“BECAUSE THIS WAS a setting/ Hence, forget about telling anybody/ What happened in custody.” This stanzaic ending repeats throughout Horror Saga, a prison memoir by Ehtesham Qutubuddin Siddiqui, published in 2024. It makes for unusual reading, by highlighting the author’s difficulty in “telling” what happened to him in custody because of a “setting”—a word annotated in the text as a “cooked up plot by corrupt people.” At the same time, the recurring lines reiterate the author’s need to narrate, despite his difficulty, what went on behind bars. Siddiqui’s authorial difficulties are not uncommon among writers narrating experiences of prison, as they grapple with the problem of relaying events that are associated with the stigma of punishment and lie outside the purview of public scrutiny. However, Siddiqui’s insistence that it was “a setting” begs an obvious question: why does he do so? Is Horror Saga an all-too-familiar tale of a criminal who insists upon their innocence by drawing attention to settings? Or is it that Siddiqui pens a larger story, one that is more than an individual tale of suffering, as he uses the collective pronoun “we” at the end of the text to describe the intolerable conditions of prison?
Siddiqui was one of 13 people arrested in connection with the Mumbai train bombings of 11 July 2006. He was held, as he says in the text, for “seventy-five terrifying days” in police custody. In 2015, when a special court under the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act sentenced Siddiqui and four others to death, and seven more to life imprisonment, Siddiqui was immediately transferred to the phansi yard, or death row, of Nagpur Central Prison. Prior to that, he had spent nine years as an undertrial, mainly in the high-security ward of Mumbai’s Arthur Road Jail, along with his co-accused. The subsequent decade has been harrowing, as neither the procedural confirmation of the death sentences nor the appeals against the trial court’s judgment have concluded. This long wait has claimed the life of one of the death row convicts, Kamal Ansari, who died of COVID-19 in April 2021.
Though imprisoned in the same jail as the deceased Ansari and his co-accused Naveed Khan, as per prison rules, Siddiqui has had no connection with any of his co-accused. In fact, he has very little contact with the outside world, barring online mulaqats—visitation—and phone calls that he is permitted from his family. In a letter to his friend, written sometime in January 2025, Siddiqui describes his life:
Here is a small garden in my yard, which is actually under my care. I spent sometime in the Gardening. I do regular 1½ exercise from Monday to Saturday. When we were in Mumbai, we played cricket. But in Nagpur I have not played any sport, even such facilities is not available …