Hangwoman

by K R Meera

  A roar that shook the very foundations of the house rose from Thakuma’s feeble body. Kaku and Kakima tried to shove her away. She slipped on the doorstep and fell on her back. Father picked her up with one hand, put her on the cot inside and dashed into their room. No, no, no, Ma screamed. Father’s bellow, ‘I’m going to crush this dog today,’ and Kaku’s cry, ‘I’ll stab you dead if you lay a finger on me,’ filled the air. I sat, passive, holding on to the leg of Ramu da’s cot. Father dragged Kaku out by one leg. His swarthy body bled everywhere. Father dropped him like an old sack at the foot of Thakuma’s cot. At that moment, Kakima flew in, brandishing a huge fish chopper.

  ‘Touch my man and I’ll kill you!’ she shrieked. Father snatched the chopper with his left hand and slapped her hard with his right. The chopper fell on the ground, making a huge racket. Kaku jumped up and tried to grab it. Blood splattered as he tried to hold on to the curved blade.

  ‘I’ll kill him today! He’s out to destroy me!’

  Kaku swung the chopper at Father. Though Father slipped away in the nick of time, Kaku jumped at him like a frenzied madman. Ma and Kakima tried to stop them, screaming. Thakuma alone stayed calm. She got up slowly, took out bits of betel from the box under the bed, and began to chew them. In the middle of the commotion, Ma collapsed. I moved quickly and caught her as she fell. The chopper grazed Father’s hand and blood streamed out. Father was thrown back from the shock and hit the TV, which came on suddenly. The live telecast of the Euro Cup was on. Father caught hold of Kaku’s arm and twisted it hard. He screamed and collapsed on the floor; Father stood over him, panting, holding the chopper. I was now convinced that Father was capable of killing someone without the magistrate’s red kerchief. In the pushing and pulling afterwards, Kaku grabbed Ramu da’s cot and lifted it. The legs of the cot almost hit the ceiling and fell back. Ramu da too was tossed up. The sight of a limbless man rising into the air was terrifying. The only part of Ramu da’s body that Amartya Ghosh had not touched was his skull. That hit the ground now and shattered. Father fled, like Grandfather Bhim had after severing Chowrangeenath’s limbs. Howling, Ma fell on Ramu da’s body. Kakima dragged Kaku out of the room. Thakuma chewed betel unexcitedly. Entirely distanced from the event, I made and unmade fine nooses with my dupatta.

  All of it looked like scenes on TV. All of us acted the best we could. The TV kept playing. Following the images of Portugal entering the semi-finals after beating England, Sanjeev Kumar appeared on the screen. In cell no. 3 of the Alipore prison, Jatindranath Banerjee laughed. When Father scooped up Ramu da, who had turned into a piece of flesh, and dashed out, I too tried to smile. But the smile that Sanjeev Kumar Mitra smiled on the channel was indeed worth seeing.

  31

  It was a nightmare: a man came running through the narrow alleys of Kalighat brandishing a large fish chopper. I jumped awake. In reality, I was like a grain of salt in an ocean, waiting with Ma outside SSKM Hospital, that accumulation of blood, pus and dirt. A huge crowd of people floated in and out of the hospital. In my dream I was in a blue sari. I feared that it was a sari Sanjeev Kumar Mitra had shoplifted. I was chased by someone in white clothes and with a large handlebar moustache. ‘Elokeshi!’ The call reverberated around me. I wished to respond that I was not she, but my voice would not emerge.

  The group of men who had gone in with Ramu da came out. ‘Nothing’s sure yet. I had to pay them fifteen hundred rupees to get him into the ICU,’ Father told us in a cold voice.

  Ma sobbed hard.

  ‘All the money we made yesterday is going to disappear. We hangmen don’t take money to kill. But these fellows must be paid a bribe, even to kill,’ he muttered.

  I rubbed my eyes and expelled sleep. Red-and-white clouds lay scattered across the sky like severed limbs. I struggled to fix my eyeballs either on the sky or on the earth. The fear that everyone here wielded a chopper would not go away. I tried to calm myself by thinking of the vast stretch of the Maidan and the Victoria Hall beyond the wall. Then I saw Ramu da run, a ball at his feet, around the ancient wall of St Paul’s Cathedral, in front of the utterly reddened Writers’ Building. His soul must have left his body and ran out on to the Maidan. Among the players practising there in the morning, he headed the ball as the invisible twelfth player with a transparent body. His glass-like feet kicked hard at the ball that had turned brown from rolling about the mud. But from somewhere the man with the chopper reappeared behind me. I woke up again rudely. The dream had shaken me awake before I could see Ramu da’s delicate feet smashed by the hard ball which looked as though it was made of fired clay; I was thankful.

  Elokeshi was murdered in my forefather Kalicharan’s time. She was hacked to death with a fish chopper by her husband Nabin Chandra Banerjee for having had illicit relations with the priest of the Tarakeswar temple, Madhav Chandra Giri Mahant. The murder occurred just after Nabin Chandra, who was an employee at the Military Press, returned home with his umbrella which had a curved handle. Elokeshi covered her head with the aanchal of her sari and bowed her head for the chopper.

  The sun rose up above the Maidan in front of SSKM. It was a beautiful sight. But the entire yard was dirty and stinking. Patients clad in dirty white clothes lay on their cots or sat or strolled around glumly with heavy bandages, the pain visible on their faces. Near the gate there was a waste bin constantly rummaged by children, dogs and a seemingly mad man. That gate had opened to Indians only after Independence. Until then the hospital had been reserved exclusively for white people. There were two ponds and tennis and badminton courts on the premises in those days. The hospital building used to be the garden residence of Rev. Kirnander, the first Protestant vicar of Calcutta. The fact that the garden now was completely submerged under festering filth was itself one of the most important historical lessons of our times.The hospital was a dirt heap of used cotton swabs stained red or yellow, its walls and floors marked by betel stains and phlegm. I squirmed with unease, wanting to punish myself severely for many nameless crimes.The most serious of these crimes was the memory of the way in which I had stood inside his ruined mansion amidst vines that looked like serpents with risen hoods, locked in ardent embrace. As Ramu da fought death inside, outside, I fought the desire to live.

  ‘Doesn’t look like he’ll survive the night. . . ’ Father told Ma in an extraordinarily calm voice.

  ‘Eesh, Bhagawan!’ Ma cried.

  Father’s face grew dark. ‘Don’t waste your tears. What’s meant to happen will happen. I’ve been seeing death signs on his face for quite some time now.’

  ‘You’re responsible for it all! Who reduced him to this state? You!’

  Not paying attention to Ma’s angry reproach, Father called to me to go with him. It wasn’t clear what he had in mind. We went up to the waste bin where a competition was on between the kids, cats and dogs, and where a noxious smell overpowered one’s senses. He turned to look at me. ‘Do you have that boy’s number with you? To call?’

  I went red.

  ‘There, those are the phone booths. I’ll give you the money. Call him, let him know what happened to Ramu. This is a big news story, Chetu. The hangman’s son on his deathbed the day the hanging was postponed—who wouldn’t want to see that news on TV after hearing such a headline?’

  Father looked enthusiastic.

  ‘I don’t have his number.’

  He stared at me in disbelief. ‘What? You don’t have his number?’

  ‘No.’

  Anger and agony flashed on his face. ‘Huh! You didn’t have the sense to get his number after gadding about with him all this while?’

  Father rubbed his face with his gamchha and returned it to his shoulder. Lighting a cigarette and puffing hard at it, he gave the matter some thought.

  ‘Okay, okay, I’ll get the number . . . we can call the channel office . . . ’

  Letting out smoke, he became pleasant again.

  ‘If
the event had happened, you’d have rolled in fame. But things didn’t happen that way . . . For the time being, what you need is a government job. We’ll hang on if you get it. Only he can help us with that.’

  His voice carried the sheer load and fatigue of his eighty-eight years. I felt warm towards Father. The husband and paramour were both arrested after Elokeshi’s murder. The court first ordered Nabin Chandra to be hanged to death. But the general public cried out, ‘Punish the paramour, save the husband!’ Nabin Chandra’s sentence was converted to life imprisonment but thousands petitioned the court, and he was let off. At this news, Grandfather had reportedly said, ‘Well, one less to hang.’

  As I followed Father to the phone booth, the prospect of having to call Sanjeev Kumar made me sweat. I was troubled by the fact that he had discarded me like a used earthen cup and walked away as soon as the news of the postponement of the hanging had come. I was not the special person with whom he wanted to spend his life; rather, I was like a small rickshaw or some other vehicle, used only to get somewhere. Still my ears hankered to hear his voice again. While Father made several other calls from the booth, I stood quiet and tense. What an awful noose I wore around my neck! The thought made me feel weak.

  ‘Hello . . . Sanju babu? This is me . . . Phanibhushan Grddha

  Mullick . . . Oh, were you asleep, Babu? Sorry for troubling you. My son Ramdev became very ill last night . . . fell off his cot . . . We brought him to the hospital immediately. Just think, Babu, the day the hanging got postponed, the hangman’s son was taken grievously ill. Bhagawan! Will anyone believe this? His skull was shattered when it hit the

  floor . . . been bedridden for so long, his bones are all weak . . . that’s what the doctors say. It’s time for him to go, Babu . . . today or by tomorrow evening . . . ’

  I swallowed hard the humiliation that rose up in my throat. My only consolation was that few people recognized me in the hospital; the people who came there were mostly poor farmers from distant villages who didn’t watch much TV. Many didn’t even have electricity in their villages. I went back to Ma, who was sipping the tea Hari da had bought her. An old woman with a thin little child on her lap was complaining about something to her.

  ‘Poor woman, she’s from Midnapore. She’s been here for two weeks,’ Ma introduced her.

  ‘Where do you stay?’ I asked.

  ‘By the road, where else? Somebody or the other from their village is usually here for treatment . . . they reserve some space by the road,’ Ma said.

  The woman left with the child, still complaining. Ma finished her tea and flung away the mud cup. ‘That fellow, your old geezer, he’ll give you all sorts of advice. Don’t heed any of it,’ she told me as if she were reading my mind.

  ‘You say don’t obey, but you never defy him, Ma.’

  Running her finger on the long blood-red streak of sindoor on her head, Ma said, ‘You are not like me, you are educated.’

  I couldn’t really take that in fully. The moments slipped by. School buses and other vehicles zoomed past.I could see the tops of those vehicles, big and small, the sleepy little faces inside. By noon, a vehicle bearing the logo of Sanjeev Kumar Mitra’s channel entered the hospital yard. My blood froze. He might come—with a warm look and a loving smile—I hoped.

  ‘Where is your baba?’ he asked, not even bothering to smile. There was discontent and revulsion on his face.

  ‘He was here . . . ’ My voice trailed away.

  ‘Which room is your brother in? Quick! I’ve no time, I need to leave soon.’

  ‘We heard that he was on the third floor, Babu.’ Ma pulled her aanchal over her head and came up to us.

  ‘Show me quickly, I’ve to shoot it and leave.’

  I stared at him, not knowing what to do. He was giving instructions to the cameraman. Getting in through the emergency outpatient door, cutting through the queue of people waiting to see different doctors, we walked through the hall filled with a rotting stink towards the lift and waited after pressing the button. He did not look at me or speak to me.

  ‘SSKM Hospital—what is this SSKM?’ he asked the cameraman, who gestured his ignorance.

  ‘This used to be called PG Hospital before, Presidency General Hospital. Later it became Seth Sukhlal Karnani Hospital,’ I muttered to no one in particular.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Someone who donated some money to the hospital.’

  He acted as if he wasn’t listening. Not even when we were walking briskly though the spit- and phlegm-stained corridor of the third floor towards the ICU did he acknowledge my presence. Ramu da lay on a rusty cot; there was an oxygen mask on his face, but his eyes were only half shut. The heavy bandage that covered his whole head down to the forehead was stained with blood. I broke down when I saw him. That moment, Atul Kishore Chandra’s camera gaped at me.

  ‘You can’t shoot here,’ a nurse who was passing by said, suppressing a yawn.

  ‘Go and file a case!’ snapped Sanjeev Kumar.

  She turned around, but seeing that it was useless, went her way.

  ‘Pull that sheet off,’ he ordered me.

  I shook my head in the negative. ‘Better not see it.’

  ‘Look, madam, I know what’s worth seeing and what’s not. If I tell you to pull off the sheet, you better do it!’ He was relentless. ‘You pull me out of bed before daybreak and now I have to listen to a lecture?’

  It felt as if he had slapped me. He pulled the sheet off himself. Ramu da lay with a piece of green cloth covering his waist. His right side from which the arm had been fully severed and the stump of his left leg, severed above the knee, were in full view. The camera leapt greedily on the bed and, like Kali with her dreadful long tongue, licked him dry. I struggled to squash down the memory of Ramu da’s tall, healthy, youthful form rising in my mind.

  As I retreated with tearful eyes and a terrible pain throbbing within, Sanjeev Kumar smiled derisively. ‘Remember? That day when I tried to take a picture of him, you knocked down my camera? Now, you yourself have summoned me here to take pictures of him!’

  I felt gutted. Even to look at him was revolting. My mind and body smouldered. Father entered then and, running up to Sanjeev Kumar Mitra and the cameraman, bowed to them and started explaining all sorts of things. My legs numb, I stumbled out slowly. Not in a state of mind to look for the lift, I climbed down the stairs, my eyes fixed on the ground. Tears fell. The salt of my tears joined with the many layers of dirt that had sedimented there. In my mind’s eye I saw him, trying to photograph Ramu da that day. His words, I want to fuck you at least once, reverberated in my ears. I hated myself then. Who is this Sanjeev Kumar Mitra, I asked myself. A man. How is he related to you? He donated some love. Just a pittance. Mesmerized by it I sold myself, and ruined everything.

  Father, Sanjeev Kumar Mitra and the cameraman had reached the ground floor before me.

  ‘It won’t work, Phani da. I know how smart you are at changing your tune. I learned my lesson from my last mistake.’ His voice was hard.

  I wiped off my sweat and observed them from behind.

  ‘Oh, don’t say that, Sanju babu. I have entrusted this girl to you . . . ’

  He was now begging. Sanjeev Kumar Mitra pretended not to hear.

  ‘Okay, okay, I’ll put in this news. It will start airing noon onwards.’

  ‘Sanju babu, that won’t be enough. Please exert some pressure on the government and get her a government job!’

  ‘Let me think.’ There was no warmth in those words.

  ‘Okay, Atul, let’s go. Phani da, we are leaving. One thing—if this news appears on any other channel before mine . . . ’

  That was a threat. He was in grey jeans and a white shirt, and his glasses were smokier than usual. He looked like an actor who had appeared without his costume, after the performance. The speed with which he changed expression l
eft me dumbfounded.

  ‘Never, Sanju babu, never! You can trust me. Phanibhushan is a man who does not go back on his word.’

  ‘Oh yeah, yeah, I know that so well.’

  ‘All right.Will you please drop her on the way? Let her go home and come back with some essential things. Looks like we’ll have to be here for four or five days.’

  ‘No, I’m busy.’

  He walked away without another glance. Father’s face fell; mine turned a deep red.

  ‘He’s in quite a fury!’ Father said angrily.

  ‘You brought it upon yourself,’ Ma said, coming up. ‘You made him play the merry fool, didn’t you?’

  ‘It’s he who made us play the fool,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t need us any more.’

  ‘If that’s the only reason why he did all this, then why did he give you those gold bangles and the ring? I don’t agree. He was sincere. It’s your nature that was the cause . . . ’ Tears of rage filled her eyes. ‘My fate! You killed the eldest one. The boy who should have lit my pyre . . . you made him this way. And this girl, the only one left, you’re ruining her!’

  ‘Chi! Shut your trap!’ Father yelled, furious. He looked around as if he were at his wits’ end and stomped off to Hari da who was chatting with someone beside the tea shop.

  ‘Didn’t the whole world get to know he was going to marry you? Bhagawan! What shame!’ Ma turned to me.

  ‘I have no shame at all!’ I too snapped, furious.

  ‘You don’t know what trouble that is. My child, how will you live? Your father is eighty-eight. I am old too. Not to mention Thakuma. And Sudev and Syamili—will they let you live in peace? No, they’ll sell you for what your flesh is worth.’

  Ma looked at me in pain.

  ‘Ma, don’t worry about me. I’ve decided how I should live my life.’

  ‘How?’

  I didn’t reply. We found some space on the granite half-wall near the Woodburn Block and sat there. Ma stretched out on it, exhausted. Just behind us, a young woman was sleeping with her infant. When the baby pulled at her sari, I saw her tattered blouse fastened with safety pins. I lifted Ma’s head to my lap and caressed her hair. Ma half-opened her eyes and asked, ‘Ramu is unconscious?’