Anshul was unusually fair, with round eyes framed by thick lashes and hair carrying the faintest streak of brown. He sat alone at one end of the quadrangle, with the particular desolation of a man who has not yet worked out how to hold his own face. A first-timer, clearly, on his first morning after.
By then I was nearly thirty-six months into my incarceration, and I had developed the sort of instinct prison teaches you : who could hurt you, who could help you, who was a competitor, who was worth the trouble of being kind to. It is a survival technique, not a virtue, and I had had more than enough time to grow the skin for it. Anshul read, at a glance, as harmless. Everyone else had already made the same calculation and moved on, so when I finished my walk I sat down beside him on the low concrete rim of the gutter that ran the circumference of the yard — the only place, in that whole enclosure, that offered anywhere to sit.
From that moment I had a puppy dog who followed me everywhere. Thank god we were housed in different barracks. By the end of our association I had come to be genuinely grateful for the seventeen compulsory hours a day that kept us apart.
He was the only child of a broken Marwari family settled in Bangalore, raised almost entirely by his mother. His memories of his father were vague — the man had never taken much interest in the son who, in a more conventional household, would have mattered enormously simply for being an heir. Anshul didn’t seem scarred by any of it. His mother, by his own account, was a remarkable, progressive woman who built a career on her own terms and earned enough to put him through college unaided. He came out the other end with a degree in computer science and an eye on cloud computing, and spent his twenties hopping from one Bangalore tech company to the next, becoming eventually as vice president of cloud services, largely on the sales side for a tier 1 IT major.
It was a progressive home, and Anshul, moving in a fast set of friends, had sampled most of what his generation considered modern freedoms. A close bond with his mother, a good salary at a Tier 1 company, and friends he considered hip, added up, in his head, to a man who had arrived. The road ahead looked like nothing but a gentle climb toward more of the same.
Work took him to Mumbai, to pitch cloud services to an officer in Mantralaya, the seat of the Maharashtra government. He walked out of the meeting certain it had gone well and filed a back-to-office report predicting he’d land the company’s first major government mandate. Then he flew on to Jaipur, checked into his hotel, showered, and with nothing planned for the evening opened a bottle and cut himself a line.
Around eight that night he rang his contact in Mantralaya to check on the proposal and was told, flatly, that it had been considered and rejected. What happened next happened inside a mind that was, by that point, thoroughly inebriated. Shock curdled into conspiracy, conspiracy into abuse, and the call ended with Anshul threatening to blow up the Mantralaya.
He kept drinking, kept at the coke, and was somewhere deep in self-pity when the knock came. A full police contingent stood in the hotel corridor, armed and in bulletproof vests. They wrestled him down, read him his rights, and took him away, and Anshul, still deep in his own fog, could make no sense of what was happening to him. Nobody thought to bag the evidence sitting in plain sight on the coffee table — the bottle, the lines. He had gone to bed expecting, at worst, a drunken warning. He woke up in custody, accused of terrorism.
A Bangalore magistrate first heard the case and dismissed it outright : the accused had no prior record, had plainly lost all sense of proportion while intoxicated, and had not followed his threat with any action whatsoever. The matter resurfaced before a magistrate in Mumbai, where the same events were now treated as sedition, and he was remanded to judicial custody regardless. It took Anshul a full day to come back to himself, and several more to grasp the size of the hole he was standing in. The Agency, he told me, had informed him plainly that he was finished for life.
The Agency that has placed you in judicial custody will, from time to time, come into the jail itself to carry on the interrogation. They called for Anshul one morning without warning, and he went to pieces on the spot genuinely terrified, begging me to come with him, deaf to my explaining that this was one door he’d have to walk through alone. Panic is the one thing you cannot afford to show in a jail, and it took some doing to talk him back into his own skin. In the end I requested the circle’s officer in charge to walk him over personally — a two-star officer carried no weight anywhere outside those walls, but inside the circle he was close to a god, and his presence alone would settle a man like Anshul. He went in for the second session of the morning and came back changed. He came back with his chest out and his head high, wearing an assurance that had not existed that morning. The reason, it turned out, was simple enough : the Agency had sat across from him, asked their questions, and concluded that he was an idiot.
I have turned Anshul’s case over more times than most. A system efficient enough to have him in custody within three hours of a drunken phone call, and yet unable to tell a genuinely grievous act from a pathetic one. One bench in Bangalore reads the same facts and dismisses them outright; another in Mumbai reads them and locks a man up for sedition. His Company sacked him long before the Mumbai court, eight months on, finally quashed the case. The verdict, when it came, changed nothing that mattered by then.
I have not been in touch with Anshul. Cloud computing has moved on to edge computing since then. I hope he managed to move on too.