Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram

I waited until the crowd thinned out, watching the men wash themselves with the little water available. A few men, one in twenty, had pieces of soap, and attempted to lather themselves before returning to the pipe for more water. By the time I approached the pipe, the tank was almost empty. The trickle of water that I collected in my plate was wriggling with hundreds of maggot-like creatures. I thrust the plate away in disgust, and several men around me laughed.

"Water worms, brother!" Mahesh said, filling his plate with the squirming, thrashing, semi-transparent creatures. He tipped the plate of wriggling things over his chest and back, and reached out to fill another plate. "They live in the tanks. When the water gets low, the water worms come out of the tap so many, brother! But no problem. They can't hurt you. They don't bite, like the kadmal. They just drop down and die in the cold air, you see? The other fellows fight to get water with not many worms inside. But if we wait, we get plenty of worms, but plenty of water also. This is better, yes? Come on. Challo!

You better grab some, if you want a wash before tomorrow morning.

This is it, brother. We can't be washing in the dormitory. That is a special for the overseers only. They let you wash there last night, because you had a lot of blood on you. But you'll never use that washing place again. We use the toilet inside, but we don't wash there. This is your only washing, brother."

I held the plate under the ever-diminishing trickle of water and then tipped the seething mass of worms over my chest and back, as Mahesh had done. Like all the Indian men I knew, I wore a pair of shorts-the over-underpants, Prabaker had called them in the village-under my jeans. I discarded the jeans, and the next plate full of wriggling beasts went down the front of my shorts.

By the time the overseers began hitting us with their sticks to herd us back into the dormitory, I was as clean as it was possible to be without soap, and using worm-infested water.

In the dormitory we squatted for an hour while we waited for the guards to make the morning head-count. After a time, the squatting caused us excruciating pain in our legs. Whenever anyone tried to stretch or straighten his legs, however, one of the patrolling overseers struck him a vicious blow. I didn't move in the line. I didn't want them to have the satisfaction of seeing me give in to the pain. But as I closed my eyes in sweating concentration, one of them struck me anyway, without cause or provocation. I began to stand, and once again I felt the restraining hands of Mahesh warning me to be still. When a second, third, and then a fourth blow ripped into my ear, over the space of fifteen minutes, I snapped.

"Come here, you fuckin' coward!" I shouted, standing and pointing at the last man who'd struck me. The overseer, a huge and obese man, known to friend and foe alike as Big Rahul, towered over most of the other men in the room. "I'll take that fuckin' stick and jam it so far up your arse I'll be able to see it in your eyes!"

Silence imploded in the room, swallowing every sound. No-one moved. Big Rahul stared. His broad expression, a parody of amused condescension, was infuriating. Slowly, the convict overseers began to converge in support of him. "Come here!" I shouted in Hindi. "Come on, hero! Let's go! I'm ready!"

Suddenly Mahesh and five or six other prisoners rose up all around me and clung to my body, trying to force me down to a squatting position.

"Please, Lin!" Mahesh hissed. "Please, brother, please! Sit down again. Please. I know what I'm telling you. Please. Please!"

There was a moment, while they pulled at my arms and shoulders, when Big Rahul and I made the kind of eye contact where each man knows everything about the violence in the other. His supercilious grin faded, and his eyes fluttered their signal of defeat. He knew it, and I knew it. He was afraid of me. I allowed the men to drag me down to a squatting position. He turned on his heel, and struck out reflexively at the nearest man crouching in the ranks. The tension in the room dissolved, and the head-count resumed.

Breakfast consisted of a single, large chapatti. We chewed them and sipped water during the five minutes allowed, and then the overseers marched us out of the room. We crossed several immaculately clean courtyards. In a broad avenue between fenced areas, the overseers forced us to squat in the morning sunlight while we waited to have our heads shaved. The barbers' wooden stools were in the shade of a tall tree. Every new prisoner had his hair clipped by one barber, and then a second barber shaved his head with a straight razor.

As we were waiting, we heard shouts coming from one of the fenced compounds near the barbers' courtyard. Mahesh nudged me, nodding his head for me to watch. Ten convict overseers dragged a man into the deserted compound beyond the wire fence. There were ropes attached to the man's wrists and waist. More ropes were attached to the buckles and rings of a thick leather collar fitted tightly around the man's neck. Teams of overseers were playing tug-of-war on the wrist ropes. The man was very tall and strong. His neck was as thick as the barrel of a cannon, and his powerful chest and back rippled with muscles. He was African. I recognised him. It was Hassaan Obikwa's driver, Raheem, the man I'd helped escape from the mob near Regal Circle.

We watched in a tight, fast-breathing silence. They manoeuvred Raheem to the centre of the compound, near a stone block about a metre high and a metre wide. He struggled and resisted them, but it was useless. More overseers joined in, with more ropes.

Raheem's legs went out from under him. Three men pulled on each wrist-rope with all their strength. His arms were drawn out so hard from his sides that I thought they might be torn from the sockets. His legs were splayed out at an excruciatingly unnatural angle. Other men, pulling on the ropes that passed through the leather collar, dragged his body toward the stone block. Using the ropes, the overseers stretched his left arm out, with the hand and forearm resting on the block.

Raheem lay beside the block, his other arm stretched out by another team of overseers. One of the overseers then climbed onto the block and jumped off onto Raheem's arm, with both feet, snapping the arm backwards in a sickening crunch of gristle and bone.

He couldn't scream, because the collar at his throat was too tight, but his mouth opened and closed on the scream that we made for him in our minds. His legs began to twitch and spasm. A violent shiver passed through his whole body, ending in a rapid shaking of his head that would've been funny if it wasn't so frightening. The overseers dragged him around until his right arm was resting on the block. The same man climbed the stone, talking all the while to one of his friends, pulling tension on a rope.

After a pause, he blew his nose with his fingers, scratched himself, and jumped onto the right arm, snapping it backwards.

Raheem lost consciousness. The convict overseers looped their ropes around his ankles and then dragged his body out of the compound. His arms flopped and flapped behind his body, as limp and lifeless as long black socks filled with sand.

"You see?" Mahesh whispered.

"What was that all about?"

"He hit one of the overseers," Mahesh answered in a terrified whisper. "That's why I stopped you. That's what they can do."

Another man leaned close to us, speaking quickly.

"And here, there is no guarantee of doctor," he breathed. "Maybe you see doctor, maybe no. Maybe that black fellow will live, maybe not live. No good luck to hit overseer, baba."

Big Rahul walked toward us, resting the bamboo stick on his shoulder. He paused beside me, and brought the stick down with a lazy smack across my back. His laughter as he walked away down the line of waiting men was brutally loud, but it was also weak and false, and it didn't fool me. I'd heard that laugh before, in another prison across the world. I knew it well. Cruelty is a kind of cowardice. Cruel laughter is the way cowards cry when they're not alone, and causing pain is how they grieve. Squatting in the queue, I noticed with a revulsive flinch that tiny insects, lice, were crawling in the hair of the man in front of me. I'd been feeling itchy since I'd woken. Until that moment, I'd put it down to the bites of the kadmal, the rough blanket I'd slept on, and the many cuts I'd sustained in walking the gauntlet. I looked at the next man's hair. It, too, was crawling with writhing, white lice. I knew what that itchiness was, on my body and in my hair. I turned to look at Mahesh. His hair was alive with lice. I ruffled my own hair onto the palm of my hand, and there they were-white and crab-like, and too many to count at a glance.