Victoria Falls

by James Hornor

  That little bit of relief to my face and my neck allowed me to sit up and sip coffee, and I used my fingers to sample the poha. It was the first food I’d eaten since lunch the day before, and although it was bland, I ate every grain of rice. The coffee helped my head to clear, and to my surprise, my back felt somewhat better. About an hour later, the same officer who had walked me to my cell the night before appeared with a clipboard, and instead of sitting, he leaned up against the wall next to the cot and began to ask me questions.

  He seemed surprised that I had arrived at the Kanjurmarg station without identification, and I told him several times that my passport, my World Bank credentials, and my return plane ticket were all in my room at the Taj Hotel. When I mentioned the World Bank, he continued to fill out another form on his clipboard and then paused without looking directly at me.

  “Is the World Bank aware that one of its own is a drug smuggler?”

  Apparently the judge had told his squadron of thugs that I had smuggled drugs as further motivation for them to teach me a lesson on the way to Kanjurmarg. I thought about protesting the officer’s assessment of me as a drug smuggler—actually, I had only attempted to bribe a judge—but I saw the futility in arguing over why I was there. If he was completing a report to have me incarcerated at Arthur Road Jail, I wasn’t sure which felony would be regarded there with more derision.

  Essentially I was being “booked,” and the officer was more concerned with filling every blank on the form than he was with the particulars of my crime. He also didn’t say a word about my swollen face or the way that I was haphazardly sprawled across the cot to find the most comfortable position for my back.

  When he finished filling out five or six forms, he must have read in the instructions, “Finally, ask the prisoner if he or she has any questions.” He read it to me verbatim.

  “Do I have the right to contact an attorney?”

  “Of course. If you give me the name and number, I will make the call for you.”

  “May I see a telephone book?”

  “We don’t provide phone books for prisoner use.”

  “Then how am I supposed to find an attorney?”

  “This is not really my problem. However, if you don’t have your own attorney, the state of Maharashtra will provide an attorney for you.”

  “Don’t you see that it would be easier to simply give me a Bombay directory?”

  “I have already told you that we do not provide telephone books to prisoners, but I am happy to make the call if you have a name and number for me.”

  I remembered from working with Indian officials on World Bank projects that the rules of protocol in India were sometimes byzantine. It was all about the letter of the law, no matter how unreasonable or draconian those rules and laws might be. He wasn’t going to budge on the phone book issue.

  “Ok, then I would like to request an attorney from the state.”

  “You have to be incarcerated for at least two weeks to request an attorney from the state of Maharashtra.”

  I lay back on my cot and looked at the ceiling. Not only was I headed to the worst prison in western India, but I was also dealing with the most uncooperative government regulations known to man.

  “So then, are there any more additional questions?”

  “No, I have no more questions.”

  I could see that he had checked off his final box on the form, so from his perspective, the interview was over. He started to pull back the iron bar that secured the entrance to the cell, and then he paused.

  “By the way, we’ll be moving you in the morning to Arthur Road, so you may want to request a shower down the hall sometime this evening. It may be the last time for months that you will actually feel clean.”

  After he left, I was encouraged that I could actually stand up and hobble around the cell. I was hoping that my vertebrae had been severely bruised but not broken. There was some paralysis in my right leg, but I hoped that would also improve as the swelling in my back began to decrease. That evening I took a shower and allowed the warm spray to move back and forth across the back of my neck. If I hadn’t had this brief reprieve at Kanjurmarg I could have easily died before my arrival at Arthur Road. I was still banged up, but my current discomfort was only a fraction of what I was to experience over the next nine months.

  The next morning, I was led out to a Kanjurmarg police van and delivered to Arthur Road Jail. When the doors of the van opened, I was surprised to see a crowd of people, and for a moment I thought that the word was out that a World Bank official had been arrested for bribing a judge—or, even worse, smuggling drugs. I was later to find that many of the people standing on the outside of the prison were there to deliver contraband to inmates who either had the cash or the connections to beat the system.

  I was led through the crowds to the main doorway, and because of my swollen nose and eye, people probably assumed I was part of a gang war and had been arrested the night before for gang violence. They brought me to what appeared to be a cashier’s window, and the same Kanjurmarg officer who had interviewed me the day before handed the man behind the small bars my paperwork.

  “No passport?”

  “All of my identification is at the Taj Hotel.”

  The man behind the bars sneered.

  “You’ll find the accommodations here very similar to the Taj Mahal.”

  Both men laughed and the man behind the screen repeated “Taj Mahal” several times as he rifled through my paperwork. He then said something to the Kanjurmarg officer in Hindi, and the man quickly exited. The man behind the screen pushed a buzzer located on the desk next to him, and a large bearded man appeared who looked remarkably identical to one of the thugs who had subjected me to the abuse in the stairwell. He led me out of the cubicle and into a large room where there were twenty-five or thirty men sitting naked on the floor. The room smelled of human sweat and urine, and I noticed a corner of the room where the naked men had gone to urinate or defecate.

  “Take off your clothes and put them in this basket.”

  I quickly realized that I was expected to undress right there, and the man watched me intently as I removed all of my clothing. I put everything in the basket and handed it to him.

  “Wait until your name is called.”

  I walked over to what appeared to be the end of the line, and sat down on the cold concrete floor. The man just ahead of me had his face buried in his crossed arms, and I couldn’t tell if he was sleeping or just tuning out the world around him.

  “How long have you been waiting?”

  I said it loudly enough that I was sure he heard me. He didn’t respond.

  “How long have you been waiting in line?”

  He didn’t verbally respond, but held up two fingers.

  “Two hours?”

  The man shook his head back and forth.

  “Two days?”

  I was actually kidding when I said it, so I was shocked when he nodded his head in the affirmative.

  “How about these other men? How long have they waited?”

  He held up five fingers.

  “They have been waiting for five days?”

  He nodded his head.

  “Do they feed you?”

  I had been interviewing the man as if I were a journalist, and now I suddenly realized that my plight was identical to every naked man in the room.

  “They feed us one bowl of dal a day, but it is disgusting and filled with dirty water.”

  “Where do we sleep?”

  “They give each of us one blanket for the night. You will not want to use it. It is filled with lice.”

  “How many men do they process from this room each day?”

  “Usually four or five, but yesterday it was nine. There was a man here yesterday who had been here for at least four days. He died last night, and they removed his body early this morning. They probably want us to die here to give them more space in the barracks.”

  I thought about the $300
that was still stuffed up my rectum. I guessed that when someone was called out of this holding tank they were probably examined, and I didn’t want to risk having to defecate and then reinsert the money while the entire room was watching. I decided that I would keep myself hydrated—maybe even drink the watery dal, but I had to avoid defecating until I was officially processed. I was beginning to believe what Amar had said about money being the only source of reprieve at Arthur Road.

  As it turned out, I was processed after only two days in the holding tank, and as I was led away by a guard, I felt bad for those who had been waiting twice that long. I was examined by a man who had a white mask over his face, and he wore surgical gloves. He thoroughly examined my rectum, but he didn’t go high enough to discover any bills. While I was in the holding tank I had spoken to a man who was being processed at Arthur Road for the third time in the past six years. He explained that because of the overcrowding—three thousand men and women in a jail designed to accommodate eight hundred—the jail essentially deputized some of the long-term inmates, and they were the ones who had more direct contact with prisoners. Some of them were even referred to as wardens, and if anyone was to be bribed, it would be the wardens, not the guards. The guards had a supervisory role, but they rarely got into confrontations with inmates.

  After the physical examination, I was told that I could find my clothes at the end of a long hallway that connected the infirmary to the barracks. I entered the hallway still completely naked, and to my surprise, there were about twenty men—I surmised that they were the wardens—who were waiting for my exit from the infirmary. I wasn’t sure how they were alerted to be ready for new prisoners who were looking for their clothes, but at the sight of me they formed two lines—a gauntlet—and they each had a bamboo stick that was flayed at the end to slice into the skin. One of the men near the head of the gauntlet had a whistle, and he stepped out of the line and walked towards me.

  “Are you looking for your clothes?”

  He didn’t wait for my reply.

  “These men and I are here to help you find them! When you hear the whistle blow once, you should head down the hallway. A double whistle means you must come back and start over. Are you English?”

  “No, American.”

  “Even better. Now wait for the whistle.”

  He blew the whistle and I headed into the gauntlet. I was hoping that my swollen eye and nose would cause them to go easy on me, but instead it seemed to have the opposite effect. I was to find out that perceived weakness in prison is an invitation for more abuse. The men were screaming in Hindi and thrashing every part of my body with the flayed bamboo. Each strike produced a small cut on my skin, so that as I reached the end of the gauntlet, I was already covered in blood. I was almost to the last man, and I could see baskets of clothes stacked up at the end of the hallway.

  The men were screaming for the double whistle, and just as I passed the last man, I heard its shrill double report echo down the hallway. I turned around, thinking that they would allow me to walk back to the beginning, but the idea was for me to fight my way back to the start through an intensified barrage of bamboo. Every strike was becoming excruciatingly painful, and at one point I stumbled and fell to the floor.

  “Get up, English! Get up and be a man!”

  The din of their taunts subsided a little when I reached the place where I had started, but I had barely arrived there when I heard the whistle blow again. I headed back down the gauntlet covering my face as best I could, but when I arrived at the end, the flays of bamboo had reopened the wounds on my eye and nose.

  I could barely see the baskets because of the blood on my eyes and face, but I finally found the clothes I had on when I arrived at Arthur Road. I was led into the barracks and directed to a large room that had one sink and one toilet for the sixty men who were packed like sardines into a twenty-by-forty-foot space. There was one window at the top of one wall, and it was reinforced by iron bars. Most of the men tried to sit or lie as far away as possible from the sink and toilet.

  With sixty men trying to use one toilet, it had constantly overflowed so that there was urine and feces in a three-foot perimeter around the flooded facility. New prisoners were assigned to the toilet end of the room, and so when a few inmates scooted over to make a small space for me, I was only ten feet away from the filth and the stench.

  I forced myself to take off my shirt, and I waded through the putrid slime to get to the sink. I drenched part of my shirt with water and went back to my spot to carefully dab away the blood from my fresh wounds. Others looked at me knowingly, since undoubtedly they had also been subjected to the gauntlet, but no one offered to help me in any way. This was a room where most had lost all sense of their humanity, and they had become incapable of care for others or even themselves.

  As I look back on my months at Arthur Road, I am grateful that I was able to use my $300 to extricate myself from the harshest realities of the prison during the first three months I was there. Because I had some money, I was able to buy my way into less offensive living conditions, and the people I lived with from May to July were gang members and drug smugglers who maintained their slightly better accommodations through cash that was smuggled in from the outside.

  A favorite ploy of theirs was to have one of their people on the outside show up at a prisoner’s court appearance. They would pay him to bring money back into Arthur Road, and their lifestyle was maintained. Because the word had gotten around that I was in for smuggling drugs, I was often approached by gang members who either wanted drugs or wanted my advice on how to smuggle drugs into Bombay. My reputation as a drug smuggler actually gave me a certain prestige that I worked hard to maintain for about half of my time in prison.

  By August, I was completely out of money, and the wardens who I had been paying off during the first several months were becoming impatient with me continuing to enjoy better living conditions.

  In early September, I was moved back into a room very similar to the room I had been assigned immediately after the gauntlet, and that is when my health and my spirits began to rapidly decline.

  Like the earlier room, there was filth and stench everywhere. Many of the inmates had skin disease, and at night the lights were left on. Inmates were constantly getting up and making their way to the toilet, and there were men who mumbled incoherently all day and night. I still think of it as an antechamber of hell. I used to close my eyes when I was there and think of being on the train with Melissa or the night we had danced together in Nairobi. This was all short-lived, as it was inevitably interrupted by someone screaming or another person bumping into me on the way to the toilet. Because of the putrid conditions, I began to develop a cough and my own saliva began to taste like the room and the stench of urine.

  It was in late September when I first met Ramesh. He was young and probably only twenty years old. He had been accused of murdering his uncle, and like most of the inmates of Arthur Road, he was there awaiting trial. For some reason, the wardens didn’t like him (Ramesh attributed their dislike to his laughter the first time through the gauntlet) and they would sometimes pull him out of the room at night and beat him for their own amusement. One night they raped him, and he returned wounded and ashamed. I could hear his whimpering until almost dawn the next day.

  Despite all of this, Ramesh maintained a fairly positive attitude, and he always wore his New York Yankees ball cap. He dreamed of going to New York City one day, and he knew most of the Yankee players and even their batting averages. He liked that I had a connection with New York, and he was fascinated by Jenny being at NYU.

  For over four months, I had been promised a state attorney, and finally at the end of September, I was notified that we had an appointment the next day. I was led into an area where there were several prisoners sitting across the table from visitors. The meeting was set for 1:00 P.M., and I waited patiently for his or her arrival.

  At about 1:10, a Catholic nun came into the room and sat across fro
m me.

  “Are you Ashmit?”

  “Actually my name is James.”

  “I didn’t think you looked Indian. I have an appointment to meet with Ashmit, but he may have not received the message.”

  “And I am supposed to meet an attorney provided by the state, but apparently they aren’t coming.”

  “Are you an American?”

  “I live in New York.”

  “How did you end up here?”

  I noticed that she was fairly young, probably in her late twenties, and her complexion was flawless. Mostly I noticed the brightness of her eyes.

  As I told her my story from the time I met Melissa at Victoria Falls to my arrest at the Taj Mahal, she seemed truly interested. I told the entire narrative in about five minutes, and when I ended there was an awkward silence.

  “Have you ever thought that all of the events of your life have led to this moment?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “What I suppose I mean is this may be your time.”

  “How is it my time?”

  “This may be the moment in your life where God finally has you where he wants you! So make the most of it.”

  “And do what?”

  “Show him that you are capable of helping other people, of caring for them.”

  Her eyes were glistening as she said the part about caring for other people, and there was a resonance in the way she said it that almost made me feel I was talking directly to God.

  As if on cue, my state attorney entered the room and the guard directed him over to me. She noticed that someone was now standing behind her, and she smiled as she got up from her chair. As she turned to leave, she looked directly at me.

  “Become that person, James. Take your baby steps, but become the person you have always secretly hoped you would be.”

  I watched her flowing habit as she exited the vestibule of the prison. Perhaps it wasn’t by chance that my attorney was late and Ashmit didn’t show. Perhaps our five-minute meeting was something planned from the day I was born. I didn’t hear a word that the state attorney said for the first ten minutes of our meeting. All I could think about was “This may be your time.”