to sleep on the stone paths. Not a few men, shuffling uncertainly on thin, tottering legs, talked a twitching madness to themselves, and stumbled into the walls until we turned them gently and set them on a new course.
Lunch, at Arthur Road, consisted of a watery soup ladled out onto our flat aluminium plates. The evening meal, served at four thirty with the addition of a single chapatti, was a repetition of that soup of the day. It was made with the peelings and discarded ends of various vegetables-peelings from beetroot on one day, from carrots the next, from pumpkins on the third day, and so on. The eyes and bruises, cut from potatoes, were used, as were the hard ends of courgettes, the papery outer skins of onions, and the muddy scrapings from turnips. We never saw pieces of the vegetables-those went to the guards and the convict overseers. In our soup, the scraps of peelings or stalky ends floated in a colourless, watery liquid. The large vat that the overseers wheeled into our compound for every meal brought one hundred and fifty ladled servings from the kitchens. There were one hundred and eighty men in the room. To remedy the deficiency, the overseers poured two buckets of cold water into the vat. They did that at every meal, with a ritual head-count and a pantomime display of inspiration as they solved the problem by adding the buckets of water. It never failed to rouse them to raucous laughter.
At six o'clock, after the evening meal, the guards counted us once more, and locked us in the long dormitory room. For two hours, then, we were permitted to talk, and to smoke charras, purchased from the overseers. Inmates at Arthur Road Prison received five ration tickets, called coupons, per month. Men with access to money could also purchase coupons. Some men held rolls with several hundred coupons in them. They used them to buy tea- two coupons bought a cup of hot tea-bread, sugar, jam, hot food, soap, shaving accessories, cigarettes, and the services of men who washed clothes or did other odd jobs. They were also the black-market currency in the prison. For six coupons, a man could buy a tiny goli, or a ball, of charras. For fifty he could buy a shot of penicillin. A few dealers also traded in heroin, for sixty coupons a fix, but the overseers were ruthless in their attempts to exterminate it. Heroin addiction was one of the few forces strong enough to overcome terror and challenge the torturers' authority. Most men, sane enough to fear the overseers' almost limitless power, satisfied themselves with the semi-legal charras, and the perfume of hashish often drifted through the room.
Every night the men gathered in groups to sing. Sitting in circles of twelve or more men, and tapping on their upturned aluminium plates as if they were tabla drums, the prisoners sang love songs from their favourite movies. They sang of heartbreak, and all the sorrows of loss. A particularly beloved song might start in one circle, be taken up by a second group for the next verses, and then move to a third group and a fourth before working its way back to the first. Around each circle of twelve or fifteen singers were twenty or thirty more men who provided the chorus of clapping hands and supporting voices. They cried openly as they sang, and they laughed together often. And with their music they helped one another to keep love alive in hearts that the city had forsaken, and forgotten.
At the end of the second week at Arthur Road, I met with two young men who were due for release within the hour. Mahesh assured me that they would carry a message for me. They were simple, illiterate village boys who'd visited Bombay and had found themselves caught in the round-up of unemployed youths. After three months in Arthur Road without any formal charge, they were finally being released. On a piece of paper I wrote the name and address of Abdel Khader Khan, and a short note informing him that I was in prison. I gave it to the men and promised to reward them when I was released. They joined their hands together in a blessing and then left me, their smiles bright and hopeful.
Later that day the overseers called our dormitory together with more than usual violence, and forced us to squat in close ranks.
As we watched, the two young men who'd tried to help me were dragged into the room and dumped against a wall. They were only semi-conscious. They'd been beaten viciously. Blood wept from wounds on their faces. Their mouths were swollen and their eyes were blackened. A snakeskin pattern of lathi bruises covered their bare arms and legs.
"These dogs tried to take a message out of the jail for the gora," Big Rahul the overseer roared at us in Hindi. "Anyone who tries to help the gora, will get the same. Understand? Now these two dogs have six more months in jail, in my room! Six months!
Help him, any of you, and you will get the same."
The overseers left the room to share a cigarette, and we rushed forward to help the men. I washed their wounds, and dressed the worst of them with strips of cloth. Mahesh helped me, and when we finished the job he took me outside to smoke a beedie.
"It's not your fault, Lin," he said, looking out at the yard, where men walked or sat or picked lice from their clothes.
"Of course it's my fault."
"No, man," he said compassionately. "It's this place, this Arthur Road. That business, that happens every day. It's not your fault, brother, and it's not mine. But now, it is a real problem for you. Nobody will be helping you now-just like in the lock-up at Colaba. I don't know how long you will stay here. You see old Pandu, over there? He is in this room three years now, and still not any court action for him. Ajay is more than one year here.
Santosh is two years in this room, for no charge, and he doesn't know when he will go to court. I... I don't know how long you will be in this room. And, sorry, brother, nobody will help you now."
The weeks passed, and Mahesh was right-no-one risked the anger of the overseers to help me. Men were released from the room every week, and I approached as many of them as I could, and as carefully as possible, but none would help. My situation was becoming desperate. After two months at the prison, I guessed that I'd lost about twelve kilos. I looked thin. My body was covered in the small, suppurating sores caused by the bites of the nocturnal kadmal.
There were bruises caused by blows from overseers' canes on my arms, legs, back, face, and bald, shaved head. And all the time, every minute of every day and night, I worried that the report on my fingerprints would reveal who I really was. Almost every night the worry worked me into a sweating nightmare of the ten-year sentence I'd escaped from in Australia. That worry settled in my chest, squeezing my heart and often swelling to such a grotesque anguish that I felt myself choking, suffocating on it. Guilt is the hilt of the knife that we use on ourselves, and love is often the blade; but it's worry that keeps the knife sharp, and worry that gets most of us, in the end.
The frustration, dread, worry, and pain finally peaked when Big Rahul, the overseer who'd found in me a focus for the hatred and wretchedness he'd suffered in his twelve years at the prison, hit me one time too often. I was sitting near the entrance to the empty dormitory, and attempting to write down a short story that had emerged and developed in my mind over the last weeks. I'd been repeating the phrases of the story line by line and day after day as I'd created them. It was one of the meditations that kept me sane. When I managed, that morning, to scrounge a stub of pencil and a small sheaf of discarded sugar-ration wrappers, I felt ready at last to write down the lines of the first page. In a quiet moment, after farming for sheppesh, I began to write.
With all the stealth that malice manufactures, even in the gross and clumsy, Rahul crept up behind me and brought his lathi down on my left upper arm with bone-rattling force. His punishment stick was split at the end, and the blow ripped the skin of my arm open along the length of the muscle, almost from the shoulder to the elbow. Blood erupted from the deep cut and spilled over the fingers that I clamped on the wound.
Springing to my feet in red-vision rage, I reached out quickly and snatched the stick from Rahul's startled hand. Advancing towards him, I forced him backwards several paces into the empty room. There was a barred window beside me. I threw the stick through the bars. Rahul's eyes bulged with fear and astonishment.
It was the last thing he'd expected. He fumbled at his chest for his whistle. I kicked out in a twisting, flying front kick. He hadn't expected that, either. The ball of my foot struck him in the face between the nose and the mouth. He took several stumbling, backward steps. Rule number one of street fighting: stand your ground and never walk backwards, unless you're preparing a counter-strike. I followed him, pushing him on to the back foot and hitting him with a flurry of jabs and overhand rights. He put his head down, and covered up with his hands. Rule number two of street fighting: never put your head down. Aiming the punches for maximum damage, I punched him directly in the ear, on the temples, and at the throat. He was a bigger man than I was, and at least as strong, but he was no fighter. He buckled, and went to his knees, rolling over onto his side and pleading for mercy.
I looked up to see the other overseers running toward me from the yard outside. Backing up into a corner of the room, I took up a karate stance and waited for them. They ran at me. One of them was faster than the others. He rushed into striking range. I kicked out quickly. My foot struck him between the legs, with all the strength I had. I punched him three times before he hit the ground. His face was bloody. The blood smeared on the polished stone floor as he crawled away from me. The rest of them baulked.
They stood in a semi-circle around me, startled and confused, with their sticks raised in the air.
"Come on!" I shouted, in Hindi. "What can you do to me? Can you do worse than this?"
I punched my own face, hard, and punched it again, drawing blood from my lip. I swiped my right hand through the blood on my wounded arm and smeared it on my forehead. Lesson number three of street fighting: always get crazier than the other guy.
"Can you do worse than this?" I shouted, switching to Marathi.
"Do you think I'm afraid of _this? Come on! I want this! I want you to get me out of this corner! You'll get me, you'll get me, but one of you, standing there, will lose an eye. One of you.
I'll rip someone's eye out with my fingers, and eat it! So come on! Let's get on with it! And hurry up, because God knows, I'm fuckin' hungry!"
They hesitated, and then drew back in a huddle to discuss the situation. I watched them, every muscle in my body as tight and taut as a leopard leaping to the kill. After half a minute of harsh whispering, the overseers reached a decision. They drew back further, and some of their number ran out of the room. I thought they must be running for the guards, but they returned in seconds with ten prisoners from my room. They ordered the men to sit on the ground, facing me, and then they began to beat them. The sticks rose and fell swiftly. The men shrieked and yowled. The beating ceased, after a minute, and they sent the ten men away. In a few seconds, they replaced them with ten more.
"Come out of the corner, now!" one of the overseers commanded.
I looked at the men sitting on the ground, and then back at the overseer. I shook my head. The overseer gave the command, and the second group of ten men was beaten with the bamboo canes. Their cries rose up in piercing echoes, and wheeled about us in the stone room like a flock of frightened birds.
"Come out of the corner!" the overseer shouted.
"No."
"Aur dass!" he screamed. Bring ten more!
The next group of ten frightened men was assembled, facing me.
The overseers raised their sticks. Mahesh was in the third group.
One of the two men who'd been beaten and given an extra six-month sentence for trying to help me was also in the huddle of ten.
They looked at me. They were silent, but their eyes were pleading with me.
I put my hands down and took a step forward out of the corner.
The overseers rushed at me, and seized me with six pairs of hands. They shoved and dragged me to one of the barred steel gates, and forced me down on my back, with the top of my head resting against the steel bars. They kept several pairs of handcuffs in a locker at their end of the room. Using two sets of those antique iron devices, they chained my outstretched arms to the bars at the wrists, level with my head. They used coconut fibre rope to tie my legs together at the ankles.
Big Rahul knelt beside me, and brought his face close to mine.
The exertion of kneeling and bending and coping with his monstrous hatreds caused him to sweat and wheeze. His mouth was cut, and his nose was swollen. I knew that his head would ache for days from the punches I'd landed on his ear and his temple.
He smiled. You can never tell just how much badness there is in a man until you see him smile. I suddenly remembered a comment Lettie had made about Maurizio. If babies had wings, she said, he'd be the kind who'd pull them off. I started to laugh.
Helpless, with my arms stretched out and chained beside me, I laughed. Big Rahul frowned at me. His slack-lipped, cretinous puzzlement made me laugh the harder.
The beating began. Big Rahul exhausted himself in a furious assault that concentrated on my face and my genitals. When he could lift the stick no more, and was gasping for breath, the other overseers stepped in and continued the attack. They hammered at me with the bamboo lathis for twenty minutes or more.
Then they took a break to smoke cigarettes. I was wearing shorts and a singlet, nothing else. The canes had cut into me, flaying my skin, slicing and tearing it open from the soles of my feet to the top of my head.
After they'd smoked, the beating resumed. Some time later, I heard from the conversation around me that another group of overseers, from another room, had arrived. The new men, with fresh arms, lashed at my body. Their fury was merciless. When they were done, a third group of overseers launched a savage attack. Then there was a fourth group. Then the first group, from my own room, cracked and whipped their sticks at me with murderous brutality. It was ten thirty in the morning when the floggings began. They continued until eight o'clock that night.
"Open your mouth."
"What?"
"Open your mouth!" the voice demanded. I couldn't open my eyes, because my eyelids were fused together with dried blood. The voice was insistent but gentle, and coming from behind me, on the other side of the bars. "You must take your medicine, sir! You must take your medicine!"
I felt the neck of a glass bottle press against my mouth and teeth. Water flowed down my face. My arms were still stretched out beside me, and chained to the bars. My lips parted, and water flowed into my mouth. I swallowed quickly, gulping and spluttering. Hands held my head, and I felt two tablets enter my mouth, pushed by someone's fingers. The water bottle returned, and I drank, coughing water back through my nose.
"Your mandrax tablets, sir," the guard said. "You will be sleeping now."
Floating on my back, arms outstretched, my body was bruised and cut so extensively that no part of it escaped the pain. There was no way to measure or judge it because it was all pain, everywhere. My eyes were sealed shut. My mouth tasted blood and water. I drifted to sleep on a lake of sticky, numbing stone. The chorus of voices I heard was my own choir of screams and the shouts of pain I'd kept inside, and didn't give them, and wouldn't give them. They woke me, at dawn, by throwing a bucket of water on me. A thousand shrieking cuts woke with me. They permitted Mahesh to wash my eyes with a damp towel. When I could open them to see, they unlocked the handcuffs, lifted me by my stiff arms, and led me out of the room. We marched through empty courtyards and immaculately swept footpaths lined with geometrically perfect beds of flowers. At last we stopped before one of the senior prison officials. He was a man in his fifties. His grey hair and moustache were closely trimmed around his fine, almost feminine features. He was dressed in pyjamas and a silk brocade dressing gown. In the middle of a deserted courtyard, he was sitting in an elaborately carved, high-backed chair, something like a bishop's chair. Guards stood beside and behind him.
"This is not exactly how I like my Sundays to commence, my dear fellow," he said, covering a yawn with a ringed hand. "Just what the devil do you think you're playing at?"
His English was the precise and rounded version of the language that was taught in good Indian schools. I knew, from those few sentences and the way he'd spoken them, that his education was a post-colonial parallel to my own. My mother, poor and worked into exhaustion every day of her life, had earned the money to send me to a school exactly such as his. Under other circumstances we might've discussed Shakespeare or Schiller or Bulfinch's Mythology. I knew that about him from those two sentences. What did he know about me?
"Not talking, eh? What is it? Have my men been beating you? Have the overseers done anything to you?"
I stared at him in silence. In the old school of Australian prisons you don't lag-or inform on-anyone. Not even the screws.
Not even convict overseers. You never tell on anyone, ever, for any reason.
"Come now, have the overseers been beating you?"
The silence that followed his question was suddenly disturbed by the morning song of mynah birds. The sun was fully above the horizon, and golden light streamed through the misty air, scattering the dew. I felt the morning breeze on every one of the thousand cuts that stretched and cracked dried blood each time that I moved. With my mouth firmly shut, I breathed in the morning air of the city that I loved with all my heart.
"Are you beating him?" he asked one of the overseers, in Marathi.
"Absolutely, sir!" the man responded, clearly surprised. "You told us to beat him."
"I didn't tell you to kill him, you idiot! Look at him! He looks like his skin is gone."
The official examined his gold wristwatch for a moment, and then sighed his exasperation loudly.
"Very well. This is your punishment. You will wear chains on your legs. You must learn not to hit the overseers. You must learn that lesson. And from now on, until further notice, you will have half your ration of food. Now take him away!"
I held my silence, and they led me back to the room. I knew the drill. I'd learned the hard way that it's wise to keep silent when prison authorities abuse their power: everything you do enrages them, and everything you say makes it worse. Despotism despises nothing so much as righteousness in its victims.
The chain-fitter was a cheerful, middle-aged man in the ninth year of a seventeen-year sentence for a double murder. He'd killed his wife and his best friend as they lay sleeping together, and then he'd turned himself in at the local police station.
"It was peaceful," he told me in English as he collapsed a steel band around my ankle with a set of crunching pliers. "They went in their sleeping. Well, you can say that he went in his sleeping. When the axe came on her, she was awake, a little bit awake, but not for very long."
With the ankle-chains fitted, he lifted the length of chain that would hobble my step. At its centre there was a wider link in the form of a ring. He gave me a long strip of coarse cloth, and showed me how to thread the strip through the ring, and fasten the cloth around my waist. In that way, the ring in the centre of the leg chain hung from the thread, at a little below the knees, and kept the leg chain from dragging on the ground.
"They told me, you know, in two more years only, I am overseer," he informed me, sharing a wink and a broad smile as he packed up his tools. "Don't you be worry. When that will happen, in two years, I am looking after you. You are my very good English friend, isn't it? No problem."
The chain restricted my stride to tiny steps. Walking at any faster pace required a shuffling, hip-swinging gait. There were two other men in my room with leg-irons, and by studying their movements I gradually learned the technique. Within a few days, I walked that rolling, shambling dance as unselfconsciously as they did. In fact, by studying them and imitating them, I gradually discovered that there was something more than necessity in their shuffling dance.
They were trying to give some grace to their movements, put something beautiful in the sliding, weaving steps, to soften the indignity of the chain. Even in that, I discovered, human beings will find an art.
But it was a terrible humiliation. The worst things that people do to us always make us feel ashamed. The worst things that people do always strike at the part of us that wants to love the world. And a tiny part of the shame we feel, when we're violated, is shame at being human.
I learned to walk with the chains, but half rations took their toll, and I lost weight steadily: as much as fifteen kilos in a month, by my guess. I was living on a palm-sized piece of chapatti bread and one saucer of watery soup every day. My body was thin, and seemed to be weakening by the hour. Men tried to help me with smuggled food. They were beaten for it, but still they tried. I refused their offers of help, after a while, because the guilt I felt whenever they received a beating on my behalf was killing me just as surely as the malnutrition.
The many hundreds of small and large cuts that I'd sustained on the day and the night of the beating caused me agonising pain.
Most of them were infected, and some were swollen with yellow poison. I tried to wash them with the worm-infested water, but it didn't make them clean. The bites from the kadmal were accumulating every night. There were hundreds of bites, and many of them, too, became infected, weeping sores. Body lice swarmed on me. I followed the routine slaughter of the filthy, wriggling, crawling pests, every day, but they were drawn to the cuts and wounds on my body. I woke with them feeding on me and breeding in the warm, damp sores.
The beatings, however, had stopped after my meeting with the prison official on that Sunday morning. Big Rahul still whacked me occasionally, and some of the other overseers struck me from time to time, but they were habitual gestures, and not delivered with full force.
Then one day, as I lay on my side, conserving energy and watching the birds peck for crumbs in the courtyard next to our dormitory, I was attacked by a powerful man who jumped on me and seized my throat in both of his hands.
"Mukul! Mukul, my young brother!" he growled at me in Hindi. "Mukul! The young brother you bit on his face! My brother!"
He mightVe been the man's twin. He was tall and heavyset. I recognised the face, and in the instant that I heard the words I remembered the man who'd tried to take my aluminium plate in the Colaba lock-up. I'd lost too much weight. I was too weakened by the hunger and the fever. The press of his body was crushing me, and his hands were closing my throat to air. He was killing me.
Lesson number four of street fighting: always keep something in reserve. The last of my energy exploded in a thrust, with one arm. I drove the arm downward, between our bodies, and grabbed his balls, squeezing and twisting with all the strength I had.
His eyes and mouth opened in a gurgling scream, and he tried to roll off me to his left. I rolled with him. He pressed his legs together and drew his knees up, but my right hand wouldn't surrender the crushing grip. I plunged the fingers of my other hand into the soft skin above his collarbone. Closing my fingers and thumb around the collarbone, I used it as a handle, for leverage, and began to hit him in the face with my forehead. I hit him six times, ten times. I felt his teeth open a cut in my forehead, felt his nose break, felt his strength oozing from him with his blood, felt the collar bone wrench and tear away in the socket. I kept hitting him with the head butt. We were both bloody, and he was weakening, but he wouldn't lie still. I kept hitting him.
I might've beaten him to death with the blunt instrument of my head, but the overseers dragged me off him and back to the gate.
The chains clamped around my wrists again, but they changed their tactics, and chained me to the gate face down on the stone floor.
Rough hands tore my thin shirt from my back. The bamboo sticks rose and fell with new fury. The overseers had arranged for the man to attack me-it was a setup, and they admitted it during one of the breaks while they rested their arms. They'd wanted the man to beat me senseless, maybe even kill me. He had the perfect motive, after all. They'd allowed him into the room, and they'd sanctioned his revenge attack. But it didn't work. I beat their man. And they were outraged that their plans had gone awry. So the beatings went on for hours, with breaks for cigarettes and chai and snacks, and private showings of my bloodied body for selected guests from other parts of the prison.
At the end of it, they released me from the gate. I listened, my ears filled with blood, as they argued about what to do with me. The beating that had followed the fight, the beating they'd just inflicted on me, was so savage and bloody that the overseers were worried. They'd gone too far, and they knew it. They couldn't report any part of it to the prison officials. They decided to keep the matter quiet, and they ordered one of their flunkies to wash my flayed and razored body with soap. Understandably, the man complained about the odious task. A flurry of blows encouraged him, and he applied himself to the job with some thoroughness. I owe my life to him and, in a strange way, to the man who'd tried to kill me. Without the attack, and their furious torture after it, the overseers wouldn't have allowed a soap and warm-water wash-it was the first and last I ever knew in the prison. And the soapy wash saved my life, I'm sure, because the many wounds and lesions on my body had become so badly infected that my temperature was constantly fevered, and the poison was killing me. I was too weak to move. The man who washed me-I never even knew his name-gave my cuts and wounds and abscessed sores such soothing solace, with the soapy water and soft wash cloth, that tears of relief streamed down my cheeks, mixing with my blood on the stone floor.
The fever fell to a simmering shiver, but I still starved, and I got thinner every day. And every day, at their end of the room, the overseers feasted themselves on three good meals. A dozen men worked as their flunkies. They washed clothes and blankets, scrubbed the floors, prepared the dining area, cleaned the mess after each meal and, whenever the whim possessed one of the overseers, gave foot, back, or neck massages. They were rewarded with fewer beatings than the rest of us, a few beedie cigarettes, and scraps of food from every meal. Sitting around a clean sheet on the stone floor, the overseers dipped into the many dishes that went into their meals: rice, dhals, chutneys, fresh roti, fish, meat stews, chicken, and sweet desserts. As they ate noisily, they threw scraps of chicken, bread, or fruit outwards to the surrounding flunkies sitting on their haunches in simian obsequiousness, and waiting with bulging eyes and salivating mouths.
The smell of that food was a monstrous torment. No food ever smelled so good to me, and as I slowly starved, the smell of their food came to represent the whole of the world I'd lost. Big Rahul took relentless delight in offering me food at every meal.
He would hold out a drum- stick of chicken, waving it in the air and feigning a dummy throw, enticing me with his eyes and raised eyebrows, and inviting me to become one of his dogs. Occasionally, he threw a drumstick or a sweet cake toward me, and warned the waiting flunkies to leave it for me, for the gora, urging me to crawl for it. When I didn't react, and wouldn't react, he gave the signal for the flunkies, and then laughed that weak, vicious laugh as the men scrambled and fought for it.
I couldn't bring myself to crawl across the floor and accept that food, although I was weaker by the day, by the hour. Eventually my temperature soared again until my eyes burned with the fever day and night. I visited the toilet, limping, or crawling on my knees when the fever crippled me, but the visits grew less frequent. My urine was a dark, orange colour. Malnutrition robbed my body of energy, and even the simplest movement-rolling over from one side to another, or sitting up-demanded so much of the precious, limited resource that I considered long and hard before undertaking it. I lay motionless for most of every day and night.
I still tried to remove the body lice, and I still tried to wash.
But those simple tasks left me wretched and panting. My heartbeat was unnaturally high, even while lying down, and my breath came in short puffs, often accompanied by soft, involuntary moans. I was dying of hunger, and I was learning that it's one of the cruellest ways to kill a man. I knew that Big Rahul's scraps would save me, but I couldn't crawl across that room to the edge of his feast. Still, I couldn't look away either, and every meal he gluttonised found its witness in my dying eyes.
I drifted, often, in fevered visions to my family, and the friends I'd known and had lost forever in Australia. I also thought of Khaderbhai, Abdullah, Qasim Ali, Johnny Cigar, Raju, Vikram, Lettie, Ulla, Kavita, and Didier. I thought of Prabakeri and I wished that I could tell him how much I loved his honest, optimistic, brave, and generous heart. And sooner or later, my thoughts always found their way to Karla, every day, every night, every hour that I counted out with my burning eyes.
And it seemed, to my dreaming mind, that Karla saved me. I was thinking of her when strong arms lifted me, and the chains fell from my wounded ankles, and guards marched me to the prison official's office. I was thinking of her.
The guards knocked. At an answering call, they opened the door.
They waited outside when I entered. In the small office, I saw three men-the prison official with the short grey hair, a plain-clothes cop, and Vikram Patel-sitting around a metal desk.
"Oh, fuck!" Vikram shouted. "Oh, man, you look... you look fuckin' terrible! Oh, fuck! Oh, fuck! What have you done to this guy?"
The official and the cop exchanged neutral glances, but didn't reply.
"Sit down," the prison official commanded. I remained standing, on weakening legs. "Sit down, please."
I sat, and stared at Vikram with tongue-locked amazement. The flat, black hat hanging on his back by the cord at his throat, and his black vest, shirt, and scrolled flamenco pants seemed wildly exotic, and yet the most reassuringly familiar costume I could imagine. My eyes began to lose focus in the elaborate whirls and scrolls on his embroidered vest, and I pulled my stare back to his face. That face wrinkled and winced as he stared at me. I hadn't looked into a mirror for four months. Vikram's grimaces gave me a fairly good idea of how near to death he believed me to be. He held out the black shirt with the lasso figures that he'd taken off his back to give to me in the rain four months before.
"I brought... I brought your shirt..." he said falteringly.
"What... what are you doing here?"
"A friend sent me," he replied. "A very good friend of yours. Oh, fuck, Lin. You look like dogs have been chewing on you. I don't want to freak you out or nothing, but you look like they dug you up, after they fuckin' killed you, man. Just stay cool. I'm here, man. I'm gonna get you the fuck outta this place."
Taking that as his cue, the official coughed, and gestured toward the cop. The cop gave the lead back to him, and he addressed Vikram, a kind of smile pinching the soft skin around his eyes.
"Ten thousand," he said. "In American dollars, of course."
"Ten fuckin' thousand?" Vikram exploded. "Are you crazy? I can buy fifty guys out of this place with ten thousand. Fuck that, man."
"Ten thousand," the official repeated, with the calm and authority of a man who knows that he brought the only gun to a knife-fight. He rested his hands flat on the metal desk, and his fingers rolled through once in a little Mexican wave.
"No fuckin' way, man. Arrey, take a look at the guy. What are you giving me, yaar? You fuckin' destroyed the guy. You think he's worth ten thousand, in this condition?" The cop took a folder from a slender vinyl briefcase, and slid it across the desk to Vikram. The folder contained a single sheet of paper. Reading it quickly, Vikram's lips pressed outward, and his eyes widened in an expression of impressed surprise.
"Is this you?" he asked me. "Did you escape from jail in Australia?"
I stared at him evenly, my feverish eyes not wavering. I didn't reply.
"How many people know about this?" he asked the plain-clothes cop.
"Not so many," the cop replied in English. "But, enough to need ten thousand, for keeping this information a private matter."
"Oh, shit," Vikram sighed. "There goes my bargaining. Fuck it.
I'll have the money in half an hour. Clean him up, and get him ready."
"There's something else," I interrupted, and they all turned to look at me. "There are two men. In my dormitory. They tried to help me, and the overseers or the guards gave them six months more. But they finished their time. I want them to walk out the gate with me."
The cop gave an inquiring look at the prison official. He responded by waving his hand dismissively and wagging his head in agreement. The matter was a mere trifle. The men would be freed.
"And there's another guy," I said flatly. "His name's Mahesh Malhotra. He can't raise his bail. It's not much, a couple of thousand rupees. I want you to let Vikram pay his bail. I want him to walk out with me."
The two men raised their palms, and exchanged identical expressions of bewilderment. The fate of such a poor and insignificant man never intruded upon their material ambitions or their spiritual disenchantments. They turned to Vikram. The prison official thrust out his jaw as if to say, He's insane, but if that's what he wants...
Vikram stood to leave, but I raised my hand, and he sat down again quickly.
"And there's another one," I said.
The cop laughed out loud.
"Aur ek?" he spluttered, through the laugh. One more?
"He's an African. He's in the African compound. His name's Raheem. They broke both his arms. I don't know if he's alive or dead. If he's alive, I want him, too."
The cop turned to the prison official, hunching his shoulders and raising the palm of his hand in a question.
"I know the case," the prison official said, wagging his head.
"It is... a police case. The fellow carried on a shameless affair with the wife of a police inspector. The inspector quite rightly arranged to have him put in here. And once he was here, the brute made an assault on one of my overseers. It is quite impossible."
There was a little silence, then, as the word impossible swirled in the room like smoke from a cheap cigar.
"Four thousand," the cop said.
"Rupees?" Vikram asked.
"Dollars," the cop laughed. "American dollars. Four thousand extra. Two for us and our associates, and two for the inspector who's married to the slut."
"Are there any more, Lin?" Vikram muttered, earnestly. "I'm just asking, like, because we're workin' our way up to a group discount here, you know."
I stared back at him. The fever was stinging my eyes, and the effort it took to sit upright in the chair was causing me to sweat and shiver. He reached out, leaning over so that his hands were resting on my bare knees. I had the thought that some of the body lice might creep from my legs onto his hands, but I couldn't brush that reassuring touch aside.
"It's gonna be cool, man. Don't worry. I'll be back soon. We'll get you the fuck outta here within the hour. I promise. I'll be back with two taxis, for us and your guys."
"Bring three taxis," I answered, my voice sounding as though it came from a new, dark, deep place that was opening up as I began to accept that I might be free.
"One taxi for you, and the other two for me and the guys," I said. "Because... body lice."
"Okay," he flinched. "Three taxis. You got it."
Half an hour later, I rode with Raheem in the back of a black and-yellow Fiat taxi through the tectonic spectacle and pedestrian pageant of the city. Raheem had obviously received some treatment-his arms were encased in plaster casts-but he was thin and sick, and horror clogged his eyes. I felt nauseous just looking into those eyes. He never said a word, except to tell us where he wanted to go. He was crying, softly and silently, when we dropped him off at a restaurant that Hassaan Obikwa owned in Dongri.
As we drove on, the driver kept staring at my gaunt, starved, beaten face in his rear-vision mirror. Finally, I asked him in rough, colloquial Hindi if he had any Indian movie songs in his cab.
Stunned, he replied that he did. I nominated one of my favourites, and he found it, cranking it up to the max as we buzzed and beeped our way through the traffic. It was a song that the prisoners in the long room had passed from group to group.
They sang it almost every night. I sang it as the taxi took me back into the smell and colour and sound of my city. The driver joined in, looking often into the mirror. None of us lie or guard our secrets when we sing, and India is a nation of singers whose first love is the kind of song we turn to when crying just isn't enough.
The song was still soaring in me as I shed my clothes into a plastic bag for disposal, and stood under the strong warm jet of water in Vikram's shower. I tipped a whole bottle of Dettol disinfectant over my head, and scrubbed it into my skin with a hard nailbrush. A thousand cuts and bites and gashes cried out, but my thoughts were of Karla. Vikram told me she'd left the city two days before. No-one seemed to know where she'd gone. How will I find her? Where is she? Does she hate me now? Does she think I dumped her, after we made love? Could she think that about me? I have to stay in Bombay-she'll come back here, to the city. I have to stay and wait for her.
I spent two hours in that bathroom, thinking, scrubbing, and clenching my teeth against the pain. My wounds were raw when I emerged to wrap a towel round my waist and stand in Vikram's bedroom.
"Oh, man," he groaned, shaking his head and cringing in sympathy.
I looked into the full-length mirror on the front of his wardrobe. I'd used his bathroom scales to check my weight: I was forty-five kilos-half the ninety kilos I'd been when [ was arrested four months before. My body was so thin that it resembled those of men who'd survived concentration camps. The bones of my skeleton were all visible, even to the skull beneath my face. Cuts and sores covered my body, and beneath them was the tortoise-shell pattern of deep bruises, everywhere.
"Khader heard about you from two of the guys who got out of your dormitory-some Afghan guys. They said they saw you with Khader, one night, when you went to see some blind singers, and they remembered you from there."
I tried to picture the men, to remember them, but I couldn't.
Afghans, Vikram had said. They must've been very good at keeping secrets because they'd never spoken to me in all those months in the locked room. Whoever they were, I owed them.
"When they got out, they told Khader about you, and Khader sent for me."
"Why you?"
"He didn't want anyone to know that he was the one getting you out. The price was steep enough, yaar. If they knew it was him paying the baksheesh, the price would've been a lot higher."
"But how do you know him?" I asked, still staring with fascinated horror at my own torture and emaciation.
"Who?"
"Khaderbhai. How do you know him?"
"Everybody in Colaba knows him, man."
"Sure, but how do you know him?"
"I did a job for him once."
"What sort of a job?"
"It's kind of a long story."
"I've got time, if you have."
Vikram smiled and shook his head. He stood, and crossed the bedroom to pour two drinks at a small table that served as his private bar.
"One of Khaderbhai's goondas beat up a rich kid at a nightclub," he began, handing me a drink. "He did him over pretty bad. From what I hear, the kid had it coming. But his family pressed charges, with the cops. Khaderbhai knew my dad, and from him he found out that I knew the kid-we went to the same damn college, yaar. He got in touch with me, and asked me to find out how much they wanted to drop the case. Turns out they wanted plenty. But Khader paid it, and a little more. He could've got heavy with them, you know, and scared the shit out of them. He could've fuckin' killed them, yaar. The whole fuckin' family. But he didn't. His guy was in the wrong, _na? So, he wanted to do the right thing. He paid the money, and everyone ended up happy. He's okay, that Khaderbhai. A real serious type, if you know what I mean, but he's okay. My dad respects him, and he likes him, and that's saying quite a lot, because my pop, he doesn't respect many members of the human race. You know, Khader told me he wants you to work for him."
"Doing what?"
"Don't ask me," he shrugged. He began to toss some clean, pressed clothes from his wardrobe onto the bed. One by one I accepted the shorts, trousers, shirt, and sandals, and began to dress. "He just told me to bring you to see him when you feel well enough.
I'd think about it if I was you, Lin. You need to feed yourself up. You need to make some fast bucks. And you need a friend like him, yaar. All that stuff about Australia-it's a fuckin' wild story, man. I swear, being on the run and all, it's damn heroic.
At least with Khader on your side, you'll be safe here. With him behind you, nobody will ever do this shit to you again. You got a powerful friend there, Lin. Nobody fucks with Khader Khan in Bombay."
"So why don't you work for him?" I asked, and I knew that the tone of my voice was harsh-harsher than I'd intended it to be- but everything I said sounded like that then, with memories of the beatings and the body lice still slicing and itching across my skin.
"I never got invited," Vikram replied evenly. "But even if I did get invited to join him, I don't think I'd take him up on it, yaar."
"Why not?"
"I don't need him the way you do, Lin. All those mafia guys, they need each other, you know what I mean? They need Khaderbhai as much as he needs them. And I don't need him like that. But you do."
"You sound very sure," I said, turning to meet his eye.
"I am sure. Khaderbhai, he told me that he found out why you got picked up and put in jail. He said that someone powerful, someone with a lot of influence, had you put away, man."
"Who was it?"
"He didn't say. He told me he doesn't know. Maybe he just didn't want to tell _me. Whatever the case, Lin my brother, you're paddling in some fuckin' deep shit. The bad guys don't fuck around in Bombay-you know that much by now-and if you've got an enemy here, you're going to need all the protection you can get.
You got two choices-get the fuck out of town, or get some firepower on your side, like the guys at the OK Corral, you know?"
"What would you do?"
He laughed, but my expression didn't change, and he let the laughter quickly fade. He lit two cigarettes and passed one to me.
"Me? I'd be fuckin' angry, yaar. I don't wear this cowboy stuff because I like cows-I wear it because I like the way those cowboy fuckers handled things in those days. Me, I'd want to find out who tried to fuck me over, and I'd want to get some damn revenge on him. Me, when I was ready, I'd accept Khader's offer, and go to work for him, and get my revenge. But hey, that's me, and I'm an Indian madachudh, yaar.
And that's what an Indian madachudh would do."
I looked in the mirror once more. The new clothes felt like salt on the raw wounds, but they covered the worst of it, and I looked less alarming, less confronting, less hideous. I smiled at the mirror. I was practising, trying to remember what it was like to be me. It almost worked. I almost had it. Then a new expression, not quite my own, swirled into the grey of my eyes. Never again.
That pain wouldn't happen to me again. That hunger wouldn't threaten me. That fear wouldn't pierce my exiled heart. Whatever it takes, my eyes said to me. Whatever it takes from now on.
"I'm ready to see him," I said. "I'm ready right now."