Pratiksha, a lawyer who has been visiting prisoners for the last two years as part of her work, recollects meeting a death row prisoner in Maharashtra who was out on parole after his sentence was commuted.
“I went to his house, I sat with him for many hours. I met him over two days and you come in with this idea of how death row prisoners are. So he had been commuted, but he’d been on death row for quite some time. You have this unidimensional idea of how death row prisoners are supposed to be — all consumed by death — defined by this one moment in their lives.”
While in jail, he had written poems in Marathi, his mother tongue. Pratiksha recollects that one of his poems was about his niece when she was a child.
When she offered him a copy of his poem, the man got emotional as his niece had grown up and was now a mother. Facing the truth of having lost all those years and not seeing her nice grow hit him hard.
Source: Barandbench
