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Long shot of a room with one gate. The gate is a row of stripes through which one can see a slow but constant movement. The source of the faint light is inside the room but it can’t be seen. The movement is a slow churning of pale matter made extra visible in the surrounding darkness. That the room has a high ceiling can be made out by the fact that the moving pale matter inside is a high heap that continues beyond the height of the barred entrance.

A medium shot of three guards sitting on a stone platform and nodding. There are three lances resting diagonally against the wall in the corner where they are seated, at the end of a long passage. This passage is lit up by a lamp placed in a niche midway between the ground and the ceiling.

One guard scratches himself in his sleep. All three have their shirts unbuttoned and their head clothes as little mounds beside them.

Close-up of the padlock hanging from the gate. The lock is big. Behind the barred gate, one notices a shuffling form. It is actually many forms. One can focus on a hand. That soon turns into a hairless chest. Which turns into a part of a face that could be a mouth. A mouth that could be a foot. A foot that becomes a chest. Which soon turns into a hand. And so on.

Medium aerial shot inside the room. One looks down on a hillock of bodies. The figures in the middle are less active than the ones at the edges. But the movement is more brisk, less slow, now that one is inside the room. The walls are black and shiny. It could be slime. The mass of bodies is white and shining. It could also be mould. Faces can be seen. One face is contorted and appears to be just a head with no body attached to it. Another has its eyes rolled up with only the whites showing and its mouths open. The huddle and the heap do not look Asiatic at all.

Medium shot of a pair of small barred windows looking out into scratchy, hazy night.

Long shot of a tall window set high into the wall opposite the gate. The jumble of mass of bodies is moving between the window and the gate.

A few faces can be seen below the window. These faces are breathing slowly.

On the other side, next to the gate, a body comes into view. It presses out from the inside of the giant white dough, pressing itself on to the bars of the gate. It belongs to a large man. His white shirt is unbuttoned and is translucent with sweat. His thinning hair and drooping moustache are drenched and pasted to his skin as if he has been baptized and pulled out of the water only a moment ago.

John Holwell had reached the mouth of the cell once before in the last eight hours. It seemed like hours, but it probably was minutes since he had last faced the bars and negotiated frantically in bad Hindustani with the guard who insisted on speaking to him in bad English. But since the transaction involved the procurement of drinking water, and neither of the two men on either side of the gate knew the right word for water in each other’s language—John had said ‘penni’ when the guard had expected him to say ‘wetter’—it took a full twenty minutes to get the message across.

‘Paani, tell him to get paani,’ croaked an emerging face from behind John Holwell. It was Tyler, one of the carpenters from Writers’ Row. The guard shrugged on hearing the request, looked sideways, then, extracting a promise of a grand thousand rupees immediately after the firingi’s release, disappeared and returned a full quarter hour later with a large thimbleful of water. By that time, John’s coordinates in the room had changed. His back was now touching the area where the metal bars ended and the damp but hot stone wall began. He had, however, somehow managed to keep his eyes glued on the entrance. He called out when the guard with his thimble came into view.

‘Here man, here. Paani, paani, please.’

Announcing the nature of the transaction about to be under way was a mistake. He should have used his reason and made that extra effort to show his face fully. Instead, he had shouted out to the guard. Not too many inside the cell were as ignorant of Hindustani as John was. What followed was a small mayhem in reaction to the word ‘paani’.

The two small grilled windows next to each other near the ceiling on the other side of the room had no one looking in through them. But if someone had, he would have seen very little in the one stop short of pitch darkness below. Instead, he would have registered the slow moan—a slimy polyphony, really—change to open cries of desperation and some flickering animal sounds. And his eyes would have smarted with the fumes that emanate when a crowd of bodies cling to each other, without proper desire or volition, but without complaint or disgust either, crunching and sliding the flesh and bones, the hair and sweat.

With a great effort, John bent his body into a half crouch–half stretch position in order to take the thimble-thing between his fingers. His mouth was too far from the bars to accept the water straight from the guard. In the crowd, and with three separate instalments of contortions to mediate, his hands were as steady as those of a drunkard loading a rifle. Only a few drops of the precious fluid remained in the receptacle, most of the palmful amount having fallen on the nearby bodies.

Through the hours that followed, John slipped in and out of an overheated and constricting consciousness. At one point, he found himself next to a man who was propped up by his own body on one side and someone else’s on the other. The man’s fingers held a tricorn cap up to the level of his chest. In the inadequate light it looked as if the man’s heart, bone and tissue had been scooped out of his chest, leaving a neat, quiet hole. But it was, John saw after a long spell of disorientation, only the man’s blue hat, turned black in the darkness, against his spectral white shirt. John only realized that the man with the hat had either passed out or was dead when the figure dropped away from his vision like a set of old clothes the moment he moved and stopped supporting his weight.

‘Only if General Drake hadn’t been so, so very stupid,’ John said to himself closing his eyes. He pressed his eyes until he started seeing pinpricks of swirling colour. Perhaps, being outraged at Governor Drake’s action against that scoundrel Omichand would help him through this hell.

No one messes with one of the most powerful natives in Bengal. And Drake had done just that. Omichand was a fat ball of grease who would happily sell his mother if that meant making a profit. But he was the richest man in Calcutta. And that kind of wealth brings power that can be transmutated into security, more wealth and even a lease of life. It was this Omichand that Drake had decided in his very finite wisdom to throw in jail. In fact, if John—as magistrate—remembered correctly, Drake had thrown the man into this very cell! People of Omichand’s stature do business by remembering, like elephants, the behaviour of the men they do business with. And Drake had thrown him in prison.

This prison.

That fool.

The pinpricks had dissolved into the darkness of his closed eyes. Opening them again, John hoped that the general had been cut to ribbons on the steps of the council building by the Nawab’s men.

The last two days had not prepared anyone now languishing in the cell for all that finally happened. Not for the cowardly departure of Manningham and Frankland on the Dodaldy. Not for the swarm of indigo-wrapped heads breaching the fort. Not for the dark, billowing smoke that signalled the destruction of Black Town. And definitely not for this room packed with more than one hundred able-bodied Europeans swaying between life and death and gasping to get out of this unintended, suffocating embrace.

But what John at that moment was really unprepared for was the appearance of Mary Carey next to him, with one of her breasts and half her body pressed on to the bars in front.

John had been aware of Mary’s existence ever since he was introduced to her by her husband, Peter, a shipmate who doubled as a transport manager for the company. Peter was married to his job and had consequently risen up the ranks as such men sometimes do. John had helped him just a bit, guided by a tucked-away feeling that this would allow himself to be presented to Peter’s young wife in a good light. No one had really asked for any explanation why John Holwell, magistrate of Calcutta, would take a special interest in the career of a young ex-sailor from Winchester. Even if they had asked for such an explanation, perhaps fuelled by spirits stronger than bourbon (which, incidentally, had been boycotted since the war in Europe), he would not have told them that he took a special interest in Peter Carey because he took a special interest in Mary Carey.

The question of how Mary had found herself in the cell with him and more than a hundred other men was swept away from John’s expanding mind when he saw Mary bending her neck down. When she rose back again, she had gathered one of John’s shirt sleeves between her dark lips. With her left breast positioned between two bars of the locked gate, she pressed the cloth with her lips which started to sparkle—or so John imagined—with newly discovered moisture. It was only after she had done pressing with her lips that she bit into the sweat-drenched cloth with her teeth.

If Mary had behaved in any similar manner a few days ago, she would have probably earned a different reputation from the one that she had—the devoted wife of Peter Carey. Tongues would have wagged, fans would have fluttered extra briskly. But on that hellish night inside a room that the English had built, in which their own people now found themselves heaped upon each other like cabbage left to rot, no one said a word about Mary Carey sucking and biting out the sweat from John Zepheniah Holwell’s left sleeve. They were too busy surviving or perishing in what Mary’s saviour would soon go on to immortalize as the Black Hole of Calcutta.