“Coming?” the shorter prisoner asked me.

“What for?”

“It’s your mattress,” he said plainly. “It is your right to be one who sets it on fire.”

I groaned. Man and his codes! Even in a lawless inferno, man has to give himself some honor, he’s so desperate to separate himself from the beasts.

“I’ll pass.”

“As you like,” he said, a little disappointed. He muttered something in a foreign tongue to his cohort, who laughed as they left.

It’s always something here- if there isn’t a riot, then someone’s usually trying to escape. The wasted effort helps me see the positives of imprisonment. Unlike those pulling their hair out in good society, here we don’t have to feel ashamed of our day-to-day unhappiness. Here we have someone visible to blame- someone wearing shiny boots. That’s why, on consideration, freedom leaves me cold. Because out there in the real world, freedom means you have to admit authorship, even when your story turns out to be a stinker.

Where to begin my story? Negotiating with memories isn’t easy: how to choose between those panting to be told, those still ripening, those already shriveling, and those destined to be mangled by language and come out pulverized? One thing’s for sure: not writing about my father would take a mental effort that’s beyond me. All my non-Dad thoughts feel like transparent strategies to avoid thinking about him. And why should I avoid it anyway? My father punished me for existing, and now it’s my turn to punish him for existing. It’s only fair.

But the real difficulty is, I feel dwarfed by our lives. They loom disproportionately large. We painted on a broader canvas than we deserved, across three continents, from obscurity to celebrity, from cities to jungles, from rags to designer rags, betrayed by our lovers and our bodies, and humiliated on a national then cosmic scale, with hardly a cuddle to keep us going.