(AUTHOR'S NOTES: Following the posting of my story 'Witness to a Whipping', I received several requests to write another similar to it. The following tale was adapted and translated from an article that was published in a local daily five years ago. Where there were gaps in the account which was an interview with a convicted drug pusher, I filled in using composites of cases I had heard or read about from all over my country and neighboring countries in Asia. This version has been revised from last year's posting. Readers are advised that this account contains graphic description of physical torture which may offend their sensibilities.)
****************************************************************************************************************************************************
"I am a drug addict and pusher. I have been jailed for my crime more times than I care to remember and publicly flogged for it just as often. My name is not important but you may call me Bawaseir. I am now forty-two years old.
"I was thirty when I was first arraigned on charges of pushing dangerous drugs to school children. I was a teacher at a high school. I went through the due process of the law, was tried and convicted, and later sentenced to be caned in public, in addition to being jailed five years.
"On the Eve of my first public whipping, a warder came to get me at my cell. I was told that I was to be caned at high noon the following day and must attend a rehearsal that day.
"I was also told the agenda of my caning but because I was strung out on tranquilizers (I had been defiant the previous day after having been raped by my cell mate), nothing much of it registered. After that I was taken to an open field where I saw a large stage with a raised platform. A wooden frame with leather restraints stood on the center of the raised platform. That would be where I was to be bound and flogged. Below the stage were rows and rows of wooden benches that stretched to all the dimensions of the field. Anyone could come to witness a public caning and the benches could accommodate two thousand people at one time.
"I saw also two large canvas screens, one on each side of the stage, strung upwards by heavy cables. These would be the TV projection screens. I had been told that the entire proceeding tomorrow, my public caning, was going to be recorded on film.
"As part of the rehearsal, I was led through the proceedings, from entering the stage to being tied to the whipping booth and then exiting the stage. It was all going to be orderly and civilized, I was told. I almost laughed out at the irony.
"On the day of my caning, I was given the usual breakfast of flat-tasting rice cakes and goat's milk, and then after finishing my duties at the prison laundry, I was sent to the infirmary. It was nine o'clock in the morning.
"The prison nurses, burly men with muscular tattooed arms, made me strip off all my prison uniform, the brown shirt, brown shorts and sandals, and then also my underwear. While I stood naked at the urinal, I was ordered to pass urine and while I did so, the nurses watched over me. In the meantime, another nurse was preparing an enema bag at an adjoining shower stall.
"When I was done emptying my bladder, I was ordered to bend over a low wall that formed a kind of demarcation between the toilet and shower area. A gloved finger then invaded my anus and for ten seconds I felt it probing and curling around inside my rectum. I was being checked for any illegal object I might have smuggled into my rectum. At the same time my sphincter was being loosened to facilitate the entrance of the enema nozzle. I passed malodorous wind during the enema. I hated that. It was humiliating.
"I was given two complete enemas, closely supervised by the prison doctor and then allowed to clean myself. It was a heavenly five minutes under the showerhead before being put naked on a hard steel examination table.
"A physical examination in the hands of the same doctor was next. I was examined everywhere - eyes, ears, mouth, throat, my private parts. The doctor took pains to listen to my heart and pulse. After that he signed the forms releasing me back to the warders and to my ill-gotten fate. Had I a weaker heart, I might have saved myself a whipping.
"By this time, there was only an hour left to noon. I was kept waiting in a backstage room, clad only in a prison towel hung around my hips, while my audience took their seats unseen by me.
"The crowd was getting noisy while I was led, ankles and wrists bound in heavy chains, through the back entrance up the stage. The moment had arrived. My heart pounded so loudly it hurt me. My knees knocked so badly I felt I would faint. But I made it to the proscenium.
"For a long time I stood before my accusers, the governor and his minions who were my town's morality standard-bearers, the prison officials, the parents of the kids I supposedly corrupted, the press, and about three hundred strange faces, while I waited for the preliminaries to my caning to be executed. The crowd had become quiet but attentive to the proceedings. The only sounds were the instructions for the proceedings that were carried through an antiquated amplifier.
"I heard finally the announcement for my sentence to proceed. My towel was first removed. For a full minute, I stood still, fully exposing my nude form to the audience, while they heard all about my various crimes. A detailed commentary about our decline into spiritual and moral corruption and the need to return to godly living was given for another full minute before the members of the press were invited to take my pictures. I hung my head down in shame as they did so. After all this, my sentence was read out and my wrists and ankles were unbound. I was then taken by my arms, hooked around those of two warders, to the whipping booth on the raised part of the stage.
"There the warders quickly and expertly bound me to the frame. I was spread-eagled, except for my arms, which were held together at my wrists and tied to the apex of the wooden frame above my head. My body was laid flat by a forty degree angle on the middle part of the A-shaped frame that could be lowered or raised by cranking a lever, and my naked buttocks were raised upward. So now I could almost see the anthropomorphic images of myself on the canvas screens beside the stage. The TV cameras had focused on my buttocks, spread open by the way my ankles were bound to the two legs of the 'A' frame.
"A doctor was present throughout the time I was bound and later whipped. His duty was to ensure that I was safely secured to the frame. This was necessary because if I could move or if I were to fall, I could badly injure myself. While he checked my bonds, I tried to compose my nerves. My mind recalled stories of a woman who was recently publicly whipped for adultery in a neighboring province. She had fainted on her twentieth lash and had to resume the rest of her 150 lashes in four installments. I was determined to survive my caning with my dignity intact.
"When the doctor was satisfied that I was well secured, he thrust a plug deep into my anus. This was to prevent any messy accidents later on. After that he nodded to someone who then nodded to someone else who I heard taking his place on the stage behind me.
"There was a long wait before my first lash could be delivered. I was too tensed up. A few times I had to be told to relax otherwise my punishment would serve no purpose. Ideally the buttock muscles must be relaxed to feel the complete impact of the cane. The long wait soon dulled my senses and succeeded to relax me. The moment the executioner realized this, he gave me the first of my sixty lashes, twelve lashes for each kid to whom I had sold the drugs. I screamed. I had been warned of the pain before but no verbal description of it could possibly adequately prepare you for the reality. My skin felt immediately torn apart. My tears immediately flooded my eyes. My palms were blistered from gripping the wood so desperately. I was writhing about to free myself. I wanted nothing more than to rub my buttocks but the warder would come to still me and placate me with threats.
"I was tensed up again after the first lash. So the doctor was sent to talk to me. I told him I could not relax with the plug inside my anus. He went away to confer with a few officials who decided to risk removing the plug. The caning was then resumed.
"My caning was a slow and prolonged ordeal because I was always tensed up. You could not help but tense up at the sound of the cane when it whipped the air. I tried to think about other things and not be mindful of my pain. I long forgot I had an audience watching the brutalizing of my buttocks. For hours the cane would dart into my skin and rip open my flesh like a meat slicer. Very early on I already felt the warmth of blood trickling down the back of my thighs and at one time I also passed urine down my front. This was an even worse indignity I suffered.
"I was in a swoon by the end of my punishment. My dignity was all defenestrated by my failure to avoid crying loudly. I was aided back to the infirmary on a gurney. There I was examined, given a shot to kill the pain and when I was conscious again, I was held up for more photographs to be taken, this time of my whealed backside. The photographs would be kept together with hundreds of others in the prison record books and made available to anyone interested to peruse them, from officials to doctors to research students.
"I was in jail for five years but when I came out, I reverted to my old ways. A few more times I went through being tried, convicted and whipped naked and in public for the same offenses. No amount of flogging in public convinced me of the evil of my deeds.
"Eight years have passed since my last caning, but my buttocks still carry the scars of my public shame."
THE END