"Come on!" I shouted, in Hindi. "What can you do to me? Can you do worse than this?"
I punched my own face, hard, and punched it again, drawing blood from my lip. I swiped my right hand through the blood on my wounded arm and smeared it on my forehead. Lesson number three of street fighting: always get crazier than the other guy.
"Can you do worse than this?" I shouted, switching to Marathi.
"Do you think I'm afraid of _this? Come on! I want this! I want you to get me out of this corner! You'll get me, you'll get me, but one of you, standing there, will lose an eye. One of you.
I'll rip someone's eye out with my fingers, and eat it! So come on! Let's get on with it! And hurry up, because God knows, I'm fuckin' hungry!"
They hesitated, and then drew back in a huddle to discuss the situation. I watched them, every muscle in my body as tight and taut as a leopard leaping to the kill. After half a minute of harsh whispering, the overseers reached a decision. They drew back further, and some of their number ran out of the room. I thought they must be running for the guards, but they returned in seconds with ten prisoners from my room. They ordered the men to sit on the ground, facing me, and then they began to beat them. The sticks rose and fell swiftly. The men shrieked and yowled. The beating ceased, after a minute, and they sent the ten men away. In a few seconds, they replaced them with ten more.
"Come out of the corner, now!" one of the overseers commanded.
I looked at the men sitting on the ground, and then back at the overseer. I shook my head. The overseer gave the command, and the second group of ten men was beaten with the bamboo canes. Their cries rose up in piercing echoes, and wheeled about us in the stone room like a flock of frightened birds.
"Come out of the corner!" the overseer shouted.
"No."
"Aur dass!" he screamed. Bring ten more!
The next group of ten frightened men was assembled, facing me.
The overseers raised their sticks. Mahesh was in the third group.
One of the two men who'd been beaten and given an extra six-month sentence for trying to help me was also in the huddle of ten.
They looked at me. They were silent, but their eyes were pleading with me.
I put my hands down and took a step forward out of the corner.
The overseers rushed at me, and seized me with six pairs of hands. They shoved and dragged me to one of the barred steel gates, and forced me down on my back, with the top of my head resting against the steel bars. They kept several pairs of handcuffs in a locker at their end of the room. Using two sets of those antique iron devices, they chained my outstretched arms to the bars at the wrists, level with my head. They used coconut fibre rope to tie my legs together at the ankles.
Big Rahul knelt beside me, and brought his face close to mine.
The exertion of kneeling and bending and coping with his monstrous hatreds caused him to sweat and wheeze. His mouth was cut, and his nose was swollen. I knew that his head would ache for days from the punches I'd landed on his ear and his temple.
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!"
