Overcrowding and squalid conditions in the Colaba police lockup

Overcrowding and squalid conditions in the Colaba police lockup made custody a daily struggle for space, food, and safety. Lin’s account contrasts a facility that might have accommodated about forty men with the 240 who were actually confined there. Its crowded rooms and corridor became an informal hierarchy, while scarce provisions and the ability to buy protection determined how much hardship a prisoner could avoid.

Layout and overcrowding

The lockup at Colaba Police Station occupied the first floor beyond a sliding steel gate. A corridor ran between four cell rooms and an open view through steel mesh onto the police compound. Each room was roughly three metres square, and the corridor, about sixteen metres long, was just wide enough for two men to pass with their shoulders touching. At its far end were a urinal, a keyhole-shaped squatting toilet, and a water tap; none of these facilities had a door. Kano was held in a ground-floor cell, where short-term detainees were kept. Men expected to remain longer were taken upstairs, as Lin was.

The first-floor rooms and corridor could have held around forty men with some discomfort. Instead, Lin woke on his first morning to find 240 people packed into them. He remained there for three weeks. With so many men sharing such limited space, even small movements could press one person against another. The washroom facilities could not serve the population adequately, and the air and passageways were burdened by the demands of constant use. The numbers themselves convey the scale of the crisis: this was not simply a crowded cell, but a confined space operating at many times its plausible capacity.

Space, status, and informal power

The rooms did not offer equal shelter. The first, farthest from the toilet, held fifteen men and had room to lie down. Its occupants were wealthy enough to pay guards to beat anyone who tried to enter without permission. Known as the Taj Mahal, it was a protected enclave whose residents were called the fifteen princes. Its relative cleanliness and space were not available by right; money and access to police protection secured them.

The second room held twenty-five men with prior prison experience. They were prepared to fight to retain their places, and the room was known as the abode of thieves. The nickname black hats recalled the clothing imposed on convicted thieves at Arthur Road Prison. Elsewhere, the last room, called the detection room, was controlled by a powerful prisoner who presided over the treatment of newcomers. Those who entered could be stripped of their clothes and valuables, then left with discarded rags. They could move out and fend for themselves in the corridor or join the group that preyed on new arrivals. Lin observed that about one in five men dispossessed in this way chose to join that group.

The corridor had its own hierarchy. Men competed for a foothold, and challengers tested one another’s strength or courage. Places near the gate and farther from the toilet were sought after, but even at the far end, where conditions were worst, prisoners fought over slight differences in available space. The arrangement turned confinement into a continuing contest: a better position could mean a greater chance of enduring the day, while those with less power were pushed toward the most difficult parts of the corridor.

Food and the economy of survival

The lockup provided one meal a day, at four in the afternoon, usually dhal and roti or rice with thin curry sauce. In the early morning, prisoners received chai and a slice of bread. Men tried to form orderly lines at the gate where the police distributed food, but crowding, hunger, and competition repeatedly disrupted the process. Some prisoners missed their meal and went hungry for a day or longer.

Each man received a flat aluminium plate, his only permitted possession. It was used for eating, but prisoners also bent plates into supports for improvised stoves. A third plate could rest on the supports while fuel burned beneath it; rubber sandals were among the fuels used. These makeshift appliances allowed chai or saved food to be reheated, and they also became a source of income for the detection-room leaders, who sold heated food and drink to wealthier prisoners. The fifteen princes had persuaded guards to allow them a small saucepan and containers, enabling them to keep food and chai for later.

The plate, food, chai, and even fuel therefore had value beyond their immediate use. Plates wore out, provisions could be traded, and the weakest prisoners lost what they had. Those who shared a plate helped others eat, but the short distribution period meant several men might have to use the same one in quick succession. This economy of exchange softened some deprivation while also showing how survival depended on access to objects that the prison officially treated as minimal or ordinary.

Unequal hardship and its human cost

The separation between the protected room and the crowded corridor did not erase every shared condition. Even wealthy prisoners had to use the same basic toilet facilities as everyone else. That limited commonality did not make the conditions equal: money could buy a safer sleeping place, access to hot food, and protection from intrusion, but it could not remove the need to pass through the crowded corridor to reach shared facilities.

Some men confined to the corridor’s far end eventually collapsed and died; others were removed in an almost unconscious state. Lin describes the struggle to move toward a less dangerous place as a prolonged contest of endurance, measured in inches and hours rather than in any formal process of review. His daily sight of hungry men watching others eat remained with him after the three weeks ended. The lasting injury he identifies is emotional: he took their fear and hunger into himself, and says the part of his heart that broke at the sight never healed.

The lockup’s conditions also belong to a wider sequence of Lin’s imprisonment, but the stages should not be conflated. Later evidence places him at Arthur Road Prison, where he learned to remain silent when authorities abused their power. That later lesson does not describe the Colaba lockup’s layout or daily rationing; it does show how the experience of custody continued beyond this overcrowded facility. In Lin’s account, the lockup’s ranks, exchanges, and daily privations make confinement a social order as well as a physical one: official custody restricts the men, while unequal resources and prisoner-made rules determine how they endure it.