say the name they stole

i.
cellular jail
port blair
That is to say: Me

I stand in the cell I died in.
It is my old room of iron and breath — four and a half by two and seven, a slit of vent like a small, tired eye.
I have no name now. Names were stripped and stamped and sent away on boats; mine is sediment in their teeth.
Day visitors come with cameras. They queue like birds, bright in cotton and sun-bleached hair, laughing at things I would not know how to name.
They lock the gates for pictures. They lean on the cold iron and make faces that mean: look at me, look how close I am to death and it is pretty. They do not know what my bones remember of rope and oil and a wooden hammer. They leave bits of themselves behind: a discarded ticket, a sunburn, a smell of coconut oil that once filled my morning.
I watch them pretend to be imprisoned and something inside me loosens. Not joy, that would be a theft, but a small, licit relief: they have the hours I was never granted. They can go outside again; they can simply leave because their country is their own now.
For a moment the world tilts and promises humans can choose to return to the beach. I do not move. I do not know the posture of moving. I have learned to map my life by the shadow of the watchtower that crosses my floor at noon. It does this still. Clocks became a concept for my mouth when the British left and the tourists came and oh. Those eyes. They stop me.
They are ordinary eyes at first: the brown of wet earth, a rim of tired blue under one lid. They are not the eyes of the laughing people. They are careful; they look as if they have been taught to look at things that make them small.
I feel my old heart tighten like a fist. A name comes up from the bottom of me: not mine, but the hand that had the whip, the hand that used it. I have the imprint of it on my back forever. The young boy with familiar eyes looks straight in. He does not smile. He does not take a picture. He reads the plaque as if it were a map to his own bones.
I have watched many kinds of faces: weeping grandchildren, bored schoolchildren, men who dare to kiss in corners where no one kissed for a hundred years. None of them stilled me like these eyes.
I reach — I do not know the verb now — toward recognition. I find only an echo. He turns away. He is walking back toward the sea and perhaps, a resort that smells of jasmine and polite towels. He carries inside him the small, private cruelty of a line of men who slept in better quarters across the water. I can see that he does not yet know how to name his inheritance.

~~~

ii.

munjoh ocean resort - private beachfront luxury retreat
havelock
That is to say: He

He is on holiday. He keeps his passport in the back pocket of shorts that belonged to someone with cleaner hands, and the woman he loves is relaxing. She is at the spa; steam and lotus and an Indian laugh that folds into the curtains. She does not know the ring in his sock, the flat and clumsy plan he has made under airplane lights.
He read the information board on the way in, the brief museum English with its careful verbs: exile, transportation, isolation. He could have read it as weather. He read it and felt the softness of permitted distance. “Eh,” he thought. History drifts like laundry on a rope, and it does not stain his shirt.
But his eyes kept returning. He wanted to hold an apology he had not yet learned to speak.
He is not a hero. He is not a penitent. He is the great-grandson of a quiet man who had a job that required a uniform and a pocket watch and a way to measure bodies here. The letters of that job are small and ordinary. Cruelty sometimes comes without flourish.
He stands at the iron and peers in. He counts the slats, the vent, the footprint of a bed. The lines on his palm whisper that men were put here for years. He imagines his grandfather — a short man with a shaved neck — leaning like that, a cigarette stub tucked behind his ear, peering in to see if the man inside still made noise. He imagines the hollowness of his grandfather’s eyes, eyes that learned to look and not to question. He looks straight at something and it looks back.
He does not see a ghost the way children do in cheap tales. What he sees is absence wearing the shape of a man. It lies as if sleep has been waiting for it for a long time. It does not swell with malice or accusation. It is the neat, gray residue of living that has been sunned away.
For half a beat, the oldness in him, the oldness that was taught in stories and in the tilt of a head at family dinners, tastes iron. He feels, briefly, the possibility of shame. It is a new and vertiginous thing that makes him look down at his hands. He can only be imagining this ghost.
He thinks of the ring again. He imagines kneeling on a carpet that is not dust. He imagines saying small promises and being forgiven by the woman who trusts him. He imagines the flash and gild of a photograph where both of them are smiling.
He takes one more look at the man-shaped absence and, because he has practiced the economy of small comforts, he walks away. He tells himself that this is not his fault entirely. He tells himself his grandfather was only a man who put food on a table. He tells himself the past is heavy and he is not yet the one to carry it.
He does not look back.

~~~

iii.
cellular jail
cell no. doesn’t matter
That is to say: the bricks of kaala paani.

When the great-grandfather peered in, the short man with a cigarette and the outward calm, he saw the body that had been worked thin. He saw wrists with old rope marks and a mouth that had never learned to ask for water in the night. He saw a life measured out in quotas of fibre and oil and, if he squinted, a small, bright defiance.
He closed the gate. He walked back to his tennis court and the smell of baking bread across the channel. He slept. He built a family. He taught his son not to look too long at the things that make you uncomfortable. He taught him manners and small evasions. He taught the next to love the smell of jasmine and to hold a pocket watch like a talisman.

~~~

iv.
munjoh ocean resort spa
havelock
That is to say: the girl who is in love and loved. 

She returns in a towel and the light catches her teeth. He pockets the ring he has not bought. He remembers the cell as an image he can keep in his head now, a soft-edged museum memory that will go well with the holiday photographs.
He will propose with a laugh in a day or two. He will invent the right line about travel and commitment, about being “brave” together. She will not know he stopped, for a moment, at a gate and saw a man who had never been allowed leave.
She will not know that a small ghost remembered the shape of his grandfather’s eyes. She is beautiful and kind. She has already embraced him. It feels warm. He hugs her back. Tightly. She will not know.

~~~

v.
cellular jail
port blair
That is to say: Me

I remain where I died because that is where the cost of freedom kept me. I have learned the practice of being small. I have learned not to step into the light even when it falls like forgiveness.
They make faces in my hollow for their pictures. They leave like tides. Sometimes they bring flowers. Once a child pounded her palm on my gate and then listened to the echo, as if the echo might answer. It did not.
The man with the eyes walked away. He carried with him the easy air of someone who will ask to be loved and then accept the answer he planned. Perhaps he will learn to say sorry in time. Perhaps he will not.
I do not move. I do not even try. I keep the single fact that I am, and that I saw him look, and that the look was an imperfect key.
If memory is a noose, it is also a rope for hauling things back. I keep both. I will remain here — a small, patient ledger — until the tides forget me or someone decides to open the gate and say the name they stole.