January-March, 2011
After I was released from police custody I was told by my
new lawyer Caroline that there would now be a waiting period for the police to
officially file their “charge sheet” with the NDPS (Narcotic Drugs &
Psychotropic Substances) court in Mapsa.
This would likely take about 3 months but incredulously there is no set
time limit since I was out on bail. If I
was still in custody then there is a 3 month time limit. Surely they should make a provision for
foreigners on bail whose lives are in a state of limbo. Locals can just go about their business
waiting for this glacially paced judicial system.
The first and potentially longest step is that the “stuff”
was sent off to the Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) in the Goan capital of
Panjim for testing. Obviously if it wasn’t
actually hash then there was no point in continuing with a trial. The lawyer told me that I was lucky in that
any other narcotic except for charas (hash) would be sent to Hyderabad where it
can take up to a year for them to test it!
I think they need some more staff.
She thought the FDA in Goa would take about 3 months to process it. Even this seems ridiculous, it should take
five minutes...just roll one up, smoke it and if you feel a little funny, it’s
charas!
So now I had to wait.
My bail conditions stipulated that I must remain in Goa
unless I had specific permission from the court allowing me to travel within
India and that I must check in at the Pernem police station once a month. On January 22nd, 2011 I drove a
scooter to the police station for my first of many monthly sign-ins. The officers there had a difficult time
finding the sign-in book and in the end they gave me a different one to the one
I had signed each day for the first week that I was out of custody in
December. The officer opened the book to
the appropriate page and put it down on the desk in front of me. I signed and was starting to close the book to
pass it back when the policeman grabbed it.
I got the sense that he was trying to hide something and then I saw the
cover of the soft back book...and can you believe that it had on it...Bugs
Bunny and some other Looney Tunes characters on it! What a joke.
The day after I was released I spent the entire afternoon in
the same restaurant where I had been busted writing out my ordeal of the past
week on my laptop. During the course of
my mental dump I couldn’t help but notice that at some point while I worked
away, every single table lit up a chillum, a pipe or a joint. What?
That doesn’t seem fair. If the
cops wanted, they could fill the cells every day, but it seems that I was the
sacrificial lamb for the police to set their tone for the upcoming tourist
season. Again, just like a bird dives
down into the sea to scoop up a fish from a school, one guy’s got to end up in
the belly, and I’m the one in the belly.
I had resolved not to smoke any more charas while staying in
India but that didn’t last long. I was
constantly being offered a joint seeing as I was now a bit of a local
celebrity. Obviously it wasn’t wise for
me to tempt fate so I kept declining but late one evening after celebrating a
birthday of a new friend, the restaurant was closed and the lights turned
off. I was sitting at a table lit by some
candles with a couple of the wait staff and a few other foreigners. A fairly full moon bathed the beach in light
and there wasn’t anyone to be seen. One
kitchen staff worker had rolled this cannon of a doobie and passed it to me to
light. I contemplated the situation and
it seemed very safe and in a strange way I felt like I deserved it after all I
had gone through. We could easily see if
anyone was approaching the restaurant and my hut was just 30 meters away out
the back way. So I threw caution to the
wind and started to light the joint...but I lit the wrong end, I lit the filter!?! Incredible.
I had just spent a week in jail for charas possession and I couldn’t
even light a bloody spliff! Yup, the
police had really found the drug kingpin here.
The worker fixed my mistake and passed it back to me. After about five minutes we did spot a couple
of people walking down the beach, in our general direction. “Okay guys.” I said, “There’s no need for me
to be here, I’m off to bed.” I began to
walk through the dark restaurant and whack!
I had slammed my foot into a concrete planter and fell flat on my
face. Wearing only flip flops I did some
nice damage to my right foot, perhaps breaking my little toe. Wow, add injury to insult!
Seeing as I hadn’t seen much of India outside of Goa yet, I
applied in late January to obtain permission to travel to Hampi and Panchgani
on two separate trips. Hampi is a
popular place for backpackers with many temples and crazy rock formations while
Panchgani is a hill station, a good place to paraglide. The lawyer’s fee was 3000 rupees ($60). As instructed by the advocates I booked
return train tickets for these trips in order to show to the court that I had
intention of returning. Well the judge
happened to be on holiday until the end of the month so I had to cancel my
tickets and rebook for a later date. In
the end, my application was granted for Hampi but Panchgani would have to be
sorted out when I returned to Goa.
After a fantastic trip to Hampi, I went to the lawyer’s
office to sign my application for the Panchgani trip. Four days later, once it had initially been
processed by the court, I was told to meet one of the junior lawyers of the
firm I have hired at the courthouse in Mapsa at 5pm. I hadn’t been to the courthouse before so I
was curious to see it. It’s a large two
storey dingy white brick building in desparate need of a coat of paint. Inside wasn’t any better with dull sun faded
yellow walls and cracks in the plaster.
I met Vijeta upstairs in a short hallway that split and led to two
different courtrooms. She passed me the
application and told me to take it to the police station to get it signed by
the inspecting officer (I/O) Sachin Narvekar, the guy who had falsified the
reports of the amount that I was caught with.
Then I was to return it to the lawyer’s office in Mapsa. What Vijeta did not explain to me was that
all of this had to be done before 10am the next day so that it could receive
the final approval from the court.
What? How can this legal system
be so monolithically slow in most respects and then demand this kind of rapid
action?
Needless to say, the application had to be resubmitted and
once again I cancelled my train tickets for Panchgani. Thankfully the Indian Rail company doesn’t
charge much for these cancellations. I
eventually received permission for the trip but not after having scootered two
times to Pernem and five times to Mapsa, both around half an hour away from
Arambol Beach in opposite directions.
On arriving to Panchgani, I went to the police station to
check in as instructed by my granted application from the court. Due to slim timing, I didn’t have the latest
copy of the application but a copy of the previous one which was identical but
with older dates on it. Well this threw
the police officer for a loop. He spent
about ten minutes searching through his tourist sign-in book, which isn’t for
cases like me but is in fact for tourists staying in guesthouses who are
registered with the police. I told him
twice that I wouldn’t be in that book as I had just arrived the night before
but then thought I’d better shut up and let him do his useless search. He then said I hadn’t been in Panchgani last
week (d’uh) but wouldn’t let me sign in any book. He told me that I would have to have Andre the
manager at the Eco Camp (where I was staying) bring a copy of my passport and
his form to be officially signed in. I
told this to Andre when I got back there and filled in the form, gave him a
copy of my passport and visa and he went into the police station later that
morning...problem solved.
Unfortunately in Panchgani I crashed my paraglider and ended up spending 11 days in a small
hospital in a town called Wai (pronounced “why”!?!). I had compressed a disc in my back and there
was no way that I would be able to take the 2 hour taxi and 5-6 hour train ride
back to Goa for some time as I couldn’t even get out of bed at this point.
Oh India, you seem to really love me. Not only is your judicial system keeping me
here but now I was physically confined to this hospital bed. Even though I was in considerable pain from
the injury, this was also another very low point for me emotionally. I felt cut off from “my world”. I had no phone or Internet access with which
to communicate to friends and family. My
only one life line was being able to send and receive SMS messages on my phone
from Naomi in Israel whom I had met in Arambol a few months before, and that
meant a lot.
I spent a few days trying to get a hold of the lawyers while
lying prone in the hospital. In the end
I was instructed to get a letter written up by the doctor and fax it to
them. I was called up the next day by
the lawyer’s assistant Rebecca at 1:50pm and she told me that this letter had
to be in their hands by 3:30pm in order to be taken to the court. Well what to do? I can’t get out of the hospital bed and
there’s no doctor paging system... I
finally got a hold of the doctor and got the note prepared but then we found
out that the fax machine at the lawyer’s office didn’t work! What?
So we emailed it instead. Another
crazy hurry up and stop.
Once out of the hospital I remained in Panchgani
recuperating for week before being physically strong enough to endure the trip
back to Goa. Once back I checked in at
the Pernem police station and yet again I signed the “cartoon” book...too
funny. Nice official documents guys!
During April I continually asked the lawyers if they had
heard anything about the charge sheet.
After numerous calls and text messages, I finally received this reply
from Caroline: “The officer told me the analysis report was not received. He said he would file immediately on
receipt. We can write a letter to FDA
department if you will take it to Panjim asking whether analysis is done and if
not why not.”
In India there’s an Act called the “Right To
Information”. Essentially anyone can
write a letter to a government body and they have 30 days to reply to the
inquiry. I scootered to Mapsa and Vijeta
showed me the letter she had drafted up.
I was planning to physically take it to the FDA office in Panjim but she
suggested that she could just mail it and it would be there tomorrow. I hadn’t been to Panjim and wasn’t looking
forward to trying to find the FDA in a likely confusing Indian city so I agreed
to her idea...which turned out to be a silly thing to do...more on that later.
Trying to exercise all of my options, I called Karen at the
UK Consulate to see if she could put a little pressure on the police to hurry
up with the charge sheet. She spoke to
Sachin and found out that they were still waiting on the test results from the
FDA. Unfortunately the embassies cannot
do a whole lot in this situation. They
cannot influence the local judicial system or get any special treatment for
you...as their “helpful” little pamphlets tell you.
Around this time I found out from Caroline that the lawyer’s
fees for my case, which is considered an “intermediate” amount (100 grams to 1
kg of charas is considered an intermediate amount) would be 150,000 rupees or
about $3000. Okay, no small change but
thankfully I could handle that. She also
told me that their office shuts down for the month of May due to the hot and
sticky weather that precedes the monsoon season. So I might as well get out of Dodge...I
worked on a new travel application to go up to Manali in Himachal Pradesh, in
the north of India, for the month of May, hoping that when I returned that the
Charge Sheet would be ready...again, how naive Dave.
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