by Rohini Mohan
At the bottom of a stairwell, Sarva’s escort stopped near a lawyer and raised his hand in a gesture somewhere between a friendly hello and a wobbly half salute. The lawyer barely responded. They seemed to converse minimally, using familiar, routine words. Sarva, in his nervousness, missed most of the exchange except the lawyer’s bored last words: ‘After lunch.’
There was more than an hour to kill. The police escort took him to a tea shack on the first floor. Lawyers, policemen, clerks and legal service vendors stood around the all-purpose shop, slurping tea or biting into rolls. Some of them sat on a couple of benches inside, eating rapidly from rice-and-curry lunch packets. The escort handed Sarva a small glass cup of black tea while he himself tucked into a chicken roti. The tea was just as sweet as Sarva liked it.
They sat there for a while, sipping their tea quietly. It was half past twelve, and the humidity of July was trickling down Sarva’s back. His T-shirt, the one he had been wearing the day he was grabbed off the street, displayed overlapping rings of sweat, new and old. He was embarrassed to look so slovenly in a court of law. In the van, he had picked out the dried mud from the sodden hem of the shirt’s front, but it hadn’t done much good. The police had left him no option but to look like scum, and he would be at a disadvantage from the second the judge set eyes on his T-shirt, hanging shapelessly from his drooping shoulders. His trousers, too, slipped hazardously from his waist.
As Sarva nursed his tea, looking down at his unkempt self, for a brief moment the policeman let go of his hand to pay the cashier. Sarva’s heart thudded loudly in his chest. He felt nauseous and stared at the back of the escort’s head. The moment seemed to grow longer, as if expecting him to respond, react, do something. He knew he would think of this moment later, in a future where he would not be afraid to run. But now he sat there, heat rising from his neck and his feet stone cold.
The hand gripped his again just as securely as before. It was almost a relief to be spared the responsibility of making a decision.
The buzz around the shack had died down, and they walked to the court downstairs. He had expected the court to be a large hall with wooden benches and an elderly judge who banged a gavel saying, ‘Order! Order!’ Indeed, an impatient judge did sit atop an elevated wooden podium, and a bored clerk on his left called case numbers and passed him files one after another. When people left the courtroom, they bowed to the judge and walked backwards out the door. Lawyers addressed him as ‘Your Honour’. The colonial style was truly preserved, including the architecture of humiliation. Sarva was taken to the far end of the room and thrown into a cage with iron bars painted silver, within which stood all the accused. Family members and visitors sat on rows of benches with their backs to the cage, and occasionally they turned to look at the men behind bars. It was demeaning to make eye contact with strangers this way, so Sarva kept his gaze fixed on the judge.
A lot happened very quickly and with casual finality. The policeman accompanying Sarva gave a sheet of paper to a grubby lawyer, who in turn handed it to the judge. Sarva mentally readied himself for his speech at the three-sided dock, but the judge mumbled an English word and stamped the paper without a second thought. He had not even glanced at Sarva, let alone asked him a question. A decision seemed to have been made. He was led out of the court into another building and dragged a few floors down. The escort was almost running now; he had another accused to go hold hands with. Sarva’s head was spinning, and his lower back was shooting arrows of pain down his legs. The stairs seemed to multiply with every step.
Finally, in a dark corridor, his escort let go of Sarva’s hand. ‘Go inside,’ he barked, opening a metal gate. In front of them, a room, ten by twenty feet in size, was packed with men. It looked like all the passengers and hawkers hanging about the Pettah bus stop had been forced in here. There was nowhere to sit. Sarva’s legs and back were useless after days of interrogation, and the arrows were now flying from his spine all over his body.
From behind him, the escort’s voice boomed, demanding that the comatose men move their asses and make room. They all looked at Sarva but no one moved. Sarva shuffled to the centre of the room and continued to stand. The policeman locked the gate with a clatter.
Some men went back to their conversations while others stared blankly ahead in the dark. That was when Sarva realised there were no windows.
Straight from the solitariness of the police station’s basement, through a whirlwind of hope, to a room with men who lay head to toe, packed like beedis: here was a new form of torment for the government’s prisoners.
IT WAS HIS second night in the crowded room, and again a cacophony of snores woke him. Immediately he was aware of the sickly sweet smell of sweat laced with ganja smoke. There were feet right in front of his face. They looked surprisingly soft, the feet of one who wore shoes: someone well-to-do or a soldier. He wondered what this man might be in here for. He wanted to turn to his other side to be able to shut out the claustrophobia and fall asleep again, but he didn’t want to wake the men sandwiching him. It was a tight squeeze.
Sarva propped himself up on his elbows. The corridor light bulb cast a checkered shadow on the sleeping men, like a blanket of iron bars. He counted the bodies. The previous night, there had been ninety. Today, there were seventy-eight, including himself. There had been a mad scramble for the spots of those who left. Sarva had been ashamed to shove about for a mere place to sit, especially with these men—murderers, smugglers, rapists, thieves of all races, shapes and sizes.
In the day, when they smoked ganja, peed in the open latrine in the corner, and swapped their stories, often proclaiming innocence, Sarva bit back his disgust. He felt he did not deserve to be thrown among these unclean low-lives, these immoral criminals. They didn’t even seem bothered by the filth in the room; they were clearly used to seeing flies hover over dried urine in their slums or in other jails. He did not like this forced intimacy, lying among them, feeling their breath on his skin. He shouldn’t be here.
‘What happened?’
It startled him, this voice from the dark. It came from the owner of the clean foot. The man repeated the question.
Sarva hesitated before asking what was consuming him. Why are we here? Where will they take us next? What did the magistrate do? Did they tell you? Are you Sinhalese or Tamil? What have you done?
He only asked, ‘Can you tell me? What is this place?’
The man looked amused. ‘You really don’t know?’
Sarva did not reply. He regretted having asked.
‘This is hell’s waiting room,’ the man said, chuckling. He seemed to enjoy saying those words, introducing another newbie to a reality only a few were clever enough to decipher. To Sarva, these words meant nothing.
The next evening, Sarva was pulled out of the room along with about twenty others. He mustered up the courage to ask the guard where they were being taken. The guard told them they would be kept at ‘CRP’. No one asked what that meant.
IN HIS NEW cell at the Colombo Remand Prison, or CRP, Sarva was holed up with forty other men. He spent the first week speaking to them entirely in Sinhala, easily and fluently. When they replied, he listened for the inflections of a native Tamil speaker. He was hoping to find a companion with whom to swap news and fears, to kill the time that stretched before him without end or purpose.
He hadn’t spoken in Tamil since he had met his mother in the police station. He missed it on his tongue, missed seeing its twirls, dots and dashes leap from a page into realms of meaning. He wanted to ask for some literature, but he wasn’t sure how many Tamil books the CRP would have or if asking for them would get him into trouble. Maybe some paper and a pen then, although he had never written anything but schoolwork in his life. He wasn’t sure what he’d say, but he was dead certain something would come to him. A record of his experiences, just in case he never got out.
Before that, however, Sarva wanted to ask the jailer to have his room cleaned. The cells were less crowded than the on
e at the court, but they were putrid. The ammonia odour from the latrine in the corner floated through the room. Sarva felt as if someone had peed in his mouth. Others complained about it too, but only among themselves. One of the older inmates, seeing Sarva hold his nose through the day, snapped at him: ‘Why, are you too special for this?’ he asked. The comment stung. Later, he heard the man narrate the incident to another prisoner, but the quip was modified. It became: ‘Why—are your people too special for this?’
Sarva tried to distract himself from the smell, but there was little to occupy the mind. CRP was boredom punctuated by mealtimes and line-ups:
Wake up at six; line up for a breakfast of tea, sambol and bread; sometimes rice.
At seven, back to the cell. He was rattled by the practice of prisoners locking the cell gates themselves, pulling the external latch shut from behind the bars. They huddled inside, willing captives doing away with their jailer.
At half past eight they lined up again, this time for a head count, after which they were free to roam the central courtyard. They played football or cricket or read magazines. Sarva didn’t like the way most of them played cards, gambling with cigarettes. But since he rarely saw them smoke, he assumed for a long time that the smoking area was a secret, as everything seemed to be. One night, however, he found his sleeping spot in the cell taken by another man who had paid twenty cigarettes for a week of sound sleep.
Cigarettes seemed to buy you anything from a weekly sleeping spot to chilli powder to season the bland meals. Paid to those jail guards whose price was known, the cigarettes could negotiate a family visit on court days or a transfer to a preferred cell. If an apocryphal story were to be believed, a prisoner once even managed to smuggle in a local journalist in exchange for three packs. Beedis were for smoking. Cigarettes were currency.
Sarva deplored gambling—it just wasn’t something decent people did—and its combination with cigarettes lowered it several notches. But he needed to get his sleeping spot back. So one morning he tried to join a game of rummy. As soon as he approached, the men sitting in a huddle stiffened. One of them raised his eyebrows at Sarva. Another turned his wrist and pointed behind Sarva, signalling that he’d better go away.
He turned around, feeling his face flush and his stomach constrict. His mother would have skinned him alive if she’d seen him join those gamblers. Why had he done that? Why had he stooped to their level?
He shook his head, berating himself: Chi! Shame on me, shame on me! He had given them the power to exclude him, to strip him further of his dignity. Those morally inept gamblers thought he was not good enough for them. They had sent him away. He started to wish more intensely that he was among his own people.
Although he had been careful not to speak in Tamil, something about him or the guards’ attitude towards him had clearly given him away. They knew he was Tamil, and that he was under PTA, as they called it. Being charged under the Prevention of Terrorism Act changed everything. Rules, even if they could be bent, would not apply to a Kottiya. It did not matter whether he denied being in the Tigers or said he was trained against his will. In his cell, everyone claimed to be imprisoned for something he hadn’t done—even the bug-eyed uncle who was always passing things to the guard during visiting hours. Or the boy whose mother shouted at him for having stolen from their employers. Or the drug addicts shaking violently with abdominal cramps and moaning all night. They all believed they were going to get out of there soon, go back to their wives, mothers, fathers and children. They all believed themselves to be innocent—that no court or police could prove otherwise. Sarva, however, had already been convicted in prison, and this justified his torment.
Even the trishaw driver Sarva played cricket with in the yard—the guy swore he had never beaten his wife and that she had him jailed because she was carrying on with another man—asked him suspiciously about his Sinhala. Where did he pick it up? ‘How?’ the wife-beater kept asking. ‘How did you learn it?’ Sarva’s bilingualism had become a liability. It was as if he indulged in some deviant behaviour.
The prisoners all ate the same insipid food, endured the same crowded conditions and humiliations, but he could see that they still believed they were a step above him. He was often singled out from the line-ups for a body search. The guards treated them all as convicted criminals, so Sarva didn’t expect any better from them. What rankled him was the enmity of his prison companions. Guilt, innocence, charges, crime, height, age—nothing set apart one man’s insults from another’s. They stared. Pointed. Made lewd jokes. A scrawny boy once asked his friend loudly if this Kottiya—Sarva was doing stretches nearby—would ever have seen a girl naked. The other replied, ‘No, no. Their great leader asks them to be celibate, you see! Paavu, he is a virgin!’ He was the butt of abuse that ranged from the solitary word Kottiya spat with revulsion to elaborate comments about his dark skin and invitations to ‘take all the Tamils and go back to India’. Some men came to his defence, saving him from bullies by joking with them just in time, or giving him the corner near the wall so that he could rest his aching back. But these small kindnesses did little to allay the all-consuming ugliness of the racism.
He could not sleep from worry that someone would slit his throat as soon as he shut his eyes. He was afraid to be found complaining of something and having that attributed in whispers to his being a national traitor. One afternoon while they were playing catch, the wife-beater casually asked, ‘Even if you didn’t actually shoot or anything, did you support Prabakaran or not?’ He mentioned the name of the dreaded LTTE chief with easy familiarity, as if they were schoolmates. When Sarva was quiet, he wagged his finger, ‘Ah, if you didn’t oppose him, you supported him.’ Sarva fumed that even if he might have, you could not put a person in jail for their thoughts. Their recreation time was becoming more unbearable by the day. In the pecking order of the prison, Sarva was the lowest vermin. He felt utterly alone.
Surprisingly, it was the wife-beater who made things easier. He was the closest thing Sarva had to a friend; they played cricket, taking turns at the bat. He seemed to be on top of all the prison gossip: who did what, said what, which jailer was easiest to bribe, at what times the food supplies came and how milk could be stolen from the kitchen. He also did an entertaining job of using colourful language to describe his wife and her alleged promiscuity. One day he said that if the Tamils hated the Sinhalese enough to become suicide bombers, he would gladly give them a separate state.
‘Okay, at least tell me this,’ the wife-beater said. ‘Did you ever want to join the LTTE? I hear they come for you when you’re just sprouting a moustache.’ It was all he wanted to know about Sarva. Yet he had a silliness that sometimes made the rest of the drudgery tolerable.
Together, Sarva and the wife-beater classified the daily lunch menu as follows:
BROWN DAY (boiled tasteless mutton)
YELLOW DAY (dal and rice)
BROWN ONION DAY (mutton and onions)
RED DAY (sambol)
MUD DAY (an overcooked vegetable)
EGG DAY (boiled)
WHITE DAY (milk rice)
Asking for second helpings was frowned upon, but a handful asked and often got more, albeit with a pronounced scowl. Sarva didn’t understand why more people didn’t ask for an extra helping. Surely they couldn’t be satisfied with just a couple of pieces of bread.
Wife-beater told him he shouldn’t draw attention to himself by asking for more. But the question grew and grew in Sarva’s mind, until one day, out of curiosity rather than hunger, he gingerly did ask for more.
He was served, but before he had turned around, his fresh portion of sambol was splattered on the ground.
A burly fellow prisoner stood before Sarva. ‘Just like that?’ the guy thundered. ‘You will just ask … and take?’
The servers were giggling. Another swipe, and the plate clattered on the ground.
Sarva tried to keep his voice from trembling. ‘Why, ayya? What did I do wrong?’ he asked.
>
The big guy looked around, took a step back, and dramatically pointed both hands at Sarva, as if to ask the other lunching prisoners if they could believe their ears. Then he looked at the servers, who were prisoners on canteen duty. ‘Give the blackie another plate. Aww, he is hungry,’ he said, sticking his lower lip out in mock sympathy.
The servers looked unsure what to do.
The thug took a step towards Sarva. ‘There are rules here,’ he said, his voice a low growl. ‘Learn them, Kottiya.’ His face almost touching Sarva’s, he said, ‘I know about you.’
Sarva stood motionless.
From among the watching prisoners, a voice yelled, ‘He is new. Leave it, Lasith ayya!’
Sarva took the cue. He looked at the ground and quickly mumbled, ‘I’m new, ayya. I didn’t know.’ It seemed to satisfy the man glowering at him, but Sarva would later regret that it sounded like an apology.
By this time, a jail attendant had walked up, making noises as if he were dispersing sheep blocking a highway, ‘Anh, okay, okay. Enough! Get lost!’ To Lasith, he was a mildly annoyed parent. ‘Whyyyy?’ he asked indulgently in Sinhala. Lasith shrugged and lumbered away. Sarva looked for the wife-beater as the prisoners returned to their cells, but he seemed to be keeping his distance.
The consensus in Sarva’s cell was that Lasith was a bootlegger. ‘He spends more time doing business in jail than he did outside,’ they said. If the prison was a den of vice, Lasith was its main supplier.
At three and six in the afternoon, when they were called for the line-up, Sarva scanned the faces for Lasith. He wasn’t there. The count was just to check for runaways anyhow. Lasith was far too settled in the CRP to want to escape.
When they were walking back to their cells, the wife-beater emerged suddenly, hurrying towards Sarva. ‘Don’t go into your cell after the nine o’clock line-up!’ he hissed. ‘Lasith has it for you tonight.’
