SURPRISING ENCOUNTERS

​Sitting in the Director General’s office in the Department of Prison Management, we weren’t offered tea until my nervous sweat had inched its way down the entire distance of my spine. We were told we’d never be sitting here. We were told that even if we did sit here, on this posh couch shared with two ex-prisoners, in this uncomfortably large office, that we wouldn’t get what we came for. Each question we answer is followed by silence and scribbling. A man walks in… two others follow; they look us up and down, exchange some words in Nepali, a language we don’t understand.

We’re told to go downstairs. After two failed attempts into rooms full of men pointing us back to the door, we’re handed a stack of sealed envelopes with a stamp and some Nepali scrypt we only hope indicates the official documentation we think we’ve just received. Soon, I’d get used to these silent meetings where hopeful eyes were met with suspicion. This was the first step to each and every visit to prison.

I’m not quite sure precisely what I had imagined prisons in Nepal to be like; but I can certainly tell you what I didn’t expect.

I didn’t expect babies in prison. I didn’t expect to see them brought in, and I didn’t expect to see them taken out. If someone told me that within this short month of research, we’d sit in a taxi with five children aged two to twelve on our laps with their heads out the windows as they saw the world beyond the walls of their mothers’ prison for the first time; that I’d have to come to terms with the fact that there were still six more children left inside; that I’d see a three year old boy transferred back to prison to spend the night with his mom after his daily 5-hour glimpse of a pseudo-typical childhood, in a daycare that consisted of only himself; that for nearly every visit, we’d be accompanied by a 3-month-old who has seen the inside of more prisons than you could count on her tiny fingers and toes, and whose adoptive mother would pass her around without the slightest hesitation to meet nearly every guard or prisoner we interacted with; if you had told me these things, I wouldn’t have believed you.

I didn’t expect sunlight and gardens inside the walls guarded by expressionless men with guns half their size. Bunnies as pets, as companions, as creatures to bless and protect, smile and laugh with, never crossed my mind as something the prisoners would have. Interviews interrupted by a meowing cat, calling our attention to the man made barrier of steel that made them different from us as it slipped through the bars.  Who’d anticipate that? To be greeted with song and dance in one prison, after the stares and silence of another. Those very stares and that very silence were unexpected, too -- they told the stories of promises unkept.

I didn’t expect the line between the innocent and the guilty to be so blurry and hard to define. I didn’t imagine the words to be so hard to find when confronted with the reality of the circumstances these women were born into; of which held them captive long before they were put behind bars. I didn’t expect their stories to be so consistently rooted in the fact that they were born female.

I didn’t know what overcrowded would look like, smell like, or feel like. I didn’t expect to see so many people. People whose identities were more than the orange jumpsuits I had seen on tv. Personalities expressed not only in faces, but in jewelry, makeup, painted nails, colorful saris, salwar and kurta. I didn’t expect these prisoners to call me “didi” or to offer me coffee.

I didn’t know what corruption and a lack of infrastructure looked like until I stepped foot into my first prison.