BEYOND THE BLACK WATER'
It was shocking to see him thus, thought Gian, the boy he had envied at college, now wearing a large red 'D' on his vest-a 'D-ticket convict as they called them. He had been brought in last, just a few minutes before the ship was about to move, escorted by two white sergeants; brought in with what, the other convicts thought, was something of a touch of fanfare, and he was handed over to the Andaman sentries who were to accompany them, like a prize exhibit: a terrorist, a revolutionary working for the overthrow of British rule.
Even in a convict's nondescript garb-coarse grey vest and shorts-he looked different to Gian, not broken and ingratiating like the others, but proud, straight and haughty. The white sergeants had exchanged pleasantries with him as they said good- bye and incredibly, had even shaken him by the hand while they had barely acknowledged the cracking salute given to them by the Gurkha sentry. Yes, there he was, Debi-dayal, only son of Dewan-bahadur Tekchand Kerwad, in the hold of the prison ship on her way to the Andamans, lying without a whimper, only half alive.
On the very first day, he had fallen foul of the head sentry, Balbahadur, a Gurkha with a mean, leathery, hairless face, for complaining to the escorting officer about their treatment.
One of the prisoners lying close to the barrel which served as their latrine had complained about the stench and asked to be moved. When the sentry took no notice of his complaint, Debi-dayal had said:
"Will you please go and call the escorting officer here, so that he can see things for himself?"
Balbahadur came close to him and gave him a long, hard stare. to see the sahib?' he asked.
"You want Yes, I want to complain to him. The stench is quite unbear- able."
"You do, do you?" said the Gurkha, grinning, coming closer. And then he slapped him on the face, hard. "Complain, will you? Who do you think you are the Aga Khan? Complain to my- And he slapped his face again.
Debi-dayal said nothing at the time, but towards the evening, when the escorting officer had come on his rounds, he protested to him about the stench.
Rogers, the escorting officer, had looked uncomfortable. He had no experience of India. This was his first assignment of its kind. It was, he felt, outside the scope of his duties to discuss complaints which evidently would cut across established pro- cedure for transporting convicts to the penal settlement.
A man of your sensitivities should have thought about all this before engaging in terrorist activities,' he said with a touch of sarcasm. The jail manual does not make provision for outside latrines."
"These are basic needs,' Debi-dayal had said. 'One does not have to look for them in jail manuals. Is this how they treat prisoners in England?"
Rogers felt weak. He had not bargained for such an exchange in the presence of all the convicts. I'm afraid it's something I can't do anything about,' he said. "You will just have to put up with it-only three more days."
Can't you at least ensure that the sentries do not harass us?" Debi-dayal asked.
"What kind of harassment?"
"When I asked to be given an opportunity to speak to you, this man just came up and slapped me on the face."
Balbahadur was standing right behind Rogers. He obviously knew that they were speaking about him, even though he did not understand English. Did you slap this man?' Rogers asked him, speaking in Hindi.
No, sahib, this man is a liar, a badmash; trying to get the other prisoners to join in his protests."
"You can ask any of the other prisoners,' Debi-dayal offered.
Rogers hesitated. His thoughts were confused. He looked from one to the other; the cocky young revolutionary and the sullen sentry, his face a wooden mask, his little eyes blinking. Rogers had never had much to do with prisoners in the past; he was a policeman. These convicts fully deserved what they were getting, and it was important not to interfere with ship's discipline. He remembered a pep talk he had been given before he joined the service...essential not to let the side down... important to back up your official subordinates-always.
And he should be warned to mind his language,' Debi-dayal went on. The foul, obscene words he uses whenever he speaks to us.. involving mothers and sisters."
You should have thought about all this before you became a terrorist,' Rogers snapped at him again.
After that, it was just a matter of time before Balbahadur got his own back on Debi-dayal. Later that very night he and another sentry accused him of trying to commit suicide by tearing his blanket and twisting the strands into a rope with which to hang himself. It was true that Debi-dayal had torn the blanket issued to him because it bore large patches of dried blood, but the suicide tale had been made up by the head sentry as a sop to the escorting officer's conscience.
They took Debi-dayal out of the hold and it was nearly two hours before they brought him back, with fetters on both hands and feet. "Complain to the sahib again,' Balbahadur taunted as a parting shot, and we'll have another go at you,'
He had not complained again; in fact, he had not said another word to anyone. "They must have beaten him with twists of rope, the man lying next to Gian whispered knowledgeably. 'Covered him in blankets and then beaten him-so that the welts should not show."
In the gloom of the hold, Gian's eyes wandered. They came to rest on the inert bundle wrapped in a coarse blanket that was Debi-dayal. And then he looked at the sentry standing rigidly beyond the barred door. A feeling of revulsion came over him as he went on staring at the immobile face the typical Indian sentry drunk with the authority vested in him. It was amazing how the Empire worked, held its sway. With a crop of honest, selfless officers at the top, and hordes of corrupt, subhuman,
minor officials at the bottom. Was that the India of the Indians? What would happen if the steel frame of British officialdom was ever removed, when India became free and her people held full sway? Then he suddenly remembered that he was leaving India for ever; that her problems were no longer his problems.
The big Ramoshi with the gnarled, teakwood face and the handlebar moustache clapped his hands for silence. He put his head back and began to sing:
Bolo jawanon kya-kya milat hai, Kale Panike bazaar?
A dozen or so voices joined him in the chorus:
Arre Kale Panike bazaar, arre Kale Panike bazaar!"
'Mofat-ki undi, aur mofat-ki brandy,
Aur mofat-ki rundi hazaar!"
'Arre mofat-ki rundi hazaar !' the chorus took him on, now much louder as other voices joined in. Arre mofat-ki rundi hazaar
They were already learning the prison song; the big Ramoshi, Ghasita, was teaching them. Ghasita was going back, a 'lifer' for the second time. For the other forty-seven convicts, it was the first time they were going across the Kala Pani, the Black Water.
Only the literate among them, perhaps half a dozen all told, and of course, Ghasita, had any precise idea of their destination: the Cellular Jail at Port Blair in the Andaman islands. To the others, their destination was merely a place beyond the black water. They came from all corners of India, a mixed lot speaking different languages, convicted by district courts and High Courts to life imprisonment. Some of them did not even know that according to a recent statute, a 'life' term in a prisoner's sentence meant fourteen years, not all the remaining years of their lives; nor did they care. Many belonged to what the official manuals designated as 'the criminal tribes'. The big Ramoshi, Ghasita, was one of them.
They were a special breed of men, born to crime and to a life of violence; they were criminals first and human beings after- wards; unrepentant, unwilling to be reformed, incapable of reforming the dregs of the social order. Crime was to them. merely a way of life, ordained by God; it was even their religion, for they were the worshippers of Vetal, the god of criminals. Fatalists to the bone, they ascribed their captivity to the wrath of Vetal. Some lapse in the ritual of his worship had provoked his anger and Vetal had withdrawn his protection. It was unfortunate, but somehow it was only just, for it could not have been otherwise.
And now they were being taken to the mythical jail of the white man beyond the black water; a great prison-palace that was three stories high and in which, so they had heard, you lived in clean, airy cells, and from where, after a few months, you were paroled as a 'feri', a freed-man or a pass-holder, and permitted to settle down in one of the convict villages in the colony. You could even get married if you could find yourself a wife from the women's prison.
It was the will of Vetal that they should go, they were ready to go, resigned, almost composed, disdainful of the other, lesser beings amongst them who looked dazed and who had set up a wail when the ship began to move.
Their familiarity with Indian jails had inured them to prison life; at least they were sure that nothing that the jail beyond the black water held in store for them could be worse than what they had already gone through. For months they had languished in little black cells infested with vermin, in the stench and filth of their own excrement, in the foulness of their warders' and fellow prisoners' linguistic depravity; getting accustomed to a vocabu- lary learnt mainly from the walls of public lavatories; fettered, handcuffed, bullied, beaten, systematically de-sensitised, wholly powerless objects for the cultivated barbarism of those who were in authority over them. Then, from their city jails and district jails, they had all been gathered together in the Kalipada jail in Calcutta, a place of special horror where enormous red-eyed rats gnawed at their feet and hands during broad daylight, and fleas crawled along the floor in continuous, slow-moving lines.
Now they were on the open sea, even though they could not see it from where they were, in the great cage of their hold, body to human body, with the sentries who had come from the jail to take delivery of them, strutting importantly, like marionettes blown up to life size, picking their victims at leisure. The heat, hanging like a vapour, and hunger, stark and rumbling, were their constant companions, for they had been already issued with what was their full quota of rations for the journey; parched rice and gram and blocks of jaggery. A half-barrel in a corner of the hold was their latrine.
Some of them had begun to weep when the ship weighed anchor but Balbahadur and his men had come wielding their lathis and stopped them. That was when the big Ramoshi had laughed at his fellow-prisoners derisively. Then he began to sing.
His voice was brave and strident, like a broken brass trumpet, Gian thought, and his face bigger than life size, like an unfinished statue roughly carved out of wood. He was coarse, defiant; a prince from the criminal tribes, the chosen people of Vetal. He had already done a full term in the Andamans, and now, within a year of his release, was going back for another term. The first thing he had done after reaching his village in India, was to seek out the man who had betrayed him to the police, struck him down with an axe right in the middle of the bazaar and in broad daylight. According to his values, he had done only what was expected of him, for the demands of tribal justice had to be met. This was something that Vetal ordained, and he had made his offering, in all solemnity. There was something in his face and bearing, an air of arrogance perhaps, that made him stand out, and there was, of course, his great size, for he was well over six feet tall and of large build. Even the sentries treated him not only with deference, but with a little fear too.
And now he was singing again, and the other prisoners were joining in, one by one. What had they to sing about, Gian found himself wondering: the freedom from bugs and mosquitoes, the faint whiff of the sea breeze drowned by the odour of crowded humanity? The words of the song would have shocked Aji, he reflected, and then for a moment he was pricked by a sense of anxiety. Aji was the one person he had really let down...left alone in her old age when she had every right to expect to be looked after by the grandson she had brought up.
He wondered how she was getting on, now all alone in the Little House, waiting for her grandson who was, if he got full remission for good behaviour, due to return in 1952. He knew that she had sold her gold bangles to pay for his defence, but the rice fields were still there, so far as he was aware. The fields should bring her enough to live on; there was too, the Little House.
The song rose to a crescendo, drowning his thoughts. He had tried to hold himself aloof from their mirth, the bawdy songs, the vulgar badinage. How could they bring themselves to sing when they knew perfectly well that what lay in store for them beyond the black water was not wine and women, but the dreaded Cellular Jail, transformed by the prisoners themselves into the 'Silver' Jail; the Silver Jail and its superintendent, Patrick Mulligan. Strict but just, that was what he was reputed to be; strict but just. In the last analysis, was not that what all British officials were strict, but just? Gian was glad to know that the Silver Jail had a British superintendent, for he had nothing but admiration for British officials. An English magistrate had decided the Piploda case in Hari's favour, he remembered. The very fact that he was still alive was entirely due to the judge's sense of fairness. At the trial, the prosecution had made the strongest plea for the death penaltya blatant, premeditated murder, the prosecutor kept repeating. But Gian's college principal, Mr. Hakewill, had personally testified to his character, and the judge had said that in view of his past record of exemplary behaviour, and taking into account his youth, a sentence of transportation for life would, in his opinion, meet the ends of justice.
But he remembered that his behaviour in college had been by no means exemplary. He had taken to wearing khaddar and had identified himself with the national movement. Mr. Hakewill had himself warned him that he might have to forgo his scholarship if he dabbled in anti-British activities; yet, when the time came, he had come forward to testify on his behalf.
Was it his youth that made him so shallow, he wondered, or was it a part of the Indian character itself? Did he in some way, represent the average Indian, mixed-up, shallow and weak? Like someone out of A Passage to India, Aziz, or someone even more confused, quite despicable, in fact, like that boy whose name he had forgotten, Rafi, that was it. Was he like Rafi? His non- violence had crumbled the moment it met a major test, and now even his nationalism was wavering, just because the British officials he had come into contact with so far had been men of sterling character. Why could he not be like Debi-dayal, who held on to his beliefs with unswerving rigidity? He, on his part, had already begun to doubt whether India could ever do without the British. It was they who were so scrupulous about the ends of justice.
But what do the ends of justice mean? Should not the ends of justice have required Vishnu-dutt to die for Hari's murder?
From where he lay, wedged in by two, coal-black South Indian coolies who stank like rotting fish and who had been convicted for raping a teen-age girl, he looked at the faces of his companions, one by one, all lying propped up against the sides of the hold or against each other, their feet stretched straight out before them because of the fetters they wore. He was horrified. Most of them were singing and looked shockingly at ease, even as though they were enjoying themselves.
He tried to catch Debi-dayal's eye, but did not succeed. Debi was staring fixedly at the ceiling, as he always did; handsome and proud, he was now a motionless bundle in a blanket, like an Egyptian mummy that was still breathing. Gian felt his limbs tremble-an unknown fear crawling through the rings of his fetters, like the lice and fleas in Kalipada jail. The big Ramoshi clapped his hands once again. 'Come on, brothers, he bawled. "Come on friends; come on kings; come on, lovers of your own mothers-sing!"
The rains had stopped, but clouds lay around them like a grey jelly, great wet sponges masking the horizon, and the gusty wind felt wet on their hands and faces. From down below, over the creaking of the woodwork and the lazy thump of the engine, came the sound of voices raised in sing-song.
Sitting on the big chair beside the wheel, the Captain in his grimy white cap sniffed the air with professional interest. He put away his binoculars and shook his frame like a dog coming out of water. 'We could have seen them now,' he pronounced, if the clouds weren't so thick. An emerald necklace scattered over the sea-not much emerald about that!
The young British police officer wearing a military-type Burberry shrugged his shoulders too, almost in imitation of the Captain. "When do we get in?" he asked.
"We should anchor by nine, tomorrow morning,' the Captain told him. 'At night the entrance would be a little tricky-in this murk."
I shall be damned glad when I have handed them all in; all counted and correct,' Rogers said. "One of them tried to hang himself last night-tore up his blanket to make a rope."
'Now what on earth would a chap do a thing like that for?' the
Captain said without interest. He's an unfortunate case. His father is a big building con- tractor-a Dewan-bahadur. The boy is a revolutionary... was, rather. Now he is getting his deserts and can't take it.'
'All these terrorists are pretty gutless when it comes to facing up. What did you do with him?"
We had to put fetters on his hands too. The others have their hands free. Now he can do no mischief."
The Captain pulled his cap low over his brow and cocked his head. "And yet they seem to be a cheery lot,' he remarked. 'Listen to them singing.
I don't know. It is all rather... rather morbid, to hear them go on like that. I'd much rather they cursed and moaned. Some- how their singing makes one feel a little-a little less than human.'
"What are they saying?"
About wine and woman, mostly. They....
'Like sailors' songs,' the Captain interrupted. 'I sort of, like the tune, catchy; you know what I mean.'
The big Ramoshi's raucous voice came from below:
Bolo jawanon kya-kya milat hai?
Kale Pani-ke bazaar?
"That means,' Rogers explained. Tell me, lads, what is in store for us in the bazaar at the Black Water-Black Water is
their name for the jail." "And what do they get?"
Mofat-ki undi, aur mofat-ki brandy,
Aur mofat-ki rundi hazaar I came the words of the chorus. Listen to that,' Rogers said. 'Free eggs, free brandy and a thousand mistresses-also free."
The Captain chuckled. 'I wouldn't mind losing my seniority for that sort of captivity,' he said. "Who would have thought.. what are they up for?
'Murder, mostly, over women and land. Three or four are for rape, and the one revolutionary-sedition and sabotage; for burning down a plane and removing fish-plates from railway tracks and that sort of things."
"The bastard!' the Captain said with feeling. "That type should have been hanged."
"I don't know. It's all so difficult. They're mostly from good homes, these terrorists, quite well-educated, and they're all fervently patriotic. It's just that they are so misguided... and they spend their lives in jails. It seems particularly sad at a time like this, when we ourselves seem to be plunging into another war for a strip of land in Poland. Do you think we will?'
The Captain shook his head. "Who can say?" His pale eyes scanned the sea around them. "How does one get involved in a war? The last time it was the murder of some prince or other that started it. No one had heard of the place, or the prince. Now it is the Polish Corridor. And yet they can hardly have forgotten the horrors of the last one. I had two whole years of it.
Destroyers.'
For a time, they were both silent. Then the Captain asked: ?
"Are there a lot of those in the country
"The terrorists? Oh, yes; they are all over the place. The people themselves seem sympathetic towards them, unfortunately. Almost hero-worship some of them-Bhagat-singh, for instance. That makes it difficult to dig them out. Once they know we're on to them, they go underground. Take this particular gang. We knew there were certainly more than thirty in it. But we that is the police, seem to have bungled it, rather. They operated from their club, a sort of gymnasium. When our men raided the place, only seven were there. The others had fled. It is rather funny, really; all seven were Hindus; not a single Muhammadan in the lot; which makes us think that there was some kind of a rift among them... what were you saying?" "So only seven were caught?"
'Well, eight, really, because later that night, they went and took this chap in his house: Debi-dayal. The others must have been tipped off-quite definitely. They usually have their sympathisers even in the force. You mean in the police!'
"Oh, yes; even in the police. Unfortunately, their leader got away, chap called Shafi Usman, but of course, that may not even be his real name at least half a dozen aliases. Really unsavoury character... long record of terrorist activities and said to be homosexual too." "Have you got all eight of them in this lot?' the Captain asked, suddenly interested. "I should like to take a look at the bastards."
'I'm afraid not. We only have this one. Only one "lifer"; the others got lighter sentences."
"Oh, in that case,' the Captain muttered, lifting his glasses to his eyes. Nothing doing,' he pronounced. "C'mon, let's get away where it's cosier. He waved a hand at the man attending to the wheel and slid off his high, Captain's chair. "The news should be on soon; let's find out whether we are already at war.'
"I should like to stay on up here for a while, if you don't mind," Rogers told him. Then I'll go and do my rounds."
After the Captain had clambered down the steps in his waddling, old-sea-dog gait, Rogers lit a cigarette. It felt limp in his fingers and the smoke was clammy on his tongue, like a sip of brackish water. For a time he stood smoking, looking at the immobile figure of the Indian second or third mate or whoever it was at the wheel. What was he thinking about, he wondered. About the coming war? The dangers of submarines and mines? Perhaps he was not thinking of the war at all, only of wine and women, like the prisoners in the hold. Gathering his raincoat tightly around him, he went down.
He paused in the doorway of the hold, peering into the gloom, bracing himself for the overpowering stench. Balbahadur, the Gurkha sentry opened the barred door and stood hovering by his side holding a rifle with fixed bayonet, a mixture of doglike reverence and servility and bravura; a strutting, cocky little terrier of a man who took his authority with terrifying serious- ness and had been invaluable in maintaining discipline.
One by one, as they saw Rogers standing in the doorway, the convicts stopped singing, abruptly, in mid-note; like a wave, the silence rolled on to the far corner where the big Ramoshi sat. It stifled his voice.
They were all staring at him, making him conscious of their fear and hatred, like characters in some dance drama. He felt
uncomfortable at the effect his entrance had caused, as though he had rubbed out the little spark of lightness in the gloom of the hold. He walked in, picking his way carefully between the lines of prisoners, the sentry striding importantly at his heels.
"Had your conna?' Rogers asked. Jee-sahib.' They answered. By now, the replies were conditioned, almost automatic. That was what he was expected to ask them, that was what they were required to answer the Gurkha had seen to that.
Any complaints?"
"Nahi, sahib."
'You'd better doss down and get some sleep. We shall be arriving tomorrow morning...and don't try any tricks tonight; maloom!"
'Nahi, sahib.'
But if you want to sing, bloody well sing!'
'Jee, sahib.'
He dragged on his cigarette and realized that it had gone out.
He flicked it into a corner where, as it fell, a hand closed over it.
But the sentry was on to it like a flash. He stamped his foot on the erring hand, saying: 'None of that, you!" Rogers gave the Gurkha a withering look. "That was not necessary at all,' he said sharply. Meekly, Balbahadur withdrew his ammunition boot and took his place behind Rogers.
"Thank you, sir,' Gian said to Rogers, rubbing his wrist. Rogers peered at him with sudden interest. "You speak of course, you were at college, weren't you?"
English.... Yes, sir.'
"You all right?'
"Yes, sir.'
'Like a cigarette?" Gian glanced at the sentry, standing like a statue behind the
Englishman. "N-no, thank you, sir." Here,' Rogers said, and thrust his packet of cigarettes into Gian's hands.
"Why, thank you, sir,' Gian said gratefully. 'But it is... it is of no use, sir."
"But you do smoke, don't you?"
"We are not allowed matches, sir.'
'Oh, of course not, but here you are,' Rogers chucked his box of matches at the convict. 'But mind you don't try to set fire to anything. No, sir,' Gian said. "Thank you, sir."
Rogers gave him a quick smile and turned on his heels. He hurried up the passage so as to be in time for the six-thirty news. The Gurkha followed him as far as the door and gave him a noisy salute. He bolted the door and waited outside, listening to the sound of the receding footsteps, his head cocked. Then he unlocked the door again and came striding in. He marched to Gian's corner and snatched away both the cigarettes and the matches.
"You son of a thank-you!" be hissed. 'Just because you speak English, I'll give you the Kaptaan-sahib's cigarettes to smoke, you- And remember I will put my foot on your hand whenever I want to, understand? A hundred times, if I want. On your hand or on your I can even you if I want, see? Or your sister and your mother."
He planted his heel carefully on Gian's thigh and turned it. His slit eyes narrowed in a grin of ecstacy. "Now let me hear you squeal. Squeal! Let us see who comes to save you!' He went on turning his heel, increasing the pressure, grinning tightly all the while.
Forty-seven men watched the performance with dead, un- revealing eyes. Almost any one of them would have risen to murder for less. Many had.
When, early next afternoon, they were marched up to the ship's deck, each prisoner carrying his roll of blankets and his enamel mug and plate, they had their first sight of the Silver Jail. It lay on a promontory from which the jungle had been shaved off, making an unsightly gash in the rain-washed green of the land, stark and bare against the swaying palms, the lush green jungle and the low-hung clouds glutted with rain.
The jail dominated the landscape; beside it, everything, even Saddle Mount, the highest peak on the land, looked stunted, unimportant, vaguely stagey. It towered above everything, a great, seven-spoked, seven-sided wheel, three stories high, the spokes radiating from a central tower, the rows and rows of
windows like countless eyelets in the limbs of some animal, a gigantic iguana or a spider from a lost world, crouching on a bed of lava and rearing its head in anticipation of its unnatural food: the criminals of India.
They were all counted in the hold and again on deck and yet again in the tiny shed on the quay where they were formally handed over to the jail superintendent who stood behind a table, wearing a quilted sola topee and smoking a black cheroot, tapping his boots with a thick black malacca cane.
That was their first sight of Mulligan-sahib. He was short and pug-nosed, round faced, and beer-fat; an Irishman who had been soured and singed and wrinkled by the tropics and now never wanted to go home. Scorched by the sun, yellowed by malaria, reddened by whisky, coarsened by authority, he was a tough man in a job that called for toughness. He had begun in the army, and then, as a corporal at the end of the war, had changed over to the Indian police. Three years earlier, he had been rewarded for specially meritorious service by being given the post of the superintendent of the Cellular Jail. Godfearing, conscientious and, according to his lights, just, he was trusted implicitly by his official superiors. He openly boasted that the only book he had read since he left school was the Jail Manual; that he could lick any man his own age, and that he could drink any man of any age under the table; affable, hard-headed, touchy, swashbuckling, arrogant, he knew the Jail Manual by heart and rode roughshod over every single one of its provisions. A unique combination of virtues, vices, whims and narrow-minded righteousness, it was impossible to think of the Silver Jail without Mulligan-sahib; to visualize any other man who could hold down his difficult job with as much efficiency and despatch. Inspector-Generals and Chief Commissioners notwithstanding, he was the real king of the penal colony. Past Mr. Patrick Mulligan swinging his cane in slow arcs, they marched up the road that led up the hill. As they went past him, no one sang, no one spoke. Even the big Ramoshi was silent. The only sound was the clanking of the enamel mugs against the shackles around their waists.
And thus they entered a new world, to the music of the chains that bound them, a world made up of prisoners and prison officials and paroled prisoners. The great main gate opened for them and they marched into the prison, this last batch of convicts that ever went to the Andamans.
The date was the 4th of September, the year was 1939. Not one of them had any idea that the world they had just left behind had already plunged into another war.
The entrance was a high archway leading through the twin turrets, like the gate of a castle, with an inner gate at the end of the long archway. Inside the passage, the walls were decorated with the implements of captivity and punishment, proudly exhibited like trophies in a game room: chain and ball fetters, multiple hand-cuffs and coffin cages designed to keep prisoners standing up. There were other kinds of fetters which prevented a man from sitting down even if his hands were free to move, and lighter chain-fetters to permit the free movement of the limbs so that a man could do his allotted work. There was too, the flogging frame and the flogging canes kept polished and oiled.
These were the relics of an earlier era, like heirlooms preserved for reasons of sentiment. At one time, their purpose was to shock and intimidate new arrivals, and remind the inmates that this was a place of punishment, not of reform; for the wreaking of society's vengeance on those who had broken its rules, not for corrective treatment of those who had gone wrong, a place where hard labour, however unproductive, the suffering of the body, however unrewarding, was a legislative requirement.
But those of them who had thumbed through the copies of the Jail Manuals which had to be made available on request, had discovered that the days of the coffin cage and bar fetters belonged to a less civilized past; now the most severe punishment that a convict could be given was flogging, and this was given only rarely, for the most serious breaches of discipline, such as attacking a warder or attempting to escape. Two successive commissions of inquiry had imposed reforms upon the administra- tion of the Cellular Jail, and now the Manual stressed that it was more of a clearing house for the rehabilitation of convicts in their new environment than a place of punishment: indeed, the prisoners now were more like colonizers than convicts, brought over to become citizens of the Andaman islands. But the new system of reform was about to receive its first jolt. The clock would be put back by the advent of war. The time for taking pains to make human beings out of criminals was already over. Now, with a war on, it was no longer necessary to be squeamish about the book of rules. This was the time for a commonsense approach, of rough and ready justice delivered by the men on the spot, leaving the policy makers in India free to devote their energies to higher problems.
The new chalan of convicts tramped through the portals of the jail; the gates shut behind them. For the moment, it was enough for them that they were freed from the control of Balbahadur and his men, enough that they were to be given their first cooked meal in five days, enough that they were liberated from the confines of their cage in the belly of the ship.
And above all, one luxury was suddenly theirs; the luxury of solitude, of an almost un-hoped-for release from the press of other human bodies, from the reek of the sweat and breath and excreta of locked-in humanity and, for some of them at least, the luxury of being able to lie back and let their minds wander.
Their cells, they found, were large and airy and, compared with the cells of Indian jails, scrupulously clean, almost like little hospital wards. They opened out of the long, open passages running down the lengths of the seven spokes of the wheel. Through the bars of their doors, they could look into the passage outside. On the other side of the passage were more bars, and through these bars, beyond the obtruding segment of their jail building, was the open sky and the jungle. The cells measured twelve feet by eight, and on the back wall, they had a minute grill about one foot square flush with the floor and a barred window fitted high up in the wall. The only furniture was a wooden plank to sleep on and an earthenware chamber pot. For the first time in many weeks, they slept, having by now learnt to adjust their postures to the demands of the fetters they still wore. They slept as men will do, as much from sheer exhaustion as from relief at having come through a major ordeal.
Only the British could have thought up something like this, Gian reflected; only the British could deliver truly humane justice. In the days before they came, anyone who stole from another had had his hands cut off, and anyone who blasphemed or committed perjury had had his tongue cut off. Now, even murderers were being rehabilitated, given another chance in another country; permitted, no, encouraged, to settle down, own land, raise families. Here, even as prisoners, they were far better off than millions of Indians who had committed no other crime than that of being born.
Their day began with daylight. They were taken to the bathing troughs which had been filled with sea water by other prisoners, and permitted to take baths while the sentries stood on guard. After that, they spent long hours in orderly, slow-moving queues being documented, finger-printed, weighed, tonsured, fumigated for lice. In the afternoon, they were taken to the prison workshop to be fitted with their Andaman chains.
The chains were about twenty inches long and an inch thick, and in the centre, they bore an oval disk made of steel. On the disks were engraved the name and number of a convict, also the year of his anticipated release. The two prison blacksmiths fitted the chains around their necks, cutting the ends off and bending them inwards with pliers. Each man was warned to place his forefinger against this throat to ensure that the chain was not fitted too tightly, and after the chains were in place, Joseph, the assistant jailer, and Mathews, the Chief Supervisor went round and satisfied themselves that they could not be pulled off over the head.
The six 'D-ticket holders' came last, under a special escort. They were led by the big Ramoshi who greeted the blacksmiths with laughter, almost as though they were friends who were meeting again after one of them had been away on a holiday.) Behind him came Gian and Debi-dayal. They did not say anything to each other because there was nothing to say-not that they were permitted to talk.
