Serpentine

by Thomas Thompson

  By her telling, she was the daughter of a multimillionaire Virginia family whose fortune was rooted in tobacco, horses, and land. Her father, a dour man who often slept in his office and rose during the night to study his balance sheets, owned a breeding farm in Virginia, a private island in Maine, an apartment in Manhattan, and a condominium in Key West. Checkers’ mother, a mid-European beauty with a few drops of distantly royal blood in her veins, bore six children between trips to Paris, where she was a valued customer at the salons of haute couture. When Checkers was ten, her parents divorced and she was exiled to a series of private schools. “I was kicked out of six before I was fifteen,” she told Marie-Andrée, proudly.

  Checkers claimed to have begun a flourishing career as occasional prostitute at the age of fourteen, working both the locker rooms of her father’s country clubs and the streets of New York. By seventeen, she had funds sufficient for an escape to Europe, where the intent was to reclaim the attention and affection of her mother, then on a fourth marriage, to a wine baron. “My dear mother told me to kiss off,” remembered Checkers, “so I said to hell with everybody. I’ve been on my own ever since and never regretted a minute of it.”

  But how did Checkers happen to be a repeating resident of Tihar Prison? “I’m a smuggler, honey,” she told Marie-Andrée. Checkers had been arrested several days before at Delhi Airport with seven kilos of hashish hidden in her brassiere, giving her the appearance of an exceptionally well-endowed stripper, plus a vial of morphine powder, plus a flight bag that contained $30,000 in crisp Canadian hundred-dollar bills. “They took me to the tax office and beat me for five days until they saw it wasn’t going to get them anywhere,” contended Checkers. “So they decided to dump me into Tihar for a while—Tihar, beloved Tihar. I asked if any Western women were around and Marie-Andrée Leclerc was the star attraction.”

  Quickly Checkers proved that she knew how to operate—and survive. Her face still as fresh as an ingénue’s, her eyes always sparkling save when their lids were heavy with hashish smoke, Checkers refused to permit melancholy to visit her. Even if her tales had to be reduced by three quarters before they could be believed, the girl had spunk and warmth and was as welcome in the cell as a splash of French cologne. Within a half day of her arrival, Checkers returned from a “scavenger hunt” about the prison, bearing an armload of bananas, onions, garlic, potatoes, a chunk of suspicious-smelling meat, and a squawking live green parrot. The last she took to the next door cell, where an old Indian woman obediently strangled the bird and plucked it for roasting. That night the three young women, Marie-Andrée, Checkers, and the deranged Dharma dined well. Checkers had even bargained for the stub of a candle that threw a soft glow over the hideous chamber. Long ago Marie-Andrée had surrendered her interest in food, but Checkers threatened to force-feed her if she did not eat every morsel of the stringy parrot.

  “This noble bird died for us,” she said. “The least you can do is show your appreciation.”

  Marie-Andrée smiled and ate with reasonable enthusiasm.

  “Did you kill all those pepple?” asked Checkers.

  Marie-Andrée shook her head. “Of course not.”

  “Good,” announced Checkers. “I believe you.”

  Each night Checkers smoked hashish or, if she had been lucky, a bit of opium, pulling on the pipe until she was drugged enough to find sleep. Most of the women in Tihar did the same, else they could not have survived the night with its screams from the insane asylum, or the cries of babies who were condemned along with their mothers. In India, when a mother is sent to prison and there is no one to care for her child, then both are locked up. One day Checkers returned to the cell with a revolting piece of news. She had seen an enormous rat crawling over the taut skin of a malnourished infant nearby who was apparently asleep. When Checkers rushed in to shoo the rat away, she discovered that the baby was dead. “They die in here every week,” she said. “This is the bottom circle of hell.”

  Somehow Checkers managed entree to most every part of the sprawling prison, accomplishing such freedom of movement by a show of bravado whenever confronted by authority. “They think I’m crazy,” said Checkers. “If any guard gives me trouble, I explode and curse the son of a bitch. Most Indian men are afraid of Western women.”

  There came a morning when Checkers broke and sobbed like the youngster she truly was. On this day she returned from a tour of the prison, her face a rare slash of despair. She fell onto her blanket and wept. Marie-Andrée pleaded to know the cause of her pain. “Bastards,” said Checkers. “They killed her. I saw them.” When she turned her cheek to Marie-Andrée, an angry red bruise was newly present.

  “Who?” asked her cellmate. “Who did they kill?”

  Checkers told of a young country girl in prison on a minor robbery. She had progressed from tears to blankness to attempted suicide. A broken light bulb. Jagged edge across her jugular. Unsuccessful, she tried to hang herself with her blanket. “The guards found her and cut her down and beat her up as punishment—and she finally died.” Checkers said she rushed into the prison office and was informed by someone in authority that the girl died of dysentery. “I went berserk … I started kicking chairs and trying to get at the guy’s face with my fingernails. I said, ‘How can you permit a woman, a human being, to be beaten to death?’ And you know what he said? He said, ‘She’s not a woman, she’s a criminal. And she’s not a criminal anymore because she’s dead. One less case to tangle the court.’”

  When a guard was summoned to escort Checkers back to the cell, she struggled. He slapped her. “I’ll kill the bastard someday,” she vowed. “He’s going on my list.”

  In January, an unusual cold settled over Delhi. In Tihar, the thick walls drank up the chill and prisoners went about huddled in their thin blankets. Each cell was a crypt, the sun hid, and Checkers said the smell of death was in the air. She won permission to keep a fire going in the cell, but as there was no ventilation, the flames could not burn for more than a few minutes before smoke overwhelmed. Each morning, one of the girls rose before the sun and hurried to a communal woodpile where the guards tossed out a few sticks and laughed while the women fought over them like starved cats. If a woman arrived too late, it was either endure the cold until the next dawn or barter with chits that were the unit of currency inside the walls. Chits could purchase food or drugs, or bribe a guard to smuggle out a letter, or to keep a lesbian from making unwelcome advances. Adroit in such negotiation, Checkers was late one morning to the woodpile and returned instead with an armload of hard, round loaves of bread. Marie-Andrée caught one as Checkers tossed them about the room. She grimaced. The bread was inedible. “Of course,” said Checkers. “It’s our firewood today.” And until the bread was gone, their cell smoked with a pungent aroma that delivered a modest amount of heat.

  On occasion, Checkers even maneuvered her way to the men’s side, where “all the best drugs” were available, and where she renewed an old acquaintance—Charles Sobhraj. “I knew him once under a different name,” she said. Marie-Andrée was hungry for news. She had not seen him in several days. Was he well? Did he speak of her? Had he managed to remove his leg irons? The last time they met at the Parliament Street Courts, his legs were raw from steel scraping flesh.

  “He said to give you his love,” answered Checkers, “and not to worry.” Later, Checkers described Charles more fully to another friend: “He’s sitting over there like the Godfather, trying to run the criminal business of the entire continent of Asia … He says he has ‘people’ working for him on the outside, but from what I gather they consist of three or four French junkies who are stupid enough to run errands for him.”

  Checkers told Marie-Andrée that if MISA were not in effect she might have been released on bail long ago. “Who would have thought a nice woman like Indira Gandhi would turn out to be Franco?”

  Presently, Checkers heard an interesting rumor that she brought to Marie-Andrée. Several hundred letters from Canadian supporters w
ere piled up in the prison office. Somebody had decreed that an MISA prisoner was not entitled to read the avalanche of mail. Marie-Andrée burst into angry tears, begging Checkers for a scheme to pry them loose.

  Checkers nodded and begged for quiet. She was thinking. “It’s simple,” she finally said. “A hunger strike.”

  “What good would that do?” wondered Marie-Andrée.

  “Oh, cause a little drama, shake the bastards up. I can see that it gets leaked to the press. The Indians are terrified of hunger strikes. They’re a famous weapon in India; remember Gandhi? If that old man could bring down the British Raj by the simple act of refusing to eat, then you ought to get your mail.”

  Marie-Andrée agreed enthusiastically, informing the female guard the next morning that she was refusing to eat until (1) all of her mail was given to her, (2) she was removed from the MISA category, as her alleged crimes had nothing to do with politics, and (3) she was allowed certain privileges such as a writing table, stationery, and a larger ration of lye soap to wash down the cell and keep the insects under modest control. The guard shrugged and went to get a superior who in turn fetched an assistant warden who then persuaded the top man himself, a stocky, muscular, mustard-faced man in his late thirties, named Ranawanda, to visit the troublesome Canadian girl.

  Their meeting was brief and inconclusive. Marie-Andrée presented her demands, Ranawanda warned her that she was risking her health, then he stalked out.

  “It worked,” said Checkers excitedly. “He’s already worried about this getting into the papers.”

  It was not difficult for a Tihar prisoner to go on a hunger strike. Her stomach already shrunken, Marie-Andrée suffered no pangs after the first day. The prison countered by increasing her food ration, adding tempting dishes like fresh fruit and a piece of broiled chicken. But she refused steadfastly to eat. At mealtimes, when the guards came, she stretched out on the floor and looked—under Checkers’ careful stage directions—in the throes of terminal starvation. “Wait’ll the press gets a hold of this,” taunted Checkers. “I can see the headline now: ‘Canadian Woman Dies of Starvation in Indian Prison.’” Checkers embellished the act by locating some white powder somewhere in the prison with which she transformed Marie-Andrée’s face into a ghastly death mask.

  At the end of a week, prison authorities were in and out of the cell several times daily, coaxing, threatening, promising a beating or solitary confinement. But the striker refused to even look at the food in their arms. On the twelfth day, taken to the prison hospital, Marie-Andrée was warned by a doctor that death was imminent. Marie-Andrée nodded. She had heard that a Western woman is lucky to survive a year in an Indian prison under optimum conditions. It did not matter. The way she saw her situation, death would be little more than a lateral move.

  “Will you just eat one bite?” begged a female matron, holding forth a plate of newly baked biscuits. Marie-Andrée stared at the food. It was indeed tempting. She picked up a biscuit, examined it, took a tiny bite, dropped it back onto the plate. “All right,” she said, “I took one bite. Now can I go back to my cell and die in peace?”

  Finally the warden was smart enough to produce Charles, who was shocked at Marie-Andrée’s appearance. He asked for a few moments of privacy. They were granted. He urged her to break the hunger strike. Her body clearly could not tolerate more. To commit ritualistic suicide was abhorrent to Charles’ philosophy. Assuring her of his love, he negotiated a compromise. If the prison would release her mail, and allow her to have writing paper and pen, then she would call off the strike. With relief, permission was granted.

  Marie-Andrée spent the next several weeks happily reading letters from Canada, many of which viewed her predicament as the fate of a French-speaking citizen abandoned by Ottawa. “If you were an English-speaking Canadian,” wrote one woman, “Pierre Trudeau would have invaded India to get you out.”

  Soon thereafter, Checkers won release on bail, the money put up by a relative and a friend on the outside. But her passport was not returned. On the day of her release, she checked into the deluxe Imperial Hotel, ordered six Coca-Colas, a double cheeseburger, and “all the French fries in your kitchen,” then began to think about ways to get Marie-Andrée out of prison. She loathed Charles Sobhraj, she knew others whose lives have been ruined by him. Her heart went out to the foolish Canadian girl. And Checkers knew it was a race against time. If Marie-Andrée did not get stabbed by a spiteful prisoner, or beaten to death by guards, or succumb to blood poisoning from insect bites, then her innards would twist and shrivel into necrosis from malnutrition.

  Remaining in Delhi several weeks, Checkers raised money by an occasional sale of her sexual favors to a wealthy businessman from Madras, who paid well to chew on her toes and stroke her elbows, nothing else. And she always had a little hashish in a jeweled compact to sell, but the drug was so plentiful and cheap in India that scant profit could be made. A telegram to her mother, holidaying in Lisbon, asking for an advance against her someday-family inheritance did not even produce a reply.

  At least once a week, Checkers went to the teeming, scheming street fair that was the Parliament Street Courts, where she usually managed to steal a moment or two with Marie-Andrée and serve as postman or messenger girl. She avoided Charles, for he never lacked attention. His minions shared common characteristics: none was very bright, but each moth was passionately attracted by the flame of Charles Sobhraj.

  One night in the Cellar night club, Checkers searched the murk for a table and was invited to squeeze into a group of youngsters. She found herself sitting next to an extremely tall, very thin American whose most distinguishable feature, even by candlelight, was eyes the color of scarlet. Red Eye had been sprung from Tihar that afternoon, and the American Embassy had indicated that a new passport would be issued to home. Merry, celebrating, and anxious to make a final exit from the East, Red Eye announced that fate had finally blessed him. “I’m on the way home,” he told Checkers, “and if I ever get there, whatever is square, and normal, and double-knit, I’ll be all for it.”

  Checkers nodded, understanding how the values of home that had seemed so tarnished took on the luster of gold once they were remembered in the hell of an Indian prison. Quickly the two young people made the connection that both had been recent residents of Tihar, and that their friends had been Charles and Marie-Andrée. “Have you seen Charles operating at the courthouse?” asked Checkers, answering her own question. “It’s madness. In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man will rule. I really believe Charles is enjoying it. He’s on the front page of every newspaper, and he has a bunch of stupid courtiers to dance in attendance.”

  Red Eye was convinced that Charles was planning an escape. “He has six sets of blueprints and he knows Tihar better than the men who built it,” said Red Eye. It would not be easy. Not only was Charles under exceptional surveillance, the prison staff was nervous and quick-triggered. In recent months, probably due to the confusion and overcrowding from the MISA emergency rules, Tihar was unusually restless. One prisoner, a minor robber who protested that he had been sentenced unfairly, attempted a Herculean escape. The man, whose name was Galwar, dug a tunnel with a tin cup, burrowing beneath the wall of a house within Tihar where lepers were kept, across several hundred feet of earth, then down under a street. Galwar knew that only a moat and an eight-foot-thick final wall stood between him and freedom. But on his hundred and thirteenth day of labor, as he dug toward the moat and wondered how he could avoid potential drowning, a prison truck drove over his tunnel and encountered the new weakness of the street’s underpinnings. The truck sank, destroying the road, Galwar’s dream, and Galwar.

  Sometime later, ten quite dangerous prisoners united to dig a new tunnel, profiting from Galwar’s mistake. For six months the ten dug, this time in a zigzag pattern, calculated to put less strain on the surface. Beginning near a wrestling pit in the exercise yard, which served as a place to dump the dirt and rocks dredged up by their digging, they
proceeded without discovery. One night when the prison staff was watching a film, the ten calmly crawled to freedom. Alas, the story ended sadly. The escapees, once in the arms of freedom, split up, stole guns, got drunk, threatened to shoot up the interior of a restaurant. The other customers made citizens’ arrests, and seven of the ten were promptly returned with hangovers to Tihar. The three others were reportedly slain.

  After these embarrassing flights, fifteen members of the prison staff were fired, and rumor had it that Indira Gandhi herself scolded the chief administrator and warned him to tighten security within the huge institution.

  There had also been the horrible story of a convicted murderer who was waiting in Tihar for his execution. Deranged, he warned the guards daily that the government of India would never take his life, and the guards responded with taunts and promises. One night the prisoner poured kerosene on his blankets, wrapped them about his body, and set himself afire. He rushed down a corridor in flames, screaming for the guards to try and kill him. Someone threw a bucket of water over the wretch; another guard tackled him; enough of him was left breathing to be taken to the prison hospital for intensive treatment. After a week, the doomed man was pronounced well enough to be hanged, which he was, on the ancient gallows, in the chill of an autumn dawn.

  Checkers did not believe Charles would try and escape from within the prison. More likely he would engineer some spectacular drama either on the bus that bore him from jail to courthouse, or in the courtyard where he waited for court appearances. “One thing is certain,” she predicted, “Charles will either bust out or he will kill himself. He simply cannot allow authority to hang him, for that would be the ultimate negation, his final defeat. He will either escape in some grandiose flash that will be written about for years—or else he will execute himself and rig it so that he will take an awful lot of people to death with him. Charles wants his name writ large in history.”