We don’t have time to waste. You are to return to jail this month, at the end of your interim medical bail. So, I must get to it:

Media reports say that you are suffering from rheumatoid arthritis. Have your doctors told you yet that this disease never fully goes away? I looked it up. Mayo Clinic showed me a photograph of obscenely crooked fingers and said that “rheumatoid arthritis happens when the immune system attacks its own body's tissues”. Does it make sense? Think of it like you are being hurt by what is meant to protect you. Like the state turning against its own people. Or the judiciary impinging upon the very ideal of liberty that it is expected to safeguard.

These websites say that proper treatment can slow the disease progression. That’s something? Although, I’m curious, will they give you adequate treatment for it in jail? Next month, when you go back, will they be able to protect your joints, prolong their functionality, lessen the pain? Indian prisons suffer from an acute overcrowding problem: one doctor for every 775 prisoners, instead of the benchmarked 300, as per the latest India Justice Report. 

Varvara Rao’s health worsened in custody, Stan Swamy’s body eventually gave up, wrecked further presumably by incarceration, and he died. The judges observed, after Stan passed away, that they had deep respect for his work (perhaps, not enough for the courts to have released him before his death, but they did).

Be careful, Mahesh. You aren’t 30 anymore. You are 38 now. Pushing 40, as they say. You were 30 at the time of your arrest. I turn 30 next year. It’s such a complicated age: most of my friends are either getting married or getting control of family businesses, or both. You were like me. You did neither. 

Even though Alpa Shah’s book tells me that your well-wishers really did want you to get married. I mean, back then — when you were free, a Prime Minister’s Rural Development fellow, an activist helping Adivasi communities form village assemblies so that they could assert their rights under the Forest Rights Act, a social-worker loved deeply by those he worked with, “one with the people”. Your friend had told Shah: “They treated him as if he were a member of their own house!” They worried about you too — that you worked too hard and did not take care of your health enough. I bet they worry about you even more now.

It will be cold in November end, when you go back; and you know, how the cold can impact joint pain. It is not just the joints, by the way, that this disease wrecks. It can also damage skin, eyes, lungs, heart and blood vessels. You have to treat yourself against your own immune system’s onslaught. You have to resist the damage caused by the very system that was meant to protect you.

I hope you’re taking care of your mental health, as well. I hope you get to smile sometimes. To exhale. To laugh. Is there anything funny at all about jail?

Oh, wait, you remember how funny it was — when they gave you bail two years ago but never set you free? When the Bombay high court found that the evidence presented against you, did not prima facie suggest that you had committed a “terrorist act” under Section 15 UAPA, but still kept you back. When it noted that you were entitled to bail, but stayed its own order, and then the Supreme Court just kept staying it repeatedly, instead of judging your case for itself. When you nearly came out of jail, but didn’t. Not until your body started going against itself: arthritis eating away at your bones. And then you got to peek out. For a blip.

But hey, now that you’re going back this month — the high court bail order perhaps languishing in a dusty corner somewhere — what do I tell you? What advice do I give? I am studying to be a Doctor in Philosophy but I am no medical doctor. And the internet has woefully limited information. For instance, it tells me that smoking can exacerbate your condition, but it doesn’t say what prolonged incarceration does to those suffering from this disease. It doesn’t seem to answer that for any disease. Maybe if it did, you would have stayed outside for a little bit longer. Maybe Stan Swamy would not have died a prisoner.

Imagine, if after all this, you are found not guilty?

Take care!

Mekhala Saran is pursuing a PhD in Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore. She was formerly a legal journalist.

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