But it was a terrible humiliation. The worst things that people do to us always make us feel ashamed. The worst things that people do always strike at the part of us that wants to love the world. And a tiny part of the shame we feel, when we're violated, is shame at being human.
I learned to walk with the chains, but half rations took their toll, and I lost weight steadily: as much as fifteen kilos in a month, by my guess. I was living on a palm-sized piece of chapatti bread and one saucer of watery soup every day. My body was thin, and seemed to be weakening by the hour. Men tried to help me with smuggled food. They were beaten for it, but still they tried. I refused their offers of help, after a while, because the guilt I felt whenever they received a beating on my behalf was killing me just as surely as the malnutrition.
The many hundreds of small and large cuts that I'd sustained on the day and the night of the beating caused me agonising pain.
Most of them were infected, and some were swollen with yellow poison. I tried to wash them with the worm-infested water, but it didn't make them clean. The bites from the kadmal were accumulating every night. There were hundreds of bites, and many of them, too, became infected, weeping sores. Body lice swarmed on me. I followed the routine slaughter of the filthy, wriggling, crawling pests, every day, but they were drawn to the cuts and wounds on my body. I woke with them feeding on me and breeding in the warm, damp sores.
The beatings, however, had stopped after my meeting with the prison official on that Sunday morning. Big Rahul still whacked me occasionally, and some of the other overseers struck me from time to time, but they were habitual gestures, and not delivered with full force.
Then one day, as I lay on my side, conserving energy and watching the birds peck for crumbs in the courtyard next to our dormitory, I was attacked by a powerful man who jumped on me and seized my throat in both of his hands.
"Mukul! Mukul, my young brother!" he growled at me in Hindi. "Mukul! The young brother you bit on his face! My brother!"
He mightVe been the man's twin. He was tall and heavyset. I recognised the face, and in the instant that I heard the words I remembered the man who'd tried to take my aluminium plate in the Colaba lock-up. I'd lost too much weight. I was too weakened by the hunger and the fever. The press of his body was crushing me, and his hands were closing my throat to air. He was killing me.
Lesson number four of street fighting: always keep something in reserve. The last of my energy exploded in a thrust, with one arm. I drove the arm downward, between our bodies, and grabbed his balls, squeezing and twisting with all the strength I had.
His eyes and mouth opened in a gurgling scream, and he tried to roll off me to his left. I rolled with him. He pressed his legs together and drew his knees up, but my right hand wouldn't surrender the crushing grip. I plunged the fingers of my other hand into the soft skin above his collarbone. Closing my fingers and thumb around the collarbone, I used it as a handle, for leverage, and began to hit him in the face with my forehead. I hit him six times, ten times. I felt his teeth open a cut in my forehead, felt his nose break, felt his strength oozing from him with his blood, felt the collar bone wrench and tear away in the socket. I kept hitting him with the head butt. We were both bloody, and he was weakening, but he wouldn't lie still. I kept hitting him.
I might've beaten him to death with the blunt instrument of my head, but the overseers dragged me off him and back to the gate.
The chains clamped around my wrists again, but they changed their tactics, and chained me to the gate face down on the stone floor.
Rough hands tore my thin shirt from my back. The bamboo sticks rose and fell with new fury. The overseers had arranged for the man to attack me-it was a setup, and they admitted it during one of the breaks while they rested their arms. They'd wanted the man to beat me senseless, maybe even kill me. He had the perfect motive, after all. They'd allowed him into the room, and they'd sanctioned his revenge attack. But it didn't work. I beat their man. And they were outraged that their plans had gone awry. So the beatings went on for hours, with breaks for cigarettes and chai and snacks, and private showings of my bloodied body for selected guests from other parts of the prison.
At the end of it, they released me from the gate. I listened, my ears filled with blood, as they argued about what to do with me. The beating that had followed the fight, the beating they'd just inflicted on me, was so savage and bloody that the overseers were worried. They'd gone too far, and they knew it. They couldn't report any part of it to the prison officials. They decided to keep the matter quiet, and they ordered one of their flunkies to wash my flayed and razored body with soap. Understandably, the man complained about the odious task. A flurry of blows encouraged him, and he applied himself to the job with some thoroughness. I owe my life to him and, in a strange way, to the man who'd tried to kill me. Without the attack, and their furious torture after it, the overseers wouldn't have allowed a soap and warm-water wash-it was the first and last I ever knew in the prison. And the soapy wash saved my life, I'm sure, because the many wounds and lesions on my body had become so badly infected that my temperature was constantly fevered, and the poison was killing me. I was too weak to move. The man who washed me-I never even knew his name-gave my cuts and wounds and abscessed sores such soothing solace, with the soapy water and soft wash cloth, that tears of relief streamed down my cheeks, mixing with my blood on the stone floor.
The fever fell to a simmering shiver, but I still starved, and I got thinner every day. And every day, at their end of the room, the overseers feasted themselves on three good meals. A dozen men worked as their flunkies. They washed clothes and blankets, scrubbed the floors, prepared the dining area, cleaned the mess after each meal and, whenever the whim possessed one of the overseers, gave foot, back, or neck massages. They were rewarded with fewer beatings than the rest of us, a few beedie cigarettes, and scraps of food from every meal. Sitting around a clean sheet on the stone floor, the overseers dipped into the many dishes that went into their meals: rice, dhals, chutneys, fresh roti, fish, meat stews, chicken, and sweet desserts. As they ate noisily, they threw scraps of chicken, bread, or fruit outwards to the surrounding flunkies sitting on their haunches in simian obsequiousness, and waiting with bulging eyes and salivating mouths.
The smell of that food was a monstrous torment. No food ever smelled so good to me, and as I slowly starved, the smell of their food came to represent the whole of the world I'd lost. Big Rahul took relentless delight in offering me food at every meal.
He would hold out a drum- stick of chicken, waving it in the air and feigning a dummy throw, enticing me with his eyes and raised eyebrows, and inviting me to become one of his dogs. Occasionally, he threw a drumstick or a sweet cake toward me, and warned the waiting flunkies to leave it for me, for the gora, urging me to crawl for it. When I didn't react, and wouldn't react, he gave the signal for the flunkies, and then laughed that weak, vicious laugh as the men scrambled and fought for it.
I couldn't bring myself to crawl across the floor and accept that food, although I was weaker by the day, by the hour. Eventually my temperature soared again until my eyes burned with the fever day and night. I visited the toilet, limping, or crawling on my knees when the fever crippled me, but the visits grew less frequent. My urine was a dark, orange colour. Malnutrition robbed my body of energy, and even the simplest movement-rolling over from one side to another, or sitting up-demanded so much of the precious, limited resource that I considered long and hard before undertaking it. I lay motionless for most of every day and night.