Pratik : PRATIK SPRING 2021 SPECIAL : Excerpt from AMERICAN POET RAVI SHANKAR'S UPCOMING MEMOIR, "Correctional"

BOOK EXCERPT

RAVI SHANKAR

Not a confessional.

A correctional

Sometimes as I go about my day, I will unexpectedly see the faces of the men I spent time with in jail. I will be ordering a chai latte at Starbucks, and for a moment I’m certain the barista is Junky John, the drug addict and kleptomaniac who taught me how to work the “hungry and homeless” hustle. Or I’ll be boarding a bus on Broadway and could swear on Amma’s mala that the driver is Chaos, the toothless convict who had spent as much time inside as out and was a master of facial contortions. Or I will stride up to a park bench to say hello to my old bunkmate Lenny, the badly inked Vietnam vet with a gut as large as his list of grievances. But my hand will freeze in midair because of course it’s not him.

I’ll never see those men again.

Those promises to keep in touch made in privation, those addresses of halfway houses scrawled out longhand in composition books, those damp and earnest handshakes made while sitting on a metal bench in a tan jumpsuit, waiting for a correctional officer to call your name and inmate number for court? They all melt away the moment you walk out the door. Once you’re out, you’re out.

That is until you’re back in again.

Not me, though. Or at least that’s what I thought the first time I went to jail. That time I was innocent and indignant. Slurred a “sand nigger” by the NYPD, wrongfully detained on an erroneous warrant in a city I once considered home, I became another statistic of Mayor Giuliani’s infamous stop-and-frisk policing policy, later deemed unconstitutional by US District Court judge Shira A. Scheindlin. At the time, I was a tenured associate professor of English at a state university in Connecticut, a homeowner and married father of two daughters, so my immediate reaction was to get on a soapbox. I told my story on National Public Radio, wrote an op-ed for the Hartford Courant, and delivered a sermon on the topic of social justice at a Unitarian Universalist church in New Haven. I even sued the city for racial discrimination and police misconduct, winning a modest settlement from them—a drop in the bucket considering New York City had paid out well over a billion dollars to settle police misconduct and wrongful conviction cases just in the last decade alone.

The next time I was arrested, I was not so lucky. Nor was I guiltless.

Once as a child in South India, I went to a Nādi astrologer in the dusty streets of Vadapalani, a neighborhood in Madras. The wizened old woman then told me that, due to my previous birth’s misdeeds and a rare planetary alignment when I was born, I would have equal parts fame and hardship in this life. When she held my palm to read the lines on it, she decreed that the gaps between my fingers meant that money would slip through them like water. I would earn much, but would never be able to hang on to it. My recklessness would cause a deep fissure somewhere along my days.

This is the true story of how in the middle of a seemingly successful life I suddenly ended up in jail. My own good self, as we say in India, turned so very, very bad. This is the story of how I became the first academic in American history to be promoted to full professor while incarcerated, a decision that inflamed the local media and caused a controversy among my peers and colleagues. This is me seen through six seasons, each one taking the form of a letter to a loved one, and this memoir is a trace of what the worst years of my life ended up teaching me about the American criminal justice system and mental illness at the beginning of the 21st century. This is how I learned to process generations worth of racism, shame, and redemption while at the same time coming to grips with the dark inner mechanisms of my own heart.

This is the song to set all that shit straight. Not a confessional. A correctional.

Ravi Shankar is a Pushcart Prize winning poet. He has published twelve books and chapbooks including The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks (University of Arkansas Press). He founded Drunken Boat, has appeared on NPR, BBC, PBS, and in The New York Times and The Paris Review. Ravi has also won awards from Prairie Schooner, and from the Rhode Island State Council of the Arts, and he has taught and performed around the world., Correctional is due later this year from the University of Wisconsin Press.

From Correctional by Ravi Shankar

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