Six inmates stood in a row in the reception area, surrounded by officers and guards carrying lathis and pattas. A patta is a strip of rough material mounted on a wooden bracket, ordinarily used to drive a motor. In practiced hands it leaves no mark, which is why guards favour it over a lathi. They have, over the years, worked out with precision which parts of a body can be hurt without the hurt ever becoming evidence. The pain it inflicts is severe. This particular evening they had run out of that kind of patience. They beat all six men, mercilessly, all over the body, for a good fifteen minutes. Then they made them lie down and went to work on the soles of their feet.
To this day, writing this, my palms sweat and my heart races. The cries were the worst sound I have heard in a jail. It was around seven in the evening. Three of us, along with jail staff, happened to be there because we had just come back from a hospital visit. The beating was taking place in the same reception area that housed the jail’s administrative offices, in plain view of anyone passing through. I asked one of the guards what these men had done to deserve this. They were inmates transferred in from another jail, he told me, after causing a commotion there over living conditions. All six went to the jail hospital afterward. Four guards signed as witnesses to the incident, recording that the men had been injured fighting among themselves. The seniormost officer on duty countersigned beneath them.
Jails hold poor men in far greater numbers than they hold anyone dangerous — men without resources, without the faintest understanding of how a case moves through a system, and for that reason exactly the kind the gangs go looking for. Attach yourself to one and you get standing, small favours, a measure of protection, in exchange for obedience. Your birth is pure chance : the luck of the draw decides your future.
Cruel, though, is neither good nor bad. It is simply the state of affairs. I couldn’t tell you the day I stopped expecting anything else; there wasn’t one day, just a slow accumulation of mornings where fairness failed to show up and I stopped setting a place for it. Somewhere in that accumulation, cruelty stopped being a thing that happened to a person and became a thing the system did on schedule, the way it does headcount or lights-out. That was the moment the penny dropped for me, and Pankaj’s case is where it dropped hardest.
He was barely twenty-five and had already spent three years inside, accused of murder. An impoverished young man, he had gone out one night and drunk himself blind on country liquor, wandered onto a railway platform, found a body already lying there asleep, and lay down beside it. He woke to find the local police hauling him up; the man beside him was dead, and Pankaj, as far as anyone could establish, was simply the person found next to the corpse. He says he was beaten at the station until he confessed, then produced before a magistrate who remanded him to judicial custody. He still laughs when he tells the story, the way you laugh at something too large to hold any other way, and he still asks me, every time, whether I think this will be the month he’s finally produced in court. The law requires that an undertrial be produced before a magistrate once every fourteen days. In three years, Pankaj has not been produced once. Getting him there, he told me, would cost roughly two thousand rupees, money for whatever it takes to move an undertrial through the system when no family or lawyer is pushing from outside, and he has never had it. No one along that chain is accountable for the gap. A cursory read of the FIR would satisfy almost anyone that he has no business being where he is. He will likely serve the better part of fifteen years for a crime the file itself barely supports.
Suraj was a rickshaw driver, middle-aged, married, with two grown children, when he was remanded on a rape charge. He had a steady clientele : eight schoolchildren every morning, two beside him and six crowded in the back, picked up from their homes and dropped at school, collected again in the afternoon. He knew their birthdays, the small politics among the eight of them. He told me, with evident pride, that he had never once had a complaint in all his years driving them. Then a marital dispute involving one of the families turned, through some tangle I never fully followed, into a case against him : the estranged parents reunited around the single shared cause of seeing justice done for their daughter. Five years on, Suraj is still inside, still bewildered by the turn his life took, still telling anyone who’ll listen how unfair his fate has been. He has been taken to court three times in five years. His wife and daughters stopped visiting long ago, not out of any falling out but because being known as the family of a child molester is not a thing a community forgives easily. If the facts are what he says they are, this is a serious miscarriage of justice. But that is the difficulty of a jail : nobody inside ever tells you they did what they’re accused of, and you learn not to take any account, including the ones that move you most, entirely at face value.
Chowdhury admitted to what he’d done. A double murder, and he never once told it any other way. He was a kamwallah who kept the circle clean, and my handi mate besides : short, broad, and built like something poured rather than grown. He once lifted my six-foot-one frame off the ground with no visible effort and held me in the air the way you’d hold a flag, for a full minute, without breaking a sweat. Drink turned him into something else entirely, he told me — sober, or drunk and left alone, he was harmless; drunk and provoked, a demon came out that he couldn’t call back. The night in question he’d been asleep in his hut, deep in a drinking session, when two known troublemakers from the locality broke in to rob him. A fight broke out. He killed them both, panicked, ran, and was caught within the day.
Double murderers carry a certain weight among other inmates — not men to be trifled with. Chowdhury has a wife and a daughter. Most nights he is fine. Then, without any particular occasion for it, the rope comes up.
Is it painful, he would ask me. Is it painful.