Life was, in fact, all around him and the concrete walls, despite their thickness, managed to be incredibly poor at blocking out sound, though it seemed plausible that this could have been an intentional consideration in the design of this facility. The administrators were, after all, of the belief that the social unity of the inmates was a crucial step in the process of rehabilitation, as it required one to fall in line with a certain sense of obligation to others, which was seen as healthy from the perspective of therapeutic experts.
Other detention facilities, after all, were veritable pressure cookers: the men inside stewing in the juices of their own misconceptions, hemmed in by their own hell cries which bounced off the solitary walls to come back at them louder and louder still until they were swept away by a chorus of demons of their own creation. Then the doors would open, letting the steam out and the men would erupt into a collective battle cry as they ran out in the direction of perceived adversaries to engage in violent, untamed combat. Faces hit the pavement of the prison yard, which was really simply a desert of broken bones amidst oases of blood and sweat. Hands pulled at hair grown into filthy masculine beards that dribbled down to chest hair. Teeth emerged as fangs and nails as claws and the beasts clashed, for neither would cede to the other for dominance. Solitary clumps of flesh ravaged one another to the core, leaving indistinguishable mounds of hair, teeth, and blood upon the battlefield. Cries of pain interspersed themselves with pent-up rage as a fog settled over the grounds and one beast screamed for the heavens victorious, the blood and tears of devastation dripping from his claws and fangs. And in the silence that ensued, the weaker would seek protection from the stronger until aggregates formed around the alpha males. However, the alpha males had to be impressed in order to win their friendship, so one seeking to do so had to either attack or humiliate the rivals of the alpha male, in question, if for no other reason than to curry his favor. And so the aggregates became clans. These clans protected their own, cooperatively strategizing ways by which they might overcome outside aggressors, sometimes plotting outright offensives. The factions: they battled endlessly to seek submission from one another, so as to grow in size. The larger the faction, the more complex the hierarchy: which would only serve to intensify the impact of their influence and escalate the importance of those at the top. Factions clashed endlessly as violence was the most essential component of their vitality as a group.
With this in mind, the founders of the Asoka Plains Detention Facility sought to avoid this pattern of chaos as the factions were perceived as too powerful and violent for the administrators to manage effectively. So, instead, they designed a facility that allowed for seamless interaction between the prisoners, which served to strengthen their bonds with one another and limit any betrayal, primarily through a sense of obligation to the collective. Transactions of obligation were thereupon allowed to manifest themselves through the facilitation of free love amongst the inmates. That is, sexual favors became the common currency by which social debts could be established and fulfilled. For example, one inmate who may feel a sense of indebtedness to another may engage in fellatio to satisfy that debt. However, this action, in and of itself, may arouse the jealousy of a third inmate, causing the other two to feel obligated to him, giving way to a three-way. A fourth inmate jumps into the mix and we have a four-way, then a five-way and so on, to the logical extreme that the whole community’s bond with one another was reinforced by way of group intercourse. And so, the encouragement of these sexual favors raised the level of intimacy by which hello’s, good-bye’s, thank you’s, I’m sorry’s, and I owe you one’s came to pass back and forth between inmates. And what better way was there to say “Top of the morning” than by licking someone’s balls? Or, could there possibly have been a friendlier “Pleased to make your acquaintance” than to sniff the feces in the dirty diapers of one’s counterpart? And certainly one would be remiss if one didn’t say, through the maneuvering of one’s fingertip upon the perennial divide, “Enjoy the rest of your day!” This sort of interaction, most assuredly, served to successfully limit aggression, avert the formation of factions, and keep violent entanglements to a minimum.
As such, the benefits of this facility’s design could now be witnessed by the ease with which conversations took place between the inmates, all of whom happened to be occupying different cells. Their social dynamic was one of non-confrontation, occasioning them to go to absurd extremes to avoid upsetting one another. Naturally, this caused them all to view their fellow inmates as comrades and accordingly, the walls couldn’t contain their enthusiasm to interact with one another. So, the conversations, the giggling, the overall commotion would continue day and night. And despite Bunnu’s best attempts, he simply couldn’t help but be privy to details about the other inmates he would not have cared to know otherwise. Though he wasn’t interested in the details of the conversations, he had somehow managed to get to know the surrounding inmates by name and their corresponding topics of interest. He knew their voices and could almost anticipate what they were going to say next, though he didn’t seek to do so intentionally.
Some inmates, for example, would speak of their families or their lives and ambitions on the outside. The man in the cell next to him, for example: the others called him Vikram. And Bunnu had come to understand that this man spent most of his time waiting for something that he wasn’t likely to get. Nonetheless, the man went on constantly in a smooth, dreamy voice about how no taste was finer than that of Honey Ocha from his hometown of Mehta, or how the smell of the flowers in the window of his childhood sweetheart’s home was heavenly, or how the women in the town of Medvar were incomparable to any other he’d encountered anywhere. The sound of waves, the feel of a woman’s neck against his fingertips, the taste of Spring: the man was a romantic soul. He spoke of sounds, scents, and tastes as though everything that had once seemed mundane had ascended to a superlative status. Vikram’s experiences on the outside had managed to become so built up in his own mind that the memories of what they truly were had somehow been supplanted by an image of a vague and indistinguishable something: a something that simply couldn’t possibly be attained. Bunnu admired him for his ideals and his propensity to dream, but found himself worried that the man should see such sweetness, now, in that which had once seemed commonplace. Would it not be possible for him to once again get bored with such things with the passage of time? Transcendent beauty had seemed to manifest itself in the form of these memories and thus, from Bunnu’s perspective, it seemed best that this man stay in the prison (and out of reach of these places) for his own good, as the truth could only prove to be disappointing, propelling him, out of the madness of betrayal, to destroy either the object of his affections...or himself. This was one breed of inmate in the facility.
Another kind—as evidenced by Yoshio, who resided two cells away—did not make even the slightest mention of life on the outside and certainly didn’t make any grand sweeping generalizations thereof. This sort of inmate was a little bit similar to Bunnu, insofar as the outside was as good as forgotten. The one difference being that, unlike Bunnu, inmates like Yoshio had ambitions on the inside— in terms of sexual conquests, business opportunities, or their ability to gain dominance over others. These were the things Yoshio would go on about in that menacing, gravelly voice of his—which Bunnu could only imagine belonged to a big, lumbering beast so accustomed to prison culture that he didn’t have aspirations to go back. Yoshio claimed to have been an inmate of at least 15 other facilities and as a veteran of prison life, found this initiative of free love that the administration saw fit to force upon them as unseemly, though he understood that this may have been an unpopular view. In fact, men like Yoshio were the polar opposites of those like Vikram insofar as they didn’t spend most of their time fantasizing about something ideal that existed outside the scope of their immediate reality. These men were more pragmatic about their situation and saw it fit to make a solid go of their available oppor
tunities. Yoshio was, therefore, an ambitious man that sought to be at the top of the pecking order, regardless of what administration was pulling the strings. Free love or not, he sought to be the man running the show, though it seemed painfully clear that he wouldn’t have nearly as much influence upon the inmates in this facility as he might have in others. Bunnu couldn’t help but admire Yoshio’s ambition and knack for leadership, despite his reservations that, perhaps, these would be better utilized in other ways. It seemed that for one as ambitious and practical as he, it was easy to convince oneself that the conditions of the surrounding reality were immutable and thus had to be worked within in order to ensure success. This sort of myopic thinking often caused men like Yoshio to remain entrenched in less-than-satisfactory positions due wholly to their own stubbornness.
“Haaah haaa! Filthy! Filthy! Filthy! You might as well lube up with that excess ear wax, ne Ravi? Put it to good use! Now, we’re really hitting bottom, ain’t we? Haaah!” Then, there was Jagdish. He occupied the cell next to Bunnu on the side opposite from Vikram. Jagdish was a rather hyperactive individual, who insisted on interjecting his droll and scathing observations into the conversations around him, though most of the other inmates now seemed to ignore him, as his comments often proved to give way to uncomfortable silences. He had an exasperated, gurgling tone of voice that Bunnu couldn’t help but think sounded a bit like a kitten drowning in herbal tea. These phlegm-filled sounds bubbled up a sense of panic throughout the surroundings, infusing all within earshot with a sense of hollowness about the way they’d chosen to live. His air passages seemingly compromised by a deluge of devilish schadenfreude, he would call out derisively in the wail of a feline submerged: his mocking words spiraling out, caught up in jetstreams of tiny bubbles that permeated through membranous walls to react with the psyche of those around him, displacing what may once have been acceptance of one’s circumstances with a certain embittered zeal that raised the blood pressure, tightened one’s chest, and made one’s head pound until there was no recourse but to cringe in the corner and rock back-and-forth, resentful at the conditions with which one has been made to endure and further dismayed by the bleakness of one’s fate. “Your mothers would spit on you if they saw you! Haah! Your fathers would rip your heads off and shit down your throats, ne! But who am I to judge? We’re all disgraceful, right? Haaah Haah!” Most of the other inmates did their best to block him out of the conversations, so as to prevent him from getting a foothold, but Jagdish persisted anyway, sometimes even attempting to appeal sneeringly to Bunnu by wildly pounding on the wall adjoining their cells. “Don’t try to hide! I know you’re in there! I can hear you tooting away after those beans we had for lunch. You’re a shameful little craploaf, ain’t ya! Haah haaaah!” Jagdish, on the exterior, seemed simply like a lonely, pathetic creature who only truly wanted the attention of those around him. But what he truly sought more than anything else was to bring others down to his level so that they might empathize with his desperation. And so, every comment out of his mouth was geared at making others feel negative about their situation. In fact, it would seem that he was attempting to inject a little of his own surplus misery into the common stock, so as to diffuse it amidst the other inmates equally, until each was abidingly driven into a corner and squeezed dry of all hope. This base, dried-out clump of empty flesh who feels it necessary to air out the sediment of his own despair; this fossilized sponge who seeks vigor by draining others of their resolve, until they are left to droop lifelessly in the depths of a similar cosmic madness: This soul-destroying raptor is called Jagdish.
“Craploaf! Craploaf! Craploaf! Born in an outhouse, were we? Mother must have been right disappointed to see you staring back up at her when she got up from the toilet seat, ne! Haaah haaa!”
Aside from these 3 inmates, Bunnu found himself surrounded by so many conversations at once that it was difficult to pay attention to one without getting distracted by another. Many would engage in gossip about other inmates, referring to some incident or the other that had taken place ‘outside’ in the Yard. Somewhere down the hall, there was a group of inmates who would talk about sex non-stop, sometimes masturbating in the process, while encouraging each other to do the same. Some of the older inmates, meanwhile, would go on and on for hours tirelessly about their diaper rash, some of them complaining that it had been months or years since they’d even been allowed to shower, while others would gripe endlessly about how in the old days, the guards and the administrators used to do things differently. The layered conversations and sex talk would go on interminably, sometimes making it impossible for Bunnu to sleep.
Bunnu, in fact, had no interest in social interaction with the other inmates and had, despite others attempts to draw him out of his reclusion, managed to keep himself at a great distance emotionally from those around him, which had in recent months become a source of selfish pride for him. Now, he put one elbow behind his head and closed his eyes in an attempt to ignore the surrounding noise. His other arm—the one with the ant crawling upon it— lay flat upon the mattress at his side. He was afraid to move it, as he felt a kind of obligation to see to it that the ant remained untouched. He realized that this was a peculiar attitude to adopt as part of him still felt on edge about its presence, but then, at the same time, for some reason, he felt as though something terrible may befall him should he harm the ant. So, he kept his arm still, allowing his thoughts to drift in the reverberation of voices that surrounded him like static.
It was upsetting to think that all this time he had been under the false impression that this place was somehow unreachable by the outside world. The idea of it being impregnable to its surroundings had sustained him for these 2 years. It had led him into very important directions. Yet, this image was now shattered by this ant. He had half a mind to crush it, but for some inexplicable reason, the other half told him to cherish it and protect it and thus he didn’t completely know how to feel about it anymore. Nor did he know how to feel about the realization that he had not, all this time, been impervious to outside influence.
He silently admonished himself for not having realized the reality of his situation sooner, for not having known better. Of course, for him to be completely unreachable by the outside world would be logistically impossible, no matter how one tried to reason it, but it had been necessary to maintain this illusion for his own sense of purpose. Now, allowing the disillusionment to settle into the depths of his consciousness, creating ripples throughout, Bunnu envisioned a serene and harmonious pool deep within him becoming slightly agitated. Bubbles were now drifting to the surface.
Until now, the sang-froid with which he had conducted himself in these conditions was dependent on a kind of self-assurance that was not only therapeutic to him but also allowed him to maintain the psychological distance that he sought with respect to the other inmates and, therefore, it was now disheartening to have this equanimity that he’d afforded himself shattered by the appearance of an insignificant little creature who had taken it upon itself to reside somewhere upon his person. Yet, now, resting on the elbow of one arm and taking great care not to hurt the ant as it crawled upon the other, Bunnu could see himself getting used to the idea of the ant living with him. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. He started to sense that the initial pang of disappointment was starting to cool and in its place, he felt a mild sense of joy overtake him. Right now, even though he could no longer perceive it, some element of the outside still existed and had found him. Some element had, in fact, recognized his presence, despite his more recent assumptions that he may very well have become invisible…or even disappeared completely. He felt something slowly swell inside him: a glimmer of hopeful optimism that he didn’t think he could possibly have been capable of feeling ever again.
Courtship Hour