A first-time offender lands up in Delhi’s Rohini Jail as a pretrial prisoner. Like all other inmates living in his barrack, which houses only first-time offenders, he immediately developed feelings of trauma and denial. ‘This can’t be true’, he would keep repeating to himself while resisting the offering of food and other facilities from the jail authorities.
He slowly started to reconcile with the idea of a prison space, and began to look around at all other pretrial inmates, who, just like him, were engulfed in the paradox of hope and hopelessness. Although the awareness of what and who surrounds him became profound, the knowledge of who he was on the inside became more invisibilised. Inside that jail, he realised, he could not afford to be himself, he could not be queer.