ISSUE 35

Our days in the lock-up would have been harsher and longer, if it were not for Asgar. He was among nineteen of us detained by the police for an alleged stone pelting incident which had resulted in injuries to some passers-by in my locality. He was picked up with me during a raid at around 2 am on the night he was spending at my home. The night before, we had been together at his.

In all my twenty years, this was the first time I was witnessing so many youth from my town held in what looked like a 12-by-10-foot room. It had a small rectangular window near the ceiling, secured by metal bars of the same thickness that the lock-up door was made up of. None of us could see anything when we looked out, except the apexes of the lofty poplar trees that blurred the view of the sky. Only when the sun rose to its greatest height, did its light make it to our room in the form of few flickering rays through the branches of the trees. Differently sized and differently coloured blankets lay spread on two low-density sheets of blue foam.

On our arrival at the police station – we had never been to a police station before except when we had to get NOCs for obtaining our passports a year ago – we were not allowed to walk in on our own but lifted by our arms by the cops whose faces were covered, and dropped inside the lock-up, the door of which was already open. It was dark but we could make out easily the presence of three other people inside. They crawled to a corner from where they were hardly visible and did not say anything but sat looking at us while we got our share of beating that lasted around an hour with a few short breaks in between. I saw Asgar passing out twice.

In the morning, to our surprise, the three persons we saw in the night but did not recognise had multiplied, and the number now stood at nineteen. The relief was they were all from my town and we knew each other. Like us, they were all beaten on arrival.

Not aware of his own fainting, Asgar joked about my reactions and how many times I had fainted during the ‘interrogation’. ‘Congratulate this poor guy,’ Asgar said with mild laughter. ‘He got a new lease of life after passing out for almost ten minutes last night. I thought he was dead.’

We then drank our first tea in prison and nobody talked for a while. I looked at Asgar sitting on my right. He was weeping. I asked if he was very hurt during the interrogation. No, he said. I asked in a low voice what the matter was then. He answered loudly, ‘What if we are not released soon? Will my girlfriend grow tired of waiting for me and marry someone else?’

‘This is pure bullshit!’ I said, gesticulating in a way that set everyone laughing, including Asgar who wiped his eyes with the palms of his hands. ‘We are not staying here, not even today. Someone from our home must be coming,’ I added, hoping what I was saying was true. Oddly though, I wasn’t surprised at what Asgar had just said. Although in those first hours no thoughts about my own girlfriend, who lived in the village opposite mine, came to my mind, by evening I set off on an imaginary stroll, crossing a culvert under the river Sukhnag that carried water from a canal in my village to hers. Most evenings, I would walk through her village and find her at the window looking at me, briefly, as we talked over the phone. However, the uncertainty in the lock-up that led to what-will-happen-next discussions soon brought my thoughts back.

Whether Asgar was sad or just, somehow, managed to seem composed, he could not help his sense of humour, which was so needed in the lock-up. Otherwise, who could bear the sight of the walls, the ceiling, the angry cops who always offered to release us, though separately, if we revealed who pelted the stones, and that ruthless beating which you didn’t try to fend off? None of us could have. Our hands were tied behind us and we were blindfolded, and you could not differentiate between the darkness you sense when your eyes are closed and when you are in a dark room.

They next morning, the cops, who we thought had beaten us the previous night, would come with smiling faces to the door, 8 to 10 at a time and say, ‘If you don’t disclose who among you pelted the stones that afternoon, they are going to beat the hell out of all of you, day and night.’ In reply, some of us would rush to the door and repeat what we had been saying since the very first round of our interrogations. But, they did not seem to have come to listen to us, but to give us the message that if the guilty were not revealed, all of us had to be ready to bear the brunt of it.

On one such occasion after the cops reiterated the same demands and were beginning to leave, Asgar called out to them while holding out a polythene bag full of bananas. Our families were bringing us fruits and juices after the Sahab refused to release us.

‘Please, have these. I request you not to beat us ruthlessly next time,’ he pleaded, folding his hands. Initially, they refused to accept the bag, but gave in after all of us insisted in unison. Seeing the cops leaving the prison door, their smiles still intact, he held the hem of his long kameez and spun, singing Dazz ha maarye koatro az ha waechiye waer, a song originally sung by a Kashmiri folk singer. If you take out the seductive meaning, the words are, I will hit you O’ pigeon, it is your turn today.

On the third night – the police had not yet got a breakthrough – a few cops came stomping to the door and called out Asgar’s name, and mine.

‘Sahab has to ask you something,’ they said curtly. Both Asgar and I knew what these calls were followed with. Imagining what would happen, I felt an immense pressure in my bladder and wanted to pee. However, I dared not to ask for a minute to relieve myself. Outside the metal door, the cops made us walk between them until one of them opened another door, a small distance away, which led to the room where we had been interrogated for the last two days.

Unlike the previous night, there were fewer cops present, and contrary to the usual darkness, Sahab’s cell phone torch that was pointed at the floor, lit up the room slightly. There were no questions asked, but we were directed to obey or it would hurt more. We were asked to take off our clothes. I wished Sahab’s torch, which was now aimed at our bare bodies, became a candle and somebody blew it out.

One of the cops stated that whoever said a word or tried to resist would be dealt with strictly. They tied a cloth over our eyes and tied our hands behind our backs. We wouldn’t have been able to see anything anyway if the torch was turned out, but on Sahab’s order, they tied the cloth. We could hear the sound of the stick as it made contact with the concrete floor. A cop was pushing aside our clothes that we had dropped at our feet. Like the previous nights, this too had begun, by now, to feel in some way, touch-and-go.

‘Don’t worry,’ we recognised the voice of Sahab, ‘they won’t rape you. But if you don’t cooperate, then we have prepared something for you which neither you would like, nor I.’

‘Sir…’ both Asgar and I stopped as we heard each other saying the same word simultaneously. But I remained quiet and Asgar understood my silence and spoke. But I hardly expected what he was going to say.

‘What has this humiliation-cum-torture to do with the interrogation? We will still say what we have been saying since day one,’ Asgar said and I could feel his voice changing from being gentle to authoritarian. But there was only one authority allowed in the room, rather in the entire police station.

‘I have heard that you are the son of some unknown rich father, but that does not mean you are exempted from interrogation.’ There was anger, in the Sahab’s voice.

Asgar always loved to debate. ‘Some time ago,’ he continued, ‘I stumbled on an article published by the Guardian. It quoted Ali Soufan who, according to the author was a former FBI special agent with quite some experience in interrogating Al-Qaida operatives. The special agent says, ‘When they are in pain, people will say anything to get the pain to stop. Most of the time, they will lie, make up anything to make you stop hurting them. That means the information you are getting is useless.’

‘The article further quoted a passage from the US Army Training Manual’s section on interrogation which says that the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear.’ After a brief pause Asgar asked the Sahab, ‘Do you want us to say what you want to hear?’

I felt numbness rising slowly up my body from my feet that hadn’t moved for a few minutes now. But I was still able to make sense of what Asgar was saying. His argument had an impact on Sahab; Asgar had won the debate unopposed. The Sahab ordered his cops to remove the gag from our eyes and untie our hands. He ordered us to put our clothes back on and return to the lock-up, without having anyone accompany us.

It was the shortest interrogation in three days and save the humiliation we faced at being naked, we were not harmed. The other inmates were more shocked than surprised at seeing us return without a finger having been laid on us. ‘How did that happen?’ one of the boys asked.

‘Did you hear the jet noise a short while ago,’ Asgar asked, referring to an Indian fighter jet that had flown low.

‘Yes, we did,’ a few more boys joined in, knowing it felt good when Asgar talked to them.

‘Well, they were sent to blow this building up but could not. You know why?’ he asked without waiting for a response and went on to answer himself. ‘I waved them off while talking to Sahab. That is called spiritual-super-human-powers.’ his answer again caused much laughter as only his stories could. ‘He let us go then because I saved all of us, including Sahab.’

Everything changed after Asgar’s argument with the Sahab. Even the cops stopped teasing us at the lock-up door, and gradually, calls for interrogation in ones and twos in that dark room at night also began to decrease. During the day, our families started being allowed to interact with us longer. They gave us hope and strength to face the test of time, as all their efforts in securing our release had gone in vain.

We could spend ten or twenty minutes each with our families, separated by a door secured by a padlock. But, with calls for interrogation having stopped altogether, and being cut off from the outside world, it became tough to spend time knowing nothing about what the Sahab had decided to do with us should he fail to get his hands on the real offenders. We knew we couldn’t choose our fate in prison, so we let fate choose for us and waited. We began to pass time with whatever we thought would make us laugh or smile. Or simply throw us out of the constant unease and uncertainty. Again, it was Asgar leading the march of happiness for all of us.

On the seventeenth day, however, Asgar seemed to lose touch with himself, as we all had by then. It was abrupt, as for the previous sixteen days, he had one way or the other, kept the good atmosphere going. After lunch – we were now allowed to go to the mess without being accompanied by cops or being chained – Asgar pulled himself together and addressed no one in particular, with his head hung low and his eyes at his feet.

‘Once upon a time there was a vendor, selling vegetables and receiving rice in exchange,’ he began, as if telling a story this time, rather than a joke. ‘One day he forgot his weighing machine at home and took a faulty scale instead. He reached a remote village where people lived a simple life, trusted one another and always avoided confrontations. As customers began to come, he found himself in a precarious situation, knowing that if his faulty weighing was noticed, he might be boycotted by the villagers altogether.

‘He thought of a way to carry out his business as usual with his reputation untainted. He started the engine of his vehicle, lifted up the bonnet and tied one end of the wire he got from the tool box to the weighing scale and the other end to the accelerator cable. As he hung a sack of rice on the hook of the scale, he asked a local boy to gently press the accelerator. As the boy did so, he convinced his customers that the sack weighed, say, 10kgs or 20kgs, and that he was using the latest technique which others too had started to pick up and that he would soon be demonstrating it on national television. This way, he cheated, without even letting them know, and ended up being proud of his own genius,’ Asgar’s sad tone did not make others laugh hysterically as was usually the case. Most of the inmates, on the contrary, heaved long sighs and waited to hear what Asgar would say next. However, before he could say anything, the Munshi came and said, ‘All of you will be released by the evening today.’

No one else did, but I asked – because I happened to be with him then – how the villagers accepted the method of the vendor.

‘I will tell you at home,’ Asgar said, shaking his head and tapping my knee as if playing some musical instrument.