Living in the Time of Gulfisha Fatima

Gulfisha Fatima was arrested on this day in 2020. She has been jailed since.

Deliberating on movements and barricades, writer and cultural theorist, Brahm Prakash had written in his book, Body on the Barricades, that it is the worker’s strike that changed our sense of time in modern history. Not technology, astrology, horology or movement of sun and stars, but rather it was the slave’s strike that sent the sun to set. It was the workers who put their bodies on the barricades to bring down working hours. Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for ‘what we will’ – these were all brutally fought for with blood and sweat. 

For women though, having to work double shifts between the home and the workplace, the day worked differently. Living curfewed lives, any time for rest, leave alone for ‘what we will’ is encroached upon by the needs and wants of work and familial burden. Feminist struggle has therefore been about breaking free of curfews; of razing the prisons to the ground, and claiming time: time for rest, and more importantly, time for ‘what we will’.

And then, there are Gulfisha Fatima’s poems, written from a cell in Tihar jail, which etch a completely different temporality. 

The criminal justice system itself works to banish people, to strip them of their personhood, and reduce them to just a case number. Banished for five years, Gulfisha writes of time in prison, of endlessly waiting, of desperately yearning to break free. Jailed for registering dissent against this carceral state that intends to criminalise the very existence of people it deems the ‘other’, Gulfisha writes of freedom and unfreedoms, of dark nights and bleak days, of love and longing. She writes to her parents, her friends, her comrades, her beloved. She writes to the court, to this inhumane system that makes farce of judgments, to its utterly indifferent machinations that makes prisoners of persons. Above all, she writes to us, who perhaps remain eons away in sheltered bubbles – all those of us who have been able to move on, all those of us who can afford to leave the battlefield, all those of us for whom living in a small barred cell is unfathomable. 

Growing up in Seelampur, Delhi as a first generation woman learner, for Gulfisha, unfreedom is perhaps not an alien concept. As women, we have all been fighting against shackles in our homes, in our mohallas, in schools, in colleges, in offices, in fields, and factories. All our lives have been about bargaining with cages: cages of norms, cages of ‘morales’, cages of love, cages of protection, cages of paternalism, cages of patronisations.

It has been about walking a tightrope, of reigning in our desires, our voices, our anger, our dreams. Our lives have  been about stealing time – time for ourselves, time for our pleasure, time for dreaming, time for exploring ‘what we will’. It is bearing these experiences, these journeys that Gulfisha thinks of time in prison.

When she goes through trial everyday waiting for her trial to begin, when her days are about gintis and barack numbers and FIR numbers, when she counts the days for mulaqat and court, she converses with Faiz.

Also read: ‘These Walls Around Me’: Gulfisha Fatima’s Prison Poetry

She confesses how she cannot bring herself to have his conviction that it is only a matter of time before she will be free, only a matter of time when these days of despair and gloom, exploitation and oppression will be over. She cannot bring herself to believe, ‘fakat chand roz aur…just a few more days’. Stuck in a limbo of endless time and yet not enough to live, to breathe, she says in this translation by the Free Gulfisha Fatima Campaign,

Listen, Faiz
Do you know,
The difference between
Your wait and mine
Is just
The appointed time
“Just a few more days”
Did you know
Like the gentle breeze
The silent clouds too have nothing to say
When I  Ask them
“how many seasons like this?”
“how many seasons more?”

She writes of stealing time to remember loved ones, to gather strength, to lean on memories to fight another day. She writes how her memories of her loved ones smiling make her feel the skies, how she ‘makes time’ (‘banaye fursat’) to remember their portraits to bring to life her dreams and desires, how they light up the sky like the moon, how the picture comes to life filling the void with sound, helping pass time and armouring her to fight another day. 

In another poem, she poignantly writes of long lonely nights now spent in memories, in feeling left behind, and yet still gathering the strength to believe that perhaps one day she will reach home by dusk. She writes of her school days – the day her father took her to school but brought her back on seeing her tears. She hopes against hope that her tears will now make her father come and take her home again. She writes of history exams when she would keep forgetting the dates, and of now when she forgets everything but dates. She writes of the silence of the four walls, of them finding voice one day only to collapse again to make way for silence. For five years, Gulfisha has been writing. 

 These five years have also taught Gulfisha how the criminal justice system stops time. She writes of the way the court works to exhaust one. She writes of the elusiveness of justice, meant to eat one up. In a system that thrives on killing hope, in a country where over 70% prisoners are undertrial, even waiting becomes resistance. It becomes a battle of outliving one’s oppressors, it becomes a battle of winning against one’s patience, it becomes a battle of exhausting the regime with your resilience.

Also read: ‘Days Become Like a Ladder’: Gulfisha Fatima’s Letters From Prison

So despite the odds, Gulfisha nurtures hope. Despite the statistics, Gulfisha keeps vigil. Despite the system failing her again and again, Gulfisha patiently waits. Court date after court date. Mulaqat after mulaqat. Judgment after judgment. In a ‘secular state’ where people are discriminated against on the basis of their clothes, in a ‘republic’ where mass murderers get enthroned while students are sent behind bars,  in a ‘democracy’ where dissent is criminalised, a ‘sovereignty’ that disenfranchises, kills, disappears its own citizens, a ‘socialist state’ where justice always eludes the oppressed, Gulfisha still refuses to give up. So she writes.

Over the five years, despite the five years, Gulfisha has kept writing. She documents her every thought, her every emotion, her every dream. In a place where time seems to hold no meaning, Gulfisha seems to be racing against time. She writes to keep sane. She writes to retain her humanity that this system is trying to kill with all its brute force. She writes to retain her right to dissent in a system that is trying hard to make her submit. She writes to retain everything that makes ‘her’ her, that this system is trying to strip away, tareekh pe tareekh. Her handwritten letters to her parents and friends are also often accompanied by dried leaves and flowers – little scraps of beauty she finds in the wasteland of Tihar, barrack number 6. One hears she also teaches in jail – the same way she used to at the Seelampur protest site. It is also in these little acts that she sends a bit of herself to the world. Stripped of everything else, this is her resistance. Barred from everything else, this is the way she keeps reminding us to never forget, to never forgive. This is her refusal of this system that cares little for the toiling masses. To the sahib, she therefore, writes (once again, translated by the Free Gulfisha Fatima Campaign): 

On the fifth year of her wrongful incarceration, a social media campaign is asking us to read her poems in our homes, in our classrooms, in our mohallas and on the streets, to circulate recordings of those readings and demand her release from April 9 to 16.

Gulfisha had set out to the Seelampur protest site as a first time protestor. Growing up in an area where ‘development’ hardly comes, an area that hardly existed in our political registers before the anti-NRC-CAA protests, an area where law and order only exists to penalise the residents, Gulfisha’s poems grow out of these experiences and become lessons on temporality and resilience, about women’s struggle to steal time, about the prisoners negotiations with time, about the women political prisoners’ struggle to both make time as well as to break free of the time loop.

Above all, the poems pointedly ask, are we doing enough to keep Gul’s faith, are we going to be able to look her in the eye and say it truly is but ‘chand roz aur, meri jaan, fakat chand hi roz (a few days more, my love, just a few days more)…’?

Jhelum Roy is a PhD student at Jadavpur University in Kolkata.