Mind Without Fear

by Rajat Gupta

  My mind was occupied with my upcoming visits—my wife, Anita, was due to come the next day with my other three daughters, Geetanjali (known as Sonu), Megha, and Deepali (known as Kushy). Two friends were flying in from Germany and India the following week. Would I be allowed to see them? And would my family worry about me even more when they heard? I knew I could cope; I was not sure I could convince them that I could cope. When the announcement blared out telling me to report to the CO’s office, I left my largely untouched dinner and set out to learn my fate.

  The CO handed me the incident report he had written up, and asked me if it was accurate. It stated, correctly, that I had been tying my shoelace, but also that I had been listening to music, which I had not. Trying to adopt a deferential tone, but determined not to play his game, I told him that essentially it was accurate, but some details were wrong.

  “So you’re disagreeing with me?”

  “No,” I said carefully, “some of the details are incorrect, but I guess it does not matter. It is true that I was not standing for the count.” His expression made it clear that I had failed his test—I was not supposed to challenge his version of events.

  “The disciplinary unit will decide on your punishment,” he told me, “but if I were you, I would get ready to go to the SHU.” Turning back to his computer, he left no doubt that our conversation was over.

  Back at my bunk, I was inundated with advice from long-time inmates, many of them veterans of the SHU.

  “Take a shower, while you can.”

  “Put away your valuables.”

  “Call your wife.”

  “Give your wife’s number to a friend so he can call her.”

  “Eat.”

  I sat, frozen, the information coming at me too fast to process. The small cubicle, with its two bunks, two closets, two footlockers, and two chairs, suddenly felt like a home of sorts, compared to what awaited me at the SHU. I felt a strange pang at the thought of leaving it. Quickly, I gathered my few important possessions—my spare eyeglasses and my music player—and gave them to a friend for safekeeping. Before I had time to call Anita, I was summoned to the guards’ office.

  Here, I was handcuffed. When I asked to use a restroom, the guards said no. After some time, one of the guards appeared with three plastic bags containing all my belongings, which he threw down carelessly on one side of the office. I wondered if I would see them again, and was grateful my friend had the things that mattered to me.

  Eventually, four guards marched me to my new accommodations. I was put in a holding cell, strip-searched, and given an orange SHU uniform to wear. The entire process seemed unnecessarily rough and dehumanizing. I was not referred to by name; rather, they called me “the bad guy.” Still handcuffed, I was taken to my cell, where they locked me in and then instructed me to stick my hands through a small slot in the door so they could remove the cuffs. I asked if I could make a phone call to Anita and let her know not to come, but I was told “maybe next week.” Next week? My family were coming tomorrow, driving several hours to see me. The guard just shrugged. “So?” he asked as he walked away. I was left alone, sitting on the small steel stool, to adjust to my new surroundings and wrestle with the sense of injustice that once again threatened to overwhelm me.

  Involuntary Simplicity

  The cell was in fact not unfamiliar, since this was not the first time I’d been in the SHU. Four months earlier, on my arrival at FMC Devens, I’d spent my first few nights in an identical cell, before being transferred to the “camp” as the minimum security facility was known. I had hoped I would never be back here. Every inmate knows, however, that you can end up in the SHU at any time, for any reason. Friends would suddenly disappear for days, sometimes weeks, returning with a gaunt, haunted look and a heightened subservience to the guards. Now, it was my turn. Frustrated, I lay back on the lumpy, plastic-covered mattress, squashed to less than an inch thick by the weight of previous occupants, and closed my eyes.

  As they often had during my imprisonment, my thoughts turned to my father. He too had spent many months confined to a cell. Although the context was completely different, I drew strength from his memory. More than seventy years earlier, Ashwini Gupta had been a freedom fighter on the front lines of India’s struggle for independence. He was jailed repeatedly by the British and suffered greatly at their hands. As a child, I remember staring at the knotted scar running the length of his back. When I was old enough to understand, he told me he had been beaten in jail until the flesh split open. The poor medical care he received left him with one leg shorter than the other, by almost two inches, and a permanent limp. Another scar commemorated the surgery that removed one of his lungs after a severe case of tuberculosis almost killed him. His British overlords had deliberately locked him up with a TB patient so that he too would become infected with the disease, fully intending that, like so many others, he would die in prison, suffering and alone.

  He never said much about that episode—indeed, it was only much later in life that I learned the full story from other family members, including the fact that his infection had not been accidental. He only survived because, by a stroke of fate, one of the jailers in the prison where he lay racked by fever turned out to be an old friend and classmate, now working for the British. Seeing my father close to death, he arranged for an ambulance to take him to hospital, and also contacted his sister, my aunt, who came to care for him. If it had not been for that man, my father would have died in that cell.

  Born in Kolkata in 1908, my father was a proud Bengali who exemplified the intellectual prowess and fiery, independent spirit of his people. His own health, safety, and happiness were never a primary concern in the fight for independence. Although he met my mother, Pran Kumari, in his early thirties, they were only wed in early 1947, when independence was visible on the horizon. My sister Rajashree (who I call Didi, meaning older sister) was born before the year was out, and I followed on December 2, 1948, with my second sister, Jayashree (known as Kumkum), arriving two years later. My younger brother, Kanchan (known as Anjan), completed the family six years later, after we moved to New Delhi. My father became a celebrated journalist and confidant to the country’s leaders, and we lived in an apartment provided by the newspaper where he worked.

  One of my most vivid memories of my father is that he always wore a dhoti (a traditional garment made from homespun cotton cloth, which is wrapped around the waist and looped between the legs) and a traditional shirt on top. He explained to me that this simple choice of clothing was a symbol of his values—it represented a rejection of imported foreign goods and an embrace of Indian tradition, and it also reflected his Gandhian commitment to simplicity. He owned only three such outfits, and each day he would wash one by hand while he took his morning shower and then wear the second, saving the third for travel.

  My father’s character haunted my thoughts as I lay in my own prison cell. The ideals that shaped his life were freedom, learning, high thinking, and simple living. Generosity to those in need, forgiveness to those who did him wrong. Never once did I hear him express a hint of bitterness or resentment toward the British, who had inflicted such suffering upon him.

  In many ways our situations could not have been more different—he was jailed for a noble cause and a high-minded ideal; I was jailed for alleged personal gain, for a fabricated white-collar crime, and, at most, a careless mistake. Yet one of the lessons he taught me was that while we cannot always control what happens to us, we can control our own attitude in response. In this sense, I was determined to strive to be like him: to be free of bitterness and anger, to not think ill of my captors, and to bear my situation with grace and dignity. Thinking of him also reminded me that many people suffer much more harshly in incarceration than I did. While not pleasant, especially in the SHU, the conditions of my own confinement were certainly better than those he had endured and those many endure in the US prison system today.

  My father moved through the world with detachment, n
ever holding on too tightly to his accomplishments, his possessions, or his feelings. When it came to our family, often it was up to my mother to temper his generosity toward others in order to ensure our well-being. She would secretly save money so he could not give it away. From a certain perspective, I had lived an opposite life to his, blessed with wealth and comforts, enjoying my influence and access, always busy and on the move. But in deeper ways my life had been shaped by his values—helping others, improving society, serving my country. I’d always striven to be a “servant leader”—in my family, my school, my college, and the many institutions in which I’ve worked.

  Now that my worldly goods had been stripped away, some part of me felt that the enforced austerity of prison existence might offer an opportunity to return to my core values. Was this a message from God telling me I needed to change my way of life? Had I been too driven, too busy, too focused on making a bigger impact? If this had not happened, would I have just continued the same way for another decade or more? Was it time to simplify—to focus on the inner life, to spend more time with my family, to slow down?

  From the moment I’d surrendered to the prison camp, I had decided to approach my incarceration as if I were entering a monastery. I would live in the present moment, make it a learning experience, and try to help others who were less fortunate. With my father’s example to guide me, I was determined to emerge a better and stronger person—physically, mentally, and spiritually. My prison uniform would become my dhoti, and I would wear it with pride.

  Counting Days

  When I awoke in the SHU, after an uncomfortable night, I had no idea what time it was. It was light outside, but the tiny window did not allow me to see the height of the sun. Had I missed breakfast? The guard could have come by while I was sleeping. I was hungry, and the thought of waiting till lunch was unpleasant. Thankfully, breakfast came, thrust abruptly through the slot in the door. A bread roll, some dry cereal, a small carton of milk, and a Styrofoam cup containing powdered coffee. I pressed the button by the sink for hot water, but the best I could get was lukewarm. I forced myself to eat the tasteless fare, knowing that it was all I’d be getting for a while.

  I wondered how long I would be held in solitary. The guards did not seem to feel any obligation to inform me of their intentions. I was at their mercy, and any inquiry or complaint was likely to simply extend my confinement. The walls of every SHU cell bear witness to this cruel practice of indefinite punishment: Rows of scratches marking days and weeks, faded lists of dates that chart the fading morale of past occupants. A United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture found that holding someone in solitary confinement for more than fifteen days is equivalent to torture and can lead to trauma.2 One set of markings on the wall of my cell recorded fifty-one days.

  On my second day, I heard a knock on my door. I looked up at the small window and saw a pair of eyes, and a hand beckoning me to come. At a brief glance, I saw empathy in those eyes, and so I was surprised, when I got closer, to discover that they belonged to the CO who had sent me here. He seemed uncomfortable, and I wondered if he felt bad about his actions.

  “Are you doing all right?” he asked me.

  What does he want now? I wondered. Hasn’t he done enough damage already? Wary of walking into another of his traps, but wanting to believe that what I saw in his eyes was concern, I nodded.

  “I’ve locked away all of your things in a safe place for your return,” he said. “You will be back in the camp next Tuesday. You should be fine. Just don’t disrespect the count again.” His tone was conciliatory. After a couple of minutes he wished me goodnight and turned to leave. I was still standing at the door, trying to process this strange visitation, when he turned back.

  “Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked.

  Hesitantly, I said, “I have nothing to read or to occupy my mind. Could I get some books?”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he replied.

  An hour later, a small library cart arrived and I was allowed to look through the window in my door and choose a couple of books. The selection was poor, and many books were clearly missing pages or whole sections, so I picked two that looked most intact. One was a biography of Winston Churchill by Roy Jenkins; the other was a book called The Iceman, about a mafia hitman who dispatched of his victims with an ice pick. As these precious volumes were passed through the slot in my door, I silently sent my thanks to the CO for showing some humanity. Perhaps, in his own way, he was asking my forgiveness for his harsh treatment of me.

  I started out with the ice pick killer, but quickly realized this gruesome tale was not the best prison reading. I turned instead to the Churchill biography, which was over a thousand pages long. I am a slow and sporadic reader—the butt of many jokes among my family of avid book lovers. Would I be able to finish it, if I really was going back to the camp on Tuesday, as the CO had promised? I could almost hear my wife and daughters laughing in my head, and I told them firmly that I could and would read it.

  The book was a godsend, immersing me for hour upon hour in the life and passions of one of the twentieth century’s most controversial characters. However, for all its exhaustive detail, it didn’t touch on the story about Churchill I had been told as a child: the man who fiercely opposed Indian independence and blocked food shipments during the Bengal famine of 1943, in which millions of people died of starvation. It got me thinking about how history gets written—what is remembered and what is forgotten.

  I lay in my narrow bunk with its lumpy mattress, night after night, reading and trying to shut out the noise. One might imagine that solitary confinement would be eerily silent, but in fact the SHU made the Kolkata train station seem peaceful. Day and night, prisoners would bang on the steel doors with their fists and yell, trying to get the attention of a guard. Every transaction was conducted by shouting. Each cell’s lights were controlled by a switch outside the locked door, so some people shouted for the lights to go on, while others shouted for the lights to go off. Some demanded information, phone access, legal counsel, or medical attention. Some tried to conduct conversations with friends in other cells. Some just yelled torrents of abuse and rage, often in incoherent Spanish, that reverberated off the steel doors and concrete walls. The guards ignored most of it. I tried to tune it out. When it started to get to me, I looked at the scratches on the cell wall and told myself that maybe the crazy guys had been here fifty days or more. If they kept me in the SHU that long, who’s to say I too would not be howling curses into the night?

  The thought of being in the SHU for weeks on end struck fear into me, for all my attempts at equanimity. I hoped the CO was as good as his word, and I would only need to endure a few days. Lying sleepless on my metal bed, staring at the ceiling, I felt the walls closing in. But I was determined not to give the guards the satisfaction of hearing me yell or complain or beg for information. I’d make the best of it. There wasn’t much room, but at least it was only me. There was no storage, but then again, I didn’t have anything to store. Think of it as prison with room service, I told myself. Rise above it, as my father would have done.

  2

  Uncertain Winds

  If you shut your door to all errors truth will be shut out.

  —Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds, 130

  December 2009

  “There’s a lawyer from Goldman Sachs on the line and he says he needs to speak with you right away.”

  I was hurrying through Detroit Metro Airport, on my way to Boston to see my new twin granddaughters, and I was late for my flight. Ahead of me was a long line for security.

  “Can I call him back later?” I asked my assistant Renee, explaining where I was.

  “He says it’s urgent,” she replied, so I told her to put the call through.

  Having served on the Goldman Sachs board since 2006, I knew Greg Palm, their internal legal counsel, quite well, and we were on friendly terms. So I could tell that something was up the moment he got on the phone and infor
med me in an uncharacteristically formal tone that one of his colleagues was also on the line to listen to the conversation. He skipped any pleasantries and got straight to the point. “I need to talk to you about Raj Rajaratnam. Did you ever disclose any sensitive information related to board discussions to him?”

  “Of course not,” I told him, taken aback. “What is this about?” The security line shuffled forward, and I checked my watch, reluctant to give up my place when my flight was leaving in less than an hour.

  “Your name has come up in relation to the Rajaratnam case,” he replied.

  “Come up?” That could have meant anything. “In what sense?”

  “We learned from some other lawyers that reference had been made to phone calls between you and Rajaratnam.”

  “What kind of phone calls?” I demanded.

  “They think you may have provided him with inside information about the bank, specifically relating to Warren Buffett’s $5 billion investment in September 2008. They have Rajaratnam on tape telling a colleague that he got information from someone that something good might happen to Goldman.”

  I’d reached the front of the line and the TSA agents were indicating that I needed to get off the phone. “This is ridiculous,” I told him. “I’ve done nothing of the sort. Look, I have to go through security. Can I call you back in a few minutes?”

  “Sure,” he said. “But you should know that your interests and our interests may diverge, and I represent Goldman. I would advise you to get a lawyer.” His tone was ominous.

  As I went through the mindless ritual of removing shoes and belt, taking out my laptop, and pushing my briefcase through the scanner, my mind was racing. What could possibly have happened? How had I gotten pulled into this mess? Surely it was all a mistake. But nevertheless, it was worrying. For the thousandth time, I wished I had never crossed paths with Raj Rajaratnam.