Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
Then we’ll try to get your messages out of the jail. Thik hain? Until then, we smoke, and pray to the God, and bite any sisterfuckers who try to take our plates, na?’
And for three weeks we did just that. We smoked too much, and we troubled deaf heaven with our prayers, and we fought with some men, and sometimes we comforted other men who were losing the will to smoke and pray and fight. And one day they came to take our fingerprints, pressing the black, traitorous loops and whorls onto a page that promised to tell a truth, a vile truth, and nothing but that truth. And then Mahesh and I were crushed with other men into an ancient blue prison truck—eighty men in the black womb of the truck, where thirty would’ve been too many—and driven toward Arthur Road Prison at reckless speeds through the streets of the city that we all loved too much.
Inside the gates of the prison, guards dragged us off the tailgate of the truck and told us to squat on the ground, while other guards processed us and signed us into the prison, one by one. It took four hours, shuffling forward and squatting on our haunches, and they left me till last. The guards had been told that I understood Marathi. Their watch commander tested the assertion, when I was alone with them, by ordering me to stand. I stood up on painfully stiff legs, and he ordered me to squat again. When I squatted down, he ordered me to stand again. That might’ve gone on indefinitely, judging by the hilarity it provoked in the gallery of surrounding guards, but I refused to play. He continued to give the commands, but I ignored him. When he stopped, we stared at one another across the kind of silence I’ve only ever known in prisons or on the battlefield. It’s a silence you can feel on your skin. It’s a silence you can smell, and taste, and even hear, somehow, in a dark space at the back of your head. Slowly, the commander’s sinful smile retreated into the snarl of hate that had spawned it. He spat on the ground at my feet.
‘British built this jail, in the time of Raj,’ he hissed at me, showing teeth. ‘They did chain Indian men here, whip them here, hang them here, until dead. Now we run the jail, and you are a British prisoner.’
‘Excuse me, sir,’ I said, with the most formal politeness that the Marathi language offers, ‘but I am not British. I am from New Zealand.’
‘You are British!’ he screamed, spraying my face with his saliva.
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘Yes! You are British! All British!’ he replied, the snarl moving outward to a malignant smile once more. ‘You are British, and we run the jail. You go through that way!’
He pointed toward an archway that led into the prison’s interior. There was a hard right turn, just a little way into the arch, and I knew, the way all animals know, that harm waited for me there. To encourage me, the guards rammed their batons into my back. I stumbled into the arch, and took the right turn. Some twenty men were waiting for me, lined up on either side of the long corridor and armed with bamboo sticks.
I knew the gauntlet well—better than any man should. There’d been another tunnel of pain, in another country: the punishment unit in the prison I’d escaped from in Australia. Those guards had made us run their gauntlet down a long narrow corridor, leading to the tiny exercise yards. And as we ran they’d swung their batons and kicked us, all the way to the steel door at the end of the line.
I stood in the harsh electric light of that new tunnel, in Bombay’s Arthur Road Prison, and I wanted to laugh. Hey guys, I wanted to say, can’t you be a little more original? But I couldn’t speak. Fear dries a man’s mouth, and hate strangles him. That’s why hate has no great literature: real fear and real hate have no words.
I walked slowly forward. The men were dressed in white shirts and shorts, with white caps on their heads, and wide black leather belts around their waists. The brass buckles on those belts carried numbers and a title. The title was Convict Overseer. They weren’t prison guards, I soon discovered. In the Indian prison system, inherited from the days of the British Raj, the prison guards had very little to do with the day-to-day operation of the prison. Those everyday tasks of maintaining routines, order, and discipline were the preserve of convict overseers. Convicted murderers and other long-term serial offenders received sentences of fifteen years or more. During the first five of those years they were common prisoners. During the second five years they earned the privilege of a job in the kitchen, laundry, prison industries, or clean-up gangs. During the third and final five years they often accepted the hat, leather belt, and bamboo stick of a convict overseer. Then, the power of life and death was in their hands. Two lines of those convicted killers, who’d become guards themselves, awaited me in the tunnel. They raised their sticks and fixed their eyes on me, anticipating a charging run that might deprive them of the sporting chance to inflict some pain.
I didn’t run. I wish I could say, now, that I walked that night and didn’t run because of something noble and brave that I found inside myself, but I can’t. I’ve thought about it often. I’ve recalled and relived that walk a thousand times, and each time I remember it, there’s less certainty about the why of it. Every virtuous act has some dark secret in its heart, Khaderbhai once told me, and every risk we take contains a mystery that can’t be solved.
I walked toward them slowly, and I began to think of the long concrete path that leads from the shore to the shrine at Haji Ali: the mosque that floats like a great moored ship on the moonlit sea. That view of the monument to the revered saint, and the journey between the waves to the floating pavilions, was one of my beloved images of the city. Its beauty, for me, was like the angel that a man sees in the sleeping face of the woman he loves. And it might’ve been just that, beauty alone, that saved me. I was walking into the worst of the city, one of her cruellest and most iniquitous defiles, but some instinct flooded my mind with a loveliness I’d found in her—that path, across the sea, to the white minarets of the saint’s tomb.
The bamboo sticks whipped and cracked, ripping and slashing at my arms and legs and back. Some blows hit my head, my neck, and my face. Swung with maximum force, by strong arms against bare skin, the blows from the bamboo sticks were a cross between a hot metal burn and an electric shock. The sticks were split at the ends. They opened razor-thin cuts wherever they landed. Blood began to run from my face and the exposed skin on my arms.
I walked on as slowly and steadily as I could. I flinched often when the sticks smacked into my face or across my ear, but I never cringed or cowered or raised my hands. To keep my hands at my sides, I clutched at the legs of my jeans. And the attack, which had begun with frenzied violence, dwindled to fewer blows as I walked the gauntlet. It ceased altogether when I reached the last men in the lines. It was a kind of victory, seeing those men lower their sticks and their eyes as I passed them. The only victory that really counts in prison, an old-timer in the Australian jail once said to me, is survival. But survival means more than simply being alive. It’s not just the body that must survive a jail term: the spirit and the will and the heart have to make it through as well. If any one of them is broken or destroyed, the man whose living body walks through the gate, at the end of his sentence, can’t be said to have survived it. And it’s for those small victories of the heart, and the spirit, and the will that we sometimes risk the body that cradles them.
The overseers and several guards brought me through the prison, in the darkening evening, to one of the many dormitory blocks. The large, high-ceilinged room was twenty-five paces long and ten paces wide. There were barred windows that gave views of open areas around the building, and there were two tall steel gates, one at either end of the room. In a bathroom near one entrance, there were three clean keyhole toilets. When the guards locked us in for the night, there were one hundred and eighty prisoners in that room, and twenty convict overseers.
One quarter of the room was reserved for the overseers. They had their own stack of clean blankets. They arranged them with free space all around, and in piles eight or ten thick to provide soft beds. The rest of us were squeezed into two lines in the remaining three-qu
Each of us had one blanket, taken from a neatly folded stack at the crowded end of the room. The blankets were folded down their length, and placed side to side on the stone floor against the long walls. We lay down on the narrow blankets, with our shoulders rubbing against one another. Our heads touched the side walls, and our feet pointed in toward the centre of the room. The bright lights remained on all night. The overseers on night watch took turns to walk the length of the room between the rows of feet. They all carried whistles on chains around their necks, which they used to summon the guards in the event of any trouble they couldn’t handle themselves. I soon learned that they were reluctant to use the whistle, and there was very little trouble that was beyond their power.
The overseers gave me five minutes to wash the drying blood off my face and neck and arms, and to use the immaculately clean squat toilet. When I returned to the main room they offered me the opportunity to sleep at their end of the room. They assumed, no doubt, that my white skin was connected to a supply of money. And they may have allowed themselves, in some small way, to be influenced by the fact that I’d walked their gauntlet without running. Whatever their reasons, I couldn’t do it—they were the very men who’d beaten me only minutes before, the men who’d transformed themselves into prison guards—and I refused their offer. It was a huge mistake. As I walked to the far end of the room, took a blanket from the pile, and put it down next to Mahesh, they sneered and laughed. They were furious that I’d rejected the rare offer to join them, and they conspired, as cowards with power often will, to break my spirit.
In the night I woke from monstrous dreams with a piercing pain in my back. I sat up, scratching at my back to find an insect about the size of a small thumbtack attached to my skin. I wrenched it loose, and put it on the stone floor to examine it. The creature was dark grey, fat, swollen almost to round, with a multitude of legs. I squashed it with my hand. Blood spurted out. It was my own blood. The creature had feasted itself on me in my sleep. At once, a foul smell filled my nostrils. It was my first encounter with the parasite known as kadmal, the scourge of prisoners in the Arthur Road Prison. Nothing stopped them. They bit, and sucked blood, every night. The small, round wounds they made soon festered into poison-filled pustules. In any one night there were three to five bites; in a week, there were twenty; and, in a month, there were a hundred suppurating, infected sores on a man’s body. And nothing stopped them.
I stared at the stupid mess that the squashed kadmal made, stunned to see how much blood the tiny creature had managed to drain from me. Suddenly there was a stabbing pain at my ear as the night watch overseer swung his bamboo lathi against my head. I started up in anger, but Mahesh stopped me. His hands locked onto my arm, and he dragged me down with all his weight.
The overseer glared at me until I lay down again. He resumed his pacing of the brightly lit room, and Mahesh mouthed a warning to me. Our faces were only a hand’s width apart. All along the two lines of sleepers, men were jammed together, arms and legs intertwined in sleep. The terror that spiked in Mahesh’s eyes, and the whimper that he clamped with a hand to his mouth, were the last things that I saw and heard on that first night.
‘No matter what they do,’ he whispered, ‘for the sake of your life, don’t do anything to them in return. This is not a living place, Lin. We are all dead men here. You can’t do anything!’
I closed my eyes, and closed my heart, and willed myself to sleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
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. Challol 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
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.