Shantaram: A Novel

by Gregory David Roberts

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THE FIRST FLOOR of the lock-up at Colaba police station had four big cell rooms beyond the flexi-steel gate. A corridor connected the four rooms. On one side the corridor gave access to the rooms. On the other side it looked out, through steel mesh, onto the quadrangle of the police compound. There were more cells below. It was in one of those ground-floor cells that Kano the bear had been detained. Transients, who spent only one or two nights in custody, were held on the ground floor. Anyone likely to stay for a week or longer in the Colaba lock-up climbed the steps or was dragged up them, as I was, and passed through the sliding steel gate into one of hell’s antechambers.

  There were no doors beyond the steel gate. Each of the four rooms was accessed through a blank arch that was slightly wider than the average house doorway. The rooms were roughly three metres square. The corridor was just wide enough for two men to pass each other with their shoulders touching, and it was about sixteen metres long. At the end of the corridor there was a urinal and a keyhole-shaped squatting-toilet, both without doors. A tap, providing water for washing and drinking, was fixed above the urinal.

  The four rooms and corridor might’ve held forty men with an acceptable level of discomfort. When I woke up, on my first morning, I discovered that there were, in fact, two hundred and forty of us. The place was a hive, a termite’s nest, a writhing mass of human beings, pressing against one another with every little movement of an arm or a leg. The toilet was ankle-deep in shit. The urinal overflowed. A stinking swamp oozed out of them into the far end of the corridor. The still, thickly humid monsoon air was clogged with moaning, murmurings, talking, complaining, shouting, and the screams, every few hours, of men going mad. I remained there for three weeks.

  The first of the four rooms, where I’d slept the first night, held only fifteen men. It was furthest from the sickening smell of the toilet. It was clean. There was space to lie down. The men who lived in that room were all rich—rich enough to pay the cops to beat up anyone who tried to squeeze in without an invitation. The room was known as the Taj Mahal, and its residents were known as the pandrah kumar, the fifteen princes.

  The second room held twenty-five men. I learned that they were all crooks: men who’d served hard time at least once before, and were prepared to fight, fast and dirty, to preserve a space for themselves. Their room was known as the chor mahal, the abode of thieves, and the men were known as the black hats, the kala topis—like Ranjit’s lepers—because convicted thieves at the infamous Arthur Road Prison were forced to wear a black hat with their prison uniform.

  The third room had forty men wedged into it, sitting shoulder to shoulder around the walls, and taking turns to stretch out in the little space left in the centre of the room. They weren’t as hard as the men in the second room, but they were proud and willing. They claimed the small squares of space they sat in, and then struggled to hold them against incursions by newcomers. They were constantly under pressure: every day, at least one of them lost a fight and lost his place to a new tougher man. Still, the optimal number for the third room was forty men and, since it rarely rose above that limit, it was known as the chaaliss mahal, or the abode of the forty.

  The fourth room was known in the lock-up slang as the dukh mahal, or the abode of suffering, but many men preferred to use the name that the Colaba police had given the last cell in the row: the detection room. When a new man entered the corridor for the first time, through the steel gate, he sometimes tried his luck in the first room. Every one of the fifteen men in that room, and not a few lackeys in the corridor, would rise up, shoving and threatening him away, shouting: Next room!. Next room, bastard!. Driven along the corridor by the writhing, toiling press of bodies, the man might try to enter the second room. If no-one there knew him, whoever happened to be near the door would give him a clip, a smack in the mouth. Next room, motherfucker! If the man, badly rattled by then, tried to enter the third room as he was pushed further along the corridor, the two or three men who sat or stood in the doorway of that room would punch and kick at him. Next room! Next room, sisterfucker! When the new man found himself shoved all the way to the fourth room, the detection room, he would be greeted as an old and very welcome friend. Come in, friend! Come in, brother!

  Those foolish enough to enter were beaten and stripped naked by the fifty or sixty men who crushed into that black and foetid room. Their clothes were distributed according to a waiting list determined by a precise and perpetually adjusted pecking order. Their body cavities were thoroughly searched for jewellery, drugs, or money. Any valuables went to the king of the detection room. During my weeks there, the king of the last room was a huge gorilla of a man with no neck, and a hairline that began little more than the thickness of a thumb above his single, thick eyebrow. The new men received filthy rags to wear—the rags that had been discarded by those who’d received their stolen clothes. They then had two options: to leave the room and fend for themselves with the hundred men who lived in the impossibly crowded corridor, or to join the detection-room gang and wait for opportunities to prey on other hapless new men in the chain of muggings. From what I saw in those three weeks, about one man in every five who was brutalised and dispossessed in that last room took the second option.

  Even the corridor had its pecking order, its struggles over a foothold of space, and its claim-jumpers who challenged the strength or bravery of rivals. Places near the front gate and relatively far from the toilet were prized. Yet even at the foul end of the corridor, where shit and piss flowed onto the floor in a repulsive, reeking sludge, men fought each other for an inch of space that was slightly shallower in the muck.

  A few of those men who were forced to the end of the corridor, forced to stand ankle-deep in shit all day and all night, finally fell down and died. One man died in the lock-up while I was there, and several others were carried out in a state so close to death that I’d found it impossible to rouse them to consciousness. Others summoned the raging madness required to fight their way, minute by minute, hour by hour, metre by metre, day by day, and man by man, along the concrete anaconda’s intestine to a place where they could stand and go on living, until the beast disgorged them through the same steel jaws that had swallowed their lives whole.

  We received one meal a day, at four in the afternoon. It was dhal and roti, mostly, or rice with a thin curry sauce. There was also chai and a slice of bread in the early morning. The prisoners tried to organise themselves into two orderly lines, approaching and leaving the gate where the cops gave out food. But the crush of bodies, and the desperate hunger, and the greed of a few caused chaos at every meal. Many men missed out. Some went hungry for a day or longer.

  We all received a flat aluminium plate when we entered the lock-up. The plate was our only legal possession. There was no cutlery—we ate with our hands—and there were no cups: chai was ladled out onto the plates, and we sucked it off them with our mouths pressed into the thin pool of liquid. But the plates had other uses, first among which was in the manufacture of a makeshift stove. If two aluminium plates were bent into V shapes and used as stands, a third plate could rest on top of them. With a fuel source burning in the space between the bent, inverted plates and beneath the flat plate, a stove was created which could be used to reheat tea or food. The ideal fuel source was a flat rubber sandal. When one of those rubber shoes was lit at one end, it burned evenly and slowly all the way to the other end. The smoke given off was acrid and thick with a greasy soot that settled on everything it touched. The detection room, where two such stoves burned for some time every night, was blackened across its filthy floor and walls, as were the faces of all the men who lived there.

  The stoves were a source of income for the kingpins in the detection room: they used them to re-heat chai and saved food, at a price, for the rich men in room one. The guards allowed deliveries of food and drink—for those who could afford it—during the day, but nothing passed through the gate at night. The fifteen princes, unstinting
in the pursuit of their comforts, had bribed the cops to provide a small saucepan, and several plastic bottles and containers, in which to store chai and food. In that way, when deliveries had ceased every night, the princes still enjoyed hot chai and snacks.

  Because the aluminium plates could only be used as stoves for so long before they became brittle and collapsed, new plates were always in demand. Because food and chai and even the rubber sandals used as fuel could all be turned into money, they too were always required. The weakest men lost their sandals, their plates, and their food. Those with the heart to help them, by sharing the use of their plates, had to eat in scrambled gulps, and then hand on the plates to be used again. As many as four men often ate off one plate, in that way, during the six or seven minutes that the cops allowed for food to be distributed at the steel gate.

  Every day I looked into the eyes of starving men. I saw them watching other men shove hot food too quickly into their mouths with their fingers while cops ladled out the last of the meals. I saw them, every day, watching and waiting and fearing that they might miss out. The truth that filled their eyes was something we only ever know about ourselves in cruel and desperate hunger. I took it into myself, that truth, and the part of my heart that broke to see it has never healed.

  And every night in room one, the Taj Mahal, the fifteen princes ate a hot meal and drank hot, sweet tea, heated up on the makeshift stoves in the detection room, before stretching out to sleep.

  Even the princes, of course, had to use the toilet. The procedure was as vile and dehumanising for them as it was for the poorest prisoner; and in that, if in nothing else, we were all nearly equal. The long journey through the jungle of limbs and bodies in the corridor ended in the stinking swamp. There, the rich men, like the rest of us, packed their nostrils with strips of cloth torn from a shirt or singlet, and clamped a lit beedie cigarette between their teeth to fight the smell. With pants hitched to their knees, and sandals held in their hand, they then waded barefoot into the sewage to squat over the keyhole toilet. The toilet was unblocked, and functioned well enough; but with more than two hundred men using it, once or twice a day, every day, it was soon fouled by those who missed the keyhole in the floor. Eventually, the piles of excrement slid down into the pools of urine that flowed from the shallow urinal. That was the filthy sludge through which we waded on our way to the toilet. Wading back to the urinal, the rich men then washed their hands and feet at the tap, without soap, and stepped on bundles of rags that were heaped like stepping-stones and formed a makeshift dam before the entrance to the detection room. For the price of a cigarette butt or a half-smoked beedie, men squatting in the muck would clean their feet once more with rags, and then they could begin the long struggle back along the corridor.

  It was presumed that I had money, because I was a white foreigner, so the rich men in room one had invited me to join them when I’d woken in their room on my first morning. The idea appalled me. I’d been raised in a family of Fabian socialists, and I’d inherited their stubborn, impractical revulsion for social iniquity in all its forms. Imbued with their principles, and being a product, as a young man, of a revolutionary age, I’d become a revolutionary myself. Some of that commitment to The Cause, as my mother had called it, was still there in the core of my being. Moreover, I’d been living in a slum for many months with the city’s poor. So I refused the offer—reluctantly, I must admit—to enjoy the comforts of the rich. Instead, I muscled my way into the second room with the hard men who’d all served time in prison. There was a brief scuffle at the doorway but, when it was clear that I was prepared to fight for a place in the abode of thieves, they shuffled themselves around, and made room for me. Still, there was some resentment. The black hats, like self-respecting crooks everywhere, were proud men. It wasn’t long before they manufactured an opportunity to test me out.

  On one of the long, squirming trips back from the toilet, three days after my arrest, a man in the crowd of prisoners tried to wrestle my plate away from me. I shouted a warning, in Hindi and Marathi, making the threat as anatomically impolite as my vocabulary would allow. It didn’t stop him. The man was taller than I was, and bigger by some thirty kilos. His hands grasped the plate near my own, and we both pulled, but neither of us had the gross strength to wrest it away. All the men fell silent. Their breathing was a tidal swirl of sound and warm air around us. It was a face off. Make or break: I made my way in that world, right there and then, or I broke down, and let myself be forced into the foetid swamp at the end of the corridor.

  Using the man’s grip on the plate as leverage, I smashed my head onto the bridge of his nose, five, six, seven times, and then again on the point of his chin as he tried to pull away. Alarm surged through the crowd. A dozen pairs of hands shoved at us, crushing our bodies and faces together. Packed into the press of frightened men, unable to move my hands, and unwilling to release the plate, I bit into his face. My teeth pierced his cheek until I tasted his blood in my mouth. He dropped the plate and screamed. Thrashing wildly, he scrambled through the bodies in the corridor to the steel gate. I followed him, with my hand reaching out for his back. Grasping the bars, he shook the gate and screeched for help. I caught him just as the watchman turned his keys in the lock. I grabbed at him as he escaped through the gate. His T-shirt stretched behind him, and for a second he was stuck there, his legs running but his body quite still. Then the T-shirt gave way, and I was left with a chunk of it in my hand as the man staggered through the opening. He cowered behind the watchman, his back pressed against the wall. His face was opened at the cheek where my teeth had cut him, and blood streamed from his nose down his throat to his chest. The gate slammed shut. The cop stared, smiling inscrutably, as I used the T-shirt to wipe the blood from my hands and the plate. Satisfied, I threw the shirt at the gate. I turned and squeezed my way through the silent crowd, taking my place in the thieves’ room once more.

  ‘Nice move, brother,’ the young man sitting beside me said in English.

  ‘Not really’ I replied. ‘I was trying for his ear.’

  ‘Oooooh!’ he winced, pursing his lips. ‘But probably more of a nourishment in his ear, isn’t it, than the fucking food they’re giving us here, man. What is your case?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘They picked me up at night and brought me here. They haven’t told me what I’m charged with, or why I’m here.’

  I didn’t ask him what he was in for because the Australian prison protocol, followed by crooks of the old school—crooks who know there is a protocol, and who taught me about it, when I’d started my jail sentence with them—dictates that you don’t ask a man about the crimes he might’ve committed until you like him enough to make him a friend, or dislike him enough to make him an enemy.

  ‘They gave you a solid pasting, man.’

  ‘The aeroplane, they called it.’

  ‘Oooooh!’ he winced again, hunching his shoulders. ‘I hate that fucking aeroplane, brother! They tied me up in the ropes so tight, once, that it took three days for my arm to get the feeling back. And you know how your body swells the fuck up inside the ropes, when they’ve been beating you for a while, na? My name is Mahesh. What is your good name?’

  ‘They call me Lin.’

  ‘Lin?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Interesting name, man. Where did you learn to speak Marathi, like when you were calling that fellow a motherfucker, before you started eating on his face?’

  ‘In a village.’

  ‘Must be some sort of tough village, that one.’

  I smiled for the first time since the police had picked me up. In prison, a man rations his smiles because predatory men see smiling as a weakness, weak men see it as an invitation, and prison guards see it as a provocation to some new torment.

  ‘I learned the swearing here, in Bombay,’ I explained. ‘How long do people usually stay here?’

  Mahesh sighed, and his broad, dark face fold
ed inward in a resigned frown. His wide-spaced brown eyes were so deep-set that they seemed to be hiding or seeking shelter beneath the ridge of his scarred brow. His wide nose, broken more than once, dominated his face and gave him a tougher look than his small mouth and rounded chin might’ve managed on their own.

  ‘That is nobody knows, brother,’ he replied, the light dimming in his eyes. It was the sort of response Prabaker might’ve made, and I suddenly missed my little friend in a second of loneliness that speared my heart. ‘I came here two days before you. There’s a rumour we will be taking a truck to the Road, in two or three weeks.’

  ‘The road?’

  ‘Arthur Road jail, man.’

  ‘I have to get a message out to someone.’

  ‘You’ll have to wait for that, Lin. The guards here, the cops, they’ve been telling all of us here not to help you. It’s like somebody put a curse on you, my brother. I’m probably going to get some shit on my head just for talking to you only, but what the fuck, yaar.’

  ‘I’ve got to get a message out,’ I repeated, my lips bared from my teeth.

  ‘Well, none of the guys leaving here will help you, Lin. They are afraid, like mice in a bag full of cobras. But you’ll be able to get some messages out from Arthur Road. It’s a fucking big jail, no problem. Twelve thousand men inside. Government says less than so many, but everybody of us, we know there is twelve thousands of men inside. But it’s still a lot better than this. If you go to the Road, you’ll be with me, in maybe three weeks. My case is stealing. Stealing from the constructions—copper wire, plastic pipes—three times in jail, already, for the same things. This time number four. What to say brother? I am what they call a serial offensive, against the pilfering law. This time it is three years for me, if lucky, and five years, if not lucky. If you go to Arthur Road, you go with me.