I smiled for the first time since the police had picked me up. In prison, a man rations his smiles because predatory men see smiling as a weakness, weak men see it as an invitation, and prison guards see it as a provocation to some new torment.
"I learned the swearing here, in Bombay," I explained. "How long do people usually stay here?"
Mahesh sighed, and his broad, dark face folded inward in a resigned frown. His wide-spaced brown eyes were so deep-set that they seemed to be hiding or seeking shelter beneath the ridge of his scarred brow. His wide nose, broken more than once, dominated his face and gave him a tougher look than his small mouth and rounded chin might've managed on their own.
"That is nobody knows, brother," he replied, the light dimming in his eyes. It was the sort of response Prabaker might've made, and I suddenly missed my little friend in a second of loneliness that speared my heart. "I came here two days before you. There's a rumour we will be taking a truck to the Road, in two or three weeks."
"The road?"
"Arthur Road jail, man."
"I have to get a message out to someone."
"You'll have to wait for that, Lin. The guards here, the cops, they've been telling all of us here not to help you. It's like somebody put a curse on you, my brother. I'm probably going to get some shit on my head just for talking to you only, but what the fuck, yaar."
"I've got to get a message out," I repeated, my lips bared from my teeth.
"Well, none of the guys leaving here will help you, Lin. They are afraid, like mice in a bag full of cobras. But you'll be able to get some messages out from Arthur Road. It's a fucking big jail, no problem. Twelve thousand men inside. Government says less than so many, but everybody of us, we know there is twelve thousands of men inside. But it's still a lot better than this. If you go to the Road, you'll be with me, in maybe three weeks. My case is stealing. Stealing from the constructions-copper wire, plastic pipes-three times in jail, already, for the same things. This time number four. What to say, brother? I am what they call a serial offensive, against the pilfering law. This time it is three years for me, if lucky, and five years, if not lucky. If you go to Arthur Road, you go with me. Then we'll try to get your messages out of the jail. Thik hain?
Until then, we smoke, and pray to the God, and bite any sisterfuckers who try to take our plates, na?"
And for three weeks we did just that. We smoked too much, and we troubled deaf heaven with our prayers, and we fought with some men, and sometimes we comforted other men who were losing the will to smoke and pray and fight. And one day they came to take our fingerprints, pressing the black, traitorous loops and whorls onto a page that promised to tell a truth, a vile truth, and nothing but that truth. And then Mahesh and I were crushed with other men into an ancient blue prison truck-eighty men in the black womb of the truck, where thirty would've been too many-and driven toward Arthur Road Prison at reckless speeds through the streets of the city that we all loved too much.
Inside the gates of the prison, guards dragged us off the tailgate of the truck and told us to squat on the ground, while other guards processed us and signed us into the prison, one by one. It took four hours, shuffling forward and squatting on our haunches, and they left me till last. The guards had been told that I understood Marathi. Their watch commander tested the assertion, when I was alone with them, by ordering me to stand. I stood up on painfully stiff legs, and he ordered me to squat again. When I squatted down, he ordered me to stand again. That mightVe gone on indefinitely, judging by the hilarity it provoked in the gallery of surrounding guards, but I refused to play. He continued to give the commands, but I ignored him. When he stopped, we stared at one another across the kind of silence I've only ever known in prisons or on the battlefield. It's a silence you can feel on your skin. It's a silence you can smell, and taste, and even hear, somehow, in a dark space at the back of your head. Slowly, the commander's sinful smile retreated into the snarl of hate that had spawned it. He spat on the ground at my feet.
"British built this jail, in the time of Raj," he hissed at me, showing teeth. "They did chain Indian men here, whip them here, hang them here, until dead. Now _we run the jail, and you are a British prisoner."
"Excuse me, sir," I said, with the most formal politeness that the Marathi language offers, "but I am not British. I am from New Zealand."
"You are _British!" he screamed, spraying my face with his saliva.
"I'm afraid not."
"Yes! You are British! All British!" he replied, the snarl moving outward to a malignant smile once more. "You are British, and we run the jail. You go through that way!"
He pointed toward an archway that led into the prison's interior.
