SURESH RAMPHUL
Three women from different generations are in a cramped, claustrophobic cell meant for only two prisoners. Despite the sweltering heat, they share their stories in bits and pieces to overcome their pains and anxieties. They also describe recipes with attention to details to quell their hunger. It helps them to kill time and to put events into perspective. Their stories bind them together. Kinship forms a major theme in the novel (first published in 2001 and in paperback in 2002 by Bloombury, London). To lighten the weight of boredom, they begin playacting and pretend to be training with the possiblility of rebelling, “of getting out of the rut we’re stuck in” (p 55). They run on the spot as if in a marathon, breathing carefully, moving their shoulders to accentuate their stride. This, at least, brings some fun and laughter in their monotonous lives. The novel uncompromisingly examines what people do when they find themselves in an enclosed space. The focus is on the psychological and emotional state of the protagonists. 
Squatting
Leila, about 16 years old, a delinquent girl, was always running into trouble at home and at school. Uncontrollable, her mother wanted her to be taken away till the age of 18. Leila was doing drugs. One day, with her male friends, they ransacked a house. Insulted by a policeman, she attacked him. She beat the other policemen till blood spurted from their mouths. She even bit off one policeman’s ear in a scuffle. The boys are caught; the girl surrenders and is charged with assaulting a policeman with effusion of blood.
Moreover, she was involved in “tilting an insured car down some remote cave in the north and claiming insurance for car theft” (p 210). She ought to have been in juveniles but apparently they do not take offenders accused of wounds and blows. Leila’s father was rejected by his wife for sympathizing with the daughter. She was only a child, he claimed. Zanfan, sa. He began selling pickled cucumber and pineapples with salt and red chilli paste. He built a shack on a State land in Kan Saplon. He stopped taking drugs. The squatters were officially warned to vacate. They chose to ignore the notice. They had nowhere else to go. No one came to help or advise them. Leila’s father helplessly watched his meagre possessions being taken away. He wept and shouted. One policeman pushed him with his baton, swore at him, and even stood “on his toes with his boots” (p 242) and pushed his shield at his face.
Houses were torn “like paper” (p 242). A house he built in 2 months was destroyed in 2 minutes. The squatters were horrified at “years of savings and work crushed in seconds” (p 242). The bulldozer turns out to be a powerful symbol of oppression and repression.
Occupying State land is illegal but treating the squatters cruelly is not the solution. Demolishing their shelters is a way of humiliating them as animals. Politicians often talk about social injustice but their piecemeal measures have never fully addressed the problem of poverty. Every year, as the Audit Report mentions, millions of our rupees are wasted by the ministries. Drastically diminishing wastage of public funds by modernizing our system of management could be one way to channel the money into tackling poverty or squatting.
Planting
Juna is older than Leila. Early one morning plainclothes men called at her place. She resented it, for “They sometimes get at you when you’re still in your pyjamas.” (p 138) They banged on the door to make her feel hunted down. She barred the doorway, telling them she was not the one they were looking for. They pushed past her. She went reeling across the room. As members of the drugs squad, they were arresting her on account of an allegation for planting drugs (not cultivating but placing drugs on someone’s property to set him up).
At the headquarters, a man identified her as Anita. He cooked up a story about Juna plotting with him to frame somebody. She is made out to be a ringleader with lots of money and drugs, enough to make her a drug-trafficker. She protested about mistaken identity but in vain. Her younger brother, Jay, was arrested for cultivating gandia on his front porch. Juna ponders about small offenders getting arrested while the big sharks get away scot free: those who declare war, killing hundreds of people, go free; they “strut around in suits and ties” (p 274). And we have those who make armaments or provoke starvation by lowering wages, sacking people, or closing factories, causing children to suffer. The real criminals are out there creating havoc in society under the veneer of respectability. They will never be arrested. We know why.
Juna was the secretary of a union and had just joined a movement. A case had been prepared against the company for “a slow drift back to slavery” (p 163) and for buying and selling employees. A trade dispute – a threat of a possible future strike – had been declared. They were after her blood possibly to discredit or silence her or simply to suppress dissent. They must have seen her as an obstacle.
Brutality
Roni, Leila and Juna’s friend, is brought to the sick bay of the prison on a stretcher. She has swollen jaws, a lopsided face, black lips, and puffed up eyes. She says she has been beaten by the political arm of the drugs squad. You ask yourself: What connection could there be between politics and the police? It is an incestuous relationship yet we know it exists. It is not the business of the police to brutalize a suspect. Nor is it its responsibility to judge him. We have a Court for this. Police brutality must stop. It is worth thinking over reforming the financing of political parties. There must be transparency. We must know who is financing how much. Dirty money injected into an election opens the door to corruption.
Mama Gracienne, the oldest of the trio, is Chagossian but could not go back; the Americans had taken hold of Chagos. Her daughter, Honey, worked in a factory. One night she died. The doctor recommended an autopsy but at the hospital a blue lady said post-mortem was unnecessary: (1) you never know when the body will be given back (2) the police have not got a case anyway. The blue lady got some hospital doctor to sign a death certificate with “some nonsense for cause of death” (p 182). The mystery of her daughter’s death is overwhelming. She is traumatized. Juna thinks Mama went off her head a bit. So she confessed to killing her daughter. They took her confession for truth and she was victimized as a result of corruption having infiltrated an institution.
Mutiny as a metaphor
In cyclonic weather, two yellow Cape Canaries come to sit on the sill of the women’s cell. Although they stripped the branch of all its leaves to make it less likely to break, their nest is gone. They shiver, desolate and lonely. They are at a loss yet they are together in their adversity. The association of the birds’ plight amazingly and appropriately reflects that of the three women.
From a feminist point of view, the mutiny may be a metaphor for rebellion against all the prejudices, the discrimination, the narrow-mindedness, the unfairness, the injustice, the persecution and the harassment, the biases, without forgetting violence, to which women are still subjected overtly or subtly in the world. A collective effort is needed to stand against all these ills. The mutiny may be about the marginalization of women, and a struggle against a certain patriarchal mindset. It can also be about a quest for freedom.