The Prison Book Club (9 page)

“He should have kept the money, then?” Carol asked Gaston.

“Yeah and paid the painter and got his wall built,” said Gaston.

I had doubts about the morality of Gustad keeping the money, but Gaston's mention of the painter demonstrated the kind of attentive reading that Lawrence Hill had talked about earlier in the month. Gaston had clearly got to the end of the book, and recognized that the pavement artist had a certain significance. To me, the painter seemed to be Mistry's symbol of the impermanence of life in India. At Gustad's request he paints a riotously colourful mural of prophets and deities from many religions on the community's boundary wall to discourage passersby from using it as a latrine, yet is unconcerned when wreckers demolish the whole thing.

Dread liked Gustad for different reasons altogether. “He worked and helped his parents pay for his own schooling. And I liked the way he sacrificed himself when a taxi was going to hit Sohrab and he put himself in the way to protect. He's an okay guy.”

Graham was the only one who had nothing positive to say about Gustad, observing that he was “plodding and kind of dumb.”

Many of the other readers in the book club just hadn't been able to get traction in the novel because they had difficulty with the descriptive passages. I could connect with the men's frustration to some degree because I'd had some difficulty with the untranslated Hindi and other words, which occasionally made me feel like an outsider. But for the men, it was more basic. It came down to too much scenery and not enough plot.

“He spent twenty or fifty pages on the chicken,” Graham complained.

An exaggeration, sure, but for Carol, hearing a comment like that was like telling a Hells Angel that he should consider trading in his Harley for a station wagon. She let loose a passionate plea for description as a sensual experience that yanks the reader into another world. The former English teacher in her had seen an opportunity to light a fire and she was going for it. She read aloud to the men Mistry's description of the teeming Crawford Market in the second chapter. As she read, we were immersed in the market's dirt and odours, its floor slippery with animal viscera, the air swarming with flies and the butchers covered in sweat and bloodstains. Carol used her most dramatic voice and hand gestures to make it come alive.

“Do you ever want to buy any meat there, with those flies?” she asked the men. “It's disgusting. Can't you just smell it? Try to enjoy it for this incredible artistry, because it's extraordinarily evocative.”

“It's visual,” allowed one man.

“Yeah, almost 3-D,” said Dread.

Ben got it too, marvelling at how Mistry manipulated the language.

“It's a world that from our sensibility is chaotic, crazy,” said Carol.

But Stan pushed back. “I just found it too self-indulgent, like he was trying to show off.”

Vivid description was okay once in a while, said Winston, speaking for the first time at the book club, but he thought it happened too often in the novel. “You kind of lose the importance of certain events if you over-explain every event,” he said. It was a valid point generally, though I hadn't felt that in this book.

And it depends
what
you're describing. Graham would have been happier with fewer pages on Gustad's chicken, and also less graphic description in the scene where Tehmul, an intellectually disabled man in the neighbourhood, has been rejected by the prostitutes and is found masturbating over a doll that belongs to Gustad's daughter. The scene runs for two quite specific pages, ending with a description of the semen on the doll's body and Tehmul's erection.

“Why was that necessary?” asked Graham. “That was so graphic. He could have done the same by saying the doll was naked.” A few of the men shifted in their chairs but no one added further comment.

“Because even that is so foreign to our sanitized culture here in Canada,” said Carol.

Frank, who had read two other novels set in India—Mistry's
A Fine Balance
and Aravind Adiga's
The White Tiger
—said he admired how Mistry used these odd and sometimes comic secondary characters. “This writer's got a real knack for bringing in characters and threading them through the whole story,” said Frank. “Even the prostitute—he had a role for her down the road.”

I'd been given a copy of
A Fine Balance
years earlier by one of my brothers and had never gotten around to reading its nearly eight hundred pages. But if Frank had read it, I decided it would be my summer reading.

As the men left the meeting I thought about the prison in England that might still be holding the man who had attacked me and whether the summer heat was ever unbearable in the cells there. England was rarely as hot and humid as Southern Ontario in the summer, but any room without circulation can be stifling. I had often done the math to figure out when his eight-and-a-half-year sentence would expire. That summer I realized his time in custody was up, if he hadn't already been released on parole.

I packed up and labelled the last batch of books and looked at my watch. It was late morning, still hours before the afternoon Work Up shift when Graham and Frank might appear. I wouldn't be allowed in the prison cafeteria, of course, so I drove to the centre of the city for lunch at Chez Piggy. After giving the waiter my order, I reached into my plaid satchel and pulled out a letter that Carol had given me. It was a letter Graham had written, with her encouragement, to apply for a volunteer position with at-risk youth because he had hopes of being paroled in the coming year. He was happy for me to see the letter too so I could understand him better. In it, he mapped out many of the devastating events of his life, some of which had led him into crime. They were, after all, his calling card when looking for a position of that type. He argued that he could relate to young people with similarly tough life stories because he'd been there. The letter also said that two of his relatives had been convicted of murder and a number of other family members had criminal records.

“My father was a chronic alcoholic who I personally cared for throughout my younger years,” the letter said. “I would often have to put him to bed, take burning cigarettes out of his hands after he passed out, and go to bars to pick him up because he was too drunk to walk home.”

It must have been a frightening feeling of insecurity. For me, a sensitive person who had grown up in a secure, stable nest with loving parents, I know I couldn't have survived those circumstances.

As the letter went on, he explained that much of the criminal activity he had witnessed at a young age, including drug dealing, was the same type of criminal activity he would engage in as an adult. It started with thefts, break and enters and small-time drug dealing, and gradually escalated to tobacco smuggling, drug trafficking and extortion. In due course, he joined a street gang and then the Hells Angels. It was like hearing someone describe the progression of a drug addiction, starting with marijuana and building to heroin in search of ever more exhilarating highs. But he claimed he had never become addicted to drugs. And maybe that's what saved him. “These experiences have taught me how important families are in helping at-risk youth,” the letter argued. I refolded the paper, put it in my satchel and attacked my salad.

I returned to the prison after lunch, hoping that Graham and Frank might appear. Just as I was about to give up, I heard a heavy footfall in the corridor and there he was: Graham had braved the strike to come and meet me. Frank was close behind him, and would have to wait in the chapel while Graham and I talked.

The chaplain showed Graham and me into the chapel storage room, which was adjacent to the chapel where the book club met. There we could close the door and converse freely, without being interrupted by the hymn-singing next door. Here was a new challenge for me. I could see no security cameras in the room, and the guards sat in a guard station some twenty-five metres down the outside corridor where they could neither see me nor hear if I called for help. I was a little apprehensive. I felt certain that Graham wouldn't harm me, but it took some getting used to—my first time alone in a room with an inmate.

Graham sat on a garish orange stuffed chair that looked scratchy, the only soft furniture I'd seen in the prison. I set up a metal folding chair and placed the tape recorder on a stack of Bibles that I had borrowed from the room's bookshelf and arranged on a low coffee table. Someone had tried to make the table more cheery by covering it with a red chiffon tablecloth. Two four-foot-high plastic religious statues stood watching us: Jesus and Mary, with identifying notes taped to their chests:
Chapel Jesus
and
Chapel Mary
, presumably so they could be returned to their rightful place if they went missing. Chapel Jesus had one hand broken off. Chapel Mary had a gentle face and jewels at the neckline of her garment. The rest of the room was filled with guitars, music stands, keyboards and sets of Bibles and other religious books.

Graham was angry about the double-bunking plan and wanted to talk about it up front. “There's already fights over the number of phones. There's problems over seating in the cafeteria, over there being enough supplies in the canteen, program spaces, school spaces. They're talking about adding another twenty, twenty-five bunks for every unit. That's an increase of 25 percent in your population.” He talked about the risks of sharing space with another inmate who might bring in contraband or might have enemies in the prison. I couldn't imagine even being able to fall asleep in that situation.

I commented on his nerve in crossing the yard to see me. He seemed genuinely surprised. He'd been through worse, he said. “You've read my biography, right?” he said to me as I sat down with him for our chat. I nodded. “I'm still in one piece,” he said.

I told him I had read his letter and expressed my sympathy for what he had gone through as a child. “There are others who went through similar things,” he said, “and they made better decisions than me.” His answer struck me as noble. I was too reticent to take him up on his implicit invitation to speak frankly about the childhood he'd described in his volunteer application. Not yet. I wanted to get to know him better first.

I asked him to cast his mind back to his exposure to books growing up. He couldn't recall whether his parents had read to him. How empty that feeling must have been. I remember many happy evenings as a child cuddled next to my mother as she read storybooks in both French and English: the Babar books by Jean de Brunhoff, the Madeline books by Ludwig Bemelmans, the Beatrix Potter series,
The Hobbit
and others. But Graham did have memories of participating in reading drives in public school. He wasn't an avid reader, preferring baseball, soccer and video games. Then in high school, the books that left an impression were
Animal Farm
,
The Catcher in the Rye
and
To Kill a Mockingbird
.

As an adult in prison, his reading taste ran to non-fiction. He read history and biography for pleasure, when he wasn't studying legal materials. And he'd formed a good relationship with Clive, the prison librarian, who had given him a book to read by the French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault,
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
. The book's discussion of the design similarities between schools, hospitals and prisons intrigued him. But now the book club had sparked an appetite for fiction. He said he had a copy of
Lord of the Flies
next to his bed.

A few beads of sweat had appeared on Graham's forehead. It was only twenty-four degrees Celsius outside, but inside the room the heat seemed to bounce off the walls and intensify, like a convection oven. The open window and the fan made no difference to the oppressive Mumbai-like conditions, like those in
Such a Long Journey
. As always, I kept my wool jacket firmly buttoned up, and so I was feeling it too—a runnel down my spine.

“I'm wondering, have you ever looked on the internet for Frank and me?” he asked, wiping his brow. I think he was wondering if I really knew what he was capable of. I told him I'd started to do that one evening, but hadn't found much. Later I did spend more time researching him and discovered he had been a high-profile crime figure from Western Canada who'd been caught in a police sting. A man he'd been extorting turned out to be a police agent wearing a wire.

“I understand that you were involved in drugs and the Hells Angels … and extortion.”

“I was a member of the Hells Angels. Convicted of extortion, yes. A whole array of charges.”

“Were those fair convictions?”

“Oh yeah. I was guilty as sin. As guilty as they come.”

I gave him credit for his honesty. It wasn't boasting. He seemed to me like a man who was owning up and putting it behind him. He laughed hard at himself, making me laugh too. But when I assumed that this was his first time in prison, he corrected me. “In the past decade I think I've only been out for eighteen months.”

He said he was a little in awe of the bravery that Carol and I exhibited. “It makes me laugh,” he said. “Some of the men in the book club are convicted murderers, some are dangerous offenders, and here is Carol controlling the group. I wouldn't be able to do it. They know it takes courage for you guys to come in here just cold from the street to start a book club. Everybody may not be able to put it as eloquently as me and Frankie, but they appreciate it.”

Not only that, he said that the book club members would talk about their progress in reading the books when they ran into one another around the prison. “I hear guys walking the track at night and talking about the book,” he said. “If I see a guy from the book club in the weight pit, I'll talk to him about it and say, ‘Hey, what did you think?'”

It was even bridging prison ghettos according to Graham. “Prison is a very divided place,” he said. “You've got Muslim Group, Celtic Group, Native Group, Hispanic Group, BIFA Group … that's Black Inmates Friends Association.” Inmates tended to stick with their clan and avoided talking to others. He said book club helped break the ice.