I met Sanjay in my fourth year inside. He was the only inmate in the jail booked under COFEPOSA, the law built to nab smugglers, and his story, when he finally told it to me in full, turned out to belong to a genre that recurs in jail with a regularity you’d never expect from a place built entirely of confinement : the rags-to-riches story.
He ran away from Kutch at fourteen. His parents were basket weavers, six children to feed on next to nothing, and he was the eldest. He’d saved fourteen rupees for a one-way ticket to Bombay, and someone had told him which station to head for once he arrived — Ghatkopar, where a great many Kutchis and Gujaratis had already settled before him.
He had nowhere to go when he got there, so he laid his scanty luggage out on platform three and slept on it. A man on the bench beside him slept there too, every night, and for a week said nothing at all. A porter showed him the public toilets and the unwritten etiquette of leaving your bags while you used them.
Every morning at four the havaldar came through swinging a lathi to wake the platform up, and Sanjay learned fast that the trick was to be awake before he arrived, spared the lathi, and free besides to take his time at the toilets while everyone else scrambled. Once he was ready there was nothing to do but walk the street outside the station, and as the shops opened he made himself useful to each one in turn : the newspaper vendor let him read the day’s paper, the tea vendor gave him a cup, the baker gave him bread, the restaurant owner fed him breakfast for sweeping the front yard. By mid-morning he’d be going door to door for day work. Most days, he told me, there was work for anyone willing to do absolutely anything.
A week in, the man on the bench finally asked him where he was from, and then asked if he’d work as a houseboy at a place he ran for customers; a sort of local club, carrom and tea and gossip, men coming in to relax and leaving a few hours later. Sanjay said yes and took charge of it. His new employer sent him to a shop nearby with instructions to buy whatever the place needed, all on account.
He was serving a guest one afternoon when he overheard two men talking — an elderly Gujarati gentleman and a younger friend, discussing a salesman they needed to hire for their textile shop. Sanjay introduced himself on the spot and offered his services. A few months of caretaking later, he was now a salesman selling textiles, and the old man turned out to be generous with what he knew, walking Sanjay through the business in detail. It didn’t take long for Sanjay to discover he had a genuine eye for design and an equally genuine gift for selling. On the side he began cultivating the old man’s tailor, feeding him designs for women’s clothing, and the side venture took off faster than the main one.
The old man died a year later. By then Sanjay had built a clientele of his own and was selling his own designs at a healthy margin. He started saving toward a shop. One of the women who bought his dresses introduced him to her husband, a customs officer. Through that acquaintance Sanjay found his way into customs circles, arranging the clearance of incoming cargo between importers and the officials who processed it. Before long he was clearing whole containers himself.
Sanjay was an earnest sort, with an earthiness in the way he spoke that pulled you in as a willing collaborator — you wanted to believe him, and mostly you did. The most successful sales, he told me, were never really about the product. They were about the connection you built with the person across the counter; the sale itself just followed as a by-product. He brought that same instinct to customs officials the way he’d once brought it to housewives choosing between two blouse designs. His trucks were prioritised, cleared first, released without the onerous inspections other importers had to sit through. He never bargained — whatever an officer wanted, an officer got — and in return he built a reputation for delivering, every time, without fail.
Trust and honour, he said, mattered more in that business than in almost any other, because it ran entirely on relationships between men who could just as easily ruin each other. That dependability was the whole engine of his success.
Not many men reach the position Sanjay reached. Customs officers are rotated frequently for exactly that reason — to keep relationships like his from calcifying into something worse. In Sanjay’s case, though, each outgoing officer took the trouble to personally introduce him to the one replacing him. Several rotations later, he had built a system that simply worked, cycle after cycle, regardless of who was sitting on the other side of the counter.
He married a Kutchi girl from back home. Bought his parents a proper house in the village. Saw his sisters married off. Raised two daughters, one set on medicine, the other on engineering and, in her spare time, bodybuilding — he’d told them both, more than once, that marriage could wait; education and a career came first.
I asked him, eventually, what a man like that was doing in jail under COFEPOSA. He usually didn’t go into the customs area himself to clear cargo, he said he had people for that. This one time his regular agent had a family wedding to attend, and Sanjay went in his place. The customs officers on duty had just been rotated, new to the job, unfamiliar with him, and they confiscated his cargo and booked him under the Act meant for the smugglers he had spent thirty years quietly working alongside without ever, by his own account, becoming one himself. He was out in three months.
I had always thought of prison as the place ambition went to end. Sanjay made me wonder whether, sometimes, it simply pauses there a while.