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.
But it
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 might’ve 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.
