The jottings that make up this book were my way of coping with incarceration. Some prisoners pray, some weep, some just put their heads down and work themselves weary. Some fight defiantly every inch of the way, some are inveterate grumblers, some spew gossip. Some read the newspaper from cover to cover, some shower love on children, some laugh at themselves and at others.
I watched through the bars, and I wrote.
These notes were written during the first half of my incarceration; that is, during my time in the Yerawada Women’s Jail, Pune, between early November 2018 and late February 2020. I wrote them in my cell at night, in notebooks that I bought from the jail canteen. And when I was shifted to Byculla Jail, Mumbai, I took them with me. I typed them out after my release on bail in December 2021.
Except for the first week, I spent my entire time at Yerawada in the Phansi Yard (cells for death row convicts) of the women’s jail, where my co-accused in the Bhima Koregaon case, Professor Shoma Sen, and I were lodged in neighbouring single cells. We were never told why we were in this high-security unit for death-row prisoners, but it probably had something to do with our being arrested under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA).
I could take ten paces down the length of my cell and six paces across its width, and indeed I did a lot of pacing about. Our neighbours in the Yard were two highly strung sisters, lodged in similar separate cells, who had by then entered their twenty-fourth year in jail, of which nearly two decades had been spent on death row.
These four cells and a fifth vacant cell (used as a storeroom and bathroom by the Constables guarding us 24×7), and the narrow corridor into which they opened, were all enclosed in a cage-like structure, with bars all along the front. The cage lay along half the longer side of a rectangular grassy ground, overlooking it.
The other half of that side, to our left, was taken up by the Hospital Barrack. Barracks 1 and 2, housing mostly convicts, stood on the adjacent (shorter) side of the rectangle, to our right, and their windows overlooked the ground too.
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