Barry Hulse's 10-Year Ordeal in India's Deadliest Prisons

Barry Hulse was living an ordinary life as a factory worker and father in Salford, Manchester, with one extraordinary passion—his love for Goa, India. He visited the coastal paradise so often that he and his mother pooled their money to buy an apartment there. It was his slice of heaven, thousands of miles from home.

But in 2006, during what should have been a routine trip with a friend, Barry's life was destroyed. That friend—someone he trusted—secretly smuggled over 75,000 diazepam tablets into packages Barry was mailing back to the UK, putting Barry's name on every single parcel. Barry had no idea he'd just become a marked man in India.

Three years later, in November 2009, when Barry returned to Goa, customs officers arrested him at Dabolim Airport. What followed was a nightmare that would consume nearly a decade of his life: three years and eight months on remand in Arthur Road Jail—one of India's most notorious and overcrowded maximum security prisons—before being sentenced to 20 years for a crime he insists he didn't commit.

This is the true story of survival in a foreign justice system where Barry didn't speak the language, didn't understand the laws, and had no way to prove his innocence. Inside Arthur Road's walls, built in the 1920s and criticized for inhuman conditions, Barry was crammed into barracks designed for 80 prisoners but holding over 200. He witnessed violence, corruption, illness, and desperation. He contracted malaria and lost dramatic amounts of weight. He formed unlikely alliances with gangsters for protection. He endured the psychological torture of wearing a prison uniform with yellow stripes—a public mark of his conviction for seven-plus years.

Through it all, Barry maintained his innocence. And somehow, against impossible odds, he survived. From Mumbai to Kolhapur, through multiple prison transfers, court battles, and the crushing isolation of being thousands of miles from home, Barry Hulse documented his journey in his powerful memoir, No Tension—a story of resilience, adaptation, and the unbreakable human spirit.

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