Shantaram

by Gregory David Roberts

  We watched in a tight, fast-breathing silence. They manoeuvred Raheem to the centre of the compound, near a stone block about a metre high and a metre wide. He struggled and resisted them, but it was useless. More overseers joined in, with more ropes. Raheem’s legs went out from under him. Three men pulled on each wrist-rope with all their strength. His arms were drawn out so hard from his sides that I thought they might be torn from the sockets. His legs were splayed out at an excruciatingly unnatural angle. Other men, pulling on the ropes that passed through the leather collar, dragged his body toward the stone block. Using the ropes, the overseers stretched his left arm out, with the hand and forearm resting on the block. Raheem lay beside the block, his other arm stretched out by another team of overseers. One of the overseers then climbed onto the block and jumped off onto Raheem’s arm, with both feet, snapping the arm backwards in a sickening crunch of gristle and bone.

  He couldn’t scream, because the collar at his throat was too tight, but his mouth opened and closed on the scream that we made for him in our minds. His legs began to twitch and spasm. A violent shiver passed through his whole body, ending in a rapid shaking of his head that would’ve been funny if it wasn’t so frightening. The overseers dragged him around until his right arm was resting on the block. The same man climbed the stone, talking all the while to one of his friends, pulling tension on a rope. After a pause, he blew his nose with his fingers, scratched himself, and jumped onto the right arm, snapping it backwards. Raheem lost consciousness. The convict overseers looped their ropes around his ankles and then dragged his body out of the compound. His arms flopped and flapped behind his body, as limp and lifeless as long black socks filled with sand.

  ‘You see?’ Mahesh whispered.

  ‘What was that all about?’

  ‘He hit one of the overseers,’ Mahesh answered in a terrified whisper. ‘That’s why I stopped you. That’s what they can do.’

  Another man leaned close to us, speaking quickly.

  ‘And here, there is no guarantee of doctor,’ he breathed. ‘Maybe you see doctor, maybe no. Maybe that black fellow will live, maybe not live. No good luck to hit overseer, baba.’

  Big Rahul walked toward us, resting the bamboo stick on his shoulder. He paused beside me, and brought the stick down with a lazy smack across my back. His laughter as he walked away down the line of waiting men was brutally loud, but it was also weak and false, and it didn’t fool me. I’d heard that laugh before, in another prison across the world. I knew it well. Cruelty is a kind of cowardice. Cruel laughter is the way cowards cry when they’re not alone, and causing pain is how they grieve.

  Squatting in the queue, I noticed with a revulsive flinch that tiny insects, lice, were crawling in the hair of the man in front of me. I’d been feeling itchy since I’d woken. Until that moment, I’d put it down to the bites of the kadmal, the rough blanket I’d slept on, and the many cuts I’d sustained in walking the gauntlet. I looked at the next man’s hair. It, too, was crawling with writhing, white lice. I knew what that itchiness was, on my body and in my hair. I turned to look at Mahesh. His hair was alive with lice. I ruffled my own hair onto the palm of my hand, and there they were—white and crab-like, and too many to count at a glance.

  Body lice. The blankets they’d forced us to use as sleeping mats were infested with them. Suddenly, the itchiness I felt was a crawling horror, and I knew that the filthy pests were all over my body. When my head was shaved, and we made our way back to the dormitory, Mahesh explained about the body lice, known as sheppesh.

  ‘Sheppesh are fuckin’ horrible, brother. The little fucks are everywhere. That’s why the overseers have their own blankets, and sleep at their own end of the room. No sheppesh there. Come on, watch me, Lin, and I will show you what it is you must be doing.’

  He took off his T-shirt, and pulled it inside out. Holding the ribbed seam at the neck, he prised it apart and revealed the sheppesh crawling in the crease at the seam.

  ‘They’re fuckin’ hard to see, brother, but you don’t have any trouble feeling them, crawling on you, yaar? Don’t worry. They’re easy enough to kill. You just squeeze the little fucks between your thumbnails, like this.’

  I watched him as he worked his way around the neck of his T-shirt, killing the body lice one by one. He moved on to the seams at the sleeves, then, and finally to the hem at the bottom of the shirt. There were scores of the lice, and he squashed each one expertly between his thumbnails.

  ‘Now this shirt is clean,’ he said, folding it carefully, away from his body, and placing it on the bare stone floor. ‘No more sheppesh. Next you wrap a towel around yourself, like this, then take off your pants, and you kill all the sheppesh on your pants. When clean, put your pants with your shirt. Then your body—your arms underneath, your arse, your balls. And when your clothes they are clean, and your body it is clean, you get dressed again. And you’ll be okay, not so many sheppesh, until the night. And then you’ll get too many new sheppesh on you from the blanket. And no chance for sleeping without blanket, because the overseers will give you a solid pasting if you try. You can’t avoid it. And then tomorrow, you start the whole business again. This is what we call sheppesh farming, and we are farmers every day at Arthur Road.’

  I looked around the open, rain-drenched courtyard beside the long dormitory, and a hundred men were busy farming, picking the lice from their clothes and killing them methodically. Some men didn’t care. They scratched and shivered like dogs, and allowed the lice to breed on them. For me, the itchy, crawling violation of the body lice was a frenzy on the surface of my skin. I ripped my shirt off and examined the seam at the collar. The shirt was alive with them, squirming, burrowing, and breeding. I began to kill them, one by one, seam by seam. It was the work of several hours, and I practised it with fanatical assiduity, every morning that I spent in Arthur Road Prison, but I never felt clean there. Even when I knew that I’d killed the lice, and rid myself of them temporarily, I still felt their wriggling, itching, crawling loathsomeness on my skin. And little by little, month by month, the horror of that creeping infestation pushed me to the edge.

  For the whole of each day, between the early-morning head-count and the evening meal, we moved about within a large courtyard that was attached to our dormitory room. Some men played cards or other games. Some talked with friends, or tried to sleep on the stone paths. Not a few men, shuffling uncertainly on thin, tottering legs, talked a twitching madness to themselves, and stumbled into the walls until we turned them gently and set them on a new course.

  Lunch, at Arthur Road, consisted of a watery soup ladled out onto our flat aluminium plates. The evening meal, served at four-thirty with the addition of a single chapatti, was a repetition of that soup of the day. It was made with the peelings and discarded ends of various vegetables—peelings from beetroot on one day, from carrots the next, from pumpkins on the third day, and so on. The eyes and bruises, cut from potatoes, were used, as were the hard ends of courgettes, the papery outer skins of onions, and the muddy scrapings from turnips. We never saw pieces of the vegetables—those went to the guards and the convict overseers. In our soup, the scraps of peelings or stalky ends floated in a colourless, watery liquid. The large vat that the overseers wheeled into our compound for every meal brought one hundred and fifty ladled servings from the kitchens. There were one hundred and eighty men in the room. To remedy the deficiency, the overseers poured two buckets of cold water into the vat. They did that at every meal, with a ritual head-count and a pantomime display of inspiration as they solved the problem by adding the buckets of water. It never failed to rouse them to raucous laughter.

  At six o’clock, after the evening meal, the guards counted us once more, and locked us in the long dormitory room. For two hours, then, we were permitted to talk, and to smoke charras, purchased from the overseers. Inmates at Arthur Road Prison received five ration tickets, called coupons, per month. Men with access to money could also purchase coupons. Some men held rolls w
ith several hundred coupons in them. They used them to buy tea—two coupons bought a cup of hot tea—bread, sugar, jam, hot food, soap, shaving accessories, cigarettes, and the services of men who washed clothes or did other odd jobs. They were also the black-market currency in the prison. For six coupons, a man could buy a tiny goli, or a ball, of charras. For fifty, he could buy a shot of penicillin. A few dealers also traded in heroin, for sixty coupons a fix, but the overseers were ruthless in their attempts to exterminate it. Heroin addiction was one of the few forces strong enough to overcome terror and challenge the torturers’ authority. Most men, sane enough to fear the overseers’ almost limitless power, satisfied themselves with the semi-legal charras, and the perfume of hashish often drifted through the room.

  Every night the men gathered in groups to sing. Sitting in circles of twelve or more men, and tapping on their upturned aluminium plates as if they were tabla drums, the prisoners sang love songs from their favourite movies. They sang of heartbreak, and all the sorrows of loss. A particularly beloved song might start in one circle, be taken up by a second group for the next verses, and then move to a third group and a fourth before working its way back to the first. Around each circle of twelve or fifteen singers were twenty or thirty more men who provided the chorus of clapping hands and supporting voices. They cried openly as they sang, and they laughed together often. And with their music they helped one another to keep love alive in hearts that the city had forsaken, and forgotten.

  At the end of the second week at Arthur Road, I met with two young men who were due for release within the hour. Mahesh assured me that they would carry a message for me. They were simple, illiterate village boys who’d visited Bombay and had found themselves caught in the round-up of unemployed youths. After three months in Arthur Road without any formal charge, they were finally being released. On a piece of paper I wrote the name and address of Abdel Khader Khan, and a short note informing him that I was in prison. I gave it to the men and promised to reward them when I was released. They joined their hands together in a blessing and then left me, their smiles bright and hopeful.

  Later that day the overseers called our dormitory together with more than usual violence, and forced us to squat in close ranks. As we watched, the two young men who’d tried to help me were dragged into the room and dumped against a wall. They were only semi-conscious. They’d been beaten viciously Blood wept from wounds on their faces. Their mouths were swollen and their eyes were blackened. A snakeskin pattern of lathi bruises covered their bare arms and legs.

  ‘These dogs tried to take a message out of the jail for the gora,’ Big Rahul the overseer roared at us in Hindi. Anyone who tries to help the gora, will get the same. Understand? Now these two dogs have six more months in jail, in my room! Six months! Help him, any of you, and you will get the same.’

  The overseers left the room to share a cigarette, and we rushed forward to help the men. I washed their wounds, and dressed the worst of them with strips of cloth. Mahesh helped me, and when we finished the job he took me outside to smoke a beedie.

  ‘It’s not your fault, Lin,’ he said, looking out at the yard, where men walked or sat or picked lice from their clothes.

  ‘Of course it’s my fault.’

  ‘No, man,’ he said compassionately. ‘It’s this place, this Arthur Road. That business, that happens every day. It’s not your fault, brother, and it’s not mine. But now, it is a real problem for you. Nobody will be helping you now—just like in the lock-up at Colaba. I don’t know how long you will stay here. You see old Pandu, over there? He is in this room three years now, and still not any court action for him. Ajay is more than one year here. Santosh is two years in this room, for no charge, and he doesn’t know when he will go to court. I … I don’t know how long you will be in this room. And, sorry, brother, nobody will help you now.’

  The weeks passed, and Mahesh was right—no-one risked the anger of the overseers to help me. Men were released from the room every week, and I approached as many of them as I could, and as carefully as possible, but none would help. My situation was becoming desperate. After two months at the prison, I guessed that I’d lost about twelve kilos. I looked thin. My body was covered in the small, suppurating sores caused by the bites of the nocturnal kadmal. There were bruises caused by blows from overseers’ canes on my arms, legs, back, face, and bald, shaved head. And all the time, every minute of every day and night, I worried that the report on my fingerprints would reveal who I really was. Almost every night the worry worked me into a sweating nightmare of the ten-year sentence I’d escaped from in Australia. That worry settled in my chest, squeezing my heart and often swelling to such a grotesque anguish that I felt myself choking, suffocating on it. Guilt is the hilt of the knife that we use on ourselves, and love is often the blade; but it’s worry that keeps the knife sharp, and worry that gets most of us, in the end.

  The frustration, dread, worry, and pain finally peaked when Big Rahul, the overseer who’d found in me a focus for the hatred and wretchedness he’d suffered in his twelve years at the prison, hit me one time too often. I was sitting near the entrance to the empty dormitory, and attempting to write down a short story that had emerged and developed in my mind over the last weeks. I’d been repeating the phrases of the story line by line and day after day as I’d created them. It was one of the meditations that kept me sane. When I managed, that morning, to scrounge a stub of pencil and a small sheaf of discarded sugar-ration wrappers, I felt ready at last to write down the lines of the first page. In a quiet moment, after farming for sheppesh, I began to write. With all the stealth that malice manufactures, even in the gross and clumsy, Rahul crept up behind me and brought his lathi down on my left upper arm with bone-rattling force. His punishment stick was split at the end, and the blow ripped the skin of my arm open along the length of the muscle, almost from the shoulder to the elbow. Blood erupted from the deep cut and spilled over the fingers that I clamped on the wound.

  Springing to my feet in red-vision rage, I reached out quickly and snatched the stick from Rahul’s startled hand. Advancing towards him, I forced him backwards several paces into the empty room. There was a barred window beside me. I threw the stick through the bars. Rahul’s eyes bulged with fear and astonishment. It was the last thing he’d expected. He fumbled at his chest for his whistle. I kicked out in a twisting, flying front kick. He hadn’t expected that, either. The ball of my foot struck him in the face between the nose and the mouth. He took several stumbling, backward steps. Rule number one of street fighting: stand your ground and never walk backwards, unless you’re preparing a counter-strike. I followed him, pushing him on to the back foot and hitting him with a flurry of jabs and overhand rights. He put his head down, and covered up with his hands. Rule number two of street fighting: never put your head down. Aiming the punches for maximum damage, I punched him directly in the ear, on the temples, and at the throat. He was a bigger man than I was, and at least as strong, but he was no fighter. He buckled, and went to his knees, rolling over onto his side and pleading for mercy.

  I looked up to see the other overseers running toward me from the yard outside. Backing up into a corner of the room, I took up a karate stance and waited for them. They ran at me. One of them was faster than the others. He rushed into striking range. I kicked out quickly. My foot struck him between the legs, with all the strength I had. I punched him three times before he hit the ground. His face was bloody. The blood smeared on the polished stone floor as he crawled away from me. The rest of them baulked. They stood in a semi-circle around me, startled and confused, with their sticks raised in the air.

  ‘Come on!’ I shouted, in Hindi. ‘What can you do to me? Can you do worse than this?’

  I punched my own face, hard, and punched it again, drawing blood from my lip. I swiped my right hand through the blood on my wounded arm and smeared it on my forehead. Lesson number three of street fighting: always get crazier than the other guy.

  ‘Can you do w
orse than this?’ I shouted, switching to Marathi. ‘Do you think I’m afraid of this? Come on! I want this! I want you to get me out of this corner! You’ll get me, you’ll get me, but one of you, standing there, will lose an eye. One of you. I’ll rip someone’s eye out with my fingers, and eat it! So come on! Let’s get on with it! And hurry up, because God knows, I’m fuckin’ hungry!’

  They hesitated, and then drew back in a huddle to discuss the situation. I watched them, every muscle in my body as tight and taut as a leopard leaping to the kill. After half a minute of harsh whispering, the overseers reached a decision. They drew back further, and some of their number ran out of the room. I thought they must be running for the guards, but they returned in seconds with ten prisoners from my room. They ordered the men to sit on the ground, facing me, and then they began to beat them. The sticks rose and fell swiftly. The men shrieked and yowled. The beating ceased, after a minute, and they sent the ten men away. In a few seconds, they replaced them with ten more.

  ‘Come out of the corner, now!’ one of the overseers commanded.

  I looked at the men sitting on the ground, and then back at the overseer. I shook my head. The overseer gave the command, and the second group of ten men was beaten with the bamboo canes. Their cries rose up in piercing echoes, and wheeled about us in the stone room like a flock of frightened birds.

  ‘Come out of the corner!’ the overseer shouted.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Aur dass!’ he screamed. Bring ten more!

  The next group of ten frightened men was assembled, facing me. The overseers raised their sticks. Mahesh was in the third group. One of the two men who’d been beaten and given an extra six-month sentence for trying to help me was also in the huddle of ten. They looked at me. They were silent, but their eyes were pleading with me.