4
Prose
Escape Plan
Amita Basu
ESCAPE PLAN
By: AMITA BASU
All morning I’ve waited for the sound but when it comes it startles me: wings fluttering below. Fifteen feet of masonry separate us but, with my face pressed to the bars, I can feel the warm downscented breeze. I listen to the pair settling down, picture their rose-pink feet dislodging dried pigeonshit. They start cooing.
Coo, coo. Metronomic, tireless as the drip-drip of water on the scalp of that prisoner who was condemned to death from monotony. These birds could fly anywhere. They fly from the prison’s west façade every morning to its east façade every afternoon.
I scratch another notch in my wallcalendar.
I count the ricegrains I saved from dinner and dried in this morning’s patch of sunshine as it crawled across my floor. Twenty-three. I add them to the dried ricegrains I’ve hidden in the hollowed leg of my bed – not that anyone ever comes in here to clean. I’ve got 3,547 ricegrains. I need more. I’ll only get one chance.
Coo, coo. I always hated pigeons. Only after coming here did I understand why.
I remember pigeons flocking to the birdseed that wiry old jogger in Company Garden used to scatter. In the sun, their throats iridescing blue-violet, they’re almost beautiful.
Sometimes a white pigeon wanders into the dull-gray flock. Do
pigeons recognise a belle, and woo her, as the tourguides on Benaras banks woo a white girl with unbound hair and meatfed shouldermuscles?
Here on the top floor the heat is stupefying. My windowsill is narrow, offering the delicate pigeons no shade. The windows on the lower storeys must be shaded. I wasn’t paying attention when they brought me here: I felt sure I’d be out soon. I remember glimpsing, that smoggy February, a straggling hodgepodge building, half-stone half-brick, the odd pale face peering between the bars.
Coo, coo. Why don’t they get bored? Even mediocre fliers could fly across India, stage by stage. Messenger birds were pigeons. Why don’t these birds fly away?
The bell rings. Footsteps shuffle out to the yard for exercise hour. I used to envy the downstairs prisoners. But can you imagine glimpsing the outside world. then being marched back into darkness? I’m better off here, staring at my square of sky that goes from dark-gray to light-gray, light-gray to dark-gray.
I recount my notches. 109 days left till my tenth anniversary here. I’m planning a little treat.
Ten days beforehand, I’ll start paving my windowsill with ricegrains. Let the pigeons get comfortable, peck-peck, draw them a little closer each day. How tender they smell under their wings, like a puppy slightly moist, like an infant just weaned. On my anniversary I’ll wait till a pigeon swollen with rice turns its back to me to doze. Flashing out between the bars my hand will wring the beastie’s neck. It will peck me, and draw blood, and leave scars.
That’s how I’ll know it really happened, that something’s happened at last, that I’m not trapped in limbo hallucinating one endless day.
END