Hangwoman

by K R Meera

  ‘But when I went up the stage, it was exactly the reverse. I would always feel a noose tighten around my neck. There would always be a struggle with death, a brief one, lasting just five or ten seconds. And I would dissolve. I always delivered my dialogues like gunfire, people say. But to tell you the truth, I can never remember what I said or did on stage. After the first piece of dialogue, I ceased to be Phanibhushan Grddha Mullick. Sanju babu, I think that I hang myself at that moment only to be reborn as the character I play. Don’t know if all those who die by hanging feel that way . . .’ Father let out a long sigh.

  ‘All through my life, I’ve been beset by this confusion. Azar, the stage on which a jatra is performed, is open on three sides. Standing on it with make-up thick enough to look like a coat of white cement on my face, I’ve often felt that I am a condemned man wearing the death-hood. But standing before the gallows, lever in hand, I’ve felt that I am on stage, acting a part,’ Father said with emotion, as if he was speaking lines on the stage.

  I listened, silent. During the sandbag test, I was convinced that the hangman who stood facing the gallows needed an island of light to escape to. The sandbag fell into the cellar with a thud; instead of watching the rope twist, shiver and then become still before swinging mildly in the sudden burst of rain, my mind escaped to the ruined house in which roots flowed through the balconies, and leaves and branches peeped out of the doors and windows. I felt upon my neck and toes the gentle touch of vines on which the dark blue nilmani flowers bloomed. On the walls from which the plaster had fallen off flashed the many greens of the ferns and single-leaved plants that reminded one of single-cell creatures. Anwar Shah of the silver handlebar moustache glided in on his flaming rickshaw fitted with a yellow tiger amid a heavenly shower of blue-tinted aparajita flowers. Sanjeev Kumar held out his hand, inviting me to sit beside him on the rickshaw’s burning seat. I imagined his heart throb for me, making the same sound which rose from around the stage when the audience stood up to applaud Father’s performance.

  Father drew another mouthful of smoke from the cigarette, took out the liquor bottle from behind Grandfather’s picture, and poured himself a drink.

  ‘I have never hanged anybody. Nor have I been in the jatra. But I do know the terrible struggle of the moment when the noose tightens . . .’

  Sanjeev Kumar rubbed his neck ruefully, took off his glasses, and winked at me.

  I could not tear my eyes off his face. My reflection glinted bluish in his green eyes, I felt. Each time he looked at me, the derelict mansion that held a whole jungle within came to my mind. I craved to hear once more the gentle murmur of leaves and the twitter of the little orange bird that had flown in through the window. My heart, strong enough to kill a man, became impatient again to hearken to the beating of his heart.

  ‘Ma Mati Manush was a gigantic hit at the time. During S.S. Ray’s glory days. It had Bhairab Gangopadhyay’s mind-blowing dialogues. Six hundred shows were performed that year. Within two years, the communists were in power. Jyoti babu became chief minister. Get the point?’

  Father emptied his glass, drew in another whiff of smoke and let it out slowly. Then he stood up and delivered a line to an imaginary audience: ‘We are people who stood watching them build forts and mansions on land that was leased out to them for trade. In the end, when their cannons spat fire at our breasts, we had lost everything. My land, Mother, is like you. Like you, Mother, who bore me in your womb for ten months and brought me into this world in searing pain!’

  ‘Is this a line from that play?’

  ‘No, it is my own. When an actor has played many roles and appeared on stage many times, he doesn’t need another person’s lines, Sanju babu.’

  Sanjeev Kumar Mitra smiled and applauded. I had seen Father act in the jatra only once or twice. The drama companies are on both sides of the zigzag road that runs from Strand Road, where our house stands, to the Chitpur tram road. On my way to school, I used to look up curiously at posters of Tumi Badhu Tumi Mata, or Bhange Khare Chhador Alo with pictures of lipstick-wearing women with thick layers of make-up, clad in sleeveless blouses and silk saris. I have trembled with fear seeing Father act on the azar. Ramu da had taken me to the play Tumi Desh that was performed one Durga Puja at Kumortuli, in which Father played the role of the zamindar.

  The musicians took their places on the two-and-a-half-feet high stage with their tabla and cymbals on one side, and with the flute, violin and harmonium on the other side. The stage was awash with the bright light falling on it from the four pillars mounted on the sides. I could see someone walk and sit in the green room behind the stage through the gap in the curtain. When Father came on stage in his shiny boots, I saw his legs first under the curtain. I did not recognize him. Ramu da whispered into my ear, ‘Baba, Baba,’ and I sat up, wide-eyed, bursting with awe. His new form was majestic. When Father stepped into the spotlight in a shiny red kurta, stroking his abundant moustache, the lone chair in the room became his throne. The same chair became a window to some characters, a door to some others, and to a third set it became the shade of a tree. Why, to my amazement, it even turned into the gallows!

  ‘In our time there used to be jatras that crossed a thousand performances. But then the numbers began to fall with every passing year. Even some ten or twenty years back, we could expect a hundred and fifty or two hundred performances, but now it’s rare for them to cross even seventy-five.’

  Father threw the cigarette stub out of the open door and lit another one.

  ‘What is there to be surprised about it—isn’t there a television playing in everyone’s house twenty-four hours a day?’

  ‘Don’t blame the TV people, Phani da! Let us live too,’ Sanjeev Kumar Mitra laughed out loud. ‘But I can’t help saying this—if you were a big performer in the jatra, your daughter is a big star on TV. Each day her performance leaves our editors and viewers speechless! No one believes that she’s studied only up to Plus Two. It’s all your cleverness, Phani da!’

  ‘But didn’t she slip up yesterday?’ Father emoted scepticism, knitting his brows. ‘When you asked about the sandbag she ought to have looked more serious. Instead, she was smiling, and her talk sounded too playful. Chetu, haven’t you heard me correct Sudev so many times? We hangmen speak about death. We should always be careful, wary, when we do so. It is the most serious thing in life. Never speak of death smilingly. When we speak of it, our faces and voices must be marked by heavy seriousness. We shouldn’t speak of death to entertain people, but to remind them of their own inevitable end.’

  My face blanched. The swish of the orange bird’s wings had reverberated in my ears as I sat in front of Sanjeev Kumar for Hangwoman’s Diary after the sandbag test. I had felt unnecessarily happy, energized—I forgot the camera’s presence. When Sanjeev Kumar asked me how it felt to know that there would be a real human body hanging there in seven days, I had given him an unnecessarily broad smile.

  ‘But have you forgotten your ancestor Kala Grddha Mullick?’ Sanjeev Kumar intervened as though to help me.

  ‘You haven’t really understood my ancestor Kala. He viewed the act of hanging differently. The crowd those days knew only so much; its discernment was poor. Our days are not those, are they, Sanju babu? Aren’t publicly spoken words more important today? We need to be politically correct, Sanju babu, that’s my point.’

  But I completely forgot Father’s reminder the next day when I set out for the studio again with Sanjeev Kumar Mitra. My heart pounded. It yearned to go with him once again to the ruined bungalow that hid a forest within. It hankered for the moment when I could listen to the rustle of leaves in the midst of alluring verdure and be silent, my head resting on his chest. Between Strand Road and Bowbazar, he flagged down a rickshaw again. Just as the rickshaw-wallah stopped next to us he broke into a coughing fit at the end of which he spat a blob of phlegm on the road. Sanjeev Kumar looked at him keenly. ‘Bhai, to which royal fam
ily do you belong?’ he asked, leaning against the seat.

  The man controlled his cough and looked irritated. ‘Why, Babu, making fun of others?’

  ‘No, no, never . . . I was just joking.’

  The rickshaw-wallah looked again at both of us; the light of recognition appeared in his eyes. He returned to his pedalling.

  ‘I am no king or emperor. We have been poor for generations.’ His voice softened. ‘Have you heard of the cholera that followed the famine in Nabgaon in 1943? A thousand people perished in it, including all of my mother’s family. She lived on the streets and gave birth to four children, all fatherless. I am the youngest. That’s the only the lineage I have . . .’

  At the age of ten, he had gone to Jaipalguri and become a farm labourer. Soon he had risen to being a tenant farmer, and then bought some land with his hard-earned money. By then he was married with three children.

  ‘The government acquired thirty-nine acres of land in Torol Pada village for medicinal plant farming, Babu. I lost my land. A factory was built on one acre; the rest is still fallow. They promised compensation and jobs for the children of those who had lost land. But it was like a line drawn on water.’

  He had had to watch, helpless, as the waste from the pesticide plant ruined the land which had once yielded gold. His eldest son had died as a child. The second, a daughter, grew up, got married and went away to Kolkata. Sailendra and his wife watched their crops die and when life became unbearable, he and his wife came to Kolkata with their third daughter. He had drawn a hand-pulled rickshaw for four years after that, and had now moved on to the cycle rickshaw.

  ‘I watch your programme, Babu,’ he told us, when we got down at Chitpur Road.

  ‘How is it, Dada? Are you for hanging or against it?’

  He coughed again and spat out another blob of red-streaked phlegm. A smile of pain appeared on his face.

  ‘Babu, years ago, when we were sleeping on the pavement with our child—a polio-stricken girl—four men beat me to the ground, made off with her, and raped her. It’s been nine years since. We pointed the men out to the police but they didn’t even register a case. When just one person is punished for that very same crime, the others walk free and fearless? It is folks like us who should die on the gallows! We’d escape our misery, and the government would save money . . .’

  Sanjeev Kumar Mitra stood there stunned. We continued to stand there after the rickshaw-wallah had peddled away.

  ‘Chetu, this place is driving me mad.’

  ‘Really, why are you here then?’ I asked, irritated.

  ‘My mother is from here, that’s why.’

  ‘Is it true that the ruined mansion belongs to you?

  ‘Yes . . . that was the house my father bought forty years ago. He met my mother when he was staying there. He married her and took her to his native place. I was born there. When my father’s business went bust and we lost all our wealth, my mother came back here . . .’

  ‘Where is your mother’s house?’ I asked him without thinking.

  He sighed. Then, pressing my palm, said, ‘You must have heard of it . . . it’s very famous.’ As dramatic as Father in his jatra role, he announced: ‘Sonagachi.’

  Where in Sonagachi, where brothels and homes line opposite sides of the street, I did not ask. He had stopped a taxi by then.

  He did not look at me or speak again in the taxi. Maybe pain glinted in the green eyes behind the dark glasses At least at that moment, he did not resemble the painted, made-up person I knew in front of the camera. He too was an excellent actor. But facing the camera with my face made up, I felt like an actor as well. I imagined myself playing the role of Sanjeev Kumar’s mother in Ma Mati Manush. I saw the son, abandoned by his mother, lie weeping in the darkness of his father’s house. My left breast swelled with milk.

  22

  There was but one woman in our family who ever laid claim to the hangman’s job. Her name was Pingalakeshini; she lived in the time of Tughral Tughan Khan, in the thirteenth century. Thakuma called him Glutton Sultan, because she found it simply impossible to pronounce his name. He had been in love with Raziya Sultan and so surrendered Bengal to her, she alleged. I was in front of the mirror, fixing my bindi after a bath. Seeing me laugh she thought that I should be reminded of Pingalakeshini’s fate. Ramu da had been taken away for his bath and so there were just the two of us in that small room where the old yellowing mirror hung on the dirty wall. Thakuma, who lay curled up on her cot with her left arm under her head, looked up at me with distaste and asked, ‘Chetu, why are you laughing for no reason?’

  Her question made me feel awkward, so I laughed again to hide it. ‘Ah, Thakuma, don’t I have the freedom even to laugh—me, the symbol of woman power?’

  ‘Women should not laugh. That’s a bad omen. The house where a woman’s laughter rings—it won’t be long before it collapses. Haven’t I told you Pingalakeshini’s story?’

  ‘If a house falls because of laughter, let it fall, Thakuma!’

  ‘When Pingalakeshini laughed, not just the house, but the very land fell.’ Her voice resounded with a threat.

  ‘I dreamt last night that we found your gold coin, Thakuma,’ I tried, eager to change the topic. ‘I dreamt that it rolled out when we were making your bed.’

  She let out a sigh of pain. ‘That’s gone. Will anyone who’s stolen such a thing return it?’

  That threw me off balance. I realized only then that she hadn’t got her coin back. I helped her off the cot, and shook her bedding and sheets; no, it was not to be found. Someone else had taken it for sure. And I couldn’t even try to find out who it was without letting slip the truth about my own involvement. Ma who made Thakuma’s bed had her grouses but surely was not bold enough to filch the coin. Other than her and Ramu da, the only people in the house were Kaku and Kakima. Champa and Rari had still not returned from their uncle’s house.

  ‘That disappeared quite some time back, Chetu, don’t you worry about it now,’ Thakuma tried to console me as I went out of the room in a sad stoop.

  I did want to open up to her—tell her that Sanjeev Kumar had given it back to me and that I had put it under her pillow to protect his reputation—but did not have the courage to do so. His reputation had become my liability. Sadly, it dawned on me that I was now obliged to protect it at any cost. Even after Ramu da came back from his bath and Thakuma from her walk, my laugh did not return. I was leaning against Ramu da’s cot—he was waiting impatiently to know if the cable operators’ strike was over—eating the bhelpuri Thakuma had bought from Harida’s shop when Sanjeev Kumar Mitra appeared on the eleven o’clock news bulletin. It was an investigative report about the young woman who had been killed in a police encounter in Gujarat. The young woman’s mother did not have an answer to his question as to why she had hurriedly left for Ahmedabad. After the mother demanded a CBI inquiry through her tears, the father of one of the alleged terrorists spoke by telephone—and something happened that threw me off balance again.

  ‘Sri Nair, can you tell us about your son who was killed? Was he in love with this young woman?’

  I was stunned by the question—he spoke in a language I could not make out at all. I only knew what he meant because it appeared in Bangla translation at the bottom of the screen.

  ‘Your Sanjeev Kumar—where is he from?’ Ramu da did not hide his annoyance. ‘Native place? Don’t know! Language? Don’t know! Who are his relatives? Don’t know! Does he have a wife and child somewhere? Please try to make sure that he doesn’t, before the marriage at least!’

  I had no reply. My eyes were fixed on the little bit of bhelpuri masala left on my palm; my mind was empty. Sanjeev Kumar continued to speak on-screen. Not interested in what he had to say, I went out of the room. There was more mystery in the life of the man I loved than in the death of the young woman who had been shot. A bout of anger and frustration engulfed me. It
was galling that I was now obliged to establish the honesty of a person who was not honest with me. By the time I reached the studio that day for Hangwoman’s Diary, no trace of laughter remained on my face or in my mind.

  During the short gap before the show began, Sanjeev Kumar asked me why my face looked so wan; I could not even manage a smile in response.

  ‘When you take charge as the first hangwoman, Chetna—’

  ‘I have talked about it many times before,’ I snubbed him even before he began. ‘I am not the first woman in my family to take up this work. There was Pingalakeshini in the thirteenth century. Her real name was Tripurasundari. She changed her name when she took up this profession.’

  Sanjeev Kumar stared at me incredulously. I ignored him for my own peace of mind and launched into speech. Tripurasundari was a peerless beauty. Her laugh was like bells pealing, and it had the power to seduce any man. She was married off at the age of seven, according to the prevailing custom. Her husband was a rich nobleman. Once, when she was travelling with her husband in a palanquin on her way back from worshipping at a Kali shrine, Tughral Tughan Khan heard her talking and laughing with her husband in her alluring way. He stopped the palanquin and pulled them out, and was smitten by her glowing beauty. Her husband surrendered her to the Khan, hoping to save his own life. When Tughan Khan, old enough to be her father, lifted her up and threw her face down upon his horse, her veil came undone; through the gap, she shot a furious glance at the husband who had abandoned her thus. He had taken the bag of money the Khan had thrown at him and was trying to flee with his life. She was six months pregnant then. But Tughan Khan showed her no mercy. Whenever she was summoned to his rooms, the guards would have to carry out her torn and ravaged body afterwards. In the meantime he also made her convert; it enraged Tughan Khan to have the vermillion she wore smudge on his face.

  Tripurasundari gave birth before term; fashioning a noose from the umbilical cord for the neck of her beautiful, golden-skinned baby, she satisfied the hangman’s craving in her veins. For ten years, Tughan Khan was the ruler of Bengal. In those ten years, she gave birth nine times; all nine infants were dispatched with their own umbilical cords. It was then that Narasimha Dev, the king of Odisha, attacked Bengal. Though Tughan Khan captured one of Narasimha Dev’s fortresses, the Odisha army hit back when the Khan’s forces were celebrating their victory. The Khan had to retreat. The Odisha army pursued him right up to Lakhnavati, the capital of Bengal in those days. They laid siege to the city and soon captured it. The city’s Muslims were massacred. Tripurasundari fell into the hands of the Odisha army. They made her wear a sari, marked her forehead once more with vermillion, and shut her up in Narasimha Dev’s tent. Her lacerated body had to be carried out the next day. Tughan Khan sought help from the Delhi Sultan. The Odisha army withdrew in the face of the forces from Delhi, but Tughan Khan had lost his eminence. He had to return to Delhi. Seizing her chance, Tripurasundari, who had escaped from Narasimha Dev’s tent, sought refuge in a Buddha vihara. She shaved her head and became a female mendicant. Meanwhile, many governors ruled Bengal. In 1272, when the governor Amin Khan destroyed the vihara were she lived, Tripurasundari was fifty. But her youth was undiminished; she was once again captured by the soldiers and turned into a kept woman. When Tughan Khan attacked Bengal again, defeated Amin Khan and retook his position as governor, his soldiers found Tripurasundari in the enemies’ tents. Despite her shaved head and ochre robes, Tughan Khan recognized her. She had to change her faith again.