Hangwoman

by K R Meera

  I hesitated, then put the child on the bed and went up to the door. He moved towards the kitchen. ‘Is it true that the deceased Grddha Mullick was a Naxalite?’

  He asked as if it were some deadly secret.

  ‘Chi! What a pity! Would have made a great story when he was alive! I didn’t know of this when we were doing Hangwoman’s Diary! What a loss!’

  I had no response.

  ‘I’ve been thinking of how we can save your baba. As far as I can see, it can be done if you issue a statement that Sukhdev Grddha Mullick was a Maoist!’

  I didn’t get him, not one bit.

  ‘Ah, there is record of his Naxalism as he was jailed as a Naxalite. That makes it easy to identify him as a Maoist.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘If you cooperate a bit, Chetna, we can save Phani da easily. Declare that Sudev was a Maoist, that’s why your father murdered him and his wife. And with a good lawyer . . .’

  Until then I had been more or less tearless. But when he proposed this, Kaku’s face rose up in my mind and the song, Aandhar shokoli . . . I felt the tears come. He must have paid for all his karma in the hot and cold hells S.S. Ray set up, like Ashoka, during the Emergency.

  ‘Think about it, Chetna.’

  I went back to Thakuma, distraught. Rari was lying on her lap.

  ‘His wedding proposal—how is that going?’ she asked.

  My voice refused to emerge.

  ‘Uh-hm! How will it work now, Chetu chotdi? How can he marry you now? You are not an ordinary woman, but a hangwoman! You can’t be married to an ordinary man.’

  She stroked my hair proudly.

  ‘Are you human, woman?’ Ma, who had come back in, snapped. ‘One of the sons you gave birth to in pain is dead, his neck broken—and listen to her talk! One son is dead, the other in jail! But does she have a single tear to shed?’

  ‘I wept a long time ago.’ Thakuma opened her mouth and smiled innocently. ‘Now there are no tears at all, girl. I am so old! Is not all life alike? Is not each death the same? What is there to cry about so much?’

  But Ma went to Father’s room, still scolding. Neighbours and acquaintances kept flowing in and out. Why did he do this, they all wanted to know. When Kaku’s and Kakima’s bodies were brought back late that night, the house filled up with people. They went through all the rites, same as Ramu da.

  ‘Why did Baba do it, Ma?’ I asked Ma while we were preparing Kakima’s body—bathing her, putting the sindoor on her forehead, and dabbing her feet with alta.

  ‘Only your baba knows. Syamili ran in sweating and your father came running behind her, shouting at her to stop. He caught hold of the poor woman’s hair and dragged her down. She spat on his face . . . then he went and got the chopper . . .’

  I felt the noose tightening around my neck again. As I walked to Nimtala Ghat once more for the ceremonial dip, I couldn’t but help admire Father. How the man clung to his resolve never to tell a story fully! Like the soul which has to return to the earth to complete unfulfilled karma even if it has gone through all the sixteen hells, he would come back, I felt, with a newer set of tales. I left the Ghat soaking wet, holding Champa and Rari; it was very late. We waited in front of the timber mill for the traffic to ease. CNC’s news bulletin was audible from inside the timber mill.

  ‘And the biggest anticlimax has been the arrest of the famous hangman Phanibhushan Grddha Mullick, who boasted of having executed four hundred and fifty-one criminals, for double murder. He has been remanded to custody. If sentenced, he may have to share the same premises as his prospective victim, Jatindranath Banerjee. But if Jatindranath’s mercy petition is rejected, then his execution will have to be carried out by Grddha Mullick’s daughter Chetna Grddha Mullick, all by herself. The whole country now waits eagerly to see whether she will be able to accomplish this without her father and her uncle. From Alipore Jail, this is Sanjeev Kumar Mitra, along with Atul Kishore Chandra, only for CNC . . .’

  I knew how it felt to have your skin prickle and for the prickles to swell with pus, for teeth to clatter, the body turn bluish, and the

  flesh fall off piece by piece. When the girls called my name, I started

  to walk again. Mustard seeds, I reminded myself. Too numerous to count.

  46

  ‘Grddha da, why did you do this?’

  ‘I had my own reasons, Babu.’

  ‘Is it true that you are deluded?’

  ‘Which beggar said that?’

  ‘But think of it . . . of hacking down one’s own sibling!’

  ‘It happened. I grieve for him.’

  ‘Won’t they reduce the sentence if it was done in a deluded state of mind?’

  ‘Babu, I am eighty-eight years old. My whole life has been devoted to carrying out justice. Should I now subvert it?’

  ‘But will not an act like this from someone like you send a wrong message to society?’

  ‘I should not have done it. But I have done it. The only message I can send society now is that of my bowed head.’

  ‘This is a double murder, Grddha da. What if they send you to the gallows?’

  Since morning all the channels had been airing the scenes of Father speaking to the reporters as he sat in the police jeep, and each time I heard the question, my heart quivered. But my wonder at the way he dealt with the questions was endless. He raised his eyes to the crowd with the same dignity he wore on his face while performing the role of an emperor on the azar of the jatra.

  ‘I hope for the gallows! Babu, I hope so because sending someone like me to the gallows will be a very good message for society!’

  The jeep began to move. The regal expression on his face as he turned once more to look at the crowd was one only he could summon. He was looking at me, I felt, and asking, ‘One thumping line, right?’ My only consolation was that he wouldn’t be passing through the many hells when he lay all alone in some prison cell. Having to go through hells while still in the body was the worst punishment any soul could receive.

  ‘Look, look, does the man have even a twinge of regret, an iota of hope, even a trace of conscience?’ Ma saw him on TV and screamed in deep agony.

  ‘He did what he did. Now you want him to weep like a child for what he did?’ Thakuma, who had been enjoying his performance, hit back, opening her mouth in a big smile.

  ‘Uh-hm! Yes, yes, that’s all you’ll say, mother and son! Do you have a heart? Don’t you feel the slightest anger at a man who hacked your own son to pieces?’

  ‘What’s the use of being angry now? Didn’t I also give birth to Phani in pain?’ She was unfazed.

  ‘So you don’t grieve Sudev’s death at all?’

  ‘What is the use of sorrowing, girl? Will he come back? Girl, this is a family which has executed not thousands, but lakhs of people over generations. The blood of the Grddha Mullicks cannot hate death; it can only love it. Poor Sudev, he’s gone. But well, he didn’t come to stay in this world forever. He had to go, someday. He went by a single slash—lucky fellow!’ she said coolly.

  ‘Thakuma!’ I called out, alarmed.

  She turned sharply to me: ‘Why, Chetu, are you afraid? Chetu, are you not my grandchild? You ought to laugh loudly in your mind when you hear of death. Irrespective of whether someone dies or is killed, it’s all fated . . . only fate . . . ’

  Fear was slowly filling each of my pores.

  ‘Oh fate, indeed! Do evil and then justify it all, fate indeed!’

  ‘Tell her the story of how our ancestor Upendra Mullick created the Ajivaka cult, Chetu!’ Thakuma ordered angrily.

  I looked at her, empty-faced. She firmly believed that the Ajivaka cult was founded by our ancestor Upendra Mullick. Once, when he was about to behead a young man, the victim looked up and addressed him as ‘father’—only then did Upendra realize that it was his own son, born to a courtesan. It
put him in a dilemma—he was duty-bound to execute his son but could not bring himself to do it. When he aimed the sword at his neck, his hand shook and the sword slipped, missing its aim. This was all due to the anger of the gods, proclaimed the king’s spiritual advisor. The king released Upendra’s son. But the infirmity still plagued Upendra’s hands—they kept shaking. The realization that he could never raise a sword ever again shocked him. He began to think deeply about the accidents and twists of fate in life. He pondered at length about life, death, relationships that transcended life and death, and the reasons and causes of karma. He rationalized having to raise a sword to his own son’s neck as the result of his former karma—as the prevailing thought of the Buddhists and the Jains suggested. But what karma that was, he wasn’t sure. Was it that he had sex with a courtesan? Was it that he gave her a son? Or was it that he was a hangman? He struggled to think it through. One day, as he was lost in thought under a mahua tree beside the Adi Ganga, a branch of the tree broke and fell to the ground, bringing down with it a bird’s nest with three little chicks. One of them died on the spot, its neck broken. The other fell into the river. The third clung to the nest still on the branch and survived, only to be gobbled up by a fox within moments. The dead chick with the broken neck was eaten by a vulture. The one in the river was snatched up by an eagle. But it fell out of the eagle’s beak, and straight into Grandfather Upendra’s lap. He dried the little creature with his garment, put it back it in the nest and restored the nest to another branch. And then the chick said to him: So we meet again. He was stunned. The chick continued: Three births before, you owed me a debt of life. Fate brought you back here to repay it. Don’t be proud of it or sad. This made him think and wonder at the long path he had had to traverse, past three whole lives, to reach this spot beside the river and sit there lost in thought, so that his gratitude to another creature could be repaid. That’s how the Ajivaka creed, which decrees that all series of karma are determined by fate, and that all living creatures are but pawns on a large chessboard, came into being. Grandfather Upendra believed that human beings did not suffer the fruits of their karma; rather, human beings were determined by karma according to the larger designs of fate. Later, he passed on his discovery to the slave Mankhali Gosala and, descending into the Adi Ganga, completed the cycle of life.

  It worried me when I considered the possibility that it might be all a play of fate: Father, who boasted about sending four hundred and fifty-one people to their death, ending up in the Haldia Sub Jail. If so, then I too could be just another character with him in the same play, and maybe such strange vicissitudes awaited me as well. What worried Thakuma more than Father’s going to jail was his going to the Haldia Sub Jail. She retold the stories of the five prisons the British had opened after taking over those of the nawabs, sultans and maharajas. I recalled then that my ancestor had met Naren dakat in the Bara Bazar Jail. This debt being repaid when Satyanatha Grddha Mullick’s descendant met Naren dakat’s descendant—in which birth had it originated? Whenever I shut my eyes, I saw Father in the prison cell. His face looked swollen as if he had been drowning. In the olden days, at Harinbadi Prison, they laid out the dead bodies of prisoners—who used to die almost on a daily basis—on bamboo rafts, and set them afloat on the Adi Ganga.

  ‘God, what a life,’ whined Ma to the world in general. ‘What did I do to suffer so much! Why did I have to lug around a fellow like him? There hasn’t been a single day of happiness in this life. I haven’t heard a single warm word!’

  ‘Your lack of talent, girl,’ Thakuma raised her head and taunted her. ‘Look at him, still a fit man. He can have any number of women even now.’

  ‘Oh yes, he can, he can—he’s just eighty-eight!’

  ‘At least one person in each generation of our family lives till a hundred. In my generation it is me. In the next, it is going to be Phani!’

  The arrogance that rang in her voice drove Ma mad.

  ‘Yes, even if everyone else in the family dies, you’ll cling on till hundred or two hundred! How awful! Are you a woman? Shamelessly praising a cad who hasn’t the slightest regret about murdering his own brother!’

  ‘If he killed Sudev, there must’ve been a reason!’

  ‘What reason?’ I asked, anxious.

  ‘I don’t know what it is . . . but if he killed without the signal of the magistrate’s red kerchief, there must have been a good reason.’

  After this confident declaration, Thakuma turned on the TV to see whether they were showing Father. Kaku had brought the girls back from school. Kakima said that she would return to take them with her to Budge Budge. I racked my brains but still couldn’t see what Kakima could have done to make Father attack her in such a mad frenzy of rage. The only people who came to see us after the hustle and bustle of the first week were Mano da and Sanjeev Kumar. If Mano da came with little things we needed in the house, Sanjeev Kumar came to find out what was new.

  ‘Chetna, aren’t you going to the jail to meet your father?’ he asked me, during a flying visit to our house the day Father was remanded to fourteen days in custody.

  Mano da who was been sitting on Ramu da’s cot and chatting with me, raised his mischievous eyes towards him. Sanjeev Kumar’s make-up was still intact.

  ‘No.’

  That flustered him.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be good to meet your father?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Mano da, laughing heartily. ‘“Hangwoman Daughter Meets Hangman Father”! Marvellous!’

  I liked the sharp point of his humour but refused to laugh.

  ‘Don’t tease, Mano da, we can’t do these days without some such thing! If Chetna goes there today, that will be big news.’ Sanjeev Kumar wouldn’t let go.

  ‘But Sanju, what’s in it for you? Won’t all the channels cover it?’

  His face lit up. ‘Well, we do have a contract . . . That all of Chetna’s trips and visits will be exclusively for CNC.’

  ‘That contract became void the day the execution was postponed.’ I spoke with complete confidence.

  Mano da agreed with me and turned to Sanjeev Kumar with a pitying look, ‘Yes, yes, what a shame!’

  But a new glimmer of hope now lit his face. ‘No, no, we can think about it. But on condition that we will decide what you do in the coming days.’

  ‘Which means?’ Mano da frowned.

  ‘For instance, we will decide that it is better for Chetna to go to Kalighat and perform puja, rather than go to the jail. We will follow her and shoot all her activities.’

  ‘Brilliant!’ Mano da laughed disdainfully. I couldn’t laugh, though; I kept a watchful gaze on Sanjeev Kumar.

  ‘Baba said that no one is to visit him in prison,’ I said. ‘And he knows my face has value for TV channels. It won’t be proper to reduce its value.’

  Mano da looked a bit taken aback but when he looked at me, the naughty smile came back. He nodded vigorously. ‘Yes, yes, very true. Don’t step out under any circumstances, don’t reduce your star value! If they need it so much, let them buy it for a hefty price! After all, you have to live too, my daughter. Two old women in the house, and two little children! Aren’t you the one who has to carry the burden of the family?’

  Sanjeev Kumar left without continuing the conversation; Mano da gave me a sympathetic smile.

  When Sanjeev Kumar came back after a week to check whether I had changed my mind, Mano da was visiting us again.

  ‘Ah, Sanju babu, we’d heard that you’re going to marry this girl? When is the wedding?’

  A sheepish look spread on Sanjeev Kumar’s face. ‘Wedding, Mano da? In this mess?’

  Mano da gave him a broad smile. ‘Son, all creatures in nature know when to hold a hand out to one’s mate.’

  ‘In the earlier days, when horse carriages had to travel long distances, some drivers would fix a stick over the heads of the horses and hang a bunch of green g
rass at its end. The horses would run faster to get at the grass. They never knew that no matter how fast they ran, they wouldn’t get to the grass . . .’ I sighed involuntarily. ‘Our wedding is like that bunch of grass.’

  Sanjeev Kumar’s face blanched. ‘No, never! Don’t question my sincerity, Chetna. As far as I am concerned, our wedding has already taken place. It happened that day when I jumped down after you into the cellar. That was the first time my body mingled with a woman’s. Mano da, I accepted her as my bride many, many years ago!’

  ‘Even before you met her?’ he asked mockingly.

  ‘Yes, even before I saw her. I knew that someone like her would be waiting for me somewhere . . .’

  ‘The hangman’s daughter?’

  ‘No, but someone’s daughter, somewhere,’ he said determinedly.

  ‘In truth, Babu, didn’t you make a certain forward calculation in the case of your life’s mate?’ Mano da’s voice was very calm.

  ‘Uh-uh! For each generation, a different standard!’

  ‘Have you given up the plan to set up Kaku as a Maoist?’ I wanted to change the subject.

  ‘Why did you ask that? See, Mano da, this is why I can’t get along with Chetna! She tears down all that I do to help her. And she’s always criticizing me and making fun of me.’ He jumped up and left in a huff.

  Mano da smiled. ‘Since Sudev is no more, what does it matter to him what he is made out to be? Let’s make him a Maoist according to Sanju babu’s plan. Just for a joke . . .’

  Because I could sense the depth of sorrow in his tone, I did not reply.

  ‘The dead are dead. Don’t you have to think of the living? If it helps Phani why not think on those lines? They can even say that it was Sudev who killed that woman in Imphal! It has market value.’ He laughed. I couldn’t help laughing with him.

  When Sanjeev Kumar came again after three days, I was alone. That made him more confident.

  ‘I am telling you this for your own sake: this new image will suit you better than marriage at this moment. See, if you get married now, your whole image will change. But if you want, you can be not just the symbol of the self-respect of Indian womanhood and of women everywhere, but also the symbol of love for the nation.’