Stories from death row: Three poignant portraits
Editor’s Note: Trade unionist and human rights lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj spent more than three years in prison—first at Phansi Yard (death row) at Yerwada Jail, Pune and later the Byculla Jail in Mumbai (This Big Story has all the details on the Bhima Koregaon case). During her time at Phansi Yard, she observed and wrote about 76 other women—inmates and those working the jail. Why were these women incarcerated? What were their crimes? How did they spend time in prison? Who were their victims? Bharadwaj’s book ‘From Phansi Yard: My Year with the Women of Yerawada’—published by Juggernaut—paints moving portraits of these female prisoners and the policewoman who guard them. The below excerpt is a collation of three such portraits, published with permission from Juggernaut publishers.
Tale #1 from Phansi Yard: The death of a Brahmin lady
The saddest sight is of the very old prisoners. I am thinking of an old Brahmin lady from UP, tall and fair with snow-white hair, big, round eyes and buck teeth, who is at least eighty years old. The rules say that once a woman prisoner given a life sentence has completed fourteen years and reached the age of sixty, she is entitled to be released. This woman may not have completed the minimum term of her sentence, yet the jail administration is trying to procure her release because she seems to be suffering from dementia. No one from her family visits her. It seems that six or seven years ago, a son had helped her get a few days of parole.
She left happily, thinking she had got bail. But it turned out that this was only done to have her transfer her share of property and land to her children. She came back weeping. After that her son visited her only once. I see her deteriorate before my eyes.
When I had just arrived at Yerawada, she would slowly hobble up with her plate and bowl to collect her bhatta or bring her water bottles to the water tap to fill drinking water. She would make her way to the raised platform when the Brahma Kumaris came to preach in the mornings and would sit there patiently, hands folded in a namaste, and collect her prasad. It even seemed that she was reading their handouts, though how anyone her age could do that without spectacles was beyond me.
But one day I saw the Warder of her barrack half-holding, half-dragging her to the Hospital Barrack, another prisoner following with a vessel of hot water to bathe her. The irritated Warder was mumbling, ‘Just this morning we bathed her, she has no control over her motions, she has soiled her sari . . . She doesn’t remember she has already had her bhatta and comes to take it again.’ I hear she was very supercilious when she first arrived.
She wouldn’t touch Canteen food and wouldn’t accept anything from the hands of a lower-caste person . . . Now all that is history, she is just another helpless old woman. Of late, as she hobbles slowly past our Phansi Yard, she has developed a strange habit. If my eyes meet hers she gives me a laborious namaste. I return it sheepishly. She evidently thinks I am one of the Bais.
Each day I think, tomorrow I will not look at her. It seems so false to delude her about my identity. But it feels mean to deprive her of that tiny bit of recognition and dignity in her condition. I can well imagine her being a tyrannical mother-in-law. Perhaps she did kill or at least drive to death her daughter in-law, as many other incarcerated women have? Even so, what purpose is served in keeping her in jail now? As she says philosophically one day, gesturing towards the sky as she passes by the bars of our Yard, ‘Oopar bhi jagah nahin, aur neeche bhi jagah nahin!!’ (No place for me in heaven or on earth!!)
A couple of months down the line, we do see her being carried out of the Gate, virtually on her deathbed, on a ghongri held by four prisoners. Finally, her release order has come. Her family has come to collect her. The prisoners in the Hospital Barrack tell the Constable on guard at the Phansi Yard: ‘Madam, do you know, we were waking her up every three hours last night, just to make sure she stayed alive. It would have been so terrible na, if she died without being able to go home!’
Tale #2 from Phansi Yard: The woman who loved kittens
She’s a short, old Bhil woman, about sixty-five, with white hair and a big, red vertical line of kumkum on her wrinkled forehead, wearing her green sari in the typical Bhil fashion, just below her knees and with a long pallu wrapped around and covering her head. She came to this jail four years ago, after being lodged as an undertrial in another jail. She was convicted of murdering someone who was found dead in her field. She speaks in a childlike sing-song mix of Marathi and Hindi and probably her own Bhilala language.
Most people here think she is ‘simple’ or maybe just a little mentally backward, and quite incapable of the premeditated murder of which she has been accused. One day, when she is given two bright saris by a visitor, she excitedly asks someone’s advice – which one to wear for Diwali? (On festivals, even the green-saried convicts are allowed to wear colourful clothes.) She moves around alone, but follows the ebbs and flows of the barrack. She’s always one of the first to rush to the water tap to fill her water bottles when the barracks are unlocked at 3 p.m. after the 12–3 afternoon bandi. She also sits obediently to hear the Brahma Kumaris every morning and religiously receives prasad, even though she seems not to understand or participate in the talk.
She’s most animated looking after kittens, to whom she gives her share of the morning milk, and they purr their love in her lap. Occasionally, she sits alone in the sun with her empty aluminium plate and bowl after finishing her meal, looking far away into the distance. Where does she transport herself? To her home, her village, her forest? If only there was a magic carpet . . . Then she has to be roused. ‘Eh buddhi!! [Hey old woman!] Didn’t you hear the Toll?’ She laughs at herself apologetically and runs bow-leggedly back to her barrack. Before we left Yerawada, she was released. Possibly, her children decided to appeal and her sentence was suspended by the high court.
That day she waited a long time at the Gate, carrying, apart from other things, a small bucket somebody had given her to use. The social worker who was to accompany her was late, so she was once again locked in the barrack. She refused to come out later that evening, when the social worker finally arrived with tickets for the overnight bus, but finally relented and went off with her. A few days later the social worker told us how the two of them had to walk for several hours to reach the village where her small, bare hut stood.
Tale #3 from Phansi Yard: The andolankari prisoner
Today, we saw our first andolankari (agitationist) prisoners: Four middle-aged lower-middle-class women – one older and unable to walk very well, another apparently a Muslim woman from her salwar-kurta and absence of a bindi – all wearing sweaters and shawls, and in an easy relationship with each other. It seems that they were protesting against their houses being demolished for the widening of a highway. They had gone to protest at the corporation’s office (must have been a gherao, in which they surrounded officials) and were booked under Section 153 IPC (preventing a government servant from carrying out his duty), which has been made a non-bailable offence recently. These women must be local leaders of sorts. It feels good to see that they are not nervous or weepy, but come and join their barrack inmates with their jail bedding and aluminium vessels in hand and try to learn how to go about living here. Where to get food and to throw waste, where to bathe and dry clothes . . .
Two of the more agile ones do the swabbing of the corridors of their barrack, as their share of barrack duty. They have been arrested on a Friday to ensure that they spend Saturday and Sunday in jail, a common ploy by vindictive police officers bent on ‘teaching agitators a lesson’. On Monday evening they are released after bail orders are passed by the concerned court. We watch them leave their barrack with their beddings and jholas (bags) when their names are called out from the Gate, just after the bandi. ‘Hey, where are your vessels?’ shouts the Senior Bai from our Phansi Yard, as she supervises our being locked up for the night. ‘They have food in them, Madam . . .’ they reply. But they are allowed to leave, even though the rule is that those leaving the jail need to return their vessels. In a women’s jail, there is at least an unspoken consensus that food shouldn’t be wasted. The vessels can be returned to the utensil store the next morning.
