Tihar Jail, Hell on Earth
Chapter 4
I weaved my way through a haze of rickshaw drivers, vendors of Hindu God stickers and a maze of hand-painted signs until I saw the Bright Hotel up ahead. It was still early and on this January morning a gaggle of skinny men stood around a wooden stall where a kerosene stove furiously boiled up frothy milk tea. Those with enough rupees held a cup of chai to keep them warm and one or two had woolly hats. One or two had only a pair of trousers and a string vest.
I parted a way between them and stepped through the portal to the hotel reception. Behind the desk a 15 year old boy eyed me with empirical doubt. He had seen every kind of dirty backpacker come through here and there wasn’t much new you could pull on him.
“My friend, Don, is here?” I asked.
“Room 110” He muttered, reluctant to grant me the right to exist. I squeezed past him and then up concrete stairs with a low ceiling that obliged me to bend low. The landing and the rooms were all concrete and nothing had ever been painted here. The Lonely Planet has this to say about the Hotel Bright: ‘nothing bright about this place’. The attraction of this guesthouse was probably lost on the researcher who failed to appreciate that the owner is a former police chief. Thus you’ll never get busted for smoking charas in one of his rooms.
The doors and walls were lined with felt tip pen graffiti: portraits of Shiva looking stoned and the ubiquitous mantras of the India traveller:
Everything is possible in India
Same same but different
As you like
I rapped on Don’s door and a hungover English voice answered:
“Yeah, just a minute.” I heard the sound of someone getting out of bed and the door swung open to an unshaven, weighty guy in his 30’s with an unimpressed expression that said who-the-fuck-are-you?
“My name’s Tom. I’m a friend of Clive. I’ve come here to help Natasha.” His eyes flickered in recognition.
“You’d best come in then.”
Don sat down on the edge of his single bunk and offered me a pile of bricks with a pillow on top to sit down on. Beside me was a crate of beer and a suitcase stuffed with folded clothes. On top of the crate of beers was a small black and white TV on which Don watched the cricket. The room was too small to swing a cockroach.
Don wiped the dust from his eyes and lit a cigarette and pulled an empty beer can closer to use as an ashtray. His arms were tattooed with the usual anchors and roses and you expected to see a union jack rising from behind a bicep. I could see Don propped up at a bar in South London, making his money lifting or fixing something. A take out from the curryhouse when the pub closed. What was he doing here?
Don had never planned on coming to India. He hated everything about it – the noise, the heat, the chaos. His skin was thick though and he grimaced his way through all of it for the sake of his blood.
His brother had always passed through India for business reasons and as a consequence of such had ended up in Tihar jail. He had been a professional smuggler, Don told me, and would never have got caught if one of his parteners hadn’t betrayed him. Don had now been in Delhi for two and a half years trying to get his brother free.
“I’ve even had to start swallowing half a kilo of charas myself to flog back in England just to get the money together to carry on.” Don grinned bitterly and glanced around his room. “And as you can see, I don’t have a pot to piss in here.”
He was working with a lawyer who said his brother might be able to get compassionate bail. The trick was that Mark was supposed to go to a hospital every other day to fake a heart condition that was supposedly leaving him at death’s door. If the judge could be persuaded of this then his brother might be able to get bail to visit him and then escape from there. Two of the doctors were in the pay of the lawyer but Mark was nervous that the other doctors might pick up on the hoax ot worse yet, want to operate as they’d recently tried to do.
As a favour to Clive he’d also been to see Natasha and had passed on supplies and messages. Only after my first visit did I understand exactly how many extra hours of stress this had entailed. Don and Clive were now no longer on speaking terms but he was good enough to give me the rundown on the lawyers.
There was one famous lawyer who once had great connections but was now a nobody and would swallow your money and do nothing in return. Another lawyer was good but worked on a queue system, meaning that his oldest clients got priority. He recommended that I go and see the lawyer he was using, a leech called Sethi.
“Can I trust him?” I asked.
“You can’t truist any of them.” Don sneered, “They’re all fucking thieves but Sethi did get someone free two months ago.Don then told me how the charges worked. Possession of more than 25 grams ensured you a sentence of ten years without parole nor bail. Less than that amount only merited 6 months in jail. Murder, incidentally, also got you ten years but bail was granted. More often than not the witnesses then mysteriously retracted their accounts after their homes had been set on fire with kerosene and the charges would be dropped. Get caught smoking a joint though and you were fucked.
The legal processes in India are notoriously slow but there had been a special ruling that insisted that every foreigner held under a drugs charge must go to trial within two years of being apprehended. Two years of hell before a judge decides whether you’re guilty or not. And forget compensation if you go free. A few days later I read in the newspaper about the closing of the longest running civil law case in India. The process had been open for 45 years. On the last session the judge had asked:
“And where is the defendant?”
“Your honour, he has recently passed away.” Of old age.
“Case dismissed.”
Kafka would have had a nervous breakdown.
I left Don in his room and reflected that he was about as much in jail as his brother. In a shit hotel in a country that he couldn’t stand, risking his freedom to smuggle a drug he didn’t take just so that he could come back and help his brother. In a sense it was even worse as he always had the choice of giving up and going home. He was too stubbornly loyal to do so but even the hardest resolve gets worn down sometime.
I went to an internet café and fought with the slow connection to set up a new email account: jailbreaker@yahoo.com Clive had already set up his anonymous address of wheretheresawilltheresaway@hotmail.com We never wrote to anyone else from these two accounts and never used any keywords like charas, drugs or smuggle that could be picked up by a random Interpol computer sweep.
Over the next 4 months we sent hundreds of messages to each other as we discussed the ins and outs of the situation. The written word is much colder than the spoken though and it was too easy to imagine subtexts between the lines. Silent insinuations and invisible slurs found their way onto the screen and each email added to the distance between us. Phone calls were outrageously expensive to and from India and so we came to rely entirely upon email to communicate. That marked the beginning of the end of our friendship.
The next morning I woke early and went top the German Bakery to buy 8 cinnamon rolls, 6 cheese croissants and 3 big slices of chocolate cake. I figured there probably wasn’t a bakery at Tihar Jail.
Pahar Ganj was still quiet. Litter burned here and there and men were gathered around in social groups of 5 or 6. A couple of the bicycle rickshaw guys were asleep with their feet propped up on the handlebars and I wondered if they ever fell off during the night. One of them was already awake and even at this cold hour he was taking a shower in the street. He stood in his underpants next to a bucket of water and, with a bar of soap in one hand and a beaker in the other, he washed himself without any self-inhibition.
Mangy dogs nervously sniffed piles of rubbish and their jumpy gait suggested that they expected a stone in the back of the head at any given moment. Confidence is everything in India. The lowly animals, like the lowly castes, know their positions in life and they stay there. Indians only respect those who respect themselves - like the cow meditating in the middle of the road who simply ignored the bleating horn of the truck behind that wanted to pass.
The flickering blue jinns of kerosene stoves fried omelettes on street stalls and boiled pots of sickly sweet chai that gave you tooth ache just by looking at it. A boy walked past pulling a cart of bananas and copper scales with iron kilogram weights. I bought a couple of bananas to feed to the cows and it was only by the grace of the gods that I avoided slipping on the peel.
The notorious rickshaw wallahs were huddled around their vehicles, also where they probably passed the night. They were parked up together and constitute their own little gang on this street. Powerless and lowly elsewhere in the city here they had their piece of territory marked out.
“How much to Tihar Jail?” I asked. One raised his eyes to the sky in search of a price and replied with a waggle of the head.
“100 rupees.”
“I’ll give you 50.” He looked away and I walked onto the next rickshaw a few metres further up.
“I’ll give you 60 rupees to Tihar Jail.” He was a little slower to refuse and so I moved onto the next one and settled on 70. It’s the only way to find out the price when you’re going somewhere new.
Any remaining doubts I had about the fare evaporated as we fought for 45 minutes through Delhi’s morning traffic. A motorised rickshaw is essentially 3 wheels, a lawnmower engine and a leather cushion protected by a canvas wrapped around aluminium poles. In a bad mood you could probably crush the whole thing in about five minutes. They nip along at a mean rate but there are no air cushions to save you if they flip over or are squashed by a truck. We zipped in and out of the traffic with chaotic abandon but when we were stuck in a jam the driver seemed oblivious to the buses that pulled up next to us. With exhaust pipes on the side they filled the rickshaw with black smoke to the point that I could no longer see the driver to hit him around the back of the head.
The walls of the jail now appeared along the side of the road, grey concrete rising high and topped with barbed wire. Wild hemp plants grew all along the side below. It was too early in the morning for irony though and I was feeling nervous as the prison gates came into view.
I walked through the entrance and was ignored by the guards. I followed the drift of people towards an office where I lined up to sign my name in the visitor’s book. It was 9am. Soon after the list was closed and we were told to return at 1pm to see the prisoners. For 20 minutes.
I spent the next few hours in the grim jail canteen, slurping queasy cups of chai and scribbling notes. The seats and tables were all metal and the only thing to suggest a penal setting were the sleazy cops wandering in and out and the overall pervasive atmosphere of desperation. To begin with I imagined a team of cid investigators were about to jump on me at any moment and march me off for interrogation. Only later did I understand that visitors to the jail are seen as so much cattle. And not the holy kind either.
By midday I was already lining up. Don had already warned me about the prohibitions on gifts for the prisoners; No plastic bags. Apparently some years ago someone had managed to manufacture a key from scrunched up polythene and tried to escape. The locks were made in India after all.
No sweets. There had been a famous escape where a prisoner had persuaded the guards to eat some drugged biscuits. Thereafter it was prohibited for anyone in the entire jail to have a sweet tooth.
Best of all though, no bananas. Some moral authority had gotten the idea that the female inmates were using them for purposes of masturbation. Was there no depth that these criminals wouldn’t stoop to?
The queue began to form in true Indian style. People came closer to share the oxygen of the person in front and then began to vaguely push, seeing only their destination and none of the people in the way. Herds of animals move in exactly the same way. The pressure of heads and shoulders behind me put me off balance and so finally I took to leaning back on them at a 30 degree incline.
The gate of the visiting chambers opened and we moved forwards like a starving mob at a bread line. The guards at the gate shook us down and confiscated the bottle of shampoo and conditioner I had brought. Luckily I’d put the tampons in my inside coat pocket and as the crowd surged behind me they missed those.
All at once I was standing at the corner of a right angle of dark corridors. Before me were three wire fences and I could dimply see people on the other side.
“Tom! Tom! Here!” I squinted and could just about make out a white skinned girl on the other side. While I hesitated people squeezed past and around me like a flood unleashed. I looked around for the door to the visiting room where we’d be able to sit down at a table and talk.
“Natasha! Where can we talk?”
“You have to fight for your place at the fence – these people are animals!”
Oh. I picked my way up one of the corridors while Natasha followed a parallel course on the other side. It became quickly apparent that an English sense of good manners wasn’t going to get me very far here and so I kicked, pushed and elbowed people smaller than me out of the way. No one thought anything of it.
“Where’s Clive?” Natasha shouted. “I want Clive, not you. Where is he? I have to get out of here!”
“Listen, Clive is in Europe, getting money together and-“
“There is no God in here! There is no God in here!” She screamed, banging her head against the chicken wire.
“Shut the fuck up!” I yelled and she looked up at me in shock. “Clive is working 24 hours round the clock for you. You’re coming out. He’ll never give up. You understand?”
Natasha stared at me, crying; half in despair and half in happiness that her lover had not forgotten her. Finally words welled to the surface again.
“We sleep on concrete floors here, Tom. And it’s so cold. There are six women in my cell and two of them are complete bitches. The food is impossible to eat and I’m going to be here for ten fucking years. Oh God!”
“Easy, easy. Next time I’ll bring blankets and some books in Russian. Tell me what you need and I’ll get it.”
“I need money, too.” She said. “I have debts here.”
Sure. If she needed money she could have it. Clive wanted her to lack for nothing. 5000 rupees ($120) seemed like a lot but I didn’t think about it much at the time. I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to see the warden on duty.
“Time finish.” He told me with a shark’s smile.
“One minute more, please. ji, she is my sister, ji.” He smiled at my obsequious display and left us alone. As soon as he had turned the smile from my face fell like a dead bug.
We confirmed that we’d use Sethi, the lawyer specialising in medical bail and we were talking about the possibilities of escape when I noticed an Indian with an educated face leaning silently on a post to my right. We started chatting about the best way to make a good lentil curry until he moved away.
Every few minutes I had to elbow someone in the neck as they squeezed too close. The chaos was further augmented by the guards who rang the bell overhead with no particular purpose.
“They do that just so that we can’t hear each other.” Natasha insisted.
It was time to pass the presents through. Two guards checked everything and passed it all down a metal chute. They passed everything through except for the chocolate cake.
“Sweet not allowed!” They cried with glee and began stuffing the cake into their mouths. Natasha passed me a letter for Clive and in a moment I was back outside, sweating in the afternoon sun.
I walked out of the jail, stoned; the 20 minutes of that corridor rattling around in my head. A rickshaw carried me back to my hotel and through the journey I could hear Natasha screaming ‘there’s no God in here’. She was young, smart and beautiful and she was facing ten years in Tihar.
I had come to Delhi for Clive. I would stay for Natasha.
