Lin Finds a Way to Send a Message to Khaderbhai

Lin’s attempt to send a message to Abdel Khader Khan from Arthur Road Prison becomes a turning point in his isolation. Two young men agree to carry a note beyond the prison walls, but the overseers discover their help, punish them, and make their example a warning to everyone else. The failed communication leaves Lin with no reliable route to his ally and makes the prison’s power over both inmates and their prospects of release painfully clear.

The message and its messengers

At the end of Lin’s second week in Arthur Road Prison, Mahesh assured him that two young men who were due to be released within the hour would carry a message. They were village boys, illiterate and unfamiliar with the city’s ways, who had come to Bombay and been swept up in a roundup of unemployed youths. After three months in prison without a formal charge, they were at last being released. Their imminent departure offered Lin a rare chance to communicate with someone outside.

Lin wrote Abdel Khader Khan’s name and address on a piece of paper, adding a short note to say that he was in prison. He promised to reward the men after his own release. They accepted the message and joined their hands in a blessing before leaving, a gesture of hope that contrasts with the risks they had taken on Lin’s behalf. The note was brief, but carrying it meant crossing a boundary the prison authorities were determined to control.

Punishment and public warning

Later that day, the overseers assembled the dormitory with unusual violence and forced the prisoners into close ranks. The two young men were brought back in a badly weakened state, their faces marked by the beating they had received. The overseer Big Rahul announced that they had tried to carry a message out for Lin. He extended their imprisonment by six months and warned the room that anyone else who helped Lin would face the same consequences.

The punishment transformed a private act of assistance into a public demonstration of authority. The men had been on the verge of leaving after months without a formal charge; now their release was postponed because they had tried to help another prisoner. Big Rahul’s threat did more than punish the two messengers. It made the likely cost of assisting Lin explicit to everyone who had heard it, turning the men’s ordeal into an enforced barrier between Lin and the outside world.

When the overseers left the room, the other prisoners moved quickly to help. Lin washed and dressed the men’s wounds, with Mahesh assisting him. Their response did not undo the punishment or restore the men’s lost freedom, but it showed that the threat had not extinguished all solidarity. The prisoners waited until the overseers were absent, helping in the narrow interval their surveillance allowed.

Mahesh’s warning

Afterward, Mahesh took Lin outside to smoke a beedie and told him that the men’s punishment was not his fault. Lin disagreed, accepting responsibility because the men had been punished for carrying his message. Mahesh instead located the cause in Arthur Road Prison and its everyday practices: the overseers, he explained, could make this kind of retaliation routine. He also recognized the practical consequence for Lin. After the public warning, no one was likely to risk helping him, just as people had been unwilling to assist him in the Colaba lockup.

Mahesh’s warning was grounded in the dormitory’s prolonged, uncertain confinements. He pointed to Pandu, who had spent three years in the room without court action, and to Ajay and Santosh, who had each been held for more than a year without knowing when they would go to court. Their cases showed Lin that the obstacle was not simply a delay in sending one note. A prisoner could remain confined for months or years without a clear timetable for legal proceedings, while the people around him had little power to change that condition.

Isolation and accumulating pressure

The following weeks confirmed Mahesh’s prediction. Men continued to leave the room every week, and Lin approached as many as he could, discreetly seeking another way to send word. None agreed to help. The note had not established contact with Abdel Khader Khan; instead, its discovery had closed off the most immediate means Lin had found to reach him. The repeated failures made the consequences of the overseers’ warning last well beyond the day it was delivered.

After two months in the prison, Lin estimated that he had lost about twelve kilos. He was physically diminished, and the daily fear of identification added another pressure: he worried that the report on his fingerprints would reveal who he really was. Nearly every night, that fear turned into nightmares about the ten-year sentence he had escaped in Australia. His distress grew into a suffocating anxiety that the narration connects with guilt and worry. The failed message therefore marks both a practical setback and an intensification of Lin’s precarious position: cut off from help, he must face the possibility that his hidden identity and past sentence will catch up with him.