Hangwoman

by K R Meera

  Tughan Khan ruled Bengal for the next nine years, and during this time, Tripurasundari continued to be his concubine. Then, steadily growing uneasy with Tughan’s rise, Balban, the ruler of Delhi, led a campaign against him. Tughan Khan won in the first two encounters. During the third assault, Tripurasundari escaped from the royal quarters and sought refuge in a gypsy tent. As his soldiers dragged her out of the tent, Balban happened to see her. Tripurasundari promised to help him defeat Tughan Khan; in return, she asked for Khan’s body. When Tughan Khan was finally defeated, he was thrown at her feet, bound hand and foot. What more do you want, asked Balban. A ten-foot long stake of teakwood, she replied; another piece of teak half as long, an iron hook, some rope and a carpenter. When all these things were brought to her, she asked the carpenter to fix the narrow edge of the shorter piece of wood on the longer piece. The iron hook was fixed on the shorter piece, closer to its free edge. She then secured the rope on it. A pit was dug in the ground and the ten-foot wooden stake was planted in it firmly. Thus, right before the eyes of the watching crowd, a gallows tree rose up inside the tent.

  ‘What next?’ asked Balban, amazed.

  ‘Now I need only the body,’ she said, lifting up Tughan Khan, an old man by then, and propping him on a small platform below the gallows. As the crowd watched, she untied her sari, made a noose out of it and placed it around the Khan’s neck. She then kicked the stand down. When Tughan Khan died of a broken neck, she let out once again, after fifty years, that seductive laugh that sounded like the pealing of bells.

  My laugh did not return even when I noticed how engrossed Sanjeev Kumar was in the story, so much so that he seemed to have even forgotten his questions.

  ‘And then?’ he asked, still dumbstruck.

  ‘When Balban asked her what more she wanted, she demanded the hangman’s job. The sultan appointed her hangwoman. Thereafter Tripurasundari took the name Pingalakeshini. She lived till ninety. According to Thakuma, Pingalakeshini dispatched a thousand people.’

  The expression on Sanjeev Kumar’s face changed. ‘One can understand Pingalakeshini’s murder of Tughan Khan. That was her revenge. But why did she want a hangman’s job?’

  ‘All I can say,’ I told him, ‘is that some women’s anger is such that it cannot be satiated with the death of just one man.’

  I looked straight at him. He looked back uncomprehendingly.

  ‘It’s very hard to understand the people in your family, Chetna,’ he said.

  The day’s show ended there. He took me to Park Street that evening. I got out of the taxi and looked around in wonder. Reminding everyone that it never slept and was completely unafraid of the rain, Park Street continued to froth. A paan-wallah sold paan from a box that hung from a cord around his neck, his uneven teeth dark red in the neon lights. Everywhere there were shops and big cars and people walking enthusiastically on the clean, wide road. He pulled me on to the footpath and hugged me to his side as we began to walk. I was hot and cold at the same time. Park Street throbbed with sounds and lights and many kinds of scents. We passed a few obese men on the road, and he said, ‘Should we eat something? We can go to Trincas. These are the loveliest nights of the year in Kolkata. We can celebrate this lovely night in Park Street. Blue Fox, Barbeque, Olympia . . .’

  When he laughed, I was still looking around; my own laugh had not yet returned. Park Street was born out of the park Sir Elijah Impey had laid to raise spotted deer. In the row of lights from the Maidan to Park Circus, instead of deer and peacocks, people and vehicles flitted up and down. In between the dirty buses and the cars big and small, an ambulance was trying to squeeze its way ahead; next to it was a rickshaw, pulled by a twig-like creature, in which a fat woman sat. Even as efforts were on to ban hand-pulled rickshaws, Sanjeev Kumar reminded me, thousands of men in the city continued to pull them, always running short of breath and dying, spitting blood. When the rickshaw and the puller disappeared in the stream of traffic I closed my eyes and tried to imagine how Park Street must have looked when my grandfather’s grandfather was my age. It must have been filled with palanquins and horse-drawn carriages instead of cars and buses. I knew Thakuma remembered building number eight on the corner of Radha Bazar Street and Old Court Road. The carriages used by the British aristocracy were crafted by Stuart and Co. which functioned in the yard of that building. Those plush vehicles began to acquire a special touch after James Stuart came to Kolkata in the eighteenth century. Satchidananda Grddha Mullick, the brother of Grandfather Kalicharan Grddha Mullick, was a servant in the house of a Dutch artist who was visiting Kolkata at that time. Grandfather Satchidananda was a true artist, adept at building coaches embellished with silver carvings and embroidering the edges of the red satin seats with gold thread. It was he who fashioned the two palanquins that were ordered by Lord Cornwallis for the princes of Mysore with gold and silver carvings. For each palanquin, the Dutchman Solvines received seven thousand rupees, and his servant Satchidananda a gift of one British rupee. The white man and his wife went back after this, and my forefather died of too much drinking.

  Sanjeev Kumar led me towards Chowringhee. The scent of jhalmuri filled the air. He bought us some jhalmuri and we continued to walk, munching the spicy and tangy beads of puffed rice. We spotted the rickshaw-wallah we’d seen in the road earlier; he sat leaning against the handle of the rickshaw, smoking a bidi. His greying beard, yellowing eyes and sunburned, blackened face with its stony impassiveness reminded me of Jatindranath Banerjee. Not love but death pervaded my heart as I walked on Park Street with the man I desired. I felt very uneasy.

  ‘What are you thinking, Chetna?’ Sanjeev Kumar ran his finger lazily on my wrist.

  ‘What language did you speak today on TV at noon, Sanju babu?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh that . . . that’s my father’s language,’ he said rather casually. It didn’t sound so simple to me. But I could not see if his expression had changed. The dark and his glasses hid him well.

  ‘Hey, we are planning the eve-of-the-hanging show in a big way. We need your help and somehow must steal Grddha da too. Look, Chetu, this is a prestige issue for me. No one has ever even thought of something like this. Understand? This is the wedding gift you should give me.’

  ‘What?’ I asked, flustered.

  ‘The success of that day’s show.’

  My heart wilted again.

  ‘Thakuma’s gold coin got lost again,’ I said, not addressing him in particular.

  ‘Eh? How? You should have been careful,’ he said.

  The thief accuses the owner, I thought, and it made me want to laugh. We were silent then for some time.

  ‘This is the first time I am seeing Park Street at night. There are many shops, aren’t there?’ I looked around. We were in front of the Zaveri Sari Emporium.

  ‘Do you want to buy something, Chetna? Saris?’ he asked me in a tempting tone.

  I looked deep into his eyes and shook my head, laughing enigmatically. Pingalakeshini had retained her strength and health to the very end. The sultan built her a mansion close to the prison. Till she died she invited a different man to her bed each night, announcing a reward for the man who could conquer her in bed. Her death came at the age of ninety—after dispatching yet another at the gallows, she had a bath followed by a full meal and was sleeping with the man of the night when death claimed her.

  ‘I have a wish . . .’ I murmured in a seductive voice.

  Remembering Father’s advice that no story should be fully told, I had not revealed the vital parts of Pingalakeshini’s story on Hangwoman’s Diary that day. When Pingalakeshini untied her sari to make a noose for Tughan Khan, she was completely naked. Tughan Khan’s eyes fell on her body, but instead of desire, fear glinted in them. She did not kill him at one go. She stood him on the platform, kicked it down, enjoyed his struggle for breath and then restored the platform beneath his feet. Relieved, Tughan Khan tried to loosen th
e knot around his neck. Then she kicked away the stand again. He hung once more, flailing desperately. This went on all night long.

  ‘What is it that you want, Chetu? Let me buy it for you,’ Sanjeev Kumar ran his finger lovingly on the curve of my neck.

  ‘Don’t buy it . . .’ I closed my eyes and whispered amorously.

  ‘Then?’ His voice became tenderer.

  ‘Steal it!’ I whispered, stroking his palm with my left hand.

  Sanjeev Kumar stopped, unable to believe his ears. Then he laughed, embarrassed. I wanted to know how he accomplished his thefts. I gave him half-an-hour’s time, but he returned in five minutes.

  ‘You have to come with me, Chetna, otherwise it is difficult to steal a sari.’

  I laughed out loud. ‘Some things you have to do by yourself,’ I challenged him.

  He looked at me, helpless, and said, ‘In that case, let’s go to another shop. One where men’s clothes are also sold.’ He scratched his head, ruffled. ‘This sari is a complicated garment . . .’

  I remembered all of Thakuma’s complaints about the sari; her grandmother had apparently cursed Keshab Chandra Sen till the end of her life for having popularized such a tight-fitting, stifling garment in the name of the Bengal Renaissance. How comfortable the old style was, she grumbled—just wrap one end around the waist, throw the other over the shoulder!

  ‘I can filch anything in this world except a sari. Or a woman should come with me . . .’

  I enjoyed the joke and laughed.

  He looked at me, puzzled. ‘But truly, why did you ask me to steal?’

  ‘Just to check if you’d do as I ask . . . and I also wanted to see how you do it.’

  ‘No one can see. That’s the artistic knack to stealing. Like magic. You need a hand that’s quick. And a tongue that will keep people’s attention.’

  ‘Even if you did steal it, I’d have asked you to return it to the same shop.’

  His face grew heavy. ‘No, I have never returned anything except your gold coin. And I won’t do it, ever.’ His tone was filled with resentment.

  We were silent for a while as we walked on the footpath where light mingled with dark. As the brilliant lights of the Park Plaza Hotel appeared in the distance, he stopped. ‘What if we go to my place tonight?’ He asked in a casual tone.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t you want to see the house where you’ll live?’

  That was offered seductively. And my mind was not left untouched by the memory of the house where the nilmani latha and the aparajita bloomed.

  ‘That’s my father’s house. We will live in my mother’s house . . .’

  I looked at him, a little suspicious.

  ‘ . . . in Sonagachi . . .’

  He sounded calm. Before I could ask why, he laughed and grabbed my hand tightly. ‘That’s a long story, not to be told while we walk down Park Street. My bride-to-be should hear it in my house, in the bedroom, lying on my lap.’

  ‘Another day,’ I said.

  ‘When? The days are going by so fast. Today is the twentieth . . . just four days to go, and after that . . . I insist that you know everything about me before we are married, Chetna.’

  I looked at him, helpless, not knowing what thoughts gathered in the green eyes behind those dark glasses. When he caressed my palms with his fingertips I was assailed by a sudden sense of frustration. His fingertips throbbed not with tenderness for the woman he loved, I felt, but with the wile and agility of a thief. In my heart, a hundred serpents raised their hoods in apprehension, thrusting out their forked tongues, alert for sounds and scents.

  As we walked back down the street which was now a beehive of many kinds of lights, he turned his gaze uneasily towards the sari shop. I found the laugh which I had lost. When he accepted my challenge and went in, I waited outside in the ancient youthfulness of Park Street, feeling hot and cold at the same time. To recover her lost laugh, Pingalakeshini made Tughan Khan ascend the gallows again and again. Seven hundred and twenty-seven times to be exact.

  23

  A straight line. That was what Gautam Deb drew first on my broken slate. Above it he drew something that looked like an eyeball with small straight lines, like eyelashes, around it. When he finished he smiled, showing all his small white teeth, saying, here Chetu di, look, the sun. A couple of hours later, when he was hanging from a branch of the guava tree behind his hut, his eyes bulged out like brown solar orbs rising in the white sky. His body was suspended in a straight line, dark and thin. There was no fear or pain on his face; it was lit up with curiosity. His mother, Aruna, was returning with pots of water on her head and hip. She flung them to the ground, clasped his legs to her breast and broke down. Seeing me in the crowd that had gathered, she cursed: May the lightning fall upon your head. Even then, I did not know what I had done wrong. We were playing the hangman’s game. Only when I grew older did I realize that it was a game that cancelled out one of the players.

  That was one morning in 1987. A greying journalist had brought a clean-shaven young man with a large leather bag on his shoulder to meet Father. Father had already announced loudly enough for all the corpses on Strand Road to hear that the journalist would be coming to our house by taxi, having flown down all the way from Delhi. I can still see him throw away his smouldering cigarette, receive the men with great respect, and lead them to his room. No sooner had he got out of the car than the young man took a camera out of the leather bag and started taking our pictures. Gautam, Champa, Aparna, Amalendu and I—all of us laughed loudly and tried to run away, feeling very shy. As we ran we looked back, hoping that he would take more pictures of us.

  ‘Let’s peep into Grddha da’s room,’ Amalendu began to make a fuss. He would die of a fever in SSKM Hospital later. All of us peeped into Father’s room through the tiny window, brimming over with excitement and sheer happiness. All I remember of that is the image of the senior reporter filling the round chair, the plastic weave of which was frayed and broken, his bulging tummy and a recorder in front of him. Father’s moustache and hair were not so grey then. We saw him draw himself up, summoning the kind of dignity that he called up while playing the zamindar in the jatra, and make a noose from a piece of old rope as he talked.

  ‘This is no ordinary job, Babu. It is a duty, a vital duty. It is believed that our earliest ancestor, the first hangman, Radharaman Mullick, received a boon from Bhagawan Mahadev: whoever died by Radharaman’s hands would enter heaven. That has continued through generations to this day—anyone who dies by our hands will indeed reach heaven. And so, to tell you the truth, the old jail IG, Basu babu, he would pat the condemned men and tell them, your great luck, you are to be dispatched by Grddha Mullick . . . you will go straight to heaven. See, Babu, this is the noose we make . . . it is special because only Grddha Mullicks can tie it. Many people have tried to learn this art from us. But none of them could make such a perfect, beautiful knot . . . oh, no!’

  Father held it up.

  ‘Grddhaji, your victim is an infamous murderer. Are you afraid?’

  ‘No, Babu. God has chosen me to kill this cruel murderer. It is my mission, my fate. Why should I be afraid?’

  He was to hang the infamous killer Vinod Gaurav, a refugee from Bangladesh who had strangled to death nearly a hundred children with his handkerchief. His pleasure was to travel all over Bengal, lure children with sweets, and then murder them. When he had slain his hundredth victim, he went to a police station and confessed that he had killed a hundred children and destroyed their bodies with acid.

  ‘Children are the incarnations of God, Babu. The reprobate who kills them should be hanged not once but a hundred times. That is what I wish.’

  But outside, there was a scuffle going on near the small window, with both Champa and Aparna trying to peep in at the same time and shoving each other out of the way. Aparna scratched Champa and Champa tried to hit
her. But her hand fell on Amalendu instead. He leapt on her and pulled her hair. She screamed. Father was really mad—he stood up and shouted, get lost, be quiet, you kids. We ran away past the kitchen yard, past Champa’s, Aparna’s and Amalendu’s mud huts which stood behind my house, and reached the backyard of Gautam’s house. That too was a mud hut. We leapt over the urinal drain running out from Amalendu’s house and reached the shade of the guava tree, panting heavily. Gautam picked up a length of rope from the ground, tied it to a branch, knotted the loose end into a noose, and put it around Amalendu’s neck, saying, ‘I am the hangman Grddha Mullick. I am going to hang Amal da now . . .’