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Once you are handed over, Tihar begins its six hours of prisoner processing. We walked from the police bus to the big gate with the small door that you have to crouch to get through. I had three stitches on my left arm and a limp from a cut on the sole of my right foot. The cotton and gauze that were wrapped around it had started falling apart. We were seven out of the eight men in the JNU14. The women had been taken for a medical checkup, and the eighth man, Vishnu Tiwari, due to it being his second time in Tihar, was sent to another prison block altogether. He smiled as he was taken away.

We were ordered to discard all personal effects: belts, house keys, loose change. These were to be hung on the iron fencing outside the gate, along with the many other rusted house keys and weathered belts. Except for the loose change, which goes into the guards’ pockets. By this point, despite the two long days of abrasion with the police, the seven of us were still in high spirits. We were hoping for a short stay, and after all these years, I thought I would be more prepared.

Processing is designed to humiliate and prepare you for life inside. Most of it involves waiting in a line in the hallway with other would-be inmates. Two lines were going in opposite directions. That day’s intake and release. The ‘release’ line stood across us in the hallway with markedly different emotions. Through the iron grill, we could see a giant mural of a canal in Venice painted on the wall. 

Some of us hadn’t eaten a full meal since the protest the day before. The food was served on the floor, on two plates for seven people. We hunched around it and ate quickly. The food came from what seemed like the mess intended to feed the prison staff. Through our jokes about prison food, we slowly realised that this would be the last meal we would recognise as food for the duration of our stay.

Processing involves confirming your identity over and over. You are questioned at one station and then another and then another. Names, addresses, affiliations, insults, names again. One by one, we were forced to squat on the floor to answer. You were hit for non-compliance. The floor felt cold on the skin. Someone was asking questions. The floor had a crack in it shaped like a river delta. Someone was asking questions. The crack ran from near the left boot of the man ahead of me to somewhere under the table. The questions continued.

We were stripped at two different points. First, in the medical room with the prison doctor and two guards. We were made to stand in a line with our foreheads leaning on the back of the person in front of us, and asked to strip one by one. We were probed for injuries. Evidence of what was done to us already before we arrived. We laughed at each other once it was done. The second was a strip search for contraband, which requires squatting five times, to make sure the body doesn’t contain anything other than itself. There was an unusual number of Tamil policemen in charge of intake, but my attempts at small-talk in broken Malayalam-Tamil were met with stonewalling.

At night, when the formalities ended, we were brought into the main compound of Prison No. 4. We were greeted by a giant statue of Buddha in the lotus position. It was surrounded by well-tended gardens and high walls. Here we were assigned our specific ward and barrack. They write your number on the palm of your hand with a ballpoint pen.

Of the seven of us, Nitish, former JNUSU president, and I were placed in Ward No. 1, though in separate barracks. This meant we would see each other during the six hours of yard time permitted each day. The five other comrades were distributed across five different wards, in which they were to spend the rest of their time alone, cut off from the rest........

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