Shafiqul Alam: My village friend Monju has been freed from prison. He has been named a suspect in an alleged murder of one of his relatives. They are eight brothers and recently they had a land dispute with a distant cousin. It ended in a physical fight and during the quarrel one of his brothers allegedly beat their 85-year-old distant uncle with a stick. He was rushed to the hospital and was treated and retuned home. His conditions deteriorated again and about a month later he died. Monju told me he did not take part in the fight. But then he is part of a big extended family. So when his distant cousin filed a murder case against his siblings, he was also named as a suspect. Monju spent weeks hiding and when I went to my village a couple of weeks ago, he came to see me. His distant cousin caught him and tipped off police and they took him to custodz. Monju was afraid of  prison. But somehow he could not avoid it.

The reason I am writing this isn’t to vouch for his innocence. I was not at the scene of the fight. So I did not see who did what. One thing my journalism profession taught me was not to trust any narrative — be that coming from your close relatives, police or journalists. I am writing this because when Monju was released, he was found to have gone completely mad. He was also beaten brutally by his fellow prisoners. Monju has been suffering from bouts of schizophrenia for decades. It visits him once or twice a year. In the past his wife and brothers would take him to a village quack and chain him the entire episode. Butvsince 2015, after my suggestion, they started taking him to a psychiatrist, a friend of my brother, in Faridpur. These days his wife and children know how to manage the illness. The first signs are lack of sleep and super-charged talks. 

They immediately take him to the doctor and he recovers in a week or two. There is no need to chain him anymore. No need to watch where he goes. The biggest danger for a mental patient in a vilkage is dog attack. When you are sick, you tend to walk and talk to yourself in the night. And that make dogs super suspicious about your illness. I know quite a few mental patients who were bitten by dogs. One of them died.

People like Monju need treatment at home. They need someone to look after them 24 hours. They need someone to put them into sleep or regularly administer medicines. But the prison system in Bangladesh is brutal. A suspect with a history of mental illness should have never been in a prison in the first place. Their medical records should be treated as an evidence and that the court should let them stay free until they are proven guilty. And if they are found guilty there should be some basic treatment for people with history of longstanding mental illness. 

But somehow we have never developed a humane penal system that will treat prisoners with respect and honour. The whole criminal justice system is a sham, with failures by successive governments to ensure fair probe, trial and justice. The idea that prisoners with mental illness need some special treatment is one of its least priorities.                

Fortunately, Monju got a bail and he is seeing the psychiatrist again. He is the sole bread earner of his five member family and his wife needs him back to work — he drives a rickshaw van — very quickly. The family has suffered a lot and they hope the doctor would help return him to his normal life.

#VillageDiary