“We are not in a textbook, Miss Roy,” Chaitali had said last Tuesday, gesturing to the dry, cracked soil. “My customers need vegetables they can eat. Not… flowers for butterflies.”
Chaitali Das grew up in Alipore, Kolkata, where her father served as a public prosecutor at the Alipore Police Court. As a child visiting him at work, she witnessed a recurring scene that would forever shape her destiny: “I saw some people getting off the police van handcuffed, their kin trying to reach them while policemen were driving them away. The humiliation that labelled the undertrials and the agony of their families, the unavoidable lifelong stigma they carry when they return to their families and the society, disturbed me,” she has recalled. This early exposure planted the seeds of a lifelong commitment to prison reform and social rehabilitation. chaitali das abby roy