Dada 121

They thought their good son Rama would disown him as well as the rest of the family, the politicians and the State. I was on a journey. Between the hours spent sleeping, remembering things in all their blonde, red and green patterns sometimes shot with gold, reading the French story and watching the light fade in my cell and grow light again with the grey fingers of dawn, I seemed to travel great distances. A distance as real to me as any life I had lived on the outside. I’d read somewhere that people ended up ended up losing a notion of time in prison. That was nonsense. I was realising every moment of my life as time passed through me.

The clarity was like the ice of a cold fish knife held between my thighs and not at all like Iskra the pimp’s little blade used i used on those two poor lost souls. It seemed so long ago. After you had been through one memory after another on a form of trip always tinged by guilt it was made easier by the way the body adapts and encourages you to get around this problem or align your shoulders to stack one upon the other the way they do at yoga. These were my days. Easy breathing days. They became so extended that they ran into each other. My siesta could be my night’s sleep or one day separate me from another by a snooze in the afternoon. The names of the week became lost but not my sense of time. Only Yesterday and Tomorrow became important to me.

One day when the guard told me that I’d been there for over five months I believed him but couldn’t quite understand it, to me it was either five minutes or five years. The same day had played itself out endlessly in my cell and I had set my goals each time by the stars. Maybe Dada knew this and was secretly teaching me from all of his time on the sea with those chartered voyages on tramp ships that ran between these islands and crossed the oceans for years on years. He would have done his own counting.