Page 355 - Leadership in the Indian Army

glass. There were no curtains either, which meant the Talib guards who

roamed the courtyard had an eyeful of the interior of the cells. Some of
the women complained that the guards smoked outside the window and

leered in, with their inflamed eyes and wolfish smiles, that they muttered

indecent jokes to each other about them. Because of this, most of the

women wore burqas all day and lifted them only after sundown, after the
main gate was locked and the guards had gone to their posts.

At night, the cell Mariam shared with five women and four children was

dark. On those nights when there was electrical power, they hoisted
Naghma, a short, flat-chested girl with black frizzy hair, up to the ceiling.

There was a wire there from which the coating had been stripped.

Naghma would hand-wrap the live wire around the base of the lightbulb
then to make a circuit.

The toilets were closet-sized, the cement floor cracked There was a
small, rectangular hole in the ground, at the bottom of which was a heap

of feces. Flies buzzed in and out of the hole-In the middle of the prison

was an open, rectangular courtyard, and, in the middle of that, a well

The well had no drainage, meaning the courtyard was often a swamp and
the water tasted rotten. Laundry lines, loaded with handwashed socks

and diapers, slashed across each other in the courtyard. This was where

inmates met visitors, where they boiled the rice their families brought

them-the prison provided no food The courtyard was also the children's
playground-Mariam had learned that many of the children had been born

in Walayat, had never seen the world outside these walls. Mariam

watched them chase each other around, watched their shoeless feet sling
mud. All day, they ran around, making up lively games, unaware of the

stench of feces and urine that permeated Walayat and their own bodies,