Lin arrives at Arthur Road Prison after three weeks in the Colaba police lockup, where he and Mahesh have waited, smoked, prayed, fought, and sometimes comforted other prisoners. Their transfer begins with fingerprinting: the prisoners’ prints are pressed onto a page meant to identify them, then eighty men are crowded into an old blue prison truck built for far fewer. The truck speeds through Bombay toward the jail, carrying Lin from one form of confinement into a much larger institution.

Transfer and Intake

The prison gates do not mark a simple change of location. Guards pull the men from the truck and order them to squat while the staff process and register them one at a time. The intake lasts four hours. Lin is left until last, in part because the guards have been told that he understands Marathi. A watch commander tests this by repeatedly ordering him to stand and squat. Lin complies at first, then refuses to continue the performance. The commander’s amusement gives way to open hostility, and the moment of silence between them becomes a prelude to the punishment waiting inside.

The commander invokes the jail’s history to define Lin as an enemy: the British built the prison, he says, and now an Indian institution holds a British prisoner. Lin formally corrects him, identifying himself as a New Zealander. The correction changes nothing. The commander insists that Lin is British and points him toward an archway leading deeper into the prison. The episode makes the transfer political as well as procedural: Lin’s stated identity is overridden by the category his captors assign him, and the jail’s colonial past becomes a justification for present violence.

The Baton Gauntlet

Beyond the archway, a sharp turn leads to a corridor lined on both sides by about twenty men carrying bamboo sticks. Lin recognizes the arrangement from a punishment unit in the Australian prison he escaped from, where guards had forced prisoners to run a gauntlet. The echo connects his earlier imprisonment to this new one, but the personnel and prison system here are different. The men awaiting him are convict overseers, not ordinary guards.

Arthur Road Prison’s daily routines and discipline have been delegated to prisoners serving long sentences. Long-term offenders could spend their first five years as common prisoners, their next five working in prison services or industries, and their final five in roles that carried a hat, belt, and stick. The overseers in the corridor are therefore both inmates and agents of prison authority. Their delegated power makes the assault part of the jail’s operating order rather than an isolated encounter with a guard.

Lin walks forward instead of running. The narrative does not turn that choice into uncomplicated heroism: looking back, Lin cannot settle on a single explanation for why he did not run. As he moves, he recalls the long path over the sea to Haji Ali Shrine, one of his cherished images of Bombay. The remembered route toward the shrine’s white minarets interrupts the corridor’s immediate threat with an image of beauty associated with the city. The contrast does not remove the danger; it gives Lin something other than fear to hold in mind as he continues.

The overseers strike him as he passes. Lin flinches when the blows land, but keeps his hands at his sides, gripping the legs of his jeans rather than raising his arms. He does not claim to be untouched or fearless. The attack gradually diminishes and stops by the end of the corridor, where the men lower their sticks and eyes as he passes. Lin describes this as a limited victory: in prison, survival includes not only the body but also the will and spirit that can be damaged alongside it.

Prison Order and Its First Consequences

After the gauntlet, guards and overseers take Lin through the prison to a dormitory. The room measures twenty-five paces by ten and has barred windows, steel gates at both ends, and three clean squat toilets. That night, 180 prisoners and twenty overseers are locked inside. The arrangement makes hierarchy visible in the room itself: the overseers claim a quarter of the floor, with clean blankets stacked into thick beds and open space around them, while the other prisoners sleep shoulder to shoulder in two lines on narrow blankets. Bright lights remain on through the night, and overseers patrol between the rows, carrying whistles to summon guards if a problem exceeds their control.

The overseers allow Lin five minutes to wash and use the toilet, then offer him a place in their part of the room. The offer may reflect their assumption that his white skin means access to money; the account also allows that his conduct in the corridor may have influenced them. Lin refuses to sleep among the men who have just beaten him and now exercise authority over the dormitory. He chooses a blanket beside Mahesh instead. The decision costs him the overseers’ favor: they sneer and laugh, angered by his refusal, and begin to act against him. Thus the gauntlet’s apparent end does not end the conflict. Lin’s refusal of their offer turns a moment of possible accommodation into a continuing struggle with the men who control daily life inside the prison.

Significance

The arrival sequence links Lin’s Australian imprisonment, his disputed national identity, and the violence of Arthur Road Prison without treating them as identical experiences. The commander’s insistence that Lin is British collapses the distinction Lin tries to make, while the jail’s convict overseers embody a system in which incarcerated men are given authority over others. Lin’s steady walk through the corridor offers no escape from that system; its significance lies in his effort to retain choice within it. The event establishes survival as an inward as well as physical contest, then immediately tests that principle in the dormitory, where Lin declines a privilege offered by the same men who control his surroundings.