Then....

I went back to my cell and ran into Fatima on the way there. She saw me and immediately came over to talk to me.
“Hey, Mexican, what’s your lawyers name?” - Dawar, I said. Rajeev Dawar. –
Her face turned a light shade of oh shit. Then she said it, “Oh, shit. You have to let him go. He got a girl convicted last year after taking all her money.- You have to tell your embassy to find you new guy”. I was getting it from all angles today. Now my lawyer was the shittiest lawyer they had in Delhi. I kind of figured that from the time he made me sign my own arrests warrant at the police station by telling me it was standard procedure. I had to do something, I had to get my eyebrows under control and I had to communicate with Mr. T and it all had to be done soon. Especially the eyebrows and the stash, those had to go.
That afternoon I ran into Angeli, my sweet warden. What a strange set of words. They almost don’t go together, sweet and warden. Hi, I said, I need to talk to you for a minute please. Sure thing she said and invited me to her office. I sat down in her drab office. She sat at her desk and looked at me with kindness. I started, “I was told my lawyer is not very….honest.” She stared at me and laughed. Really? She said ironically. --Yeah, I guess rumor has it he got a girl convicted after she ran out of money to pay him off with. How can I find another lawyer? Can I do that? Get my own lawyer? -– She looked at me like I was speaking Chinese.
See, the problem in India is you get caught with a person, guilty or not, and you both get tried together until the end. It is one case. You are accomplices of the same crime. Like my roommates for example, they were both caught at the airport together and only one of them had a fake passport, the other one was straight as Chinese hair. They actually didn’t even know each other. In China, through the newspaper, women find travel companions. This is how they met. Wei spoke no English and therefore needed a travel companion. Hui was young, nice, trilingual had a visa and was heading back to continue her studies in Paris, but she didn’t want to travel on her own so decided to respond to that fateful ad that landed her sleeping next to me in a concrete floor for months. Maybe years. Life is like this.
I could get my own lawyer, if I could prove that the one I had right now was doing nothing and trying to extort me for all I had. And it was true, he had not once come to see me and explain what the heck was going on. I only heard from him through Mr. T’s weekly letters where he always said, “ We need more money to pay Dawar this week ” – So, I said: I can do that. File a complaint. But are there any good honest lawyers in India? Angeli stared at me blankly. Then she said,
“The problem here is you are desperate to get out. If you are not desperate to get out you get out sooner.” – I had to think about that for days.
I actually only understood it not too long ago. That which you resist, persists. If you continue to resist a situation you get stuck in it. The moment you let go, everything flows and you move forward. The issue is that what you resist is on your mind 24/7 therefore you continue creating that reality for yourself. The moment you let go and say, Bah I don’t care anymore. That reality has the freedom to move on to the next phase, to transform. If we understand that, creative energy does not understand yes or no, it only understands intention as an energy source for creation, then we can understand that weather we think about wanting something or not wanting it, the fact is that we are thinking about IT all the same and have energy behind IT all the same. That though or desire has an intention, a very strong one behind it, so it continues to exist in our reality because of that intention. For better or worse.
It kind of made sense the way Angeli explained it on an instinctual level. So I started not caring so much about when I would get out. Maybe the fact that I showed no desperation in front of Dawar would turn him off and make him realize he could not turn me into his personal ATM machine.
So, I had decided this but what about Mr. T? I was stuck with whatever he would decide to do for himself. I had to get this intel to him as soon as I could. But it was Friday, oh glorious unproductive Friday. I wrote him a letter and went back to Angeli right away. She took my letter and without flinching said, consider it done. I know the male prison director. I will see him tonight and give him the letter to give to your associate, husband. Don’t worry so much. She said sweetly, life is like this. Sometimes you are up and sometimes you are down. You take the good with the bad and make the best of it.
Wise words Angeli. That is what life is, a series of experiences. And what we are able to learn about ourselves through these experiences, is what propels us forward into the next level of human conciousness. But at this point I just wanted this to be over and didn’t consider her words wise so much as just condescending. Trying to make good out of shitty. It was actually irritating to hear those words. “Life is like this” I was not going to just give up and grow old in an Indian prison because, life is like this. One day you’re at a Starbucks the next day you’re at a Jailbucks. Fuck that. I was getting out. I didn’t do anything! And truly I didn’t. I wasn’t trying to be like all the innocent inmates. I was stuck in a shitty situation because my boyfriend was too chickenshit to deal with things like a man from the beggining. That was the painful truth. Or at least that’s what I thought. He was too accomodating because his ego told him he would get a good directing gig out of a shit editing one. Looking back it makes no sense. One must never compromise one’s integrity in order to gain something else. It never happens. If you don’t stand for anything you’ll fall for anything. You can’t say “oh I’ll take a little shit now and have Glory later ” Wrong! You’ll never get Glory out of taking shit from anyone. Just like, you’ll never get a paying gig after working for free for anyone. Self love and self appreciattion should never be bargained with in order to attain anything. They are treasures to be protected at all cost.
So, the letter left my hands and was on its way to Mr. T. Now it was up to him to decide if he wanted to join me and fire that awful lawyer his people got for us. I went back to my chuckee it was almost cage time. The sun had gone down and mosquitoes were staring to swarm around all of our un-bathed bodies. I had been there for another week and had not had a shower yet. I looked like Chewbacca and probably smelled like him too. Tomorrow would be my bath / spa / wax day. I couldn’t wait.
Hui, Wei and I were locked in our pad / chuckee for the night. It was lockdown. We gathered our old bollywood magazines and started swatting mosquitoes. We were trapped in a cage with two thousand five hundred and seventy five mosquitoes that waited to feast on our fragile little ethnic bodies. But we were not going to give up without a fight. I was not about to get more dengue injected in me and malaria was out of the question. The fight was on. I started jumping and swatting mosquitoes like they were Indian police. Wei was laughing hysterically. Hui was covering herself from the falling corpses of little tiny Indian insects. It was raining men that night in chuckee number 8. After we were done killing all those intruders we stuffed the remaining pieces of magazine on the border of the cell gate. It looked like a piece of Indian art. Crumpled Indian faces staring at us. It looked like we were being spied on from outside out cell. The damn light bulb was so bright it took me forever to go into dreamland. The rotten smell of feces poured out our private shit hole. All we could do was cover our face and drown in our dreams as fast as we could, just another night in Tihar jail.