There are no advertisements on the walls of a prison cell.
No exhortations for a study-abroad course, or proclamations about the efficacy of detergent-powder; No screen printed fliers for a circus or a family-planning clinic. There are no bawdy film posters here or thrift store deals, no boarding house rates or quick-loan schemes, no handbills for chinese food and homoeopathy clinics, there are no bulletins and no political banners.
The walls of a jail are not plastered with the promises of the living because there is no vantage to see them from. There is no landscape here that can place the clamour of existence into perspective and no distance from which you may squint towards a sign or a leaflet and declare yourself convinced by its proclamation.
In jail you are equidistant from every other wall and every other body that is confined to the present. Confined without the dignity conferred to each of us by the landscapes we can traverse, and by the people who travel with us.
To a state that has learnt to fear your actions, or your voice, or your name, or the accident of your birth, the colour of your faith or the lineage of your learning, you are but bodies that deserve their seclusion.
You are ideal citizens; Subject to just as much space as the state deems sufficient for your meagre survival. You are bodies reclaimed from the colourful theatre of the street, and from the public stage of the maidan where you once performed, in pagan fashion, your desperate marches and rigorous migrations in a proud defiance of the state.
But one cannot march in a prison cell, where every tread only mimes the liberation of walking without the transcendence of a landscape.
After all the most terrifying spectacle of rebellion was always the simple act of walking across the arterial conduits of towns and cities. Bodies set in motion, sometimes with just a fistful of salt, occupying landscapes like riverine tributaries of dissent.
Our game ponders the cost of such dissent, amidst a spate of retaliatory detentions and state mandated carceral violence against lawyers, poets and authors, researchers, professors, trade unionists, dalit leaders, women's rights activists and many others; Who have been imprisoned for years without conviction, under laws resurrected from the cursed legacy of colonial rule.
As a multitude is kept in prison for unreasonable charges and for unreasonable time, to be made to suffer under secret violences and withdrawals of bodily dignity, you wonder - how pervasive is the fear of a state towards its own denizens; and how insecure indeed is the perch of a despot!
With this game we are trying to articulate the pain of withdrawing bodies from public spaces and imaginations. To evoke the moment between the dense mobility of a living population and the sparse solidarity of confinement. And examine the grievous harm of a state which is keen to contain its population in boundaries entirely of its own choosing.
This is then, a story of bodies pulled apart and the shared grief that might yet bind us all together, before the membranes around us, through which we percolate into each other's lives, irrevocably calcify into the folds of a separation.
