India, July 18 -- Of all autobiographical literature, prison memoirs are the most distinctive. They take us into a sharply different world pervaded by themes of perdition, violence and redemption. Despite their wretchedness, or perhaps because of it, prisons have proved to be fecund sites for the production of confessional writing. They are at once a record, therapy, escape, and subversion of the bondage of the institution. Mahmood Farooqui's The Tihar Players is all this and more. It stands apart from the many fine accounts of life in prison published in recent years: Sudha Bharadwaj's Phansi Yard, Anand Teltumbde's The Cell and the Soul, Kobad Gandhy's Fractured Freedom, Arun Ferreira's Colours of the Cage and, earlier, Iftikhar Gilani's My Days in Prison. That is because Farooqui was a different kind of prisoner. Sent to jail not for his political views but charged with rape. He denied the crime and was acquitted. Incarceration on political grounds bring cruel hardships but not disgrace. Memoirs by political prisoners are written by those confident of their place in the world, secure in the belief that wider society does not condemn them. The Tihar Players belongs to another order. Excoriated of all middle-class dignity and prestige as a man of arts, abandoned by friends and hangers-on - always aplenty in his days of glory - reviled by both mainstream and alternative media, cognisant of his own failings in personal life, Farooqui recounts his prison sojourn from the vantage of acute fragility. Rather than rendering him self-absorbed, this experience attunes him to the vulnerabilities of those around him. The result is a memoir of powerful and singular poignancy. Divided into two parts, Arrival and Return, the memoir opens with The Mulahiza (the name for the prison ward for first- timers). Here, the wound of humiliation is raw, the confusion and fears palpable. His entry is likened to a passage into "the jaws of Sheol. where the living are swallowed into a kind of anonymity, where you do not burn so much as disappear". The reader learns of the ward's rites of initiation designed to show new entrants their place, their "auqaat"; the shame of strip searches and the casual degradation of body and soul that prison imposes on inmates. Not for a moment does Farooqui lose his writers' eye for observation or the humanist urge for empathy; the story of his fellow prisoners and that of Tihar emerges alongside his own tragedy. The reader becomes familiar with the elaborate system of jail wards and the bureaucracy of unnecessary cruelty. Beneath jail officialdom is the army of inmate workers who oil the prison machinery: munshis, sevadars, chhoti police, desk-jobbers, runners and general attendants. This efficiency produces more misery. "One day", Farooqui prophecies, "all the despair that is stored and pent up here will leak, dissipate, and envelop the entire city of Delhi." In this despair, Farooqui finds the thought of suicide oddly life-affirming. But three things intercede to save him: the discovery of faith, writing implements, and the riches of the jail library. A long-time atheist, he turns tentatively to the Quran, then the prayers, and then to fasting (and its quick renunciation). "As I prepared to fast, I waited for the morrow with an impatience I hadn't felt since entering jail: for the canteen, for a register, for a pen." A "foolish joy" consumes him as he touches the Urdu books in the library, which became his refuge from the noise and grime of the ward, suturing him at least for a while to a semblance of his past life. His faith is as eclectic as the sources of his daastans. He reads the Gita in the Roza barrack, wrapped in a newspaper, and chants the Buddhist mantra Om Mani Padme Hum after the Asr namaz. In jail, time stands still, as does life itself. The stasis is overwhelming and it is filled with petty squabbling, listening to endless curses piled one upon another, waiting for mulaqat, or any news at all of the developments in one's case. Above all, it is filled with bakwas, the meaningless banter that gives "the illusion of normalcy, of being alive, of occupying some casual, familiar space". Within that space, Farooqui notes wryly, "my presence as an exotic director and an entertaining storyteller acquired value". While the Part One: Arrival section displays a feverish, nightmare quality, reflecting Farooqui's inner turmoil in the early days of his incarceration, Part Two: Return, has him throwing himself into teaching and mounting theatre productions. Time is now structured by looming deadlines, scripts to be worked out, props to be fashioned out of materials available in the jail, and actors to be created out of men who had no training in theatre, and often no literacy. Ramleela and Charandas Chor, Premchand's Nasha and Swadesh Deepak's Court Martial, Farooqui picks stories playing on themes of justice and fairness that resonate with the audience in jail. It is all delivered with chutzpah: "Basantlal played Ravana's brother Kumbhkaran, and I knew he would bring the house down by demanding, after being awakened from his slumber, mutton, mutton and more mutton in a purely vegetarian gaol! I then had him daringly roar that if there is a shortage of booze, get it from the superintendent's office". Unlike the depressive air of the early pages, a sense of resolute purpose pervades the book's second half. Shailendra's anthem, "Tu zinda hai, toh zindagi ki jeet mein yaqeen kar (If you are alive, have faith, life shall triumph over death and decay)", becomes the leitmotif. It is during this phase that Farooqui composes his magnum opus, Dastaan-e-Karn, based on the Mahabharata. It has now been performed to great acclaim around the world but the author maintains that the session in Tihar, where he first recited the opening lines about how the great epic came to be written to his theatre students and the superintendent, remains etched in his heart. Farooqui writes that life in jail robbed him of the desire to be judgmental. There are some heartbreaking portraits of fellow inmates: Haji Sharafat (a fellow consumer of dimaag ki dawai or psychiatric drugs) accused of killing his wife; the pure-hearted Bhanu Raghav, a wedding cameraman charged with murder because of a fracas gone wrong; Badal Farazi, a Bangladeshi implicated and convicted in a murder, who educates himself and now argues his case in English in court. The Tihar Players bears witness to the waste that large prisons produce. It makes an impassioned plea for alternatives such as open prisons, and for prisoners to be allowed to atone with dignity and humanity. In Mahmood Farooqui, Tihar has got an incomparable memoirist....