Behind Bars in Byculla

by Jigna Vora

  JIGNA VORA

  Behind Bars in Byculla

  My Days in Prison

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1. Entering Laal Gate

  2. Barrack No. 2

  3. Spider Woman

  4. The Saffron Lady

  5. First Encounter with the Police

  6. Ruler of the Jail

  7. Joining Mumbai Mirror

  8. Usha Maa

  9. Meeting a Stalwart: Jyotirmoy Dey

  10. The Outsiders

  11. The Rise and Fall

  12. Jail’s Mandakini

  13. Collateral Damage

  14. The Killing of J. Dey

  15. Dog Eat Dog

  16. Days of Destruction

  17. Caste Factor

  18. Unlikely Saviour

  19. Cheerleaders

  20. The Birthday Gift

  21. Cheats

  22. My World War III

  23. Return of Rajan

  24. The Trial

  25. Accused No. 11 Acquitted

  Epilogue: The Mystery

  Footnotes

  4. The Saffron Lady

  14. The Killing of J. Dey

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  EBURY PRESS AND BLUE SALT

  BEHIND BARS IN BYCULLA

  Jigna Vora is a crime reporter who has worked at the Free Press Journal, Mid-day, Mumbai Mirror and the Asian Age. She also practises healing, tarot card reading and astrology. She is currently researching for and writing web series and movies.

  For my loving son, and my guru Satish Kaku

  Prologue

  Friday, 11 May 2018

  A resounding gunshot echoed through the corridors of Himanshu Roy’s home at Suniti Apartments, Nariman Point, Mumbai. His wife and two domestic helpers rushed inside his room. A pool of blood streamed around the fallen body of Himanshu Roy, an officer of the coveted Indian Police Service from the batch of 1988. Moments before, he had placed the cold barrel of his licensed revolver in his mouth and pulled the trigger. The bullet had entered through his mouth and pierced through his skull. Roy’s driver, a constable with the Mumbai Police, informed the Control Room about the incident. Authorities were quick to respond. Sirens from ambulances and police jeeps converged towards Gen. J. Bhosale Road, where Suniti Apartments stood tall against the Mumbai skyline. Roy was rushed to Bombay Hospital. Doctors hurried to check on him, but the wounds were the work of a man trained in the use of firearms. He had left nothing to chance. Additional Director General of Police (Establishment) Himanshu Roy, aged fifty-four, was declared dead at 1.47 p.m. His body was taken to GT Hospital at Crawford Market for a post-mortem under tight security. The hospital was metres away from the police commissioner’s office, the premises of which had also housed top officers of Mumbai Police, including Himanshu Roy. Tributes from fellow cops, politicians, top-notch lawyers and media personnel began pouring in. The news flashed over TV channels and flooded social media timelines. An entire city mourned the death of a super cop.

  Roy had been fighting a prolonged battle with renal cancer. He had been operated upon in the year 2000, but the cancer had returned with a vengeance nearly sixteen years later and spread to his brain and his bones. This had rendered him out of action for the past two years. His skin had darkened due to chemotherapy. He had been reduced to a pale shadow of the imposing personality that had once made criminals cower with fear. The bulky muscles that often bulged in his shirts during press conferences and flexed on to the front pages of newspapers had grown frail and weak. He had lost a lot of weight. A white beard had covered his jawline.

  But even in the depression of battling a fatal disease, the super cop gave no warning that he had made up his mind. Or maybe he did. The evening before his death, he took out time for what he was most obsessed about: a hard workout at the gym. He was a devout follower of Lord Hanuman, the god of strength. A photograph of Bajrangbali standing in all his glory had once adorned the wall of Himanshu’s office at the Crime Branch. He would visit the Hanuman temple near his office every Saturday. And on the day he killed himself, he had eaten a good breakfast for the first time in several days. The man who loved eating tandoori chicken asked his cook to prepare his favourite dish for lunch. These could have been signs that he intended to continue his fight with the enemy that had plagued his body.

  Or maybe he wanted to relive some semblance of his best days before breathing his last.

  Perhaps it was the latter, because he later walked into his bedroom and wrote the suicide note that was eventually found in a folder by investigators. The note read that he was committing suicide due to the ‘frustration’ of his illness. Investigators also believed that he had taken out his revolver from his locker a day earlier. His note said, ‘No one is responsible for my suicide.’

  As joint commissioner of police (Crime), Himanshu Roy had handled extremely sensational cases like the Laila Khan murder, the Kohinoor Mill rape, and a multi-crore diamond heist in Goregaon. He had also led the investigation in the high-profile Indian Premier League betting scandal. But the murder of crime journalist J. Dey in 2011 had put him in the media spotlight like no other case. It was covered extensively in the media because one of their own had been murdered in cold blood. The shootout was carried out by the hitmen of underworld don Chhota Rajan. Ten men were arrested, and Rajan was also charge-sheeted in the case. But in a bizarre twist to the entire episode, thirty-seven-year-old Jigna Vora, a female journalist who was then deputy bureau chief of the Asian Age, was taken into police custody for instigating the murder.

  That journalist was I.

  ‘We have thirty-six damning transcripts of Jigna Vora and Chhota Rajan plotting the murder of J. Dey,’ Roy had told a delegation of journalists who went to meet him in the presence of then home minister R.R. Patil.

  The case was heard over a period of nearly seven years. Lives were destroyed, and families torn apart. My promising career was shattered to pieces, and could never be put together again. On 2 May 2018, the Maharashtra Control of Organized Crime Act (MCOCA) court convicted Chhota Rajan and eight other accused in the case. But I was acquitted after seven long years, a part of which I spent in prison.

  This is my story.

  1

  ENTERING LAAL GATE

  9 December 2011

  I stripped down to the last piece of cloth on my body. Two lady constables flanked me inside a dingy room in the Byculla Jail. The room had no windows. But the lack of ventilation did not suffocate me as much as the humiliation did. The crassness with which the constables made me shed my clothes shook me to the core. For the two women, barely in their thirties, it was routine. For me, even the dim orange glare from the tiny bulb felt like a violation.

  ‘Take off your underwear,’ the stout constable said.

  ‘Please,’ I said with folded hands. ‘I am menstruating.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘Make it quick!’

  I pulled my underwear down to my ankles and stepped out of it. The constable checked my undergarments for contraband. To my utter disbelief, she even checked the sanitary pad I had worn without batting an eyelid.

  ‘Now,’ the stout constable said, ‘sit down and stand up. Five times.’

  As a law graduate and a journalist, squatting, I knew, was a police drill, to check contraband that one may be carrying in their private parts. My body shivered, as I did what I was asked to. I squatted, five times, my vagina exposed, blood dripping down my thighs. Once sure, they asked me to dress up and step out of the room. I cleaned up and put my clothes back on. I picked up the plastic bag in which I had carried a comb, toothpaste, toothbrush and a bar of Lux soap tha
t my lawyer Jayesh Vithlani had handed me when the cops dragged me out of the courtroom to be taken to the jail.

  When I stepped outside the dingy room, I was ordered to wait in the reception area. The heightened ceiling had two fans rotating slowly, their blades covered with thick dust. Even though it was December and the weather bearable, I felt the sweat roll down my ribs. Two male constables with self-loading rifles stared at me, from top to bottom. They exchanged a look that conveyed a voyeuristic pleasure of knowing what I had just been through. Something rose inside my throat, a scream perhaps; but whatever it was, I held it in and gazed at the dirty floor. When I looked up again, the constables were still staring.

  I covered myself with the woollen shawl that I had purchased from Sikkim, where I had spent a blissful vacation only a few months ago.

  A woman constable then led to me towards Laal Gate. True to its name, it was a huge iron gate painted in red. To me, it carried a sense of foreboding that once I crossed this gate, my life of freedom would be dictated by the rules of the jail.

  As a reporter, I had filed stories of various accused, such as Sujata Nikhalje, the wife of Chhota Rajan; Fahmeeda, a bomb blast accused; Maria Susairaj, an accused in the sensational Neeraj Grover murder case; Jaya Chheda, accused of murdering her husband. I had never thought that I would one day be following in the footsteps of these women. Crossing that threshold changed my life for ever—in ways that could never be undone. All the identities I had worked so hard to build—a dutiful daughter to my parents, a loving mother to my son, a woman journalist who fought to carve her space in the male-dominated bastion of crime reporting—were reduced to a four-digit number in the annals of that government prison. The undertrial number that jail officials assigned to me was 1193. I was ordered to sit under a huge tree near the entrance. I rested my head against the thick trunk as the constable completed her paperwork.

  I had lived life on my own terms. I have never been concerned about others’ opinion about me. But as I sat there, one thought spun through my mind constantly: What will people think of me?

  Soon, I was taken to the jailer’s office. Aagya madam, as the jailer was known, sat in her chair, while a woman, wearing a nightie, wailed beside her. The jailer gave me a stern look as I passed through her room, which led to the barracks. I was put in Circle Number 1. Due to logistics and security reasons, the various complexes in a jail are called circles. There were six barracks in Circle 1 and two barracks in Circle 2. Byculla Jail comprised two circles for women.

  Depending upon your crime, and later, your behaviour (if someone creates nuisance or does not follow rules), inmates are shifted from Circle 1 to Circle 2.

  The lady constables knew about my impending arrival. It was probably due to the constant media coverage that my case had received. The inmates too seemed to know who I was. I walked past a group of inmates, who sat in a semicircle. My arrival deviated their attention.

  ‘Look,’ said one of them and elbowed the other. ‘The new whore has arrived.’

  The barrack was like a dormitory, with stained walls and black limestone flooring. The constables gave me a thin sleeping mat, an aluminium plate and a mug. In that large room full of women and children, I was left to find my own space. A plaque on the wall told me that the barrack had been built only nine years ago. With very little ventilation and a filthy stench, it was dirtier than a warehouse. There were nearly forty women in that room. Some looked comfortable, singing songs and chit-chatting, or bonding by picking lice from another’s head, while others just kept to themselves. There were infants howling and children playing around the room. ‘Why are there kids here?’ I asked the room, but no one bothered to answer me. I put down my head on my knees and sat there, hoping it would all disappear when I looked up again. When I did, I found a boy, barely five years old, staring at me.

  ‘Aunty, why are you crying?’

  I sniffed.

  ‘Don’t worry, God will make everything right,’ he said and ran off.

  I thought about my son. He is twelve years old. How would he react to all this? What would he think of me? Would he believe that I had done something wrong? The thoughts made me numb.

  The undertrial inmates had their own way of allocating space to the other inmates, depending on their reputation. Those at the lower rung of the barrack’s social ladder received barely enough space to sleep. Relative luxury was accorded to those who were higher in the hierarchy of power. One of the women had pointed me towards a corner. ‘That is your area,’ she said. ‘Stay within your limit.’

  At 5.30 p.m., dinner was served inside the barracks. On my aluminium plate, I had two chapattis, dal and some vegetables. Strands of black hair floated in the watery dal. I put the plate aside and wept again. Pangs of pain cramped my stomach. I had hardly eaten since my arrest. I felt weak and exhausted, but I could not bring myself to eat the food I had been served. An African undertrial, who had been observing me from a distance, sensed my predicament.

  ‘You are the journalist, aren’t you?’ she said.

  I nodded.

  ‘Did you commit the murder?’

  ‘No,’ I said, as if it meant anything. ‘No,’ I emphasized.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘You’re a good person.’

  I didn’t know how to respond.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ she asked.

  I shook my head. She stared at me, reached inside her pockets and pulled out a coarse piece of bread.

  ‘Eat,’ she said. ‘Eat it.’

  I took the piece of bread from her hands. Soon she sensed a prison guard approaching and rushed back to her place. Her kindness felt nice. But I just did not have the appetite.

  The barracks were locked down at 6 p.m., a procedure that was known as bandi. Huge, black, iron locks were put on all doors at that time. Doors too were made of iron rods, which allowed inmates to speak to those on the other side.

  As I wiped the tears off my cheeks, a woman in her thirties, sitting diagonally opposite, watched me intently. She wore a blue track pant and white T-shirt. Her hair was tied in a neat bun, clasped with a black hair clip. A thick, red tilak ran through the middle of her forehead. Pictures of Hindu gods and goddesses were hung from the iron rods behind her. The most prominent one was that of Goddess Kali, the destroyer of evil. The woman occupied three times the space that the other inmates had. She summoned me to her temple-like corner and introduced herself as Paromita Chakraborty.

  ‘Aren’t you Jigna Vora?’ she asked, in fluent English.

  I shivered at the baritone of her voice and replied hesitantly, ‘Y-Y-Yes.’

  Paromita stared right into my eyes, measuring me perhaps. ‘Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.’

  I heaved a sigh of relief. She turned around and pulled out an open packet of potato wafers.

  ‘Eat,’ she said.

  I hesitated, but the intensity of her glare made me pick up one wafer and put it in my mouth. The wafer crunched loudly under my teeth.

  ‘Tea?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Go back to your place.’

  I did what I was told. At around 8.30 p.m., the inmates prepared to sleep, as the television in the barrack wasn’t working. They bundled their extra clothes into their dupattas to use as a pillow, and I copied them. I could hear the chatter, most of them discussing their court hearings. I thought about my son and wept.

  Another inmate slept next to me, close enough that if I didn’t turn over very carefully in my sleep, I might land on top of her. She smelt much like the mouldy barrack. I wondered if I would stink the same way if I had to spend more days here. I yearned to relieve myself, but I resisted, not wanting to witness the sight of a dirty toilet. I stood up and paced along the little space by the walls. An inmate pulled her blanket off her face.

  ‘Go sleep, whore,’ she said. ‘Why are you disturbing all of us?’

  I raised my little finger, indicating that I needed to use the bathroom. The inmate contorted her
face in irritation and pointed towards the toilet.

  Finally giving up, I walked through the narrow passage, past blue drums that stored water for daily use. Four Indian-style toilets, each of them equally dirty and stained, awaited me. I held my breath and entered through a door that only covered my torso once I planted my soles on the footrest. My head and the other end of my body were completely exposed. I prayed for some privacy.

  I returned to my place and lay down at my designated space. The lights, I learnt, were never turned off. As a rule, they are switched on, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. As I lay there under the lights, I knew what having my own space meant. To own a single bed in a small flat in suburban Mumbai. I remembered the tantrums I would throw if my grandmother would accidentally switch on the light while I was sleeping. Here, I couldn’t do a thing about it. With the hard floor under my back, I spent most of the night staring at the ceiling and thinking about my son.

  I had just fallen asleep when a sudden commotion woke me up. It was 5.30 a.m., time to wake up so that the jail officials could do a headcount. Each inmate was paired with another accused of a similar crime and asked to sit in the centre of the barrack. The gravity of the crime decided the order. Accused chain snatchers, pickpockets, robbers and murderers—all sat in order. I sat alone. I was the only one booked under the stringent Maharashtra Control of Organized Crime Act (MCOCA) that the government had formed to combat organized crime and terrorism. I looked down as the inmates stared and chattered.

  ‘Is she a terrorist? Is she from the underworld?’

  2

  BARRACK NO. 2

  Everyone wanted to know Jigna Vora. In that pity-worthy barrack, I had achieved sudden fame. The women were curious about me, each one of them asking blatant questions one after another. ‘Are you a member of the Chhota Rajan gang?’ ‘You work for the underworld, no?’ ‘Did you commit the murder?’