Snehalata

S. Venkat Ram

DURING a dark period, it was a particularly dark day in the Bangalore Central Jail. It was the 9th or 10th of May, 1976. The news spread in the barracks where we the class ‘B’ Detenues were detained that a very elegant lady prisoner had been brought to the Jail. M. S. Appa Rao was brought there the same day. It did not take us long to learn that it was Snehalata Reddy, Sneha to all her friends. The FIR had been filed against Sneha and Appa Rao in connection with what came to be known as Baroda Dynamite Case. On a couple of days subsequently Sneha and Appa Rao were taken out of the Jail to be produced in the Magistrate’s Court. Appa Rao told us that her application for bail was thwarted finally when the Government detained her under MISA. She spent the same agonising seven months in the women’s barrack of the Jail, which ought to be a place of pilgrimage to freedom fighters.

During her stay in Jail, Sneha suffered the worst form of isolation. Imagine her being confined to a cell while all her adult life she had spent in the company of friends-writers, artists, poets, theatre people, intellectuals, dancers exclanging ideas with them, entertaining them and being entertained by them. The Jail authorities took pains to make her isolation as complete as possible. She who loved trees and birds and all things of beauty so much perhaps never set her eyes on a tree or a bird for seven long arid months. For her who was a stranger to the world of “Rules” “Procedure” and “Proper Channel”, it might have been a Kafakeseqe world. And she reacted to it like a duddite.

She sometimes felt that steps taken by the Jail authorities to make her isolation complete were mean and utterly senseless. On Depavali Day 1976, at Appa Rao’s initiative all of us, her friends in Jail, inscribed our greetings to her and signed our names on a book of poetry. She had loved poetry as few people do. Her husband Pattabi Rama Reddy is a noted poet besides an outstanding new cinema Director. And instead of sending the book to her through number two channel in Jail, we acted as gentlemen and handed over the book at the Jail office with a request to pass it on to her. The authorities kept their word in letter but ingenuously broke it in spirit. They gave her the book after pasting up the page containing the greetings so that she could not know who sent it to her. Imagine her consternation when accidentally the pasted page came loose and she discovered the greetings and all after many weeks. These petty harassments upset her to no end.

Even in the indescribable hopelessness of her condition, she never ceased thinking of others. She had heard that I was in charge of kitchen in MISA ‘B’ Detenues camp. One day a piece of yellowed paper reached me after 2 or 3 days of journey from her cell just across the high walls written in her big bold hand was a recipe for making Dal and Mutton Kurma. I can only imagine how concerned she must have felt about us, how alive the incomparable hostess in her was even in the Jail, to manage to send slips of paper through a channel which she must have hardly known how to operate.

During all these months there were many spells of relaxation of Jail rules for us when we were allowed to take walks in the Jail, which was to us a luxury alternating with vindictive confinement to our compound. which was a great bore. But for Sneha it was isolation in her barrack all the time. Even her interviews were conducted in her cell, though we vainly pressed the authorities to allow her to have her interviews on the common interviews Hall. We had company in Jail and off and on managed to arrange some get together, meetings, games, and so on. But she was never allowed to join us even once. She suffered two near fatal attacks in Jail. Once her daughter Nandana on a visit to her mother had to pick up a big row before a doctor came to see her mother who was gasping for breath. Sneha was twice taken to Hospital outside Jail under medical advice to admit her. But the Government at the last minute refused to allow admission. She was a chronic and severe Asthma patient. Her friends had seen her how she suffered from excruciating attacks. I wonder whether her health would have been so disastrously undermined had she been merely allowed to take walks in the morning and evenings within the Jail away from her stuffy cell. It was miraculous that she did not catch an infection, miraculous that the fatal attack did not occur in Jail. She was often forced to take the same drug or the other to make her artificially brace up for the interviews. She suffered in the loneliness of her cell without a comforting voice near her. In a chance meeting with a convict she said “Appa, I am dying” He was fearfull as he reported it to me. But the Jail authorities went on as if there was nothing to worry, even though some of us protested time and again. It was criminal negligence on the part of the Jail authorities not to have got her thoroughly examined and not to have told her family on the eve of release as to how ill she was. But then I must confess that we too did not know how seriously ill she was.

In Jail, she never ceased fighting for her rights. Reports of her fights and demands reached us always late and always in garbled versions for we had no direct knowledge Once she went on a hunger strike in protest against the cancellation of her interviews as a “punishment” for some alleged ‘misconduct’ on her part. She was said to be defiant, refused to eat and put up a brave fight. We sent advice to her to break the fast. She relented, but not before she won a point. However, we never could see or talk to her in Jail. On some days when we cooked something special or had a programme, the thought of her never left some of us. We sometimes sent her food or fruits. But we learnt much later that she received only portions of what we sent, the rest of it being sucked by the Jail system.
She kept a running battle against the inhuman conditions of her fellow women prisoners. He diary is full of fury and anguish on this account. Poor Sneha, she did not know that all the revolting conditions around her were in accordance with ‘Rules’. Reports were that she fought and wept alternatively, bitterly. No act of hers escaped the eagle sharp eyes of the authorities and no hand of anguish or yearning reached them. She never forgave one female warden for her heartless treatment of women prisoners. I remember this female warden telling me in a chance meeting that Sneha treated her with contempt and hostility. I know this warden and I know Sneha and was not surprised. But Sneha, most of the time singled out officers and officials for attack. For the cruelties of the system for she was a sensitive human being reacting to a situation and not a cold thinker analyzing it. It was the rules, the system and the administrative jungle which sent her to fits of anger. I think she never accepted any of it. I doubt whether any of the detenues rejected the Jail and all that goes it with it so completely and totally.

We felt happy when we learnt that she had been released on medical grounds hardly a month later in the middle of December 1976. It was said that the Jail Doctor, a kind but ineffective man had recorded the opinion that she would die in Jail unless sooner released. When after this, the bureaucracy took months to release her on parole, though the case against her had been dropped. As she was being driven out of Jail, some one caught glimpse of her, she looked at him. The report of that glimpse, that wave and that smile was sweet news to us. We were also told that she had refused to go out on parole, while her comrades were still behind. She was persuaded to go with great difficulty. When she had endless anxiety as to whether her parole, would be extended beyond the one month period The bureaucracy never let her know till the last day, then kept her all tensed up with the night mare of return to Jail haunting her. And then the news of her release came at the last moment. I was myself released a couple of days later on 17th January, 1977. 1 rang her up on 18th morning. She wanted me to join her for lunch that afternoon. I was a little late. She had left for lunch with friends. And then on 20th she rang up my house and left word that I should call her back. I got the message the early evening but then it was one of inexcusable spells of carelessness and my shame and sorrow that I did not ring her up immediately. And at about 8.30 that night Deepa Dhanraj telephoned my house that Sneha had passed away. My son who picked up the phone and heard the message repeated the words with a blank expression. It was some seconds before 1 realized what the words meant. When I reached her house-the place of so many happy memories and exciting moments of bon-homie, there she was laid out on a cot, covered with flowers and with the most serene and calm expression which I had seen on her face. Some-how everything in the house looked changed, The spirit of the house had gone.

(Courtesy: OLYMPUS Magazine)