(Author's notes: A play depicting judicial caning was recently staged in the Republic of Singapore by a local theatrical repertory. The sell-out play forms the basis of the following quasi-fictional account. This is the final part.)
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Mr. Abdoul Rashad escorted me through a maze of iron cubicles to the indoor caning arena. The excursion was a privileged one in a restricted zone. Along the way, I passed boys and men in their brown prison uniforms. Some stared blankly at me behind steel bars, some others smiled at me with a pursuance of malice, but many more eyed me suspiciously and nervously.
One man had discarded his trousers and underwear to gratify himself openly. He sat on his bare mattress, his thighs shamelessly spread apart. He was spanking away gleefully on the head of his long and slimy snake. Abdoul chuckled. Turning to me, he said: "Welcome to C. P. Row. Everyone of the men you have just seen has a caning scheduled this month."
Reaching the end of the zigzagging corridor, I noticed on my left one of a number of infirmaries. A pair of naked feet hung out of the edge of a steel bunk. The toes were twitching nervously. As I made my way past the examination room, I caught a glimpse of the nude buttocks. The cheeks were separated to expose a seductive anus that was puckering as nervously as the toes. Above the naked flesh, a doctor's gloved finger was about to enter the vulnerable anus.
"There are three canings scheduled for today," Abdoul informed me. "After Rohan, it'll be that man's turn."
While he spoke, Abdoul had simultaneously nodded toward the owner of the nude upturned backside that I was still watching in earnest, but whose face I was unable to see. The doctor's finger was now inside the prisoner's anus like a surgeon's razor-edged scalpel quarrying expertly among gelatinous membranes.
"Anal examinations are not unusual," Abdoul explained. "It's another procedure. We are extremely careful and thorough. C. P. begins with an examination like this. They all loathe it as much as the actual caning. It's very humiliating to have your rectum entered like that. But you'd be amazed at what's been recovered from a prisoner's bottom before. Files are among the commonest tools."
We arrived now at the staircase that would lead us to the caning room. I followed my host silently. Ahead of us, a man was being led down the stairs, his naked body in full view of all who came in his path. He was sandwiched between two bulky men, smart and resplendent in another type of uniform. They were supporting his weight by his armpits. The naked man was in a swoon, his eyes opened at half-staff and his nose was wet. Abdoul and I stepped aside to let the men pass. As they did, I turned back and studied the prisoner's bottom. A pattern of welts was forming on his skin that appeared like a reticulation of little squares similar to those one would find on a fishing net. The welts were swelling. I had also noticed the scanty stubs around his genitals.
"He was first to be caned this morning," Abdoul told me. "The caning was for piracy of counterfeit videos. They've all been sufficiently warned. Oh, yes, we often give the prisoner a crotch shaving if it's full to prevent the pubic hair getting entwined between the splinters from the trestle."
I hesitated on the steps, watching until the men disappeared into an infirmary. The wounded man would have his shot there.
Now at last standing at the door of the caning arena, Mr. Abdoul informed me to relinquish all personal items and effects from my body and clothes. I emptied my pockets of my keys and wallet and surrendered my note pad, tape recorder and pen. A good-looking turbaned guard retained all these in a clear plastic bag while another guard concurrently frisked my body with a detector. He passed me a visitor's tag afterward, allowing Abdoul to commit me into the room. I clipped the laminated tag to my breast pocket as I followed my host into the room, wondering why it was that my fingers were shaking.
My foreign appearance had seemed to traduce on the disquieting silence and moist humidity. However, my roving-reporter eyes worked quickly to assess my latest surrounding. The room was about 450 square feet in area, with walls awashed in moss green, and indigently accessorized by two long tables and about eighty chairs in back. On one of the tables were papers, folders and an assortment of writing materials. I was immensely curious about the cameras that were perched atop the tripod stands beside the table. Almost all the chairs, save about a dozen, were vacant.
The apparatus that dominated all my senses the moment my eyes fell upon it was the wooden frame that had been fashioned into an upright trestle. It loomed in all its formidable height and fearsome symbolism in the middle of the room. The mere sight of it quickened my tactile senses and I shivered.
Mr. Abdoul ushered us both to the chairs where we would keep company with the fourteen others already waiting in ambivalent anticipation of the second caning of the afternoon. I had heard that it was the institution's thirty-one hundredth caning to date. Submitting myself to Abdoul's lead, I took my seat beside him in the front row. A deliberate check of my watch showed that it was a quarter to one, fifteen minutes to the commencement of Rohan's punishment.
Many more people were starting to stream into the room. There were now about fifteen more men and some women who had joined us on the witnesses' section of the arena. I wondered who among these were family members of the convicted criminal we were here to watch being publicly shamed. More important, I wondered if all sanctioned the event as Abdoul had claimed.
The officials had arrived about the same time as well. I inferred this from the uniforms they all wore. I could easily distinguish the warders from the doctors. Two men in dark suits took their seats at the center of the table on the left of me. I guessed that one of them must be the Warden, and the other the governor. They were then joined, on both sides of them, by a squad of olive-skinned hard-faced men whose only otherwise unidentifiable quality was the homogeneous uniforms they wore. To their right, seated very close behind the wooden trestle was the executioner, for he was the only one holding a rattan cane. This was long and thin and looked capable of causing severe injury on an elephant's backside.
As an investigative journalist for twenty-four years, I had had to master a professional sense of detachment and disinterest toward my assignments. It was better this way for it ensured that I reported the issue and event with an objective eye. However, I was finding it a challenge now to contain my feelings of awe and excitement toward what I was about to witness. I had wanted this assignment from the time its idea was first tossed about at the board meeting. In hindsight, I had almost knocked down my editor's door for this opportunity. Now on course to witness a caning being executed, I allowed my peripatetic eyes to assimilate the details of this invaluable national heritage whose existence had predated the present epoch.
My itinerant eyes soon spotted my subject behind the open door. That must be Rohan, indeed, for he was naked from his waist and naked on his feet. His wrists were cuffed to those of his warders, his feet manacled to iron restraints that were separated from each other by a long chain in order to facilitate the prisoner's walk without stumbling. I watched keenly while the warders prodded the prisoner into the room. Rohan walked the gauntlet of gawking civilians and officials with his eyes downcast. Ripples of whispered conversation rose behind me. At just some feet from the trestle, the men stopped. They were now facing the spectators and officials.
Complete silence swept over the room once more. All eyes were in the direction of the prisoner.
An official approached Rohan and bent down to release the leg cuffs. The wrist restraints were afterward unlocked. A doctor approached the prisoner about the same time that another warder was removing the towel that was the prisoner's only covering for his modesty. This executed, Rohan was rendered completely naked, leaving everything of his personal space public property and nothing of his private endowments secret. Nothing was hidden or left to my imagination either as I took stock of all his physical attributes.
Rohan was, as Abdoul had described, an archetype of his people: he was smooth and hairless of body except for the sparse furs on his arms and lower legs. He had a good height and a proportional build of 5 feet 10 and about 165 pounds. With his nudity all exposed to me, and the other fifty people in the room, Rohan kept his eyes affixed to the floor or his bare toes. Although he never looked up to make eye contact with anybody, he was visibly ashamed and humiliated, almost about to cry or faint. He must be completely aware that he was the only person that was naked in the room, the only person to be exposed naked for at least an hour, and the only person about to be caned and watched caned naked during much of that hour. I felt sorry for him.
While a man took to the microphone to make the necessary announcements, I studied the rest of Rohan's body. Fairly tanned and youthful, he had a slightly distended stomach although he was not heavy. He had a thick waist relative to his slender hips so that his body appeared as a column. His waist was also long compared to his legs. The dark and thick triangular foliage that was his pubic hair resembled wiry steel wool that appeared just trimmed to an ironic orderliness but harmonized with his thick and short penis. This was now about two and a half inches long and flaccid. His testicles were round and large goose pimples peppered his scrotum. In the time taken for the announcements to be completed, his penis had extended another inch. It was, however, still not in an erect state.
Now the man at the microphone was giving a summary of the prisoner's crime and sentence. The former was insider trading, the latter four lashes of the cane.
Very quickly afterward, the warders took Rohan by his arms once more and turned him around. His backside, round, dimpled and naked, now faced the audience. The warders swiftly tied his wrists and spread ankles to the three points of the trestle. Leather padding was next wrapped around his waist with the doctor supervising. The doctor took his time to minister to Rohan while we waited for word to commence the caning. The prisoner was sobbing between seemingly answering the doctor's questions. He sounded in censorious defiance of his impending punishment.
I saw the doctor shake his head negatively to questions posed, inaudible to me, by the announcer at the microphone. He was still exchanging words with the prisoner. At last, Rohan nodded and the doctor pushed a plug deeply into his rectum. The plug had stretched open Rohan's anus but the spigot's smooth elongated dimension was securely lodged inside and visibly held in place by the tightness of the prisoner's sphincter walls. The doctor pulled Rohan's penis and testicles downward toward himself to save them from being crushed against the trestle. Rohan was ready. The executioner took his place in front of the spectators.
"Commence the first lash," the announcer called out.
THWACK! The cane was swung high and fast, and landed its first stroke across Rohan's bottom. The bottom wiggled wildly.
THWACK! The second lash fell below the first one, and this was already forming a long and thin welt on the prisoner's skin. Rohan howled and then swore and started to cry.
At the sound of his cries, the doctor returned to minister to him. I studied the abject way Rohan was shaking his head. The doctor examined the welts and his buttocks. Ignoring Rohan's pleas for a moratorium or postponement of his punishment, he gave his nod in the way of the announcer. The latter gave his command again that the executioner proceeded with the next lash.
THWACK! Landing above the second lash, this third lash sent Rohan's body trembling uncontrollably and he started to curse at all of us in attendance. His naked buttocks wiggled again, as did he strain desperately against his ropes. There was a momentary reprieve while we allowed Rohan to recover and compose himself. The rest was but short.
THWACK! The executioner wasted little time to take advantage of Rohan's moment of composure when his buttock muscles were seen to be relaxed once more. This final lash was harsh and assaulted the air with a loud crack, drawing a shrill and tortured scream from the prisoner's lungs.
And it was all over. I checked the time. It was almost two o'clock. In a pseudoclimactic end to the suspense, a muffled sound of crying intruded upon the vacuum. I turned back. A young woman's head was buried on the shoulders of her older companion. Wife, fiancee or sister? I wondered. But I was finding the primacy of her tearful protest the most honest of the heaps of emotional debris that were piling up around me.
Rohan was also crying and swearing belligerently although the warders had freed his wrists and ankles and were pulling him upright.
"He'll continue to argue his innocence till he is released in five years' time," Abdoul explained to me.
"That's exactly it," I replied with journalistic license to a stunned Abdoul, "for no system is infallible. What if he truly is innocent? How then will you erase the stigma on his backside? I don't know if even you can justify your C. P. laws then. Physical torture simply cannot be justified."
The warders were now helping the caned man toward the cameras. I counted the six times Rohan was made to pose for the cameras. Three times he was stood up while two frontal body shots and one close-up of his face were taken, and three times he stood with his back toward the photographers for the two full posterior shots and one close-up of his punished bottom.
At the close of the proceedings, the announcer thanked the governor and the Warden for their attendance. The rest quietly followed the officials out en bloc. I got up but remained to observe until Rohan was led out of the room, still naked, bleeding and in pain. He looked broken and defeated.
My job done, it was time for me to leave. Mr. Abdoul and I shook hands. I thanked him vehemently for his cooperation and hospitality. It had been a worthwhile experience, I added honestly. But on my way out of the building, I found the hair on my arms still waving on ends in this tropical paradise of Somerset Maughm, although I realized that my own penis had hardened as well and painfully needed release from the confines of my muslin pants.
It was dusk when I took the long ride back to the hotel by train. I was surrounded by the after office-hour crowd of subway commuters but I was feeling in the least threatened or afraid.
The words of Mr. Abdoul rang in my ears. "This country has been in the list of the world's ten safest countries for the last fifteen years," he had boasted with just cause. I leaned back on my seat and relaxed.
In the wee hours, my coach disgorged its penultimate passenger. I was now its only rider. Yet I had felt unthreatened in this strange land for I was riding on the crest of one of the safest nations in the world. Why, crime rates here were the lowest in the history of fallen man. But it ought to be with its unforgiving corporal punishment laws that were prescribed to deter every offense known to man.
The train stalled now at a hermetic station. A band of boys were defiantly putting their finishing touches to a wall mural. On the wall was the onerous warning: 'Graffiti is an Offense Punishable by Mandatory Whipping.'
The boys pelted the warning sign with their empty spray cans and fled laughing.