by K R Meera
When we continued our journey in another taxi after dinner, I thought about Father’s hands which had sent four hundred and fifty-one people to their deaths.
As the taxi crawled through the stifling traffic, a signboard that said Banmali Sarkar Road made me wake up all of a sudden.
‘Why don’t we get off here and walk?’ I asked. Despite the questioning look on his face, Sanjeev Kumar did not probe. Turning left from the main road, I walked onwards as if I came here regularly. Only the yellow spots of light from paan shops and tea and biscuit kiosks remained. In one or two places, children were playing carom in the light from lanterns. The lane looked mostly deserted.
‘Where is this?’ Sanjeev Kumar wanted to know.
‘Banmali Sarkarer baari, Govindram Mitrer chodi, Omi Chander daadi, Jagat Sether kodi—ke na jaane?’
Banmali Sarkar’s house, Govind Ram Mitra’s stick, Omi Chand’s beard, Jagat Seth’s wealth—who hasn’t heard of these? I was disheartened that he did not realize that we were walking on the dark paths of the past, of the egoism, the greed, the vengefulness, the labour of so many human beings!
‘Stop joking . . . tell me where we are.’ He looked around with astonishment.
Black mud was heaped there like cow dung and behind the bundles of long bamboos were the headless statues of Durga, fashioned out of hay, seated with one leg placed over the other knee. I pointed towards them in the failing light: ‘Kumortuli.’
‘Oh, the place where they make the Durga idols for puja.’
There was nothing around us except the pale yellow circles of light from inside the houses on both sides of the street which, four months from now, would be so completely packed with Durga idols that there would be no place to even stand. In the light and the shadows of the evening, many Durgas finished to different degrees stood around us. Structures built out of bamboo strips with headless forms made of hay tied on them stood as far as the eye could see. An old man walking by made way for us. ‘How will you take pictures if you come at this hour?’ he asked, mistaking us for press reporters.
‘Dada, can you tell us where Himanshu Pal lives?’ I asked.
He gave me a quick look. ‘Go straight, turn left, fourth house.’
When he hobbled on, Sanjeev Kumar looked at me doubtfully. ‘Who is Himanshu Pal?’
I didn’t reply. As we walked carefully, watching our step in the dark, the scent of food being cooked in the kitchens behind the workshops wafted to us. The fourth house was buried in darkness—four or five weather-beaten Durgas with their stuffing sticking out were stacked against its walls. Inside the house, someone sat in the light of a forty-watt bulb, moulding black mud on a form fashioned out of hay. As I stood there, I felt that we should not have come.
‘I want him! Only him!’
Waking up in the middle of the night, Niharika’s voice rang harshly in my ears again. She had come back home a completely different person. Her face was now stiff as a statue, unable to smile even at me.
‘Don’t forget that this is a hand that’s hanged four hundred and fifty-one people.’
Father’s bellow. I could hear Ma and Thakuma beginning to say something.
‘I will follow him no matter who stands in my way!’
Her voice too was an angry shout.
‘Uh-hu-hu . . . so you will drag the family’s name through the mud?’
‘I will go, Ma, please tell him, I have no other way . . .’
‘No, you won’t. Not while this Phanibhushan Grddha Mullick is alive!’
‘Baba, I came back in search of him!’
I heard Father utter an awful obscenity. But I was terribly sleepy and so I turned over and went back to sleep again. Early at dawn, I woke up hearing Ma’s wail. I saw Niharika on Father’s wall among the framed pictures, like yet another image. She hung there as if she were bending her head for someone to place a garland around her neck. Her eyes looked at me from the air, above. A stream of blood flowed down her fair and rounded toes.
‘Who is it?’
The person who was working inside raised his head. He looked like an old man, grey, with a wrinkled forehead; but he was at least thirty years younger than Father.
I could not respond. He turned the table lamp towards the ceiling. The workshop flooded with light. Durgas filled the room as the yellow light bounced back down after hitting the ceiling. Durgas with large, wide-set eyes, rounded cheeks, with a dimple on the left one. All of them sat with one leg crossed over the other knee and smiled confidently.
‘Chetna, at this hour? Why?’ he asked as he came closer, the tone of his voice like that of a very near relative who had full freedom with me.
Trembling, I gripped Sanjeev Kumar Mitra’s wrist.
‘What happened?’ he asked again, amazed. I was struck dumb. I tried my best not to imagine myself as a full-length idol hanging from the beam in Father’s room between the gamchha and the vest. I felt a trickle of blood run down my calves. I cannot say with confidence any more that no women have been hanged to death by the Grddha Mullicks. Himanshu Pal took a small statue from a ledge on the unplastered wall and gave it to me. Durga again. Sitting with her left ankle on her right knee, showing the dimple in her left cheek, she smiled at me lovingly.
‘Take.’
With great kindness, he packed it for me. We stepped out without goodbyes and walked along the train tracks lengthening towards Strand Road. The tracks gleamed from the ambient light as if they were coated with silver. Somewhere, lal champa trees were in bloom.
‘Why, Chetna, what happened?’
Sanjeev Kumar walked beside me, holding me close. In the dark, he felt my eyes overflowing with tears. There was a cement bench next to an old building; he sat me down there. What if we go to your place, my heart wished to ask. Instead what I asked was: What if we go to Star Theatre?
‘Why?’
‘Binodini Dasi was the great love in the life of my ancestor Kalicharan Grddha Mullick.’
‘And so?’ he asked mildly.
I flew into a rage all of a sudden.
‘She was the first stage actress in Bengal. But for her, Girish Chandra Ghosh’s plays would have all ended up hollow and useless . . .’
Binodini, who had given life to eight characters in twelve years, had begun her career at the age of eleven. Grandfather Kalicharan and Girish Chandra Ghosh became her admirers after seeing her stellar performance in Kapala Kundala. As Chaitanya in Girish Ghosh’s Chaitanya Leela, she created history. Ghosh and Binodini both dreamt of building a grand theatre. When they realized that the building could not be completed because there was no money, the great master of the theatre urged the actress, a devadasi, to prostitute herself. He promised to name the drama company after her once it was built. And so she became a prostitute so that she could be born again on stage as Sita, Draupadi, Radha and Savitri. But Ghosh betrayed his promise when the building was complete. He named it Star Theatre. Binodini gave up acting at the height of her career.
When Sanjeev Kumar held me close, the scent of ilish, which lasts twenty-four hours, enveloped me. What journeys lie in wait for me, I worried, journeys through the sea, through the river? All that remains of Grandfather Kalicharan in our house is a copy of the same picture that hangs in Bhojohori Manna, now a moth-eaten, dog-eared piece of paper. The image of a woman in male attire, her left foot resting on her right knee. I looked at the statue of Durga in my hands. Seated upon a roaring lion, armed with weapons in all of her eight arms, her left leg crossed on her right knee. Images that crumble to dust; statues stuffed with hay and black mud.
26
‘This world does not value a poor man’s honesty. Even if you sell it by the kilo, it won’t get you rice and fish,’ Father announced, rising from his cot.
Such fine theatrics. On his face, challenge and threat staged a shadow play. As he neared, I leaned against the wall, afrai
d. I wanted to explain that I hadn’t been able to find another answer to Sanjeev Kumar’s question on Hangwoman’s Diary, but I choked on my words.
‘Chetna, only my word carries weight in this house,’ Father said, trying very hard to control himself. ‘I have made some demands of the government. If they don’t agree, I will have to take hard decisions. And whatever they may be, you will have to obey.’
‘But that won’t be fair, Baba.’ I found my words with great difficulty.
‘It is I who know what’s wrong and what’s right. Better for everyone to accept that—do what I say and move on.’
‘To ask for more money at the last minute will only sully the hangman’s honour . . .’
‘Chi! Shut your mouth now!’
Father raised his hand. I saw that big broad palm—the one that had taken the lives of four hundred and fifty-one human beings—come very close to my body. I wanted to burst out: Father, in the eyes of the world, I am the symbol of the power and self-respect of Indian womanhood. He pulled away his hand and, with an actor’s finesse, walked back a few paces and turned towards me again.
‘What about the thing I told you today? Did you tell them that you couldn’t go to the studio any more? There are just three days to the hanging now. Remember, after these three days you will have no value at all. So we need to make the most of these three days.’
He fixed a stern look at me.
‘Chotdi, your young blood will make you feel all sorts of things. But your baba has seen a lot of life. So take heed of this old man’s words! The honesty of the poor man has such little value! You don’t know the story of Grandfather Satyendranath, do you? Go and ask Thakuma . . .
‘Uh! And what became of me in front of these people? Sibdev babu asked me, Grddha, so your daughter has pulled the rug from under your feet? I wanted the earth to open up so I could fall into it.’
‘Baba, what else could I say?’ I asked him sadly.
He returned a look of anger. ‘You are not to serve up the secrets of your heart in front of the camera. You should just say what must be said, that is, things people like to here. Chetu, you will not step out of this house from now without my permission. You will not speak to anyone without my knowledge.’ His voice rose.
‘But that is against our contract, Baba . . .’
A cracker exploded on my left cheek.
‘Not a word more!’ he bellowed.
Rubbing my cheek, I went to my room. Ma followed me there. The tears had dried up in her eyes.
‘Just escape . . . convince that boy somehow, get married, and get away . . . or this man and his hag of a mother will dish out stale tales and traditions and ruin your life too . . .’ Ma told me in a low voice.
But Thakuma heard it, and leapt up. ‘So it’s you! You’re the one filling her little mind with poison!’
‘She’s not little! She’s well past the age to marry.’
‘That ought to be a mother’s worry. Ah, what’s the time now? Is this the hour when a girl of respectable birth comes home?’
‘She was out for her work, wasn’t she?’
‘Her work was over at seven-thirty. I may be old, but I’m clever enough to know that!’
Thakuma pulled her frayed sari over her bald head.
‘Chetu chotdi, I am telling you again, don’t submit to a marriage that’ll destroy our family traditions. That’s simply not wise.’
I pulled out my mattress from under Thakuma’s cot and got ready to go to bed, my head feeling like a smouldering pile of coals. I covered myself with the ragged sheet and tried to sleep but all I could do was toss and turn. A strange light filled my eyelids when I shut my eyes. My hands tingled to tear down the soot-covered, dirt-smeared walls and the cobwebbed asbestos ceiling, and rebuild everything. But my heart, like it always did when we were apart, remembered Sanjeev Kumar Mitra and swung between love and suspicion.
I had barely had a wink of sleep when Ramu da stirred, shouting, ‘Pass it to the left, Dada!’ Seeing his body curl like a ball and come dangerously close to falling off the narrow cot, I sprang up to hold him. What happened, I asked, but he just moved his head from side to side, and craned his neck towards the door.
‘Where is Krishanu da?’ he asked me, utterly astonished.
When I realized whom he was asking for, my words receded. It was a year ago that Ramu da had shut his eyes tight and sobbed at the news of Krishanu Dey’s death in a Kolkata hospital; I too had wept with him. Krishanu Dey’s hat-trick in Malaysia in 1986 had fetched me so many sweets from Ramu da! His face crumpled pathetically when he realized it was only a dream. But soon, he turned over and slept without a word. My sleep was completely shattered. In the dream he was on a rain-soaked football field chasing the ball between Krishanu Dey and Sailesh Bose, he told me the next morning, laughing with more excitement than he would have felt had he really been on the field with them. Unable to bear it, I went out and saw Father standing there, smoking his cigarette. He stared at me impassively.
‘It looks like it is time for him to go . . .’
He pulled hard on the cigarette. Clearly, he was referring to the belief that dreaming of dead people is a sign of impending death. But the thought of Ramu da fading away like a dream from his narrow, asbestos-covered room that always rang with the cacophony of hearses and mourners’ processions made me tremble violently.
Seeing my tremor, Father laughed. ‘Even the grass and the worm have to die. At the moment of birth, the moment of death is also marked. You must fix that in your mind first if you want to do the hangman’s job. That’s the only way to make sure that your hand does not shake when you do it.’
He drew another puff of smoke forcefully and said, ‘I’ve seen many, many deaths since my infancy. The first person I saw off after I knew the meaning of death was my older brother. Dada died vomiting blood. His condition was more pitiable than Ramu’s. My baba, your dadu, told me bravely—he is dead now, do not love him any more! You must keep that in mind too. Do not love the dead. That’ll suck the vigour from the living.’
Fear uncoiled in me as I kept looking at him. He was talking about the death of his older brother Sasibhushan, born to Dadu’s first wife, Thakuma’s didi. Like Ramu da, he too was mad about football. The story is that in 1911, when all of Calcutta was agog with the Mohun Bagan football club winning the IFA Shield at a time when Indians could play only for the Cooch Behar Cup and the Trades Cup, Uncle Sasibhushan, who rolled the ball in any empty space he found, had been invited to play with the Kumortuli Club team. He was then spotted by Suresh Chandra Choudhury, the vice-president of the Jora Bagan Club. Thus Sasibhushan Grddha Mullick became one of the players in the Jora Bagan line-up against Mohun Bagan in the Cooch Behar Cup to be played on 28 July 1920. However, some hubbub broke out on the day of the match. Jora Bagan took to the field without its best player, the half back Sailesh Bose. Suresh Chandra Choudhury had begged that he be included, but the captain would not agree. Furious, Choudhury stormed out of the field and decided, that very evening, to start a new football club. Exactly four days later, Raja Manmath Nath Choudhury, Sailesh Bose, Ramesh Chandra Sen and Arabindo Ghosh formed a new football club—the East Bengal Football Club. That month, they breezed through the Hercules Cup matches, becoming champions. Sasibhushan played in that team. Even Dadu who was very worried that his son was giving up the traditional profession was delighted by the news.
‘I still remember the stories of how Sasi da and his friends went around searching for a field to practise in . . . only Mohun Bagan and another club from Behala were permitted to play in the Maidan. When that other club disbanded, Mohun Bagan took all of the Maidan for themselves. But would Choudhury da let that happen? They made a fuss for space in the Maidan. Mohun Bagan tried to oppose it, but failed. Two years later, East Bengal also obtained permission to play there. Those days, goalposts used to be set in the east and west. The space allotte
d to East Bengal faced the Red Road then . . . How glad Sasi da was! Oh, how he dreamt of glory! What heights he would have reached, my dada!’
Father threw away the cigarette stub and feigned a sigh. Not wanting to hear any more, I turned away, went into the kitchen, opened and closed the lids of various pots for no reason at all, and then returned to Ramu da’s bedside. He lay there eyes shut, his face very pale. Because he had seen no sunlight for years, it was like a white man’s face. His shrivelled thighs stuck out from under the sheet that covered him. In the beginning Ma had needed one of us to help take him out every morning. But now he had become so light, she could easily carry him out in her own two arms. His face used to be strikingly handsome, glowing with good health. But now all that remained were two large brown eyeballs that rolled about. Uncle Sasibhushan had caught a fever while training for some competition. He was treated for many years, but when it became clear that it was consumption, the family decided to take him to Benares and abandon him there. He was taken in a grass-covered bullock cart, accompanied by Dadu, his uncle Devi Charan and my father, who was only twelve at that time.