When I Lost some Freedom and Gained some Wisdom
By Shoma Sen
The first thought that came to me when, straight from Lohegaon Airport I was safe deposited into the Vishrambagh lock-up, was that at least I’m alive! Not shot dead like Gauri Lankesh, Dabholkar, Pansare and Kalburgi. Or Dr. Ramanatham, Purshottam, Ghanti Prasad and so many others. The second thought was that at my age, a health crisis often occurs to anybody, jeopardizing the routine of a regular family life. The dreaded disease cancer, a paralytic attack, debilitating road accidents, loss of job and income, failed business and bankruptcy…well, at least I was at the end of my career, having completed the formalities of my pension papers…And finally, pushing positive thinking to the hilt, I thought that at a time when everyone was asking me about my retirement plans, the state had made retirement plans for me! Jail was the old people’s home that I would be staying in.
Terrible mood swings of panic and despair on one side and disbelief and hope on the other, flashed through me for a number of days. The gravity of the case took a long time to seep in. The case seemed ridiculous and cooked up. The state had identified certain rights’ activists whom they wanted to harass and curtail and had brought them unconvincingly together, in a story based upon fabricated letters that they had supposedly found in the laptops of some of the accused. And yet, this absurd drama was terribly serious, with allegations that according to them invoked the dreaded UAPA. Allegations had surfaced in the media of a letter from Maoists suggesting a Rahul Gandhi type attack on the Prime Minister. Here I was hobbling about in the jail, unable to walk, (corns on my feet), unable to work (barrack cleaning duties), unable to squat and shit (osteo-arthritis), so that even the uneducated women in my barrack wondered why would Maoists choose me for the job when they had hundreds of trained guerillas.
Yerawada Women’s Central Prison is a picturesque place. When, on 21st June 2018 at the time when dusk was just settling in, I crossed the double gates and entered its premises, these words spontaneously slipped out of my mouth: “What a pretty jail!” What lay before me reminded me of a Gandhian Ashram or residential school settling down to its evening prayer. Along the sides were long one storied, tile roofed stone walled barracks with verandahs and in the centre were two tree shaded grounds with a small tarred road dividing them. Neem, tamarind, mango and Ashoka trees, curated hedges bordering the grounds, two tube wells, a water bowl for birds to drink from, a children’s corner with swings, slides and a roundabout all seemed to please my visual senses. A piercing shriek from an eagle circling above the greenery, brought me back to my senses. I smiled at the guard accompanying me and said, “Kitna sundar hai tumhara jail!” Made in the British ages, she explained, surprised at my comment.
The jail has two circles, the convict side and the undertrial side. Being basically a jail for convicts, this circle is larger and gets more importance, while the undertrials are a floating population. They are under judicial custody, while the convicts are the direct responsibility of the jail administration. All convicts need to wear a uniform, the dreaded green sari. Not only that, undertrials in Yerawada accused of murder are forced to wear the same, even though the law assumes an accused’s innocence till she is proven guilty, as the jail manual states that the jail should provide a uniform to such accused.
My guard takes me to a corner where I am given some roughly woven sheets and crude aluminum vessels and tells me to walk down the tarred road to the small barrack at the side called Hospital. She shouts across the ground, “Bhawani Mawshi, sending you a new entry!” The moment I reach the door of the hospital barrack, clutching my newly acquired belongings and my own small plastic bag of clothes, the mawshi shouts, “Slippers outside!” I enter into the verandah of this tenement that is enclosed by wooden bars in an iron frame. About twelve women are sitting on the floor of this cage, arranged in rows of twos. They are sitting for the evening “total” as the counting is called. The place has no signs of being a hospital. Later I discover that a locked room does have a few items of medical equipment, but otherwise it is like any ashram cottage with a few rooms and bathroom. Serious patients, the elderly who need care and a few, punished by the jailor for “misconduct” like expressing same sex love, are kept here.
I continue to feel like a retirement plan as I get to know some of the elderly. Three of them are convicted of murder for killing their daughters-in-law. Sakkubai, in her late seventies, still stands tall and erect but sometimes she has high fever and passes stools in her clothes. She wears the bright red Kumkum bindi on her forehead, the size of a rupee, as some rural women in Maharashtra still do, to show their caste and prosperity. The other tall woman is very fair and frail. A north Indian “pure” Brahmin, she is at that stage where the old prepare to die. Of the two Gujarati women, Sarlaben is totally silent, as if depression muted her life and the long arm of law made her system hang forever. Bhawani Mawshi, the warder, has given her just one work to do – sweep the barrack—just to keep her limbs in action, she explains to me, and Sarlaben gets up like a robot each time and does her act. Hetalben, a Gujarati from North Maharashtra, explains that her own bad luck is that she got bail. For about seven years she was at home, attending her court dates, when she finally got convicted, she was quite advanced in years, so that she still has a long sentence to serve, while others were trying to get remission and move out. They were all serving life sentences, which in cases of dowry deaths are more severe. In Maharashtra, a life sentence is not fixed at 14 years but is considered to be as long as natural life. However, many are released after around twenty years when the process of remission is completed.
Sometimes, looking out at the greenery with a book in my hand listening to birdcalls in the surroundings, I would go back to the women’s movement of the eighties. After the Mathura Rape case and the intense agitations that brought a round of changes in the rape law, especially custodial rape and the onus of proving his innocence shifting to the accused, the next focus was on dowry deaths. This literally burning issue invaded the personal space as political, peeped into bedrooms and kitchens and through demonstrations, posters and publicity created a new discourse on family relations and marriage in the Indian context. While those ascribing to a revolutionary perspective believed that ultimately a democratic family space would arise only in a new democratic society, most activists argued that at the present moment we would have to demand changes in the law and go for a legal and judicial recourse. And now, sitting on the other side of the wall, looking at these pathetic women, bent and wrinkled, crushing thick rotis with their fingers to push between their toothless gums, I wondered. All of them pleaded innocent, telling me that their bahus had committed suicide and they were in jail for no reason at all. Of course, dying declarations, eye witness accounts and circumstantial evidence must have played their role, but knowing how the judiciary works…
A beautiful old peepul tree is right outside our little barrack. It is huge and wide, its branches, reaching out like sheltering arms towards the hopeless and the desperate. The constant rustle and whoosh of its foliage sounds like “the gentle rain from heaven” as so many women convicts sit praying for the quality of mercy. Sitting beneath the peepul tree I ponder over the institution of marriage and Engels’ contempt for it pervades my thoughts. The business of marriage, the marriage industry, the sexual torture, the power relations, the politics of revenge, the pitting of women against each other, the turning of women not only into victims of patriarchy but vehicles of it as well…The wisdom tree smiled at me as if to say, “You know the answer quite well, don’t you?”