Hangwoman

by K R Meera

  His voice was so loud, it could be heard from the Ghat. The road was unusually free of crowds; just a single hearse passed by. A very old man lay in it. His children and grandchildren held on to it reluctantly.

  ‘If everything goes as we want it to, it will be a happy ending.’ That was Sanjeev Kumar. ‘Things have been very smooth till now. The chief minister’s wife has taken a very strong stand.’

  ‘Uh-hm. I’ve heard she is a very competent woman.’

  ‘Her protest has created waves, Phani da. Two days ago there was a meeting where film stars spoke—what a crowd it was! People want justice to be done in this case. Only a few like Mahashweta Devi are against the death sentence; the general feeling is that he must be hanged. These meetings have all convinced the central government. We have also requested the Trinamool Congress to intervene if necessary. They are favourable too.’

  ‘Ha—so the Trinamool and the government have finally agreed on one thing! Didn’t I tell you, Sanju babu? That there should be a hanging once in a while to rejuvenate the land and the people? Isn’t that how people get to know that there’s a government in this country?’

  ‘I say, if Chetna could come to the fore now, things would be more colourful.’

  ‘Disobedient hussy! She’s stuffed with pride! I’ll kick her out if she doesn’t do what I say! Then she will have neither this family nor this house!’

  It was an awful night. CNC included a sentimental story about the sorrowing parents of the murdered Mridula Chatterjee.

  ‘Aren’t you keen on punishing the wrongdoer?’ the reporter asked the deceased girl’s thirty-five-year-old brother.

  His tired face appeared on the screen.

  ‘Why didn’t you write to the President?’

  ‘What has happened has happened. We will never get her back. What does it matter if they punish him or not?’

  There was deep pain in Binoy Chatterjee’s voice. I went to bed early that day. Outside, two lorry drivers drunk on locally brewed liquor created a ruckus. Thakuma went out, scolded them both and returned. Silence fell after a while. I sat up, unable to sleep. It seemed to me that there was no other sight as petrifying as that of a silently burning lamp placed under a cot just a little wider than a bench. Worries crowded my mind. A deep enmity towards Sanjeev Kumar Mitra surfaced. He controlled the death of Jatindranath Banerjee. As well as the lives of those who were to kill him—Father and me. Each person inside this house of ours, now crumbling to dust with age, was under his thumb. Rage smouldered within me. In the dim light, I imagined Jatindranath Banerjee sitting with a foolish smile on Ramu da’s cot. Till now he had been but a concept. Now he was real. The noose with which Father had chosen to hang him sat coiled in a large iron box in one of the dark rooms of the prison like a cobra ready to lay eggs. After being appointed the hangwoman unexpectedly, I had talked and talked about death and my ancestors for a whole month, taming myself with words the way the hangman’s rope is softened with banana flesh and soap. But the moment the hanging was postponed, I fell down into an unknown cellar. That had been a terrible fall. Someone who had lived inside me till then had died, and was reborn as someone else. In the yellowish light, like everything else—the stained walls, the cloth bundles that hung from the nails hammered into it, the old pictorial calendar, the mirror, the little statuette of Durga that resembled Niharika that I had carefully mounted on the small slab—I, hunched upon the bedding spread on the floor, too appeared to be but a shadow.

  ‘Chetu, still not asleep?’

  Thakuma sat up on her bed, shaking the betel on to her palm.

  ‘Can’t sleep, Thakuma.’

  ‘Come here . . . ’

  I went up to Thakuma, who was sitting with her legs outstretched on the bed, and pressed my face on her wrinkled back, like I used to as a child. Her palm, little more than bones, stretched back and touched my cheek lovingly. If you pressed your ear to Thakuma’s spine, you heard the tham-tham of huge waves breaking on rocks and shattering. That’s Thakuma’s heart beating, Ramu da would say. But now, when I listened, it sounded more like the cellar opening. Even the thought of the cellars inside Thakuma’s heart drained me of all courage.

  ‘Did you sleep with him?’ She turned towards me, chewing the betel.

  That was a blow.

  ‘He looks like a man capable of making a woman love him and making her happy too.’

  She sighed.

  ‘A woman and man shouldn’t be joined by heart alone, but by bodies too.’

  She sighed again. I wilted in amazement—that she could discuss the body and sex in this room even before the lamp that was showing Ramu da the way to the other world died out.

  ‘The body is a great burden. In your youth it is easier to tame and chain it. But as you grow older, the body grows weak, the mind becomes harder to hold in place. Whenever I saw him, I thought I knew someone who looked like him, and I remember now—he looks like Netra Sen.’

  ‘Thakuma . . . ’ I was disconcerted.

  Thakuma chewed her betel for some more time in the dark. Then smiled softly. ‘I thought so because it occurred to me that you resemble that girl.’

  ‘Which girl?’ I was fully alert now.

  ‘Netra Sen’s wife . . . what was her name? Savitri? Sati Devi?’

  I smiled again to myself. Savitri, or Sati, or perhaps Durga, and if not then Chamundi. I don’t know what made me go seeking him again. Maybe it was that intense night. I served Sanjeev Kumar a meal, sitting on the floor in the grand mansion at Sonagachi. I sat beside him, waving a fan. And then seized the chopper I had hidden behind me and brought it down hard on his neck. Whom he had betrayed for me to kill him so, I didn’t know. But when I woke up rudely, I knew. He had betrayed my love; my body that turned tender and vulnerable when in love. My soul which refused to leave him, like the yellow light of the dimly burning lamp. My desire, always unfettered.

  38

  It was in 1784 that Warren Hastings wrote to his masters that knowledge gained from close interaction with conquered people would be of great use to the colonizing power, and that it was essential to attract and appease these people, render their chains lighter, and impress on them feelings of gratitude and obligation towards their conquerors. That was one hundred and ninety-eight years before I was born. I remembered Hastings not just because Sanjeev Kumar Mitra had begun to frequent our house with small bottles of liquor stuffed in his pockets and some small change for Father. It was the newspapers and television channels that made me think of him. They poked into the sorrow and the anger of the murdered child’s parents and her chronically ill brother. Everywhere one heard those who had loved her, those who had kept their memories of her, screaming as they fell into the trenches of the past.

  To overcome my fear, I smiled and told jokes to myself, muttered words of consolation, and tried to sing songs from my schooldays. Have you lost your mind? Ma scolded me. Thakuma smiled kindly. ‘A death has occurred in the house, hasn’t it? And she was the most beloved to him. When the dead hold tight, not wanting to leave, living people can’t find balance.’

  I woke up screaming from my sleep. In the nightmare, Ramu da’s soul which was lying on the cot grew a tail; it twisted around my neck and strangled me. Ma couldn’t put to rest my thoughts about the tail the departed soul was likely to grow. The soul, in my dream, was smooth and shiny, as if it had been shaped out of the clay from the Ganga. His eyes and hair were red and his eyeballs white. His arms and legs flowed from the cot, spreading all over the room like a viscous liquid. It, however, was transparent like clear crystal and as flexible as molten wax. The thought that my sibling’s soul tarried painfully in this room, in this house and at Strand Road, reluctant to leave me, made me weep for months after. The image of Ramu da returning from college, carefree and happy, swooping me up in his arms and twirling me, little petticoat and all, and then throwing me up and catching me in his arms, makin
g me laugh, kept flashing in my mind. My heart broke to pieces.

  ‘I caused Ramu da’s death, Thakuma,’ I sobbed, pressing my face on her thin, twig-like knees.

  Though it was Sanjeev Kumar Mitra who started it, I could not get over the thought that the immediate cause of his death was my own cowardice. If only I had handed over the gold coin to Thakuma as soon as he gave it to me, if only I had told everyone that he had stolen it, it would not have been lost when Thakuma’s bed was being made. Kaku wouldn’t have been tempted to steal it and buy clothes and gold for his wife and daughters. Father wouldn’t have beaten up Kaku. And Ramu da wouldn’t have fallen on the floor without knowing who would win, England or Portugal.

  ‘No one can be responsible for another’s death. We can only be instruments.’ She stroked my shoulder gently. Even at the age of one hundred and four, there was still the warmth and delicacy of affection in her shrivelled fingertips.

  ‘Don’t you feel sad at losing the coin, Thakuma? Wasn’t it the proof of our history?’

  ‘What use do the poor have of history, Chetu?’ She sighed.

  ‘Then why did you search for it over and over again?’

  ‘I kept looking for it only to convince myself that I had lost it. Now I am sure I have lost it. Why grieve for it now?’

  As I gazed at her I tried to imagine how those eyes and cheeks and lips must have been in her youth. I was overcome by a feeling of deep compassion towards her aged body that desired to stay in bondage to the earth by continually fanning a small spark of life and vitality into a tiny flame.

  ‘And if I didn’t know that it had been lost? I am old. How many days more, who knows? My soul would have hung back here, hoping that the coin would be found somewhere in the wooden box or the rats’ nest in the attic. Just imagine, Chetu, me turning the place upside down, searching, and searching again, like Hastings sahib on his horse at two o’clock at night.’

  When Thakuma opened her mouth, laughing innocently, I too smiled. That’s how I chanced to think that night about Hastings sahib and Grandfather Vidyasagar Mullick who knew the finest details of the Englishman’s life. He was the son of Grandfather Purushottam’s sister Kantimati and could recite from memory the whole of Hastings’s famous letter in which he argued that the knowledge of the conquered peoples’ language, culture and lifestyle was very useful to understand their mental states and natural rights, and this would make the conquerors capable of assessing them by their own standards.

  . . . But such instances can only be gained in their writings; and these will survive when the British domination in India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which once yielded wealth and power are lost to remembrance . . .

  And then he peered into our souls with two shining eyes hidden in the forest of his long, tangled beard, abundant, shaggy eyebrows, and thickly lashed eyelids, and asked: ‘Notice where his wily foresight lies? In the part which says “. . . in their writings”!’

  Grandfather Vidyasagar was one of the few in our family who tried to get over the pain of poverty by immersing himself in knowledge. Ramu da used to joke that all references to scholarship left grandfather deeply perturbed because he had aspired to be a writer himself. Hastings made friends with nawabs; learned Urdu and Bangla and Persian. But what always floored me was his love story. For him, love always leapt up in the midst of the gravest danger and life-or-death situations. I was keen to imagine what he would have been like—this poor waif who grew up in an orphanage, joined the army for survival, and reached this new land, Kolkata, in the middle of the eighteenth century. Throughout his youth, he questioned corruption, but also made money and rose in the ranks. He had been one of the prisoners in the so-called ‘Black Hole’ about which British historians have made much noise, in which several British men were trapped during Siraj-ud-Daulah’s campaign after the death of Nawab Alivardi Khan. He was nearly on his deathbed when he met her—the widow of one of the men who had died there, and a mother of two. I was intrigued by the woman who had rendered him helpless with love even in that terrible atmosphere of decay and death. Hastings escaped from the nawab’s prison, to Fulta Island, and married Mary. Though he endeared himself to Lord Clive who led the British forces from Madras to defeat Siraj-ud-Daula, his misfortune did not end. The two children Mary bore him—a boy and a girl—died. But his horses continued to surge ahead. He became the Resident of Murshidabad. Those were the days of Mir Jafar, who bestowed upon him the title of nawab in return for his betrayal of Siraj-ud-Daula, and his son-in-law Mir Qasim. Hastings remained a faithful servant of the Company, but sold coffee and salt on the side and made piles of money. As a member of the Calcutta Council he roundly condemned corrupt officers of the Company but he himself became a contractor distributing bullocks for carts—and later, unable to tolerate corruption, returned to Britain. It was a little before his return that Mir Qasim began his campaign and our ancestor Atmaram Mullick became the nawab’s trusted man and chief executioner. Thakuma used to describe with great gusto how the British camp at Patna was surrounded by Mir Qasim’s troops and how Grandfather Atmaram put to death hundreds of British men before the Company troops came to their rescue.

  I whiled away that night sleeping next to Thakuma, alternately waking and dozing. Must escape to Mano da’s office as soon as I can, I decided. Our bathroom was used by four families. Narayan da’s wife Sankari Devi was taking a bath. I waited by the road for her to finish. The six-ten Sealdah Mail passed by, shaking the very foundations of our houses. A mini-lorry bearing a herd of goats for the slaughter house beyond the cemetery—their eyes drooping, like those who had seen a lot of life—purred impatiently. The street was still dozing. Black smoke rose lazily towards the sky above the Ghat. The dirt and muck that lay very close to my feet, our rickety outmoded houses, their roofs dotted with patches of plastic, and the terrible ear-splitting sound of another circular train—all of it created the impression of violent death. Narayan da passed that way with his cart full of bamboo for the litters without noticing me. A rich brahmin, his chest divided in two by a wet black sacred thread, searched for his car parked somewhere near the Nimeshwar Baba temple, chanting ‘Narayana, narayana . . . ’ aloud. He was probably with a group of mourners from a distant place. Rajkumari Devi, the mother of Swayambhu, who worked in the Port Trust, hobbled up in her frayed sari and torn blouse, and smiled at me. That was a smile that could appear only on the faces of those whose souls had reached the other world well before their bodies. Her husband Parameswar da must have come down with his bag full of ear cleaners and swooped her away with his crystal-clear, flexible tail.

  ‘The Ganga has dried up,’ she said, smiling at me. ‘When I looked there this morning, there was no river. Just a road.’

  Rajkumari di’s greatest pleasure was to share the memories of her life in Mayadwip before Partition.

  ‘Why did you come to have a bath so early? Did the water your Ma collected get used up so soon?’

  Sankari Devi had come out and was now drying her hair with a towel, head thrown backwards and her big chest thrust forward. She was fifty, but her body was still shapely and her face very comely. Only her fair-skinned back bore lash marks, inflicted by Narayan da who suspected her of having affairs. This had been going on for as long as I could remember. I had my bath and came out; there was a row of men at the tap near the waste heap, all of them yellow with the soap lather on their bodies. Father too bathed there, when there was water in the tap, along with the others, wrapping the green-and-red towel around his waist, pampering his body with soap, and telling tall tales to co-bathers. Kaku refused to bathe in public, choosing instead to do so in our broken-down, mossy courtyard. I noticed the lash marks on his legs after I heard that he had picked up this habit in jail. Only then did I know that he had been jailed during the Emergency.

  ‘He’s turned up before daybreak today, that boy!’ Ma told me as I stepped inside. I pretended not to hear and looked fo
r a white dupatta to go with my dark green kurta. Thakuma put her legs up on the cot and drank her tea, blowing into it noisily.

  ‘My girl has become reed thin in such a short while! It’s her heart burning for him . . . all because of you . . . I had warned you early enough—we don’t want an alliance from a non-hangman family. But you fell for the coat and the pants and the cash in his pocket . . . ’ Thakuma began to scold Ma.

  ‘Everyone knows whose habit it is to fall for the cash in others’ pockets!’ Ma vented her anger. ‘All I wanted was for my girl to receive a good alliance. Who knew that your son would sell her for cold cash on that pretext!’

  Not waiting for Thakuma to finish her tea, Ma snatched the cup and marched into the kitchen. Thakuma wiped her eyes and smiled, winking at me. ‘We don’t get along!’

  I smiled too as I combed my hair. It was hard for me to understand why she, who told us many stories of dire enmities, but declared that no enmity could be eternal, should treat Grandfather’s beloved—my mother’s mother—as an inveterate enemy half a century after she had died.

  ‘Oh, what corruption, Grddha da, everywhere! Just everywhere—my blood boils!’ Sanjeev Kumar Mitra’s voice could be heard from Father’s room.

  ‘You’re telling me about this, Sanju babu? Look, people have but one thought: money, money, money. Sometimes I think, get rid of the rope and the noose, get a gun and shoot all these buggers! This world can be redeemed only if we kill off some of these corrupt fellows!’