Lin Is Arrested and Imprisoned in Bombay

Lin’s arrest and imprisonment in Bombay turn a promise to help Ulla into a sudden disappearance into police custody. Seized on a deserted, rain-swept street, he is beaten and bound at the Colaba police station, then held among hundreds of prisoners in conditions far beyond the lockup’s capacity. His confinement separates him from Karla, leaves him fearing that his real identity will be exposed, and continues at Arthur Road Prison, where months of abuse and uncertainty deepen the physical and psychological cost of detention.

The promised meeting and sudden arrest

Ulla asks Lin to accompany her to Leopold's Beer Bar at one o’clock after midnight. The bar will be closed, she explains, so she will wait in a taxi outside while meeting someone. She says she does not want to be alone and offers him five hundred dollars. Lin wonders why she has asked him rather than Modena or Maurizio, but accepts. He trusts Ulla, likes her, and, above all, knows she is Karla’s friend. His love for Karla helps settle his decision even as he senses danger in the request.

Lin promises to meet Ulla at the appointed hour. After leaving her cab, he runs through the quiet market streets toward the rendezvous. The promise becomes the hinge of the episode: he is moving to keep his word when the police close in. At a crossroads, he turns to avoid flooded streets and sees a bicycle policeman ahead. A second officer joins from a driveway; then a police jeep appears at one end of the side street, another approaches behind him, and the cyclists converge. Five officers surround him. Their pause before taking him is charged with menace, but Lin does not yet know why he has been stopped.

Seizure and torture at Colaba

Lin asks what the police want, speaking Marathi. The commander orders him into the jeep. The officers make clear that they know he speaks the language and threaten to beat him before putting him in custody. He is seated on the floor of the covered vehicle, with six men in the back keeping their hands on him. The jeep travels only two short blocks to the Colaba police station, directly across from Leopold's Beer Bar. From the compound, Lin sees that the street outside the bar is empty and Ulla is nowhere to be seen. He wonders whether she has set him up, though the thought makes little sense to him and is never confirmed in this episode.

At the station, the duty officer orders the police to beat Lin hard and put him in the jail. Lin tries to escape through the circle of officers, but his attempt carries him to the compound’s front gate, where he collides with a roundup party of tied men. The police drag him back, punching and kicking him. They bind his hands behind his back with hemp rope, tie his feet together, and wrap his body in so many coils that he resembles a mummy. They then hang him face down from a hook caught in the ropes at his back.

The officers spin Lin around and strike him with cane lathis. The blows land through the ropes and across his face, arms, legs, and feet. He senses that he is bleeding, but refuses to scream. When the men stop him and reverse the direction of the spinning, the beating begins again. The scene makes the police station more than a place of processing: the officers use the captive’s helplessness as an occasion for deliberate physical abuse.

The lockup and the fear of vanishing

After the beating, the police drag Lin up the metal stairs to the lockup. He recognizes them as the same stairs he once climbed with Prabaker while trying to help Kano’s bear-handlers. Now no one has seen his arrest, and he cannot expect anyone to know where he has gone. Ulla may not know he was taken; Karla may believe he abandoned her after they had made love. Lin understands that detention will hide him from the people who might search for him, leaving no reliable way for news to pass through the prison walls.

His fear also turns toward identification. If the police discover who he is, he worries that questioning, identification procedures, or fingerprint checks will reveal his past. His fingerprints are on file through Interpol, and he believes it may only be a matter of time before his identity emerges. He fixes on Abdel Khader Khan as the person most able to learn of his arrest and help him, and repeats to himself the need to get a message out. That hope is practical as well as emotional: Lin sees the city’s contacts and influence as a possible route out of an otherwise sealed system.

The first-floor lockup at Colaba has four cell rooms opening off a corridor behind a sliding steel gate. The rooms are roughly three metres square; the corridor is about sixteen metres long, and the toilet and urinal at its far end have no doors. The space might have held forty men with tolerable discomfort. When Lin wakes on his first morning, there are 240. Bodies press together in a humid, airless crush, while the toilet is ankle-deep in filth and the urinal overflows into a stinking swamp. Moaning, talk, complaints, shouting, and periodic screams fill the corridor. Lin remains in the lockup for three weeks.

Crowding does not erase the divisions among prisoners. The cleanest room, furthest from the toilet, houses fifteen wealthy men who pay police to keep others out; it is known as the Taj Mahal, and its residents as the fifteen princes. Another room is occupied by experienced crooks prepared to fight to defend their space. The nicknames and enforced boundaries make visible the informal hierarchy operating inside custody: money can buy relative comfort, while other men must defend even a patch of floor.

Continued detention and its toll

Lin’s imprisonment continues at Arthur Road Prison. Mahesh warns him that prisoners may wait a long time without court action and that no one is likely to risk the overseers’ anger to help him. As the weeks pass, Lin approaches men being released and carefully asks for assistance, but none agrees. After two months in the prison, he estimates that he has lost about twelve kilos. Kadmal bedbugs leave small suppurating sores across his body, and blows from overseers’ canes mark his arms, legs, back, face, and shaved head.

The uncertainty about his fingerprints persists alongside the daily physical punishment. Lin repeatedly imagines the ten-year sentence he escaped in Australia, and the possibility works its way into nightmares. Worry becomes a nearly physical pressure in his chest, at times making him feel as though he is choking. His account connects that anguish to guilt and love, but gives worry its own sharp force: imprisonment keeps the prospect of discovery alive even when no new information arrives.

Significance of the arrest and confinement

The episode binds a private promise to a public machinery of coercion. Lin goes to meet Ulla because he cares for her and because of his attachment to Karla; instead, his absence from the rendezvous threatens to look like abandonment. The arrest’s unexplained timing makes that separation more painful, while the empty street outside Leopold's Beer Bar leaves Lin without an answer about Ulla’s role.

The arrest also changes the scale of Lin’s danger. He is no longer merely at risk of being recognized as a fugitive: he is inside institutions where beatings, overcrowding, and prolonged uncertainty are routine features of his experience. His silence under the lathis is a refusal to give the officers his scream, but it cannot prevent the physical damage or the isolation that follows. In the lockup and at Arthur Road Prison, confinement becomes both an immediate struggle to endure and a barrier separating Lin from the people and resources he believes might help him.