Saurabh was asleep on his blanket, a six by four spread, squeezed between two others, when I first noticed him. He was one of two hundred and forty men stuffed into Barrack 8, a building with a ground floor and an identical floor above, designed for sixty to eighty people and rarely holding fewer than two hundred. At his feet lay the heads and feet of two other inmates, sleeping the way everyone slept there, in rows along the walls, one body’s feet against another’s head.
So it was with real suspicion that I noticed Saurabh shrink the width of his own bedding, from four feet down to three, to give me a little more room. He was built like a wrestler, which I later learned he had actually been. The story that moved through the barrack, the one everyone repeated as settled fact long before any court had settled anything, was that he was the prime accused in a murder: that he had cut a man down with a sword in a wholesale market, in full public view, because the man had refused to pay extortion money. Saurabh, the barrack said, was an enforcer.
Saurabh did not fit the barrack’s idea of how a killing happens, or so they believed. He worked alone, never as part of a gang. You went to him to recover a debt, and he collected it for a commission. When he wasn’t collecting, he was in the yard, building his body.
I met him in my second year inside. He had already served five. His trial was crawling forward at whatever pace trials crawl at in that system, and he was entirely confident he would be acquitted.
Thank you for the space, I told him, but I’m fine as I am.
Not at all, sir, he said. You’re a big man. You need it.
That was how it started. Over the following weeks he began to tell me about himself, unprompted at first and then, once he saw I was actually listening, at length. An abusive father. A quiet mother who never once disagreed with the man. An older brother who seemed to absorb whatever attention and affection the family had to give. A slow-building isolation. Rough friends who filled the gap the family left. And, somewhere in the middle of all that, bodybuilding, which he had taken up the way other boys take up cricket.
All of that is fairly ordinary, I said to him once. Plenty of people grow up that way and never so much as raise a hand. Why crime?
It was an accident, he said. A friend asked me to collect a debt for him. I found out I was good at it. That was the whole thing. One good result, and I became an enforcer.
The body building helped, he added, as though this were an obvious footnote rather than the whole architecture of what he had built himself into.
His father, I learned later, was a wholesale trader in potatoes, a hard, successful man who had built a name for himself over decades in the market. Saurabh had helped him occasionally as a boy, and it was through that access, those contacts, that he first built his enforcement business on the side. When his father found out, he was livid.
Under my roof, you work with me, his father told him. If you want this other life, you find another roof.
Saurabh left the house.
Saurabh was visibly enjoying the reputation he was building for himself. Gangs approached him more than once, wanting him to join properly. He turned every one of them down.
I don’t want to answer to anyone, he told me once. I take the job. I do the job. I walk away. That’s the whole arrangement. Membership means somebody else decides what you do next. I decide.
One afternoon, walking the promenade near his old neighbourhood, he ran into his parents by chance. His mother was warm, effusive, thrilled in the unguarded way of someone who hasn’t seen her son in weeks. She fussed over how thin he looked, how withdrawn, reached up to touch his face the way mothers do regardless of how old their sons have become. His father stood a little apart, hands behind his back, his face doing nothing at all. Not the smallest flicker of warmth for his own son. When it was time to part, he did not offer his hand.
A wall stood between the two of them by then, and it held. His father could not understand how a son of his had deliberately chosen a life built on violence and instant reward, when there was an honest business waiting for him, one the father had spent thirty years building. His son wanted only one thing from his father: to be accepted exactly as he was, without correction, without the thirty years held up as a rebuke. Neither would move. Saurabh told me once that in all those years apart, his father never called him, not once, not even to ask if he was alive.
Then his mother died, suddenly, and the wall cracked.
He was heartbroken, he told me, more than he had expected to be. He moved back into the house and began spending real time with his father, helping in the market, learning the trade from the ground up, sitting in on his father’s dealings with the other traders. He discovered, almost to his own surprise, how fragile the whole business was. Potatoes are a winter crop, grown mostly in the north and trucked down to Mumbai on a schedule that could unravel for a dozen reasons on any given day. His father had built, over decades, an entire private intelligence network, just to move ahead of the smallest shift in price. Saurabh began, for the first time, to respect what his father had spent a lifetime building.
But it wasn’t a life for him, and he knew it within months.
I need the rush, he told me. The fear, every day, a little of it, in everything I do. I need red meat at every meal. Potatoes don’t give you that.
So he drifted back. He helped his father when it suited him, took up enforcement work again on the side, and stopped bothering to hide it. The house grew tense, and then unlivable. Of what happened next, Saurabh told me only fragments, never in one sitting, never quite in order, and never once with a name attached. Harsh words in the market. A scuffle. A sword, drawn in anger. Saurabh’s own hand doing the cutting. A man going down badly wounded, his blood running into the open water channel that ran alongside the market stalls. I pieced together what I could and did not ask for the rest. He never once told me the dead man’s name. I never asked.
Bewilderment came first, Saurabh told me, then disbelief, then something closer to horror than he had words for. He said he genuinely did not understand how things had gone from an argument to this in the space of a few minutes. The police arrived, witnesses gave their statements, the sword was taken as evidence, and Saurabh was marched to the station.
By the time I knew him, five years on, he had made his peace with all of it. He told the story the way you would narrate a scene from a film you had watched too many times to feel anything about anymore. There was no remorse in it at all. Unfortunate, he said. But it happened.
I asked him once why he was so sure he would be acquitted.
All the witnesses have agreed to change their statements, he said, as though this were simply how the system worked, which, as I came to learn, it very often is, provided the accused has the money for it. I did not think it was my place to argue with him about it.
We played a lot of chess in those months, and Sudoku. He beat me almost every time. He found the newspaper puzzles too easy after a while and started setting his own, harder than anything printed, just for the two of us.
Eighteen months after I met him, he was convicted. Life.
I remember that day clearly. This enormous, muscled man sat down next to me in the barrack and wept, openly, copiously, like a child. He wanted to walk me through every moment of the hearing again, complaining that the judge had given no weight at all to his submission.
I looked at him, this heap of a man crying into his own hands, and I told him plainly. You killed another human being. You have known since the day you were arrested that the sentence for that is life. You’ve spent six and a half years here. What exactly did you think was going to happen?
He was still crying when I said it. I asked him, finally, straight out, what exactly he had been convicted of.
The murder of his father, he said. In the wholesale market.
Didn’t you tell me you did it, I asked.
Yes, he said.
Then why are you crying.
Because I had fixed every single witness, he said. And it still didn’t work.