Born inside prison

Finally, this piece I had started working on in October 2009 made its way to Sunday Real Page 3 of Indian Express on May 23, 2010. I had written about the girl with big, black eyes and her life in prison. The edited version seemed very different.
Here is what got published http://www.indianexpress.com/news/little-steps-in-prison/622469/
Here is what I wrote.

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, November 6, 2009

On a cold December morning five years ago, two undertrials – husband and wife - sat on the cold stone steps inside a prison, and spoke urgently. The wife had just told him she was pregnant.
Their first child would be born inside the high walls of Tihar, shut off from the world, born free yet jailed. It would take its first steps inside a crammed barrack, and wear hand-me-downs most of its growing years until they took her away and put her in a residential school elsewhere, she said.
He didn’t know how to respond, Sonia recalled. Under the watchful gaze of the guards that kept pacing up and down, Mohd. Kalam felt awkward. Sonia could tell.
Walking up to him that morning, she had debated how to break the news to him. Two weeks after she was remanded to Jail no. 6 in Tihar, a co-accused in a murder case along with her husband Mohd. Kalam, the doctor at the Deen Dayal Upadhyay Hospital where she had been taken for medical checkup, a prison routine, had told her she was pregnant. That was 10 years after she was married. The law in India, as in many other countries, is that children can stay with their mothers in prison until they are five years of age. Then, they are put in residential schools where they live with other inmates’ children and complete school.
When their 30-minute interaction was over, the guards led them to their barracks to be locked up for a week before they would get to see each other. They had decided to keep the baby.
Sonia is a co-accused, along with her husband Mohd. Kalam who is serving time in Jail No. 3 for a murder case, and both are undertrials at Tihar Jail since 2005.
Inside the 400-acre campus of Tihar jail, in her stuffy barrack that she shared with eight other women, Sonia first told another inmate, who incidentally was also pregnant, about her fears, and joys, the bouts of ecstasy, and the subsequent pangs of guilt of wanting to give birth to her child inside a prison. She just couldn’t abort the baby.
“Who knows if I would ever get pregnant again? I am not getting younger,” Sonia said. “We thought about a lot of things. Her future, her needs. We have facilities inside the jail but it is not the same. Here we live in a limbo, waiting forever.”
For years after she married Kalam, a leather goods manufacturer in Mongolpuri, the couple had been hoping for a child.
And so when she took those hurried steps towards where her husband was sitting on the designated day of meeting (prisoners whose relatives are in the same complex get to meet for 30 minutes on the first, third and the fourth Saturdays in a month), Sonia had already decided her child would share her sentence.
A year later, while they were still fighting their case in the court, the baby was born in a city hospital. Two days later, she came home to her barrack inside the women’s jail at Tihar.
There could have been no other name for her. Tamanna was the sum total of their desires, the yearnings of two undertrials waiting for their sentence or acquittal, for a closure to their suspended lives in small prison cells where they spent their days oscillating between hope and dejection, hoping they could someday raise their daughter in a proper home, together, far from the madness of the prison, and its quirks, its stories of torture and sadness, its grim cells and its convicts.
They named the frail baby with thin arms, and dark hair Tamanna or desire. Inside the grim prison where they slept under the window that had no netting to keep the mosquitoes out,
Tamanna grew up inside the 40-acre prison compound, following the prison rules, meeting her father for 30 minutes over the weekend, supervised by the guards. At first she hadn’t known him, didn’t get used to him. It was only later that she started to respond to him. But the daughter breaks the deadening monotony of prison life for the mother. There is something to look forward to, she says.
Tamanna, now four years old, has large watery, unblinking eyes. The frail, quiet child, is one of around 2,000 children languishing in prisons across the country, including Tihar, as per the National Crime Records Bureau survey in 2007.
She doesn’t smile too often, and not so easily. She has learnt to be passive. When the other children tease her, pull her hair or tug at her sleeves, she doesn’t fight back.
Tamanna, the quiet child, always tags along the other children, trailing behind them.
Ruby, 6, is her friend. Soon, Ruby will leave the prison and go to a hostel where an NGO will take care of her studies.
Often, the children talk about home. Ruby is from Narela and has drawn on paper her house so Tamanna can see.
“Tamanna says she wants to come home with me,” she said. “I tell her we are in jail and she says when you get out, take me with you. I tell her there’s babu, there are cows, and flowers in my house. Tamanna’s house is far. She has told me.”
That’s what Sonia tells her daughter anyways. She wants her daughter to understand that this is a phase, that jail, its barracks, its convicts are only part of this life and that there is a life for her that’s different.
But Tamanna has no reference point. For her, home is the L-shaped barrack where the duo keeps their belongings in a bag, and where her mother plugs her ears when the women hurl abuses at each other.
The largest prison complex in Asia, Tihar was built in 1958 as a maximum security prison run by the Punjab government. In 1966, the Delhi government took over the prison and in 1984, it was renamed Tihar Prisons. It has nine jails, and staff quarters.
But it was not until 10 years later that Tihar started to experiment with prison reforms ushered in by Kiran Bedi who took over as the Director General in 1993.
When Bedi saw the children, who lived with their mothers till they turned six, hurling abuses and using legal jargons like custody and bail, and playing gang war games with paper knives and paper guns , she was shocked.
Then started a string of prison reforms under her. A crèche was established for the children where they could spend the day away from the barracks and learn to read and write. Stella Mama, a Nigerian, who has been convicted for smuggling narcotics, is in charge of the crèche. She knows the children by names, she has their background at her fingertips and she has grown fond of them because they provide a break in the monotony of her life, too.
“The children talked about courts and orders because they attended the courts, they talked about knives, played stab-stab and made knives out of spoons,” Bedi said. “When I saw all that, we didn’t take long. We put them in a play way school.”
Bedi won the 1994 Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1994 for initiating prison reforms policies inside Tihar.
Tamanna sleeps in the barracks in the women’s jail, and attends a school run by the former Director General of Tihar Kiran Bedi’s NGO India Vision Foundation.
In her cramped corridor-like cell where Sonia sleeps under the window, and where they keep their belongings – a bucket, a few clothes, and a few old toys handed down to the girl by the NGOs - the mother says she has tried to speak about home to Tamanna.
But the daughter who was born inside the prison has no reference point. Often her friends tell her they had a garden in the village, and an uncle and cattle. Home is an elusive concept, something that she can’t connect with, a vision she can’t imagine. She has never known freedom outside the prison, her mother says.
Instead, Tamanna knows the rules of the prison. She is not a troublesome child. After school, she plays with other children, and at 6 p.m., she quietly returns to her barrack.
She spends the rest of the evening in the crowded cell in her corner, leaning against the wall, playing with her doll, a birthday gift from the crèche till the lights go out.
That’s when her space expands. There’s nobody watching. It’s dark and it’s only her with her mother. She snuggles close to her mother and talks about her fights, and new friends and what Stella Mama, the warden, taught them.
When she was six months old, Sonia started taking Tamanna to the crèche run by Kiran Bedi’s NGO.
Sonia too started working in the crèche, cooking meals for 40 odd children, for Rs. 1,000 a month. The money gets deposited in her account and she can use coupons to buy little treats for Tamanna from the canteen inside the jail sells tea and snacks to inmates.
The prison provides meals. The canteen is one of the luxuries inside the prison complex for those who can afford it. A glass of tea costs Rs. 5.
On her daughter’s first birthday, Sonia asked another inmate to see if she could get her family outside to bring her two dresses for Tamanna. She traded her coupons for the baby clothes.
“You find a way out. It’s not easy brining her up here. There are so many things you can’t do. This was the least,” she said.
Bringing up a child in a prison with all its questions and demands isn’t easy. Sonia has realized that.
She has already spent about four years in the jail, and doesn’t know how many she has left. Inside the walls, she feels protected but even though she knows nobody is waiting for her release, she would rather be free.
It is the feeling of being locked up, of being branded that Sonia detests.
Inside the prison, the barracks and the cells hold hundreds of such stories, tales of abandonment, of love gone wrong, and of ambitions cut short.
Eva Jennifer Antony couldn’t give up on love. And she couldn’t make her man change his ways. So she became an accomplice in his crime, she said.
Together, they stole money through credit card fraud. She tried to dissuade him. Eva worked at a BPO, earned about Rs. 18,000 per month.
They could live well, she argued.
She had moved in with him by then. She got pregnant. There was no way out.
A few months later, both were incarcerated in a murder case of a man whose credit card details the duo had used to swindle money.
“I loved him and I ended up in jail,” she said.
Fissures in their relationship surfaced when her boyfriend wanted her to abort the baby.
But the 28-year-old wanted to keep the baby. Eva, with her dark, brooding eyes, and a ready smile, was abandoned when her husband got out on bail and never came back. He was lodged in Jail No.4.
Eva remained. Her mother came to meet her once in the prison. That was it.
“If he comes back, I will shut the door on him. He made his choices. I don’t need a man now,” Eva said, holding her five-and-a-half month old daughter. “Yes, I am a single mother, and I care two hoots about the society.”
Eva carries her baby around all day, and seldom speaks to other women.
She is worried about Rozanne’s future. It was one thing to bring her into the world. That was about her values, her love, and her rebel spirit. To bring her up inside the prison is a task, and Eva, a strong, free-spirited, and tough woman is slowly crumbling, disintegrating. The prison with all its reforms and comforts, and its abuses and criminals, and its depressing stories can’t give to her daughter what freedom could.
For those children whose mothers are in prison for years, the arrival of a fifth birthday is the most painful day because then the children must leave to live with their family outside, if they have one, or in residential schools.
Tihar, Asia's largest jail, is home to around 60 children. There are an estimated 1,392 children
living in jails across India, as per a Home Minitry figure in 2001.
The National Institute of Criminology Forensic Sciences, Ministry of Home Affairs, conducted a comprehensive study on the children in prisons in 1999. In it, head of criminology B.N. Chattoraj said the government needs to improve jail conditions for women and children. His researchers had found that there were no separate facilities for the children, who had to share their mothers' bed, usually a thin mattress in case of undertrials. Many prisons still don’t have crèches or recreational and educational facilities for children. In some cases, women and children share the same ward with men and conditions in prisons could be best described as sub human, the study said.
The study also said that children live in conditions of depravity.
The crèche in jail no. 6-A, where Sonia cooks and Tamanna learns to put names to colours, is a big, airy room with a high ceiling. On the walls are bright posters, and on the floor are scattered numerous red chairs and floor mats. There’s a cupboard with the toys and there are cribs where younger babies sleep rocked by women. Across the hall, there is a beauty parlour for women, yet another rehabilitation scheme at Tihar, where women learn the trade.
The India Vision Foundation established the crèche in 1994. Later, they tied up with residential missionary schools to educate the children like the Assisi Convent in Noida, and Grace Mission in Gurgaon. Rubeena is a six years old girl in Assisi Convent in Noida. Her mother is an undertrial and Rubeena is sent to the prison complex once a year to spend a week with her mother.
But their lives are suspended in the cycle of court hearings and sentences and arguments. The mesh is too dense for them to contemplate resolutions. So, they take the little pleasures of life and tuck it in their minds. Long after Tamanna is gone, Sonia will dig those out from the corridors of her memory and those will sustain her day after day in a prison where her baby was born, and she became hopeful.
For now, she is dreading the moment when her daughter will go. But the abdonment is imminent. Prison is a place of no luxuries. Motherhood, and love are expensive treats.