I Have Been To Prison: Part 2

(This is Part 2. Read Part 1.)

When I came to, I was already in the police station, with a policeman smiling a tobacco stained smile at me. He looked vaguely familiar.

“So,” he said, “you like to steal bricks, eh?”

“Bluh?” I asked.

“See, this is an unusual case – and I don’t even know why your college brought you to me. Maybe they were influenced by the film Slumdog Millionaire and its depiction of policemen as people who will just take anyone and put them in jail and torture them for no reason. But anyway, judging by this thick file here containing witness reports, your college really doesn’t like you.”

He threw the file at me, and I opened it. The basic statement of all the witnesses’ reports was that I thought I was just too great and needed to be taught a lesson.

“So,” he was saying, “you’ll have to spend some time in jail.”

Holy shit, I thought to myself. I decided quickly to also say it out loud: “Holy shit, man. Jail?! So you’re just like those policemen in Slumdog Millionaire then?”

“Did I give you any other impression?” he asked, sounding genuinely surprised. “I thought it was a great film. Very gritty and realistic. But they did miss the good side to us policemen though.”

“Oh there’s a good side now?”

“Yes. See, I’m giving you two ways of dealing with this: one, you spend some time here in jail, or two, you just, like, you know…”

“What?”

“Feej,” he said and then smiled widely. Oh yes, that’s where I remembered him from. Years ago, when I had to get the police verification done for my passport, I had to deal with this very same man, who even then demanded his fees – or, as he called it, ‘feej’, which is a word that I shall use from now for the distinctly dishonest connotation it possesses.

There was very little doubt in my mind that the only reason he was actually going through all this for an admittedly petty offense was that he had already been paid feej by the college; and that feej had no doubt come from the feej that they were paid by spineless students in the form of donations. And now, he wanted feej from me. This harmonious yet dastardly chain of corruption got to me, and I realised that it depended on my actions to keep it going.

The last time, I had paid his feej, and I regretted it ever since.

Not this time.

“Unless what you mean by ‘feej’ is me kicking you in the groin and running away, you’re not getting any from me.”

And that’s the story of how I ended up in jail.

When one is in jail, one acquires a great deal of life experience and new understanding, two impressive features that, I’m sure you’ll agree, practically scream out for an outlet in the form of a blog.

Thus you see, the posts that follow shall be adorned with my jail-acquired insights, that you will most likely not get from anywhere else.