Sometimes, a drag on a cigarette borrowed from a generous prison guard breaks the monotony of Dr. When he thinks he is free, he knows he must be dreaming. The desire to cross the high walls of the prison, of this city within the city, and step on to the streets of the capital remains a hope, and a dream, that wakes the prisoner from time to time with startling vividness from the depths of sleep.
#PRESENTABLE LIBERTY LETTERS FREE#
So that posterity may look back on the queues outside the prisons in our cities and be grateful.īarring a few occasions during a sparse routine of trips from Tihar to the Karkardooma Session Court at the other end of Delhi, and occasionally, to Patiala House court, prisoner number 626710 hasn’t really had his day under an open sky, breathing the foul but free air of our city. I feel that our shared patience needs to find its own way into the record of our time. And so that those who are still ‘outside’, with friends or family ‘inside’, may know that their waiting, through the ‘torpor common to us all’, is not in vain.įor the past two years (seven months more than Akhmatova’s 17), prisoner number 626710 in jail number two, in the Tihar Prison Complex in West Delhi, has waited patiently to be able to walk out of prison.Īnd I, and several others, have waited for him to do so. So that those who are ‘inside’ may know that they are being waited for. When a society begins to resemble a prison more than it does a playground, when things are no longer said as freely as they used to be, when the clenched teeth of panic and anxiety begin to make their grinding presence felt in every conversation – then – it becomes even more important to safeguard and cultivate a few patches of freely willed conversation, between those who are actually in prison, and those who are not yet confined. Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there): Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. One day somebody in the crowd identified me. In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. In a short prose preface to a long poem cycle tiled The Requiem, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova wrote about standing in the queue to visit a relative (was it her son ?) who was kept as a prisoner in a Leningrad prison during the worst days of Stalin’s grip over the former Soviet Union. Today, September 13, is Political Prisoners Day.
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