by K R Meera
‘Good business today, it seems—’ Ramu da murmured, his eyes still shut.
It was a very hot day. The clothes hanging outside dried quickly. The bells rang in the Kali temple two houses away.
‘The whole of last night, vehicles were passing this way,’ Ramu da spoke again.
The flow of vehicles on Strand Road will cease only if there are no more deaths. In my twenty-two-year-old memory the road has never been free of funeral corteges. It was either motor vehicles that sped down the road falling into ancient potholes and dents, disturbing us with their rattling, or handcarts, which were less noisy. The bodies of the really poor arrived in handcarts and waste collectors’ carts. When we needed more money, Ma and Kakima sold tea the whole night through. But such occasions were rare. ‘I’m not loose in the head to keep making money so that the Sonagachi whores get some extra,’ was Ma’s stance. Sonagachi was just two turns down the road. Past the vegetable market and the street where sweetmeats were sold in shops on both sides of the road, the lanes of Sonagachi began. Like the droplets of water in the Ganga which gush towards the ocean, every extra coin that appeared in our family flowed towards Sonagachi and found its rest.
The twelve-fifteen train to Prinsep Ghat had just passed by; it was then that someone from the office of the IG, Correctional Services, Ajoy Chakrabarty, came looking for my father. When the police jeep rattled up to the house through the crowds and the hearses, Father stepped out of the shop with a smile of triumph. As the policemen waited, causing traffic jams on three roads, Father put on his white kurta and dhoti, and fastened the black leather belt that was almost as broad as his palm over them. Kaku hurried from the next house, rolling the sleeves of his checked shirt and trying to catch up with Father. I stood leaning against the wall, tying and untying a noose with my dupatta. Thakuma chanted Nama Shivaaya, hands folded in prayer. In the inner room Ramu da lay with his face to the wall, eyes shut. It was searing hot outside; the sun glowered. Sweat poured down. A feeling as persistent as hot steam building up within a tightly shut kitchen-pot seethed in my heart and body.
Before Father returned, the first newspaper man was at our doorstep. Narendra Choudhuri, local correspondent of the Anandabazar Patrika. I stepped out when I saw him. When I passed the Plus Two exams, he had reported it: ‘Hangman’s daughter scores high distinction in Plus Two exams’. But Father did not let him print my photo even with that news.
‘Baba has been sent for from the jail, Babu.’ I went up to him respectfully.
‘Ah, he is going to be busy now . . . eh, so you didn’t continue your studies?’
I smiled and shook my head, no, I didn’t.
He looked at me with sympathy. ‘You were working at a press?’
‘I am not going anywhere now, Babu,’ I told him.
As he left on his scooter through the hustle and bustle, I recalled my job as a proofreader in Anjaneya Prasad Yadav’s Sri Maruti Press on Madan Chatterjee Lane when I was just out of Plus Two. The salary was fifty rupees. I was barely there for two weeks, but on my way to work I really enjoyed walking past the bookshops in front of Thakurbari, taking in their scent.
I was sitting on a wooden chair near a barred window in a small room of a two-hundred-year-old building, the lime peeling off its walls, comparing the written draft with the first proof on the writing board.
I was correcting the errors in ‘Ekla chalo, ekla chalo, ekla chalo, ekla chalo re . . .’ when two hands slid under my armpits and spread themselves on my breasts. Because the stink of paan and the reek of sweat invaded my nostrils suddenly, I knew it was Maruti Prasad, Anjaneya’s son, without even looking. I turned around calmly and gazed into his eyes. I was neither fearful nor nervous. Instead, laughter bubbled up in me. Setting aside the writing board, I stood up. Like all the other Grddha Mullicks, I too am unusually tall, and have a strong, well-built frame. He was a couple of inches shorter than me when I stood up. Very slowly, I took the dupatta off my chest. He gawked greedily at my breasts. I tied a noose in the bat of an eyelid and, smiling at him, put it around his neck like a marriage garland. Before he could pull me closer, I had tightened the noose, passing the other end of the dupatta through the window bars and pulling it tight. His mouth gaped open. His eyes popped. His tongue protruded and paan juice flowed from it like blood. He struggled hard. But I took all that force on my left arm. He thrashed about desperately, his eyeballs bulged and his tongue hung close to his chin. Slowly, I eased my grip. He collapsed, panting, barely conscious. As I helped him sit against the wall, I remembered Father. Whenever he had to answer questions posed by journalists, Father would ask afterwards: ‘Isn’t that one thumping line?’ I too felt like pitching one. So I said to him: ‘The hangman’s rope is not meant to tie the cow.’ He looked at me, opening his drooping eyelids. Weak, they closed again. As I untied the noose from his neck and shook it to make a dupatta again, I also let him know: ‘To kill a cock, you don’t need a hangman.’
That was a terribly hot summer. The sun blazed at forty-five degree Celsius or more. The heat and the summer did not affect me. But, as I walked from the press to the bus stop and got on to bus no. 22, a tightened noose hung from my neck. I was afraid to look at my own hands. I had not realized that my hands were so strong, so rough. I had Ma’s fair skin and her thick curly hair. But that moment I yearned for her short, frail figure too.
Thakuma was at the Kali temple as usual when I reached home. Ma had gone to Dum Dum to see her niece’s baby. When Ramu da inquired with his eyes why I was home early, I told him, ‘I proved that I am Grddha Mullick’s daughter.’
Hearing me, Father came in from the other room. I had to tell him that Maruti Prasad had tried to molest me. He didn’t believe me. Red and yellow hues flashed on his dark face. Then his eyes filled with tears. He went out of the room as if to calm the storm within. Ramu da looked at me, deep sympathy in his eyes. After some time, Father returned. ‘How did you make that noose?’
His normally resonant voice sounded weary. I looked at Ramu da, picked up my dupatta again and tied a noose. Father took it in his hand and gave it a good look. Surprise dawned in his red bulging eyes. I put it around my neck. When he pulled its tail, it tightened. I leapt up, writhing. A smile spread across Father’s face. He let go of the tail.
‘Yadav’s tongue must have stuck out?’ he asked.
I rubbed my neck and nodded, still panting. It was then that Father put his tobacco-stained index finger on the point below the chin and above the depression in my neck and showed me the correct spot.
‘This . . . this is its spot. If it moves up or down, the condemned will die flailing and thrashing. That’s disgraceful for a hangman.’
He loosened the noose from my neck and threw the dupatta at me. Anyway, my employment ended that day. Father did not allow me to go out alone after that. On that day, 18 May, when Father returned at sundown in the police jeep, I realized that I was wearing the same dupatta that had tightened around Maruti Prasad’s neck. In the past five years, I had been able to buy just one or two new sets of clothes.
Father came in looking vexed and tired. And fully drunk. He picked a fight quite unnecessarily with Ma, and retired to his room. It is the very room that you have seen in a couple of documentaries and the many TV programmes that came later. Asbestos-covered roof, unplastered laterite walls, garlanded pictures of Mahadeva and Ma Kali, and also Grandfather, on the stand nailed to the western wall. On all the other walls, framed news items about Father. An iron bar that supported the walls crossed the room; Father’s old gamchha and shirt hung on it. As he stretched out on the narrow wooden cot in his threadbare lungi, Father looked as if he was wearing a white vest because all his body hair had turned white.
‘Can’t believe those deceitful fellows; don’t touch even the water they offer! No rule indeed that hangmen’s children should be given jobs . . . Uh-uh . . . playing around with Grddha Mullick?’ Father raged.
I switched on the television, pretending not to hear. Sonia Gandhi had declared that she did not want to become prime minister. A woman with a big bindi on her forehead lamented to the newsreader that the country did not have the good fortune to have another woman prime minister. Everyone who appeared on TV was white-skinned, pinkish. Before I could get a good look at them, Kaku called from the salon on the other side, across the wall.
‘O . . . Chetu!’
I went outside. Two cats had snuggled up in the cool wetness beside the washing stone. It was that moment, the one in which I stepped over the cats into the still glowering, reddish-hued summer evening, that my life turned upside down. Soon enough, I had to go to Alipore Central Jail. A man led me into a strange cremation ground in a hearse of flowers with the toes of my feet tied together. From my life thus far, I can say this much: on this earth, only love is more uncertain than death.
2
Ours has been a family of famous hangmen for very long, right from the times when the Nanda kings ruled the land. Our roots sink deep, to four hundred and twenty years before Christ. Ramu da’s teasing banter that the only events which our family members hadn’t seen with their own eyes were Shiva’s all-consuming tandava with the body of Sati—who had immolated herself in Daksha’s sacrificial altar—and Vishnu’s splitting of her body into pieces with his Sudarsana Chakra, with the pieces scattering over eighteen places sent Thakuma into a fit. But she had a swift reply to that. ‘Get lost, you fellow! Kalighat is the place where Devi Sati’s right toe fell when Bhagawan Mahavishnu cut up the body with his Chakra. Who do you think were the first inhabitants of this Kalighat?’
That was long before the White and Black towns came up. Thakuma took pride in the fact that even the chaturvaranya had taken shape much later. Before Bharat became Bharat, before three villages between the swamp and the forest beside the Hooghly became Kolkata, there was power and crime and death penalty in the country. The very first hangman in our family was Radharaman Mullick. He was the palace doctor. That great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather fell madly in love with a woman who came to him with a fever. She was the beloved of the prince, the true heir to the kingdom. Thakuma said that our forefather of yore became a hangman so that he could possess her. All the grandmothers’ tales we heard as children were of death, of some sort.
That Grandfather Hangman’s house stood in a large yard full of portia trees in full bloom. He was rich and handsome. Still, he did not win the woman’s heart. When King Mahanandin passed away, Mahapadma Nanda, his son by a dasi, threw out the true heir to the throne. A war followed. The wounded prince went to our illustrious primogenitor to be healed. Radharaman healed the prince but then handed him over to Mahapadma Nanda. The new king ordered the prince’s public execution. Radharaman Mullick went to the court begging to be allowed to perform the hanging. He was the first person to go there asking for the job of his own free will. The king granted him his desire. The first time, the prince struggled and flailed as the noose tightened but nothing more happened. My ancestor brought him down. The second time he fastened the noose in the precise fashion which our family continues to follow: between the third and fourth vertebrae. This time his neck broke as easily as a portia flower from its stem, with a single pull of the cord. As he ascended the gallows for a second time, the man stared at our forefather and gritted his teeth: ‘You will never possess her.’ But just the opposite was to happen. When the king asked him about his reward, Grandfather Radharaman asked for that woman. And got her. But because of the precision with which that hanging was carried out, he had to work as a hangman for the rest of his life. Those days hangings were almost a daily affair. He would return home at night with swollen hands. That woman, Chinmayi Devi, bore all his ten children.
The night Thakuma told us that story, Ramu da, who was just twelve at the time, said to me as we lay on the soiled old mat, ready to fall asleep, ‘I will never love a woman when I become big.’ ‘Me too,’ I intoned. That was the time when the jingle ‘One day I will grow and be like my big brother’ was always playing on TV. In those days, when watching TV at Bhupen Chakrabarty’s house next door cost ten paisa, that song re-echoed from not just my lips, but my very heart.
Thakuma never thought that hanging was vile. She was the daughter of my great-grandfather’s sister. She told us that her prayer as a child was to marry a hangman. She reminded us: ‘That is our profession, we kill for the sake of justice. When Grandfather Radharaman was a doctor, he saved the prince’s life. When he became the hangman, he executed him. The doctor’s job is to heal even the foe who appears before him seeking a cure. The hangman’s job is to kill even his own son if he is the wrongdoer. No work is low. No work makes you a sinner. Then, as far as performing this task is concerned . . .’ Pride swelled in Thakuma’s voice: ‘No ordinary person can do it. The mind must be firm, the hand must be strong and you’ve got to have brains.’
‘Brains to kill, Thakuma?’ I asked.
She laughed aloud. ‘You think this is a simple matter? My grandfather’s father, that is, your great-grandfather’s mother’s older brother, Yogendra Mullick used to say, “Work out at one glance the weight of the condemned’s body. Then measure the hollow in his neck.”’
‘For what, Thakuma?’
‘The life breath is in that hollow, girl. There are many types of men . . . some have strong bones there . . . won’t break soon . . . so the noose has to be fastened correctly.’
Thakuma spoke as if she had done it a hundred times. As she retold the stories of hangings, Thakuma’s hands knotted and loosened a noose on an imaginary cord. That was a habit common to all the women of our family. While we spoke, we obsessively made and unmade nooses with the ends of our garments, be it a sari or a dupatta. That must have been a psychological necessity. Only once did a woman from our family accept the job of the hangman. Hard to believe, but she had demanded the job.
On the nights Thakuma told us tales of the family, I went to bed thinking of the big mansion in the yard amidst the blooming portia trees with pride and the pain of loss. In class four, we were taken to Thakurbari on a tour. That is the biggest house I have ever set foot in. As I walked along Madan Chatterjee Lane, one in a line of children clad in grimy frayed uniforms, ancient houses of uncut red stone appeared in front of my eyes. In my desire-tinged imagination, I wished: If only Grandfather Radharaman’s house were like Thakurbari. It was a happy pastime to imagine Ramu da and me playing hide-and-seek behind the pillars that lined the cemented central courtyard, almost as big as a football field. In my mind’s eye, I stood on the terrace of the house and gazed at the road. Golden tram cars flashing their blood-red lights crawled over silver tracks in front of the house. Reality, at that age, is like the noose fastened on the hollow of the neck. From the shiny reddish floors of Thakurbari, I had to inevitably wake up below Thakuma’s coir cot in our rathole of a home. Our home was dilapidated enough to look ancient too, as though it might tumble down any moment. It was one of the oldest buildings on Strand Road. We were living in the cowshed of the house that her great-grandfather built so that he could bathe in the Ganga every day, sighed Thakuma.
Our house was like a narrow box with just three sides. All rooms opened into the small courtyard where only one person could stand. The tea shop, the salon and the kitchen had wooden false ceilings. The other rooms had asbestos roofs. Only the tea shop and the salon next to it could be seen from outside, and they jutted into the road. Father’s room shared walls with them. Right in front of it was the drain in which we washed clothes and dishes. After Father’s room came the room that Ramu da, Thakuma and I shared. It had doors that opened into Father’s room, the yard and the kitchen next to it. Opposite the kitchen was Kaku’s room. All the rooms had disfigured walls and cement-bordered apertures instead of windows. The kitchen floor lay cracked and broken for many years.
The rooms fought a losing battle against the dirty drain that flowed past the quarter
s of the Port Trust workers just a wall away. At night, when we went to bed, the ground shook with the electric train’s kata-kata-kata. Hari da’s bhelpuri shop where packets of Maharani paan hung like decorations was just next door. The walls echoed the cusswords of some drunkard high on the arrack secretly sold there at night, and the piercing cries of sacrificial animals from Hemant Mullick’s Kali temple. When that happened, I always shut my eyes and calmed myself, kindling in my mind’s eye the image of Thakurbari and Grandfather Radharaman with a long beard and gown that fell right down to his feet.
When I stepped outside at Kaku’s call that 18 May, I was thinking of Grandfather Radharaman. That was because the news of the appointment of a special officer who would break open the lock of the strongroom at Thakurbari and make an inventory of the articles kept there had just been announced on TV. The Nobel medal and citation had been stolen from Uttarayan, at Santiniketan. Deep in thought, I did not notice the vehicle parked among the hearses and the ambulances in that narrow street; it looked just like them. Kaku was standing on the road in front of the salon. When the crowd passed us and moved towards the Ghat, I asked him why he had called me. He gave me a sly smile and, taking a ten-rupee note out of his pocket, asked me to go get some paan. That was unusual. Though surprised, I obeyed when he pressed me to go. To reach the paan shop just opposite the Ghat, you turn to the right from the house and walk past Thakuma’s Shiva shrine and Hemant Mullick’s Kali temple. But when I set off, Kaku stopped me. He told me not to turn right but to walk down the road to Hari da’s bhelpuri shop and get it from there. I, with all the innocence of a twenty-two-year-old girl who had never been caught in love, walked merrily to Hari da’s shop and back, swinging my arms, folding and unfolding them. I did not sense the danger I was in till I saw a handsome young man holding a mike against the backdrop of a funeral procession on the seven o’clock news. The story came just after the Muslim leaders’ accusation that Mamata Banerjee’s praise of Narendra Modi had caused the party’s seats to be reduced to just one in the upcoming elections. Father laughed heartily when the house and its surroundings, and ‘Vote for Avinash Chatterjee’ in indigo on the wall appeared on TV. I, however, was sick and tired of it. ‘Look, look,’ he called us happily. I figured out only then why Father had been sitting rooted in front of CNC since six o’clock.