Hangwoman

by K R Meera

  ‘Chetna, what did you talk about with him? Why not tell me his history as well?’

  ‘I don’t know a lot. There are records only about his ancestor Naren dakat.’

  I related that story. There was amazement on her face.

  ‘You are probably right. It is true . . . thirty years later, Sankaran alighted in Kolkata as a young man from Kollam seeking his father. He was a great merchant . . . he wrote about his arrival in Kolkata.’

  I drew in a deep breath. When the guns sounded the hour of nine inside Fort William, the employees in Writers’ Buildings wrapped up their work, extinguished the lamps, and left for home. At the same time, a twenty-year-old young man arrived in the city with a wooden box and a rolled-up mat. He gazed awestruck at the grand mansions lit up with fancy gasoline lamps as he searched for a place to rest. The silence was broken now and then by carriages with black or brown horses that came dashing down the road. The doors and windows of the beautiful mansions with balconies and terraces surrounded by decorative cast-iron railings were shut by then. When he crossed into Sobha Bazar through Chitpur Road, suddenly the road came alive with people and sounds. He stood among the bela flower sellers and the vendors of chilled sweets with his box and mat, and watched the nightlife with amazement. Then, not knowing that this was Black Calcutta and that the nightlife went on till dawn, he picked up his box and mat and began to walk through Garanagata Lane. On the way, Sonagachi lay waiting, like a bloodthirsty ghoul decked up as a beauty.

  She burst out laughing when I described how he ran through Pathuria Ghat towards the Hooghly to escape the pimps and prostitutes who tugged at his belongings.

  ‘Sankaran took rice from here, brought cardamom and pepper from there. He became very rich, he owned many grand buildings in Kolkata. His grandson married me after selling one of those.’

  ‘What about his son?’ I sat up, now interested.

  ‘He was a kalari expert. He took the initiative to begin a gymnasium in Kolkata. He was active in Subhash Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army. No one has seen him since he left for Germany to work under Bose. He went back home just before leaving the country and got married. His son was Sanjeev’s father, Mitran.’

  She seemed engrossed in some memory.

  ‘He came here to join Calcutta University. The right time to come! Jumped into the revolution as soon as he came. We met in college . . . I liked him at first sight.’

  ‘Trailokya di, did you go to college?’ I was indeed astonished.

  ‘I was the topper in school, but I couldn’t complete my degree. Mitran was in jail by then. After he came out, he took me straightaway to Kerala. Our son was born there.’

  ‘You came back . . .’

  ‘Yes.’

  She sighed again. I listened to her spellbound. Love ended the moment marriage began. Her lover was not a mate any more; he was a sentry, guarding her all the time. All the lessons that her ancestry had taught about winning and keeping a man’s love fell to naught. Mitran was afraid of his wife. Of her voice. Of her body, her courage, her happiness. So Trailokya Devi returned. He didn’t let her take their son, nor did she try to seize him. Mitran died when their son was eighteen. That was when Trailokya Devi invited her son to Kolkata. He came because he had no other option. He lives here because he still has no other option.

  Her face had turned glum. We were silent for a while. I was sketching in my mind the road he had traversed.

  Trailokya Devi wiped her face vigorously and became pleasant again. ‘Forget all that. Whenever I hear “hangman”, it is Phanibhushan Grddha Mullick’s face that appears in my mind. He’s so often on TV and in the papers!’

  She paced about the room slowly, as graceful as a dancer revealing the beauty of her body. She came up to the carved bed and, caressing the lotus at its head, looked at me. This big room and the cool floor and the shiny rosewood furniture, and me—nothing seemed real then. When I turned my face casually to look at the wall behind me, I was surprised to see a picture of Devi Manasa. Serpents, eager to fly, made a halo of light around her face as she sat with her infant.

  ‘Won’t you feel fear when you kill?’ she asked lightly.

  How is anyone to say exactly how one may kill another? Just as I was about to speak, Sushila di interrupted us. She had run up the stairs and was panting heavily when she exclaimed, ‘Didi, someone has come looking for Chetna!’

  ‘Looking for me? Here?’

  ‘Chetu!’

  I heard a cry. As I hurried out, there was Mano da hopping up the steps, pulling along his bad leg. He lurched desperately even as he neared, a film of tears clouding his vision. He stumbled as though he were blind. I looked at his face, and the whitish worms sank their maws into my cold feet. I knew it without his telling me. Someone dear to both of us had died.

  45

  There are sixteen hells that await human beings after their death, said Thakuma as soon as she saw me, as if nothing special had transpired. Eight of them are hot, the other eight cold. In the first of the cold hells, the Arbudanaraka, the karma of each soul is amassed as mustard seeds in sacks. It is like a large plateau in the middle of two infinitely high mountains. Each soul that enters shivers in the constantly blowing cold wind that makes the skin prickle. The soul must remain in that hell till the last of its mustard seeds have been counted—at the rate of one seed per century. After having enjoyed the fruits of fulfilled karma, it has to return to accomplish the unfulfilled. But more frightening than this, to me, was the idea that each soul that fell into this hell had to carry all the memories of the full-grown body, vulnerable to the heat and the cold, like an enormous cloth bundle. That Thakuma could speak about souls and hells on 12 July, when a crowd gathered on Strand Road, this street of death, was truly extraordinary, and even the corpses peeped into our ancient dwelling—where the glory of our bloodline lay. The sight of Father, who, since his nineteenth year, had been the greatest merchant of death tales, and the biggest guardian of justice, sitting in this old room so familiar to television viewers and documentary audiences, smoking uneasily, and Ma collapsed in a corner, weeping feebly, looked like a scene from a television show. In the courtyard of our house a blood-soaked chopper lay inside a circle of chalk. The blood that had splattered from it seemed to be rolling on the green moss, like drops of molten wax.

  ‘It was Emperor Ashoka who built a hell on earth. But it isn’t enough to build it, right, Chetu chotdi? Doesn’t it have to be run properly? That’s where I say, no ruler in India could have survived without us!’

  Thakuma’s cackling voice rose high. A policeman walking by, puffing at a beedi, looked our way. He grinned, showing his stained teeth. Ashoka’s hell too had sixteen cells. All the terrors after death must be suffered in life, he insisted. He had ascended to the seat of the empire after eliminating ninety-nine of his stepbrothers born to his father’s ninety-nine wives.

  ‘Only you can spout history at such a moment! No wonder you have been left to decay here bit by bit even after crossing a hundred!’ Blowing her nose and wiping her overflowing eyes, Ma got up and scolded Thakuma loudly.

  Seeing me standing beside Thakuma with no emotion on my face, she became even more furious. She gave me a tight slap on my cheek. ‘What are you staring at, eh? Have you caught the same bug as your old devil and his hag of a mother? Don’t you have the decency to shed a single tear?’

  I rubbed my cheek and tried to smile. It will take Ma many more years to realize that after 18 May I simply cannot cry in the face of death.

  ‘Smiling? You heartless wretch!’ She gave me a searing look.

  ‘Stop your strutting right now!’ Thakuma’s voice rose. ‘Her blood is that of the Grddha Mullicks. Do you know what it takes to be a hangman? Presence of mind! She has it. She will spread our fame even further.’

  I never failed to be amazed by the power and energy that resonated in Thakuma’s voice, emerging as it did
from a body that had shrunk to barely a couple of metres. What world will she leave for after death, I wondered. When one entered the mountain path of the Nirarbudanaraka, the cold would re-emerge with sharp fangs and tear at the bodies of the souls, causing the gooseflesh of the Arbudanarka to burst and for blood and pus to flow out. But they would turn solid as ice that very instant, adding to the terrible throbbing pain. The cold can burn more intensely and cruelly than fire. Each soul must cross the Nirarbudanaraka after learning that lesson. Each soul has to spend a period twenty times longer than what it spent in the Arbudanaraka. Ignoring the women of the neighbourhood who had gathered there, I pushed my legs through the front of the kitchen and from there, into Kaku’s room. The boot prints of the police were evident thanks to the blood that had pooled there. Falling into a cold hell while alive on the earth was, in a way, a completion of incomplete karma.

  ‘Chetu di!’

  Ten-year-old Champa ran out of the kitchen, blood smeared on her cheek, and clung to me. Don’t cry, don’t cry, I tried to tell her, but then I began to weep.

  ‘Where is Rari?’ I asked, as I held her close.

  She pointed towards the kitchen. Our dilapidated kitchen had been taken over by the press. At their head was Sanjeev Kumar, shooting questions. Maintaining full dignity as she faced the cameras, five-year-old Rari was earning for herself a distinctive place in the world of grown-ups. My body trembled from top to toe.

  ‘When Ma came in Jethu ran to her and slapped her. Baba got in between, but Jethu hit Ma again. Ma shouted at him . . . and then

  Jethu . . .’ Stopping to make sure that the reporters had the time to jot down her words, she continued: ‘went to the kitchen and got the big chopper and slashed Ma in the neck . . .’

  That was the moment when I noticed how unpleasant it feels when goose pimples of fear spring up on the body.

  ‘Didn’t your father Sukhdev Grddha Mullick stop him?’

  ‘Jethu is very strong. Baba fell.’

  ‘Tut-tut-tut,’ said Sanjeev Kumar.

  He has entered the Attattanaraka, I surmised, enraged. The hell of Attattanaraka is climbing up a high mountain. The hell of Haahavanaraka is in descending it. The Attattanaraka is so cold that the chapped and broken wounds from Nirarbudanaraka give out the sound ‘tt . . . tt . . . tt . . .’ And when souls fall from Attattanaraka into the Haahavanaraka, the sharp chilly wind that always blows in the opposite direction to the soul’s path makes the soul scream ‘haaa. . .’ in sheer agony. The next, the Huhuvanaraka, is a frozen pond. The souls make their way on the slippery ice, but sometimes fall through crevices into the waters beneath. It is so cold that the souls cannot even open their mouths; all they can do is groan, ‘hooo . . .’ Beyond it is the Utpalanaraka, where the naked bodies of the souls turn bluish in the unrelenting snowfall. Then they pass on to the Padmanaraka, where instead of snow, large blocks of ice come down like hail. Last is the Mahapadmanaraka, where the body shatters into pieces and everything inside comes out. I wanted to ask Thakuma how Emperor Ashoka, who built all these hells in the human world, would have fared in his life post-mortem. Emperor Bimbisara, who was a follower of the Ajivaka cult, married Subhadrangi who was also a follower of the same cult. The ministers and Chanakya prevented them from having intercourse for a very long while, said Thakuma. In the end, after waiting for many years, a baby boy was born to Subhadrangi, who took him up in her arms and declared, ‘He ends all my shoka’—that is, sorrow—and hence the name Ashoka.

  ‘He was a bastard. Not that I didn’t love him. I had to do it . . .’ Father’s voice rang from inside.

  ‘Susmita, what did your baba do then?’

  When I heard Sanjeev Kumar ask again, I left Champa in the courtyard and went into the kitchen.

  ‘Stop!’

  I pulled away those who were crowding there; they turned to look at me.

  ‘Aren’t you ashamed to ask such questions of a child?’ My voice choked with anger. They were taken aback for a moment, but they left Rari and turned towards me. Sanjeev Kumar pushed everyone aside in half a second and was beside me, holding out his mike.

  ‘Chetna Grddha Mullick, what do you say about this tragedy that has struck your family?’

  I did not utter a single word; merely looked hard into his eyes. There was a crowd milling around us. Someone stepped on Rari’s foot, and she cried aloud, ‘Haa . . . ’

  ‘Chetna Grddha Mullick, please say something! What happened? Is your father really guilty? What is your view of this incident as a hangman?’

  They were like the crowd that gathered to watch Grandfather Kala. I ignored the questions and tried to take Rari away from the crush.

  ‘Why can’t this woman open her mouth and say something!’

  I closed my ears to all sounds, and pressed my lips on Rari’s cheek.

  ‘Why didn’t you answer, Chetu di?’ Rari asked me.

  I held her even more closely and kissed her on the cheek again. Her eyes filled with tears.

  ‘Excellent visual . . . get it . . .’ I heard someone say. When a pot that Ma had hung in the kitchen fell and some aluminium pots and pans rolled on the floor, there was another round of pushing and shoving in our kitchen. I became exhausted; there was nowhere we could hide in the house from the lights and sounds.

  Then, Mano da’s voice rose from outside: ‘What is going on? Have you not a shred of decency? Get out, everyone!’

  ‘Tell that girl to open her mouth and say something, Mano da!’ A press reporter begged him. I heard laughter too. Sanjeev Kumar Mitra moved towards me through the crowd and hugged me by the shoulder. I was holding Rari. He stroked her shoulder. His expression softened again to that of a friend or lover.

  ‘Chetna, you must issue a statement now. This is an opportunity.’

  He waited for a response for a second.

  ‘Your job is hanging in the balance now—don’t you see that?’

  He brought his face close to mine. Not knowing whether it was the cold hell or the hot one, my body shuddered. Rari hugged my shoulders tightly.

  ‘This is an excellent chance—God-given! You must stay on the side of the government.’

  The first of the hot hells is Sanjeevanaraka, I wanted to tell him. Because it revives the shattered bodies of the souls who get past the Mahapadmanaraka, preparing them for greater ordeals. Grandfather Agnimitra Mullick, who was deputed to set up the hells on earth by Emperor Ashoka, enjoyed this hell the most. He greeted the shivering souls emerging out of the Mahapadmanaraka by poking them with flaming torches. Leaping up in agony, they had to run over a smouldering hot floor. Emperor Ashoka chose the Sanjeevanaraka to finish off his brothers. They had to run on smouldering coals for ten yojnas; they perished on the way, turning into ashes. Thirteen years later, Ashoka experienced a change of mind after the battle of Kalinga and proclaimed himself to be the father of his subjects. As a father, he desired the well-being and happiness of all his children. If souls are capable of carrying a sense of humour along with the memory of their mortal bodies, then these ninety-nine souls, in some world above or below Jambudwipa, must have burst out laughing hearing this proclamation.

  ‘Chetu, come out.’ Mano da made his way in with difficulty and grasped my arm. ‘These fellows will smother you to death.’

  ‘What happened, really, Mano da, tell us something!’ Sanjeev Kumar caught his arm and looked at him beseechingly.

  ‘Two children have been orphaned.’ Mano da gave him an acerbic look.

  ‘Not that, Mano da, why did someone like Phani da do something so cruel?’

  ‘Ask him.’

  ‘Shouldn’t there be a reason? To save the honour of the family, he said. What does he mean by that?’

  ‘Sanjeev babu, ask him!’

  ‘Dada, there’s no point in getting angry with me. Did I create this situation?’

  I clasped Rari to my shoulder
and turned towards him.

  ‘Yes! You! You have brought this upon us!’

  ‘Me!’ He gaped at me. ‘What did I do? I just wished for good things to happen to you—that’s all! Even the other day, I was trying to get you a better house. I’d just recommended to the minister—a permanent job for you and a pension for your baba!’

  I couldn’t help feeling that it was Ashoka standing before me. The police entered, with some neighbours from the Port Trust quarters bringing in the bodies. I squeezed my eyes shut on seeing Kakima’s partially covered body, her mouth open as if in an eternal scream.

  ‘Ma . . .’

  Rari thrust her arms over my shoulder and called desperately. She heaved once, about to cry—then, realizing its fruitlessness, fell silent. Champa pressed her face into my side and burst into tears. When they brought in Kaku’s body, I held them closer, so that they would not see him. But I looked at his body again. His eyes were closed. There was blood on his large, bloated body like an unreal coat of paint. When the police and the crowd left with the bodies, I took the girls and went over to Thakuma. She raised her hand and caressed Rari on the shoulder. Thakuma stroked my cheek gently. ‘Did it hurt? She was actually slapping your baba!’

  I made Rari sit on my lap and held Thakuma close. The policemen’s footsteps could now be heard from Father’s room. I had known that sound from childhood but it was hard to believe that today they came seeking not the hangman but the wrongdoer. Hearing noises from the room, Ma got up with a sob and ran there. The din increased—they were taking Father to the police jeep, I guessed. Thakuma and I sat still as statues. In seconds, our ancient house became empty and silent. Thakuma caressed Rari. But within a few minutes, Sanjeev Kumar Mitra’s face appeared again at the door. ‘Chetna, one moment . . .’