He smiled. You can never tell just how much badness there is in a man until you see him smile. I suddenly remembered a comment Lettie had made about Maurizio. If babies had wings, she said, he'd be the kind who'd pull them off. I started to laugh.

Helpless, with my arms stretched out and chained beside me, I laughed. Big Rahul frowned at me. His slack-lipped, cretinous puzzlement made me laugh the harder.

The beating began. Big Rahul exhausted himself in a furious assault that concentrated on my face and my genitals. When he could lift the stick no more, and was gasping for breath, the other overseers stepped in and continued the attack. They hammered at me with the bamboo lathis for twenty minutes or more.

Then they took a break to smoke cigarettes. I was wearing shorts and a singlet, nothing else. The canes had cut into me, flaying my skin, slicing and tearing it open from the soles of my feet to the top of my head.

After they'd smoked, the beating resumed. Some time later, I heard from the conversation around me that another group of overseers, from another room, had arrived. The new men, with fresh arms, lashed at my body. Their fury was merciless. When they were done, a third group of overseers launched a savage attack. Then there was a fourth group. Then the first group, from my own room, cracked and whipped their sticks at me with murderous brutality. It was ten thirty in the morning when the floggings began. They continued until eight o'clock that night.

"Open your mouth."

"What?"

"Open your mouth!" the voice demanded. I couldn't open my eyes, because my eyelids were fused together with dried blood. The voice was insistent but gentle, and coming from behind me, on the other side of the bars. "You must take your medicine, sir! You must take your medicine!"

I felt the neck of a glass bottle press against my mouth and teeth. Water flowed down my face. My arms were still stretched out beside me, and chained to the bars. My lips parted, and water flowed into my mouth. I swallowed quickly, gulping and spluttering. Hands held my head, and I felt two tablets enter my mouth, pushed by someone's fingers. The water bottle returned, and I drank, coughing water back through my nose.

"Your mandrax tablets, sir," the guard said. "You will be sleeping now."

Floating on my back, arms outstretched, my body was bruised and cut so extensively that no part of it escaped the pain. There was no way to measure or judge it because it was all pain, everywhere. My eyes were sealed shut. My mouth tasted blood and water. I drifted to sleep on a lake of sticky, numbing stone. The chorus of voices I heard was my own choir of screams and the shouts of pain I'd kept inside, and didn't give them, and wouldn't give them. They woke me, at dawn, by throwing a bucket of water on me. A thousand shrieking cuts woke with me. They permitted Mahesh to wash my eyes with a damp towel. When I could open them to see, they unlocked the handcuffs, lifted me by my stiff arms, and led me out of the room. We marched through empty courtyards and immaculately swept footpaths lined with geometrically perfect beds of flowers. At last we stopped before one of the senior prison officials. He was a man in his fifties. His grey hair and moustache were closely trimmed around his fine, almost feminine features. He was dressed in pyjamas and a silk brocade dressing gown. In the middle of a deserted courtyard, he was sitting in an elaborately carved, high-backed chair, something like a bishop's chair. Guards stood beside and behind him.

"This is not exactly how I like my Sundays to commence, my dear fellow," he said, covering a yawn with a ringed hand. "Just what the devil do you think you're playing at?"

His English was the precise and rounded version of the language that was taught in good Indian schools. I knew, from those few sentences and the way he'd spoken them, that his education was a post-colonial parallel to my own. My mother, poor and worked into exhaustion every day of her life, had earned the money to send me to a school exactly such as his. Under other circumstances we might've discussed Shakespeare or Schiller or Bulfinch's Mythology. I knew that about him from those two sentences. What did he know about me?

"Not talking, eh? What is it? Have my men been beating you? Have the overseers done anything to you?"

I stared at him in silence. In the old school of Australian prisons you don't lag-or inform on-anyone. Not even the screws.

Not even convict overseers. You never tell on anyone, ever, for any reason.

"Come now, have the overseers been beating you?"

The silence that followed his question was suddenly disturbed by the morning song of mynah birds. The sun was fully above the horizon, and golden light streamed through the misty air, scattering the dew. I felt the morning breeze on every one of the thousand cuts that stretched and cracked dried blood each time that I moved. With my mouth firmly shut, I breathed in the morning air of the city that I loved with all my heart.

"Are you beating him?" he asked one of the overseers, in Marathi.

"Absolutely, sir!" the man responded, clearly surprised. "You told us to beat him."

"I didn't tell you to kill him, you idiot! Look at him! He looks like his skin is gone."

The official examined his gold wristwatch for a moment, and then sighed his exasperation loudly.

"Very well. This is your punishment. You will wear chains on your legs. You must learn not to hit the overseers. You must learn that lesson. And from now on, until further notice, you will have half your ration of food. Now take him away!"

I held my silence, and they led me back to the room. I knew the drill. I'd learned the hard way that it's wise to keep silent when prison authorities abuse their power: everything you do enrages them, and everything you say makes it worse. Despotism despises nothing so much as righteousness in its victims.

The chain-fitter was a cheerful, middle-aged man in the ninth year of a seventeen-year sentence for a double murder. He'd killed his wife and his best friend as they lay sleeping together, and then he'd turned himself in at the local police station.

"It was peaceful," he told me in English as he collapsed a steel band around my ankle with a set of crunching pliers. "They went in their sleeping. Well, you can say that he went in his sleeping. When the axe came on her, she was awake, a little bit awake, but not for very long."

With the ankle-chains fitted, he lifted the length of chain that would hobble my step. At its centre there was a wider link in the form of a ring. He gave me a long strip of coarse cloth, and showed me how to thread the strip through the ring, and fasten the cloth around my waist. In that way, the ring in the centre of the leg chain hung from the thread, at a little below the knees, and kept the leg chain from dragging on the ground.

"They told me, you know, in two more years only, I am overseer," he informed me, sharing a wink and a broad smile as he packed up his tools. "Don't you be worry. When that will happen, in two years, I am looking after you. You are my very good English friend, isn't it? No problem."

The chain restricted my stride to tiny steps. Walking at any faster pace required a shuffling, hip-swinging gait. There were two other men in my room with leg-irons, and by studying their movements I gradually learned the technique. Within a few days, I walked that rolling, shambling dance as unselfconsciously as they did. In fact, by studying them and imitating them, I gradually discovered that there was something more than necessity in their shuffling dance.

They were trying to give some grace to their movements, put something beautiful in the sliding, weaving steps, to soften the indignity of the chain. Even in that, I discovered, human beings will find an art.