What happens if you spend 50 years in a mental asylum? Ask this man at the Thane Mental Hospital.

Barefeet and clad in a green kurta and shorts, he sits awkwardly on a stool. He doesn’t smile — at least no one remembers when he last smiled. The only time he responds is when you ask him his name. “Jimmy,” he mumbles.

Mohammad Jimmy Shaikh is now 71, doomed because the system failed him. But he is not alone. Of the 1300 inmates at the asylum, over 200 have been here for the last 25 years.

Indian jails and hospitals are replete with such examples. In 2005, 77-year-old Machal Lalung, who languished as an undertrial in a mental hospital in Assam for 54 years, was released after The Indian Express broke the story. The National Human Rights Commission stepped in and the Supreme Court ordered payment of a Rs 3-lakh compensation and also Rs 1,000 a month to him.

As for Jimmy, he was held in 1956 in south Mumbai on the orders of the then Bombay police commissioner because they found him wandering on the road, his speech incoherent. He ended up in the asylum. And then they forgot all about him.

Incarcerated in the prison-like asylum, Jimmy was called a “paagal”. Nobody knew where he came from. Nor did anyone come looking for him ever. As the years rolled by, Jimmy regressed into himself. From a “schizophrenic”, he became a recluse.

Dr Sanjay Kumavat, the asylum superintendent, says “over a period of time, his emotions became negative which reduced his social interaction, his flow of speech, even flattened his feelings, resulting in cognitive decline.”

... contd.