December 7th, 2010
* Note that some names may
have been changed.
“You want to roll one first before we get ready for dinner?”
Daniel asked me in his French accent as I sat down to join him at the candle
lit table on the sandy beach an hour after sunset.
“Sure.” I responded, not really reflecting on the fact that
this would be the first time in the two weeks that I had been on Arambol Beach
in north Goa that I would actually be rolling a joint out in public. Up until this point I had played it safe and
reserved these activities to the safe confines of my beach hut which was only
about fifty meters away from the table we were sitting at. I had met Daniel and his girlfriend a week
prior in this restaurant, The Olive Garden, which had become my regular hangout
spot.
Arambol Beach is one of many beautiful sandy beaches that
line the tiny state of Goa, the smallest in India. Lots of foreigners travel many miles to soak
up the sun, play in the surf and relax.
One can take yoga classes, have a cheap massage and of course there’s a
certain amount of partying although Arambol is one of the quieter spots. I chose to visit to Arambol due to the fact
that one can paraglide on a small ridge by the beach.
After my first few days in Goa it became obvious that along
with imbibing alcohol, many visitors partake in smoking hashish, known in India
as “charas”. On the first night that I
arrived at the beach I met some young Norwegian women in the Olive Garden who
were kind enough to invite me to their table for an evening of drinks and laughs
while playing cards. I was a bit
surprised that a few of them openly smoked joints in the beach restaurant but
this seemed to be norm, at least later on in the evenings. Actually, over the next few weeks I
witnessed, and smelled, people smoking at all times of the day. I decided however that I would be cautious
and only smoke outside my hut, away from the beach...except this one time, and
that would prove to be a big mistake.
On this evening, the sun had set, the stars were out and Daniel,
Marie and I sat at a candlelit table out on the beach. I was carrying with me a copy of “The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” that I was trying to finish reading before
heading off to my next Indian destination as I desperately wanted to shed
whatever weight I could as my pack, with my paraglider was already plenty heavy
enough. I complacently began to roll a
joint on the table, slightly shielded by my big book. All of a sudden someone lurched out from the
dark, stamped their hand down on the rolling paper and turned away from the
table yelling. I was flabbergasted. “What the hell are you doing?” I
thought. I looked up incredulously at
the culprit. It was an Indian man in his
late twenties wearing some raggedy looking clothes and a toque (a woollen cap)
which seemed a bit unnecessary as we were sitting comfortably in our
shorts. After a second or two I realized
that he was a plain clothes cop, yelling back for some other officers and my
heart began to race and my face felt flush.
I tried to pull the rest of the hashish out of my shorts’ pocket but
wasn’t able to do it fast enough before he saw me.
Two other men
appeared, also in civilian clothes.
“Stand up!” one of them barked.
“Empty your pockets on the table.”
I complied, placing my wallet, my passport and the small lump of hash
that I had just purchased ten minutes earlier on the table. Daniel was instructed to do the same but he
was clean and they left Marie alone. Ten
grams is called a “tola” and is the standard, smallest amount sold in Goa, like
a case of beer, and this is what I had in my possession. I had been idiotic in not returning to my hut
and disposing of the majority of the hash prior to sitting down and starting to
roll. It was just silly complacency.
“Where did you buy?” one officer asked me in slightly broken
English. My heart was racing and it
probably didn’t help that I’d had imbibed a three large beers already at this
point in the evening. What do I
say? The guy in question was actually
standing just ten feet behind me; he was one of the waiters of the
restaurant. I had asked one of the
Norwegian women from the first night where they had sourced their hash and this
waiter had obliged them. He wasn’t a
big dealer of any sort, but just helped out some customers while supplementing
his meagre wages from waiting tables.
Over the past few weeks I had become friends with this young, slim yet
slightly muscular twenty year old from the northern state of Himachal Pradesh
with slicked back hair and a thin, wispy goatee. I wasn’t going to rat him out.
In my 39 years on this planet I’ve had very few run-ins with
the police. My worst one was when I was
16 and some friends and I were caught climbing on the high school roof of the
small prairie town I grew up in. We were
intoxicated but didn’t catch any flak for that, just the trespassing. Each of us ended up with having to do a day’s
community service as our punishment, mine being vacuuming out the ventilation
ducts of the school. Other than that, I
can only claim having a couple of traffic tickets, both back when I was in my
teens and early twenties. So dealing
with police is not exactly one of my fortes.
“I bought it from an Indian guy in his mid-twenties, in the
afternoon on the main street.” I figured
being vague was the best bet.
“What did he look like?”
“Umm, brown skin, brown eyes, black hair...and, uh, blue
jeans.” I threw in that last attribute
in an attempt to loan some credibility to my fable.
“Okay, let’s go and see if we can find him. If we do, you won’t be in trouble.”
I picked up my wallet as the officers confiscated the charas
and my passport. As I sheepishly left
the table with the officers, I turned back to Daniel and told him to enjoy my almost
untouched beer, words that I guess haunted him for the next week as he knew
that it could just as easily have been him who had been apprehended since he
often rolled and smoked spliffs on the beach.
We walked the few hundred meters down the beach to the main road,
passing by many beachside restaurants.
Strolling up the road I swivelled my head from side to side in my fake
search for a non-existent dealer. As we
rounded a corner Manu, the manager of the Olive Garden, passed by on his
scooter. He slowed down, asking me if I
wanted a lift as he was unaware of my situation. “I sure would like a ride.” I thought but
obviously had to decline his kind gesture.
By this point I figured that the cops would be asking me to
pay some baksheesh which is the Indian term for a bribe which is not only used
for escaping from trouble with the police but also in any and all dealings with
various levels of government and sometimes even private industry. Want a wedding certificate quickly? Pay some baksheesh. Want a phone line installed this week? Pay baksheesh. I would later find out that policemen even
pay baksheesh to their superiors in order to get the tourist beach beats as
they could then supplement their meagre wages with bribes from
foreigners...sad.
I figured I would pay my “fine” of a couple thousand rupees
($40) and be on my way back to the restaurant.
It didn’t really cross my mind that I should ask them if I could pay to
be set free, I assumed they’d ask me when they were ready. In my home country attempting to bribe a
policeman would land you in more trouble so I didn’t want to initiate the deal
myself. But then all of a sudden we were
at a small police outpost, a ramshackle two or three room building tucked away
from the main street that I wasn’t even aware existed in Arambol. Oh shit.
The inside of the outpost resembled a dishevelled cadets’
dormitory than a small police station.
Clothes were strewn about. Stacks
of tattered papers occupied most level surfaces of the shoddy tables and
cabinets. I was instructed to sit down
on one of the cots while we waited for some police officer to arrive from a
small town called Pernem, about 20-25 kilometres away. Half an hour later a tall man in the standard
light tan brown uniform of the Indian police force entered the building. Not surprisingly he was sporting a thick
moustache and small but pronounced pot belly, both common attributes of many
Indian men. I would later learn that the
two silver stars on his epaulette indicated that he was a sub-inspector. After briefly conversing with the arresting
constables and examining the booty they had collected from me, he approached me
and began asking me some questions: “What is your state? (meaning my nationality) Where are you staying? Where did you buy this charas? What did the dealer look like?”
I repeated what I had told the other policemen but then he
asked a new question: “Do you have any more stuff back in your hut?” I felt an instant flush of heat run over my
face as my heartbeat sped up. I
did. But such a small piece, that’s why
I had bought some more. What do I
say? What are my rights here? Can they just search my place? In those split seconds I opted for honesty,
perhaps that will build some trust with him.
“Yes I do. I have a
small amount of charas in my hut.”
“How much?”
“About the size of a pea” I responded as I held up my
forefinger and thumb to demonstrate the minuscule amount I was talking about.
“Okay, let’s go take a look” he said as he motioned me to
stand up. I was led out of the outpost
with the three arresting constables and the officer. We cut through to the beach on a darkened
path to the hut I was staying in behind the Olive Garden restaurant. I nervously unlocked the door and all five of
us crowded into the abode. I pulled the
tiny bit of hash out of a drawer and gave it to the sub-inspector. “Oh, that’s nothing” he said which gave me a
bit of relief. Strangely they took a few
minutes to figure out that my pack of Drum tobacco was indeed tobacco. Haven’t you guys seen rolling tobacco before?
Then the officer asked me for a piece of
paper and pen and began to sketch the layout of my hut, even noting the type of
plywood that was used for the floor.
Huh? What’s that for?
“Pack a small bag.
Take your laptop and anything else of value” the officer informed me, as
my heart sank in my chest realizing I’d be spending my first ever night in a jail,
and it would be an Indian one.
As we began to walk back to the outpost, one of the officers
took a detour off to another restaurant on the Beach called Coco Loco. I saw him briefly interact with some tourists
at a table and then he joined back up with us on the main road as we climbed
into a police jeep with me sitting in the back on a bench with two constables
sitting across from me. As we began to
drive on the dark windy roads, the cop that had made the detour on the beach
passed a small red velvet bag with a draw string up to the sub-inspector. He opened it and out fell a small chunk of
hashish, just a bit smaller than the one I had.
What?!? Why didn’t you arrest
that person? Or better yet, why didn’t I
get the option to pay?
The drive seemed to go on forever and I had no clue where we
were going. In reality it was only 25
minutes but my mind was racing. What was
in store for me now? One of the officers
in the back could see my consternation and kept reassuring me that everything
would be alright. Easy for you to say
buddy...easy for you to say.
The jeep pulled up to a dimly lit one storey building. A small set of stairs led up to the front
balcony which ran the full length of the decrepit structure. The main entrance was a set of old wooden
double doors through which I was led inside by the officers into a large
rectangular room. Immediately facing me
was a large metallic desk with an old swivel chair on the opposite side and a
long bench running along the front of it.
Along the walls were wooden shelving units stacked with folders with
tattered pieces of paper sticking out. A
few officers, some in uniform, some not, glanced up at me as I walked in before
returning their attention to the cricket match playing out on the small TV
beside the doorway.
“Sit.” That was the
only instruction I received for the next hour.
I sat with my back to the desk, looking out towards the open
doorway. My focus alternated from the
cricket match on the television to the silent street outside lit by a single
faint street light. I watched as a
couple of cows pushed at each other with their foreheads in an attempt to
establish their dominance.
Eventually the sub-inspector reappeared from another office
and sat down in the chair behind the desk.
“Don’t worry” he began. “This
happened to an Israeli foreigner a little while ago and after one night he was
released and very soon after he was back in his state.” His state? I wondered, oh right, his country. “What you had is not a big deal.” He started filling in the seemingly never
ending paperwork for my arrest. He
collected some details from my passport but then peppered me with a barrage of
questions: What is your father’s
name? What is your address? What is your profession? How long are you staying in India? Where did you buy the charas?
On the last question I repeated the simple story that I had
told the arresting officers. The
sub-inspector, whose name I could see on his tag on his shirt was Sachin,
scribbled down all of the details as he proposed that tomorrow we would head
back to Arambol to find the dealer, and perhaps others. Umm...okay, well that will be a waste of
time.
He left again for at least an hour and I lied down on a
bench on the other side of the room in a state of disbelief. Staring up at the ceiling I was a bit
disturbed by what I saw. There were
hundreds of colourful strips of paper 3-4 inches long and about an inch wide
hanging down. They formed a canopy of an
orange swastika on a white background with red and green trim around the
perimeter. What the hell is a swastika
doing here? I hadn’t been in India long
enough to know that this sign, which many from the west simply equate with the
evil Nazi regime, is in fact a religious symbol and has been for thousands of years
and ironically means “to be good”. I
wish I knew that at the time.
One of the junior officers asked if I needed to use the
toilet. He led me through a door at the
backside of the room down a covered L-shaped walkway. He unlocked one of two jail cells on the
right hand side, pushed the creaking door open and motioned to a door at the
back of the cell where I would find the Indian style squat toilet; little did I
know at that time that this room would become my home for the next eight days.
When Sachin returned he asked if I was hungry and I sure
was. It was almost 11 o’clock now, three
and a half hours after I was arrested and I hadn’t had dinner. A junior officer was sent off to fetch some
food and he returned with a few plastic bags.
Inside one bag was some vegetable fried rice and the other was a soupy
red sauce of chicken chow mein although there was no sign of any noodles. There were no utensils and knowing that in
India it was customary to eat with your bare right hand I figured no spoon or
fork was forthcoming. I fared okay with
the rice but how I was to deal with the runny contents of the other plastic bag
was beyond me.
It was after midnight and three policemen began
playing cards to quell their boredom on a table near me. Seeing as my mind had been racing for the
past four hours about my dire situation, I decided to watch their game to try
and distract my brain. It worked for a
while and although the guy who kept winning was being friendly to me and trying
to explain the game, I couldn’t help my thoughts from falling back to the
evening’s events and from wondering why I was being made to sit around in the
station’s main room for hours on end.
Fatigue was catching up on me and one guy instructed me to lie down and
sleep. I was reluctant but eventually heeded
his advice. Not ten minutes later, near
2am, I was woken up and led to the cell for the night. This little catnap now made it all that more
difficult to fall asleep in the locked up stinky bare and dirty cell...damn, it’s
going to be a long night.
