Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram

I saw the steel bars of the gate swing shut, and felt the creeping coldness numb my heart. Metal slammed against metal. The keys jangled and turned in the lock. I looked into the eyes of the men around me, the dead eyes and the frenzied, the resentful eyes and the fearing. Somewhere, deep inside me, a drum began to beat. It mightVe been my heart. I felt my body, my whole body, tense and clench as if it was a fist. There was a taste, thick and bitter, at the back of my mouth. I struggled to swallow it down and then I knew, I remembered. It was the taste of hatred- my hatred, theirs, the guards', and the world's. Prisons are the temples where devils learn to prey. Every time we turn the key we twist the knife of fate, because every time we cage a man we close him in with hate.

The first floor of the lock-up at Colaba police station had four big cell rooms beyond the flexi-steel gate. A corridor connected the four rooms. On one side the corridor gave access to the rooms. On the other side it looked out, through steel mesh, onto the quadrangle of the police compound. There were more cells below. It was in one of those ground-floor cells that Kano the bear had been detained. Transients, who spent only one or two nights in custody, were held on the ground floor. Anyone likely to stay for a week or longer in the Colaba lock-up climbed the steps or was dragged up them, as I was, and passed through the sliding steel gate into one of hell's antechambers.

There were no doors beyond the steel gate. Each of the four rooms was accessed through a blank arch that was slightly wider than the average house doorway. The rooms were roughly three metres square. The corridor was just wide enough for two men to pass each other with their shoulders touching, and it was about sixteen metres long. At the end of the corridor there was a urinal and a keyhole-shaped squatting-toilet, both without doors.

A tap, providing water for washing and drinking, was fixed above the urinal.

The four rooms and corridor might've held forty men with an acceptable level of discomfort. When I woke up, on my first morning, I discovered that there were, in fact, two hundred and forty of us. The place was a hive, a termite's nest, a writhing mass of human beings, pressing against one another with every little movement of an arm or a leg. The toilet was ankle-deep in shit. The urinal overflowed. A stinking swamp oozed out of them into the far end of the corridor. The still, thickly humid monsoon air was clogged with moaning, murmurings, talking, complaining, shouting, and the screams, every few hours, of men going mad. I remained there for three weeks. The first of the four rooms, where I'd slept the first night, held only fifteen men. It was furthest from the sickening smell of the toilet. It was clean. There was space to lie down. The men who lived in that room were all rich-rich enough to pay the cops to beat up anyone who tried to squeeze in without an invitation.

The room was known as the Taj Mahal, and its residents were known as the pandrah kumar, the fifteen princes.

The second room held twenty-five men. I learned that they were all crooks: men who'd served hard time at least once before, and were prepared to fight, fast and dirty, to preserve a space for themselves. Their room was known as the chor mahal, the abode of thieves, and the men were known as the black hats, the kala topis - like Ranjit's lepers-because convicted thieves at the infamous Arthur Road Prison were forced to wear a black hat with their prison uniform.

The third room had forty men wedged into it, sitting shoulder to shoulder around the walls, and taking turns to stretch out in the little space left in the centre of the room. They weren't as hard as the men in the second room, but they were proud and willing.

They claimed the small squares of space they sat in, and then struggled to hold them against incursions by newcomers. They were constantly under pressure: every day, at least one of them lost a fight and lost his place to a new, tougher man. Still, the optimal number for the third room was forty men and, since it rarely rose above that limit, it was known as the chaaliss mahal, or the abode of the forty.

The fourth room was known in the lock-up slang as the dukh mahal, or the abode of suffering, but many men preferred to use the name that the Colaba police had given the last cell in the row: the detection room. When a new man entered the corridor for the first time, through the steel gate, he sometimes tried his luck in the first room. Every one of the fifteen men in that room, and not a few lackeys in the corridor, would rise up, shoving and threatening him away, shouting: Next room! Next room, bastard!

Driven along the corridor by the writhing, toiling press of bodies, the man might try to enter the second room. If no-one there knew him, whoever happened to be near the door would give him a clip, a smack in the mouth. Next room, motherfucker! If the man, badly rattled by then, tried to enter the third room as he was pushed further along the corridor, the two or three men who sat or stood in the doorway of that room would punch and kick at him. Next room! Next room, sisterfucker!

When the new man found himself shoved all the way to the fourth room, the detection room, he would be greeted as an old and very welcome friend. Come in, friend! Come in, brother!

Those foolish enough to enter were beaten and stripped naked by the fifty or sixty men who crushed into that black and foetid room. Their clothes were distributed according to a waiting list determined by a precise and perpetually adjusted pecking order.

Their body cavities were thoroughly searched for jewellery, drugs, or money. Any valuables went to the king of the detection room. During my weeks there, the king of the last room was a huge gorilla of a man with no neck, and a hairline that began little more than the thickness of a thumb above his single, thick eyebrow. The new men received filthy rags to wear-the rags that had been discarded by those who'd received their stolen clothes.

They then had two options: to leave the room and fend for themselves with the hundred men who lived in the impossibly crowded corridor, or to join the detection-room gang and wait for opportunities to prey on other hapless new men in the chain of muggings. From what I saw in those three weeks, about one man in every five who was brutalised and dispossessed in that last room took the second option.

Even the corridor had its pecking order, its struggles over a foothold of space, and its claim-jumpers who challenged the strength or bravery of rivals. Places near the front gate and relatively far from the toilet were prized. Yet even at the foul end of the corridor, where shit and piss flowed onto the floor in a repulsive, reeking sludge, men fought each other for an inch of space that was slightly shallower in the muck.

A few of those men who were forced to the end of the corridor, forced to stand ankle-deep in shit all day and all night, finally fell down and died. One man died in the lock-up while I was there, and several others were carried out in a state so close to death that I'd found it impossible to rouse them to consciousness. Others summoned the raging madness required to fight their way, minute by minute, hour by hour, metre by metre, day by day, and man by man, along the concrete anaconda's intestine to a place where they could stand and go on living, until the beast disgorged them through the same steel jaws that had swallowed their lives whole.

We received one meal a day, at four in the afternoon. It was dhal and roti, mostly, or rice with a thin curry sauce. There was also chai and a slice of bread in the early morning. The prisoners tried to organise themselves into two orderly lines, approaching and leaving the gate where the cops gave out food. But the crush of bodies, and the desperate hunger, and the greed of a few caused chaos at every meal. Many men missed out. Some went hungry for a day or longer.