LOVE ACROSS FIBREGLASS

G.N. Saibaba's story of hope is also a story of love

- MANDIRA NAYAR

It is the last dash of spring before the heat of summer sets in on Delhi. The sky is blue—even in the most polluted city in the world—and the burst of red on a silk cotton tree in bloom reminds you that you have to hold on to hope with every breath.

G.N. Saibaba, in an ironed blue shirt, his veshti spotless white, running his hands over his wheelchair, is proof that hope is resilient. He is in an isolation room in a crowded ward at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. The former English professor at Delhi University has spent about a decade in the Nagpur Central Jail; he was booked under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act for having Maoist links. On March 5, the Bombay High Court acquitted him.

His release came two days after his 33th wedding anniversary. This was the longest he had been apart from his wife. “Earlier, even on foreign trips, I would Skype her,” he says, as Vasantha comes in with a flask of hot tea. Saibaba’s battle to prove his innocence was fuelled by the sheer determination of his wife. It was she who spent every second of the 10 years fighting, outside, while he was locked in. It is a story of hanging on to hope, but it is also a love story, one that played out in almost silence for a decade.

Even when they could write—his first letter took months to arrive—they were restricted by language. “We could not write in our mother tongue (they were barred from communicating in Telugu),” she says. “I had to write in either Hindi or English. Even in mulaqat (jail visits), we could not use our own language. What could I convey in a foreign language?”