Hangwoman
Page 17
‘If she is really a Muslim, then her marrying a Hindu must have led to murderous violence in her village.’ Sanjeev Kumar, who now stood very close behind me, said.
I felt uneasy, as though something soft had caressed the back of my neck. Repeating in my mind the line I will not wait at my own doorstep for alms any more, I moved away from him with an effort and said harshly: ‘In the thirteenth century, a woman in my family married a Muslim and accepted the faith. Thakuma says that her progeny are to be found among the Muslims you see in Bengal.’
I was angry. It is said that Ratnamalika lived in the palace till the end of the Khilji dynasty. Those days too the hangman was summoned to the palace to carry out executions. As Grandfather Grddha—that is, Ranbir Mullick—waited for his remuneration after finishing his work, a soldier would emerge with gifts covered in silk from the secluded women’s quarters. They were a great relief to him; he who struggled to support a large joint family. When Khilji returned to Devkot after having conquered all the places in which he had set foot, he was broken in body. His trusted retainer Ali Mardan killed him on his sickbed and seized power. Known to be cruelty incarnate, Ali Mardan was beheaded by his own ministers. Eight years later, when Naziruddin Mahmud took over and established the Mamluk dynasty, Ratna Begum’s husband was killed. The pithy part of Thakuma’s tale was how she died instantly of a broken heart when she heard the news of her husband’s death.
When I saw Sanjeev Kumar Mitra poke at the cloth bundle on the bamboo poles, I felt sorely irritated.
‘There’s nothing here to steal . . .’ I said to no one in particular.
Sanjeev Kumar Mitra whirled around and hurled a hard look at me—that old look of arrogance, the ravishing ‘I’ clearly visible even in the weak light. I turned to go back to the grass mat and sit down. Suddenly the candle died. Darkness and silence filled the hut. I became alert. My hands sought the ends of my dupatta. But I felt that it could not take a heavy load and was afraid. In that moment Ratnamalika yearning to be Chamundi, not Sati, revealed herself to me. I now wished that a big dark mole would grow on one half of my face and cover it completely. I wished it to be so dark that only my one bulging eye would be visible on that side. My body too was in a terrible paroxysm. When Sanjeev Kumar crept close to grab me in the dark I proved true Father’s words that a hangman’s genius lies in tightening the rope before the condemned realizes what is happening; in an instant I flung a noose around his neck. Taken by surprise, utterly shaken, he tried to lower his head and free himself. Then the strands of his hair brushed my neck and cheeks. I felt a thrill pass through me. In the dark, he leapt about and beat his limbs like a golden-maned, black-hued Arabian steed which I held by the reins in my left hand. Through the single eye on the dark side of my face, I espied the future. It was a bedroom shining with the light from innumerable lamps and decorated like a bridal chamber with coverlets and curtains of red silk. But on the bed of silk, running hither and thither, were hordes of mice.
17
For a hangman, the most difficult moment is that in which he steps up to cover the face of the condemned man. In that crucial moment, their eyes meet. The last memory that the condemned man gathers for the next world is of the hangman’s face—an expression of guilt, impenetrable boredom, or one that begs forgiveness. Sometimes the condemned man’s tears spread on the black cloth. It thickens the texture of the black. Tears and sweat—when they spread, they thicken the black in their own distinct ways. It was in Britain, two hundred and fifty years ago, that the practice of covering the condemned man’s face was established by law. It was in response to the last wish made by a condemned man who had decided the manner of his death—with his eyes covered. The first of such hoods was the nightcap common in Britain then. The condemned man had to bear the cost and like the nightcaps of those days, these too were white in colour. Noting that covering the condemned man’s face made it better for both sides, many countries adopted the practice later. As far as the Grddha Mullicks are concerned, in our history, the black hood was used at times but not always—both before the British and after their advent. But after Independence, it was always first on the list of items to be bought and readied in the prison before the hanging:
BLACK CLOTH TO COVER THE HEAD OF THE CONDEMNED PRISONER–1
When we met again at the studio the day after we had gone to Protima di’s house in Mallick Bazar, Sanjeev Kumar Mitra and I looked at each other as if we had black hoods on. As he was applying his make-up in front of the large mirror below the TV that constantly played CNC programmes, I noted with glee that he was trying to ignore me. His glasses were gone. They had broken when I knocked them to the floor in the darkness that filled Protima di’s single room. In that moment, he had been strong; it was hard to control him with just my left hand. And so, after being thrown off guard initially, he struggled and, with considerable effort, tried to loop the other end of the dupatta around my neck and pull me close. When I fought him with both hands, his glasses were knocked off. He gripped my shoulders fiercely, and I pulled hard to tighten the noose around his neck. Our legs stamping on the ground raised a racket louder than horses’ hooves. I did not even hear Protima di reach the door, mud cups balanced on a plate in one hand and a light in the other. Ratnamalika had taken over my mind then. I had a revelation about how the horseman who had swept her off on his horse managed to erase her bear-face. I was so envious of Ratna Begum.
‘Stop!’ Protima di roared, putting the plate down.
We jumped apart. But because the dupatta was too short, our heads collided. I quickly undid the loop around my neck. He, however, could only loosen it somewhat; he could not take it off. Protima di strode into the house, looked straight into his eyes, and aimed a half-slap on his cheek.
‘Bloody fool!’
I recalled how his face had turned a deep red, and smiled, and Sanjeev Kumar, who sent a sidelong glance at me through the mirror, noticed it. He said to the make-up man sternly: ‘Hurry up. The number of dead in Amlasole is five now.’
The night before, when Protima di ordered him to sit down and drink up his tea, he had sat down passively, looking quite exhausted. Next to where he sat lay the broken spectacles. Picking them up—the lenses were intact, but the frame was broken—he looked helpless. I too was weary. I did not feel like yielding to the fact that this was the man who had first sounded in my heart the hoof beats of love. I was more the warrior who had left the battlefield briefly for a sip of water. The frenzied rage of war danced in my blood and flesh, in my very marrow.
Sanjeev Kumar tried very hard to get the noose off, both before and after he had his tea.
‘You can’t undo the hangman’s noose,’ Protima di said, as though to herself, when she saw his discomfort.
I wanted to see Jitendra Ghosh, who had reached Rukhiyabi’s village after having got lost on his way to a friend’s wedding in a village near Kurseong, some 550 miles from Kolkata. At very first sight, he decided that she would be his bride. He refused to leave the village until she agreed to go with him. Caring not for the mist and the sun and the rain, he pursued her for two whole years. At night, he hid himself in the bushes behind her house, whistling and waiting for her. When heavy mists fell for the fourteenth day in winter, she went out to him. His fair-skinned feet had swollen and turned blue in the cold. Holding their very lives fast within clenched fists, they hid in the bushes during the day and travelled by night, finally reaching Purulia; to live in peace there she took the name Protima. The bouts of epilepsy that she had suffered from ever since her mother remarried never recurred . . . until the day she learned that her husband had died in jail. Tears welled in my eyes as I heard her voice falter when she said this. Sanjeev Kumar’s cell phone rang just then.
‘Just two people, Harish babu? Isn’t it a bother to go all that way for just two? Have we followed up on that gangrape? And what about the visuals of the new shop in New Market? Are they done? Okay, okay . . .’
Hearing such words in a place like that, my tears sprang up again. Thinking of Jitendra Ghosh made me terribly envious of Protima di. Her face betrayed no emotion at all. If only my dupatta were of stronger material; if only Protima di’s hut had a stronger beam, rod or pillar, I wished fervently. The passion of the hangwoman inside me was of exactly this sort—the quickening eagerness of the noose fixed precisely between the third and fourth vertebrae.
His make-up done, Sanjeev Kumar stood up. He looked all the more handsome now. But those eyes, now deprived of their dark-tinted shields, ran hither and thither like grey mice. Even the night before, when he had stood there helplessly, the dupatta with its pattern of red circles hanging down from the noose around his neck, his eyes had made a cowardly retreat. The only way to remove the noose was to cut it. The dupatta was part of the salwar kameez stitched from the cheap cloth that Ma had told Kakima to buy from New Bazar for me to wear to the TV studio. Protima di handed me an old, handleless knife. I cut the noose below his neck with difficulty and draped the rest of the dupatta on my shoulders. When he touched Protima di’s hand while bidding goodbye, Sanjeev Kumar slipped out two hundred-rupee notes: ‘Do take these, from the channel . . .’
She stared down at the money and shook her head impassively.
‘Well, if you don’t want them . . .’
Like a thief, he pocketed the notes again and hurried out. You could have taken them, Didi, I tried to tell her sadly.
She looked hard at me and said, ‘This great city has tried to make me beg many times. It didn’t succeed. Do you think this fellow’s channel will?’
The embers of anger had glowed again on her face. I feared that she would convulse again. But do not fear, go in peace, she insisted. Told me to take care as I walked back in the dark. Putting her bony hand on my shoulder, with no emotion whatsoever, she had said, ‘Ramesh should have brought home a girl like you. That wasn’t to be . . .’
As I sat in front of the camera, the heaviness of heart that I’d suffered the night before rushed back into me. Sanjeev Kumar cast a serious eye on me; he looked as though he had not lived through the previous day at all.
‘Everyone’s after Amlasole today. If we want good ratings for our show, you’d better be more energetic.’
That was the order and challenge issued to the slave by the master. So when he began as usual with All right, Chetna, as the day approaches, what is the latest news about the execution, I responded with the same coin.
‘Look here, Sanjeev Kumar Mitra, there are many things in a hangman’s life that you cannot understand . . .’
I looked at him as though he were my equal or even my inferior.
‘It’s easy for you to simply say: a noose, the gallows. But only those who have felt the noose around their necks know what that experience is. I can easily loop this dupatta around someone’s neck and kill him. But that’s not what citizens expect a responsible government to do. When the government undertakes to do it, it must be done in a faultless, neat way. The government and the worker appointed by the government, the hangman, cannot simply hang and murder someone like some hired killer. No, simply not possible.’
I continued in a serious manner, ‘Take, for example, the rope and the noose. Without the rope, there is no hanging. The rope is an instrument of justice. You can’t use just any rope or make any noose. Strict instructions have to be followed in each case. One of my father’s great-grandfathers, Jnananatha Grddha Mullick, used to make his noose by burning the end of the rope and inserting an iron ring. The ring would fall exactly on the vertebrae of the neck; such was his skill in making the noose. At the same time, my father, Phanibhushan Grddha Mullick, believes that the practice of looping around one end of the rope to form a noose symbolizes our life and work. An iron ring need not come between life and death, he thinks. He prefers the simple noose, what the British call the halter-style noose.’
I had picked up that word three years ago when an English novelist had come to interview Father. Father made him a noose with his gamchha and the man had exclaimed in surprise, hey this is just a halter-style noose. Sanjeev Kumar Mitra sat up, alert now.
‘For a long time, rope made by John Eddington and Co. was imported especially for the hangings in Kolkata. But there was a shipping delay once after which local companies began to be preferred. The imported rope was very elegant—its edges neatly sewn up, not frayed. That rope, 3.8 metres long and three-quarters of an inch thick, was woven from four strands. When my father’s elder brother, the late Sasibhushan Grddha Mullick, hanged a criminal for the first time, the rope he had to use was covered with leather.’
I paused and looked at Sanjeev Kumar Mitra’s face.
‘Uncle Sasibhushan did not want to become a hangman at all. His passion was football. On his first day as a hangman, a match was on, and Sailesh Bose, who was Jorabagan’s star player, was to play that day. Dadu—Purushottam Grddha Mullick—had to give him a terrible beating to get him to do the job. Uncle, who was still a teenager then, was teary-eyed and morose when he put the noose around the neck of the first man brought to him. The position of the noose was correct, but this rope was of the new sort and so his calculations went wrong. The leather covering cut the poor man’s vein and he bled and bled. The noose didn’t stay in the right place; the head was torn off the neck; the body fell into the well with a loud thud; the head lingered in the noose for a moment and then it too fell, like a ball of cloth, and rolled on the floor. Uncle screamed in terror . . .’
Sanjeev Kumar was motionless. I paused dramatically and continued after a minute or two.
‘After that, Grandfather informed the government that such a rope couldn’t be used. Later, an order was passed that made smoothening the lower end of the rope with a kind of wax—called gutta perccha those days—a necessary practice. If the rope isn’t softened before the hanging, it will be hard as stone. So if someone is to be hanged at four in the morning, the softening of the wax-coated part must begin at three o’clock at least. When the condemned persons were brought out of their cells, the scent of the softening wax would reach them. Just think, Sanju babu, how it would be if you were a condemned man. That situation—when the aroma of softening wax fills the jail yard, reminding you in those last moments of your life, in the breaking dawn, that it’s time, almost, to go . . .’
Sanjeev Kumar’s face was now redder than it had been when Protima di had called him a bloody fool. With a subdued smile, I took over the reins completely and continued: ‘The British rope at that time was all made in Italy. The British decided to insert a leather washer to make sure that the noose would not move. They ordered that such a rope be used. My forefathers did not like that. Then when rubber became common, the leather was replaced by rubber. As far as my father is concerned, the rope is the symbol of Yamadharma, the God of Death. He won’t let it be polluted with leather or metal.’
‘And what about you, Chetna?’ Sanjeev Kumar was clearly uneasy when he asked that.
‘This is a democratic country, Sanju babu. It is the government elected by the people and of the people that must decide how we live and die.’
When that day’s show ended, Harish Nath hurried up to me and congratulated me, Chetna, you were terrific. I saw the scenes of poverty deaths in Amlasole on TV only when I was wiping off my make-up. The terror that I had felt as I walked back to the car from Protima di’s hut rose up in me again. Standing in that studio room flooded with white light, I saw the paddy and wheat fields go dry and black in the unrelenting summer; I saw, as if before my eyes, the cattle collapse and die from sheer exhaustion. Most of those who slept on both sides of the path—so narrow you could barely walk on it—that ran through the slum had come to the city because they had been betrayed either by the rain or by reli
gion. They lived—sometimes ten or twelve together—in rooms so tiny that you couldn’t stretch out your arm. When it rained, they sheltered under bits of tarpaulin or hurriedly torn pieces of advertisement hoardings. They collected water from taps where a hundred or hundred and fifty people waited; they learned how to shit and piss in the open after darkness fell and before the morning light came. They got used to eating, sleeping and making love among rats and cockroaches and worms and mosquitoes. The dogs and cows and cats and goats and fowl squeezed in between somehow.
Then, the pretty newsreader began to read her news on TV: ‘Meanwhile, following the controversy around his initial statement that the deaths in Amlasole were not because of lack of food but due to some nutrients in the food, the chief minister has announced that he is withdrawing it. He has admitted that poverty still exists in some parts of the state and that such situations may arise again . . .’
I remembered the adivasi family that had come to Nimtala Ghat the summer before. One of the women huddled at our doorstep with two little children, begging for some food. Ma gave them a little rice and a few rotis; the children screamed with sheer want. When she told us that they had survived for a whole month on nothing but the flesh of mynahs, Thakuma pressed her hand to her breast and called out to Bhagawan Mahadev. The children who were small enough to be toddlers were actually six and eight. Their mother looked as old as Thakuma, but was really just my age. When she got up to leave after wolfing down the food and thanking us, I saw her breasts through her frayed, weather-beaten sari—two bits of leather that hung like gloves, somewhat dark at the tips.
The anchor’s face came on again as I was walking out of the make-up room. ‘Minister for the western region, Parameswar Burman, declared that the deaths in Amlasole were not caused by hunger but by disease . . .’