“I spent 21

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August 2015 to 24

th

April 2019 in one of the clusters of Changi prison. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking–but this isn’t one of those “dropping the soap in the shower” stories. Those stories are terrible, by the way. They do happen, and they are unforgivable.

Anyway, I had a cellmate. Let’s call him Jali. He’s, for lack of a better word, like a spastic midget that’s overly hairy and has the eyes of an insect. I wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole if I was a homosexual. But you see, what’s worse is he’s mentally “different” and doesn’t get along with people. He talks to the warders often and in prison, we don’t like that. He wants everything to be his way and he needs all the attention in the world. I’ve met a thousand and one assholes but no one is as ostracized and despised as him, and at first I didn’t really know why.

My cell consists of six to seven inmates and we usually spend the morning doing martial arts, exercising and the typical prison routines. This guy doesn’t. He’s always reading, or writing notes, or leering at the rest of us. In our cell, the warders specifically placed an inmate of “high influence and power”–let’s call him Sai–so that nothing happens to Jali.

Sai is a 55-year-old hardened gangster renowned for his effective boxing techniques and training that few can endure. I was in the cell to learn Sai’s boxing. Ask any Singaporean man what they think of BMT during national service, and I’d say Sai’s sessions are worse. You train until you’re out of breath and sweat, you punch until your knuckles microfracture. And then you punch some more.

So, back to Jali. No one talks to him. I sleep diagonally next to him, because in a prison, all Malays/Muslims sleep near each other in the cell’s corner for practical prayer reasons. At night I’d talk to him. I don’t really care if you’re unpopular or if everyone thinks you’re “xia suay” (a term to describe embarrassment or disgrace), everyone has a story. In a spartan prison environment, where everyone looks the same, dresses the same, possesses more or less the same, stories are all we have to differentiate one man from the next.

Every night, I’d be exhausted, but Jali would always want conversation. Sometimes we talked about girls, sometimes we talked about we like to do outside, sometimes we talked about family. There are nights when we can talk for hours, and sometimes, certain topics seem to hit a nerve in a Jali. I notice these things, and I’ve heard some rumours.

One night, he asked if I knew about his past. I didn’t exactly, but admitted that I heard he’s been sodomized while he was a boy. These news travel fast. “Prison internet”, they call it.

He gave me his personal recount of what happened while he was 12, in Muhammadiyah’s home for juvenile delinquents. It was at a Mussolah (the place where Muslims congregate), and somewhere near the pulpit they restrained him and took turns. There were 5 of them and all were twice the size of an average teen. And Jali, I remind you, is stunted like a midget. At 26 years old, he’s probably 153cm tall, at most.

He said that there was blood, and he kept begging them to stop. They were his friends. Everyone involved got caught for the act of sodomy and were punished accordingly, and this was how people, even today, knows his story. He wished no one knew of the way he was treated: like a shameful animalistic whore. When he told me his story, tears were streaming down his face.

In a prison, men don’t weep. So when I saw Jali cry, my heart softened.

I gave him a hug. I told him it’s alright, that he had no choice during the incident and that if you let go of the past and move on, you are braver and stronger than half the assholes in prison. You are not “xia suay” to me. And you are my friend.

So that’s Jali’s story. But this is about mine. After that night, Jali and I got closer. Because Sai’s boxing classes were physically and mentally demanding, Jali began offering massages to ease my pain and tension. Every two days, he’d painstakingly balm his hands and massage my knuckles, arms, shoulders, back, neck. We’d still talk while he massages, though I feel a tinge of guilt every time because he doesn’t owe me this. All I provided was a shoulder to cry on.

Sometimes, I’d imagine I was in a spa indulging the services of a beautiful girl. And those nights, I discovered that humans really do have erogenous parts of their bodies. Some touches, on innocuous parts of the body elicit inevitable pleasures. I almost had erections. I started shifting my pelvic area a lot. Sporadically, I let out barely audible moans.

“Now lie on your back”, Jali says. Again with the massages. One would have thought that a “victim” of sexual violence would be touch sensitive and allergic to men.