I met Ram in Circle 1, Barrack 4. Medium height, five-five or five-six at most, rotund, with the thick wrists and thicker ankles you only get from hard labour begun in childhood, and skin so black it seemed to absorb the little light that came into that barrack. He told me he was Bengali. Whether he had crossed over from Bangladesh, whether Ram was even the name his mother had given him, I never established and eventually stopped trying to. He was, I would learn soon enough, the javabdar of our barrack; a word it will take a moment to explain properly, but the position explains almost everything else about him.
He was sharp in a way that had nothing to do with schooling : quick to read a room, quicker to see the one opening in it worth taking. There was something underneath the sharpness that I recognised without being able to name it for a while, and then one evening, watching him work a guard for a favour with his voice pitched just so, I understood what it was. It was the particular alertness of an animal that has learned, early and permanently, that every moment might be the one that decides whether it eats or is eaten. Cornered rats, they say, turn savage past anything their size should allow. Ram carried that latent charge in him at all times, un-cornered or not. You could smell it on him, faintly, the way you can smell weather changing before it arrives.
Taloja has five circles. Each circle contains sixteen barracks, built for thirty men and usually holding twice that number. One wall was nothing but iron grille looking onto an open quadrangle; the others were solid concrete, relieved only by a line of vents near the roof. We spent seventeen hours a day locked inside, and were let into the quadrangle for five hours in the morning and two in the afternoon, the only hours in the day the place felt like it had any air in it at all.
Discipline inside each barrack runs through an inmate the system calls a javabdar — literally, the one who answers for it. The circle officer works through him. Javabdars are also given charge of keeping the circle itself clean, and Ram was the principal one for ours, which meant he could move through the jail in ways the rest of us couldn’t: out of the barrack during lock-up hours, into corridors we never saw, in and out of the officers’ notice. It also meant that information reached him before it reached anyone else.
Jails run on informing the way a body runs on blood. Nothing stays private for long. I shared my food once with a man in another barrack and was hauled up within the hour by the circle officer and told, not unkindly, that the privilege would be cut if it happened again. I never had proof, but I had no real doubt either that Ram was one of the men that information moved through.
So it surprised me when he came and asked me to join his handi. I hadn’t yet attached myself to one, and I said yes without quite thinking it through, and it turned into the strangest companionship I have known in my life.
There is a rule in jail, unwritten but absolute, that you do not discuss your case with another inmate. You do not hand anyone your personal history. You trust no one, and you give no one reason to think you might. You keep your own counsel. That is the rule, and everyone arrives knowing it. But put men in close enough quarters for long enough, with nowhere to go to talk, and the rule erodes on its own, the way anything erodes under enough pressure applied for enough time. Friendships get built anyway. Strange ones, sometimes.
I learned only weeks later why everyone in that barrack gave him the space they did.
He had been arrested bringing a busload of young girls from Calcutta into Mumbai.
I sat with that for a while before I learned the rest. Trafficking, though he denied it to me flatly when I finally asked, and I did not believe the denial for a moment. Over time, mostly from other sources, the fuller picture came in around the edges of what he’d already given me — kidnapping, extortion, at least two murders, blackmail, a string of cases still open against him in Calcutta. Taloja was his third stint inside. Two earlier ones, both in Calcutta jails, had come before it.
He was a peculiar kind of braggart. With everyone else in that barrack he was closed as a fist — businesslike, an enforcer, quick to bristle if he thought he was being tested. With me, for reasons I never fully understood, he talked and talked, walking me through his exploits in a level of detail I wished he’d spare me. And he was, in every practical sense, good to me. Made sure I wasn’t cheated in the small transactions that make up a day inside. Watched out for me in a way that felt, against everything I knew about him, genuinely protective.
His story, told to me across many evenings, the two of us sitting against the wall after the quadrangle had emptied out, was in outline a simple one. A farming family in West Bengal, the only son among two daughters. Unusual physical strength from boyhood, pulled into the fields early, school abandoned after class five because the land needed him more than a classroom did. A fight with his father over a girl Ram wanted to marry and his father wouldn’t allow, and Deva gone from the house for good. The wrong company after that, small crime becoming larger crime, and — because a man in that line needs a legitimate face in front of the illegitimate one — a second life learning trades, carpentry and masonry and plumbing and wiring, moving through the country by day while the other business went on underneath. Wives and children accumulating behind him as he moved: Bengal, Orissa, Bihar, Kerala. Two stints in Calcutta. Now two years into this one, just thirty-three.
I was careful about what I ate inside — you learn to be. Ram noticed, and started asking me about it: food, health, what I did to keep fit. I hadn’t set out to teach him anything, but within weeks he had built a routine out of it, and I watched it take hold of him in small, specific ways over the months that followed. He stopped asking for second helpings, which for a man his size and history was no small renunciation. He waved away the sweets that came round on festival days, twice, in front of everyone, which drew exactly the kind of laughter you’d expect — men calling out that the javabdar had gone soft, that jail was making a woman of him — and he took it without a word and kept at it anyway. The first time I saw him jogging laps of the quadrangle in the cool of the morning, alone, I nearly didn’t recognise the outline of him from a distance. By the sixth month his belly was gone, his back had straightened, he was bathing twice a day, which in that heat and with that water supply was its own quiet discipline. A couple of the younger men in the barrack started jogging with him, tentatively at first, as if trying on something they weren’t sure suited them.
And then he began keeping a diary.
He told me about it almost shyly, which was not a register I had heard from him before. He was writing the story of his life, he said, from the beginning, in his own hand, for the first time. One evening he had it out on his knee when I came and sat beside him, and I asked, carefully, if I might read some of it. He closed it before I’d finished the sentence. Then he opened it again, just the first page, and turned it toward me long enough for me to read a single line before he shut it and put it away inside his shirt.
I don’t remember the exact words. I remember that it was a child’s opening line — my father had a small piece of land — and that he would not show me another word of it, then or ever.
I still don’t know what to do with Ram. He had done terrible things to people who never had the chance to defend themselves, and I have no interest in softening that or asking anyone else to. But I sat across from a man rebuilding his body and starting, for the first time in thirty-three years, to put his own life into words, and I could not make myself believe that nothing in him was capable of turning. Whether he ever became a different man, I do not know. Whether anyone outside those walls was ever willing to let him become one was no longer a question that belonged to him alone — and it is the one I carried out with me, and never found an answer to.