He was a man of medium-height but who for some reason, appeared tall with a chest-length beard, jet-black hair swept back into a ponytail, thick wrists and thicker ankles. I first saw him from the far end of the quadrangle, on the diagonal opposite side, and even at that distance I felt the weight of his presence. Some ten men stood around him.
In jail, status is measured by orbit: how many people hang on you, how close they stand. By that yardstick, he was a man not to be trifled with.
I learned later that he was a local gangster who had spent years building his gang from inside the prison walls. The gang ran on extortion, on hired muscle, on the ordinary machinery of intimidation. He was, as I came to understand, a minor figure in the world outside, made larger than life by the small, closed geometry of a prison.
I was twelve months into my sentence and still unschooled in the politics of gangs. I kept away from them. They kept to themselves too, mostly, throwing their weight around only to secure small privileges: an extra blanket, a better spot in the queue, a guard who looked the other way.
He slept in a space built for three men, at the head of the barrack, dead centre against the wall, flanked by his lieutenants. When he went to bathe, buckets were lined up in advance and no one else was allowed near the toilet. Two of his men would pour the water, soap him, dry him, while he sat on an upturned bucket, his face composed, his eyes betraying how much he enjoyed the attention. Someone else washed and dried his clothes. Yet another laid out a fresh change. He was a man looked after.
Our paths never crossed. Except once.
I was on my morning walk around the quadrangle. He was playing volleyball at one corner. He jumped, smashed a serve, and the ball came off at an angle straight into the back of my head. I went down face first onto the ground.
The next thing I knew, he was standing over me, pulling me to my feet. He did not apologise. He asked, “Are you ok?” Before I could answer, he had turned and gone back to his game.
It was, I came to understand later, entirely in character. He could knock a man down and lift him back up in the same unbroken motion, and feel that nothing was owed either way. It was the same instinct, unhurried and unaccountable, that would later stage a boy’s oath, a man’s thrashing, and a rescue, all as one continuous gesture.
I walked away dazed, working hard not to show how shaken I was.
Jails, for all their impersonal architecture, are intimate spaces. You spend seventeen hours a day locked in a barrack and seven hours walking a circle barely wide enough to lose yourself in. In that confinement you grow a second skin, tuned to trouble before it has a name.
That afternoon the air in the circle had changed. Groups clustered at the edges of the quadrangle. Men looked sideways at each other, especially towards the gangs. Rumours moved fast, theories multiplied, and most inmates stayed close to their barrack doors, ready to duck in.
It was near closing time. Bandi was called, as it was every evening at five. The guards ran their lathis along the grills. The javabdars struck the iron locks with their knobs, a rhythm that meant: move. Inmates began filing back towards their barracks.
It was exactly then, as everyone drifted inward, that two guards marched into the circle and read out three names.
The first was the gang leader.
The second was one of the youngest men in the jail, an orphan who had run away from his institution and ended up inside on a murder charge.
The third was a man the gangster had spent weeks courting to join his ranks, and who had refused every time.
I was not there for what followed. I pieced it together afterwards, from men who stood in that hall and told it to me separately, in accounts that lined up too closely to be anything but true.
As the men described it to me afterwards, the three were marched to the open-sided hall where the Superintendent and his officers held their evening tribunal, the place where the day’s troublemakers were brought and sentences handed down on the spot. A modest thrashing with the patta or the lathi ran to two or three strokes. The severest ran past twenty. Punishment here was arithmetic, and everyone in the yard knew the table.
The accusation: the man who had refused the gang had used the boy as a courier, sending a handwritten note to a rival gang leader in another barrack. The note listed names and numbers, the gang’s whole order of strength, laid bare for an enemy to read.
The boy confirmed it. Yes, he said, he had been asked to carry a message.
The gangster went purple. He shouted the accused down before the Superintendent could finish speaking.
When the hall had quieted, the Superintendent turned to the accused and asked him directly. Had he done this?
He said no. He said he was being framed. Then, in a move that startled the officers, he turned to the boy, a known believer, everyone in the barrack knew it, and asked him to swear on Lord Shiva that the message had ever existed.
The Superintendent allowed the challenge to stand.
The boy swore. On Shiva’s name, he said, yes, he had been given a message to carry.
Jails are even-handed, in their fashion. The Superintendent ordered the boy thrashed twice, for carrying the message, and the accused ten times, for sending it.
The gangster stood and watched his own trap close on the man who had refused him.
By the fifth stroke, or so I was told, he stepped in. He told the Superintendent to stop, that he would personally answer for both men from here on, that nothing like this would happen again. The Superintendent, satisfied, called it closed.
The three walked back to the Circle in silence and returned to their barracks.
The accused showed his palms to whoever asked. They were red and swelling, his face puffed where a stroke had caught him wrong. When someone asked what he meant to do now, he did not answer.
It took me months to understand what I had watched. Nothing about that evening had been accidental. The courier’s oath, the accusation, the punishment, the gangster’s timely mercy at the fifth stroke: all of it had been written and rehearsed in advance, a piece of theatre with a single purpose. To bring a man who had refused three times into the fold, on terms he could live with.
There is a word for this in jail: tagada. It means to set a man up, to build a false case against him with enough conviction that the administration has no choice but to act on it. Tagada takes planning. It needs a story that several inmates are willing to carry and repeat under questioning without breaking rank. It is most often used against rival gang leaders, a way to have a man thrashed, humiliated, or transferred without laying a hand on him directly. What I had watched was a variation on the theme. Not an attack on a rival, but a trap laid for a man who would not be recruited any other way.
The administration knew about tagada. Everyone did. Their answer to it was blunt, and they believed it fair: when in doubt, thrash everyone involved, accuser, accused, and witness alike. It felt like justice, and in its way it was. What the administration never seemed to grasp was that the thrashing was not a deterrent. It was the ritual itself. Taking the strokes and staying silent afterwards was how a man proved, in public, that he could take a hit and hold his ground. That is the exact currency a gang leader trades in when he chooses who stands beside him.
The accused, the man who had taken ten strokes and shown his swollen palms and said nothing when asked what he would do next, had not been beaten into submission. He had been auditioned. And he had passed.
The next morning, the new gang member was soaping the gang leader.