Through the lens of her jail experience and that of her fellow prisoners, Anuradha’s vivid description takes us to the unknown and unseen world of women prisoners, their children, their day-to-day lives and their world view of society as a larger prison even outside the Jain. Anuradha wonders what constitutes a crime. Who does the law protect? Are the laws of the land capable of rendering justice to classes and social groups that are exploited? Whether the existing laws are being implemented fairly? At the end, the questions remain: what is a crime? Who is a criminal?.

\n  \n \nA luminous account of jail from the pen of a sensitive young woman who draws deeply moving sketches of women who sometimes do not even know why they are in prison. Anuradha’s stories move from children who are born in prison, with no idea of the world outside their walls – not even knowing what the moon looks like except on television – to old women bent with age serving life sentences and longing for release before they die so that they can die at home. But jail life is also throbbing with humanity in the midst of trauma and sadness. \n \nThis is a poignant book about a world we need to know and think about: a world that presses against conventional boundaries and is just beyond the prison walls, not so far from us at all. UMA CHAKRAVARTI, Feminist Historian and Filmmaker \n \nB. ANURADHA is a women’s rights activist based in Hyderabad. She resigned from her bank job in 1996 to work in the Chaitanya Mahila Sangam, a state-wide women’s organization. In 2005, she relocated to Jharkhand to work as an activist in the Nari Mukti Sangh. She was arrested in October 2009 and spent four years in the Hazaribagh Central Jail. \n \nGITA RAMASWAMY works with the Hyderabad Book Trust, a not-for-profit Telugu publishing collective. She has co-authored Taking Charge of Our Bodies (Penguin, 2004), On Their Own (Otherwise Publications, 2004), The Oxford University Press Anthology of Telugu Dalit Literature (OUP, 2016) and has authored India Stinking (Navayana, 2005).