BENGALURU: It was an early morning call from the then prison chief asking me to come to the Central prison. “I would like to share with the media the recovery we have made from inside the prison. Please come,” he said and disconnected. The Bangalore Central Prison is quite far from the Central Business District. I reached there after spending almost two hours in Bengaluru’s notorious traffic.
Upon reaching, I was taken straight to the office of the chief superintendent, where his boss, the prison chief, was sitting. A corner of the wall was submerged with oddly shaped paper balls. The officer explained they were all contraband narcotic drugs, which his prison staff has seized from inside the cells.
He also showed me a stash of mobile phones (those were the good old days of basic models) and kitchen knives, which were part of the haul. “How did all these enter the prison,” I asked. “The drugs, wrapped in papers, were tossed over the prison walls by visitors of prisoners, and the cell phones and knives were concealed in food boxes, fruits, which were given to them during their ‘interview’ with family members,” was his reply. He praised his staff for the recovery.
These things can only be curbed, he said, not stopped completely inside the prison because of the human element. The officer was honest and candid. A prison is a house of humans with curtailed freedom. But humans they are; most would say evil. Outside the office, there were men in white clothes and caps, busy doing some cleaning up, and odd jobs. These were convicts, who because of good behaviour, were assigned some jobs in the administrative block.
One of them was a doctor. I was introduced to him. The man had spent a little less than 14 years’ sentence for murdering his wife and was about to be released on account of good behaviour and a clean record. “He is a doctor and attends to prisoners who take ill at the prison hospital,” the officer said while introducing him. He joined his palms in a diffident namaskara and I responded with equal humility.
“Why did you kill your wife?,” I asked. “It happened, madam,” he mumbled with a distinct remorse in his voice, while making eye contact with me. At that point, I saw some more men donning white caps look up. Suddenly, I felt that a line divided me and the prison officers from the prisoners. I felt stifled not because of anything but a realisation about my own freedom.
That I could walk out of the prison into the open air which was not an option for those who are awaiting justice for their crimes, and that is the biggest punishment, bigger perhaps than the guillotine. A majority of them spend their lives as under trial prisoners awaiting justice. Freedom is invaluable, and to preserve i t , one must be responsible. Freedom is such a given until taken away by a rude stroke of life.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, under the Supreme Court directions, prisons were asked to decongest following due diligence. I came across some convicts who refused to go out. They dreaded life outside the prison with the raging pandemic and lack of basic health facilities.
For them, it was not about going back to an eagerly waiting family, but the fear of adding another hungry mouth to feed out of a meagre family kitty further depleted by the pandemic. “Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open,” the 13th-century Persian poet Jalaluldin Rumi said about the human condition. The bird in the cage does not answer.