Father in law

Father in Law

It was about seven am on Sunday morning and I was in the middle of an interesting car chase! No! I was not in Monte-Carlo or Sriperumputhur race tracks. I was not even in the presence of a gaming console or a television, this car chase along the hairpin bends on a treacherous mountain slopes, was happening in the pages of the novel that I was writing. It was natural that I would be extremely irritated at the interruption. It was the block warden who told me that the jailor wanted to see me. In a prison, a jailor’s summons are not something that you could refuse, and thus I donned my T-Shirt and followed the baton waving warden, apprehensive about why I was being summoned.
On reaching the front, instead of the jailors office, I was led to security block four, which surprised me because this was a punishment area. I met the flustered jailor who quickly took me in. The jail doctor too had been summoned and would be there soon. I had been called to see a patient with a dislocated shoulder. He was a punishment prisoner, and in the beating that he had received, dislocated his shoulder. For those of you, who would be wondering about punishment calls inside a prison, which itself is a place for punishment, here is an explanation.
Prisoners who commit crimes within the prison can be punished as per the provisions of the jail manual. The jail manual does not allow the warders to mercilessly beat a prisoner or dislocate his shoulder. A solitary confinement is all that is allowed. But sometimes a prisoner commits such an atrocious crime within the prison, that the wardens loose their temper and in frustration, use the poor prisoner as a punching bag, resulting in an occasional accident like this. A dislocated shoulder is an extremely painful affair for a patient, it is also an easy situation for a qualified orthopedic surgeon like me, and the relief after relocation is so dramatic that the tearful face changes to a smiling one as if by magic. I would only know later that Human Rights judges were expected on a surprise visits and the authorities did not want a dislocated shoulder to distract their attention. If I had not succeeded, the prisoner would have been packed off to an isolation cell and kept hidden from the visitors. Once the shoulder was popped back in place, the crisis was solved. The grateful patient was Raja, who had been caught in his attempt at strangling Hariprasad, an elderly Brahmin fellow who was in for a land fraud case. After the warders left, I asked Raghu why he had attempted to kill the prisoner on the next Kattai. This is his story.
Raghu was a local goonda and rowdy who lived off mamool collected from petty traders, and on extortions. Hariprasad had been recently arrested in the color Xerox fake documents case, in which he had cheated a land buyer of about ten lacks. But by the time Hariprasad was arrested, he had become a pauper. He quickly befriended Raghu, on whom he depended for his beedies, tea tokens, bathing soap and tooth paste. Raghu was getting a little irritated by the shameless scrounging but at that time Hariprasad’s daughter came to visit him. She was young, dark and cute. Hariprasad took Raghu along and performed introductions. Later he told Raghu that he was willing to make him his son- in-law.
Raghu rather liked the girl. The daughter too agreed and started visiting the prison on alternate days. Raghu had about three months to his release and a wedding was scheduled after that. Raghu had his lifetime’s savings of thirty thousand, deposited with a Marwadi Seth. He gave a slip to her so that she could withdraw the money and start buying the mangalsutra and other things for a wedding. But a couple of days after he gave her the slip, she stopped visiting Raghu. Hariprasad gave some excuses about the daughter being sick. Raghu was not too worried because in a month or two, he would be outside; he liked the girl and looked forward to a happy life with her. The girl did not visit him for the whole month.
And then when Raghu went to the visitors room to meet someone else, he saw her. From where he stood, she could not see him. He from his corner to could clearly see and hear. The burly youth beside Hariprasad was an illicit liquor trader who was shouting the grill, the jewelers address! “Get at least a fifteen gram Mangalsutra made. After all, you are going to marry me!” That night, he had twisted a towel around Hariprasad’s neck and if he had not been caught in right time, would have strangled him.