Hangwoman

by K R Meera

  K.R. Meera

  HANGWOMAN

  Translated from the Malayalam by J. Devika

  Contents

  About the Author

  Praise for the Book

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Acknowledgements

  Translator’s Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Type

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Hangwoman

  K.R. Meera is a multi-award-winning writer and journalist. She has published short stories, novels and essays, and has won some of the most prestigious literary prizes including the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award, the Vayalar Award and the Odakkuzhal Award. Most recently, she won the Kendra Sahitya Akademi Award for Aarachar, widely hailed as a contemporary classic and published by Penguin Books India as Hangwoman. She lives in Kottayam with her husband Dileep and daughter Shruthi.

  A bilingual feminist scholar, J. Devika has translated Malayali women writers from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and contemporary authors like Sarah Joseph, Nalini Jameela, Anitha Thampi and V.M. Girija besides K.R. Meera.

  Praise for the Book

  ‘Meera is at her best when she examines the lives of her women characters. . . . The writing is strong . . . An epic novel’—Outlook

  ‘A daring book, for the panoramic sweep of its canvas, for the sheer audacity of its narrative logic . . . for its irreverent play with the paradoxes of life—Love and Death’—The Hindu

  ‘This striking novel includes within its majestic sweep the enigmas of the human condition. . . . Stunning images bring out the depth and intensity of Chetna’s spiritual development, and stand testimony to the author’s consummate writing style’—Deccan Herald

  ‘Meera achieves a vision of [Kolkata] that is both acutely observed, almost anthropological, in its minute detailing and, at the same time, mythic in its evocation of the city’s decaying, decrepit majesty . . . . One of the most extraordinary accomplishments in recent Indian fiction’—Indian Express

  ‘An absorbing novel’—New Indian Express

  ‘One of the strongest voices in contemporary Malayalam literature . . . . Meera plays with the reader’s anticipation masterfully . . . The novel is extremely atmospheric . . . Meera turns the entire city into a haunted house’—Open

  ‘The book heaves with violence, is lush with metaphor and shocks with details. The reader can only gasp at the surgical precision with which Meera describes the act of hanging’—The Hindu Business Line

  ‘An immense, intense coiled rope of a novel . . . There are chillingly clear-eyed vignettes and moments of razor-sharp dark humour . . . . If Aarachar, the original, was—plot, stock and barrel—“Malayalam’s ultimate gift of love to Bengal,” as its translator J. Devika puts it, its English translation is no less a bonus for showing us, its non-Malayali, non-Bengali readership, the dazzling interstices of her story, instantly recognisable across time and space’—India Today

  ‘An incisive critique of the barbarism of the death penalty . . . [The book] gives us a glimpse into the inner lives of those who have been deputed to execute it through generations . . . A vast and riveting sweep of time, locked into the gritty interstices of the contemporary—a pastiche made of fact and fiction, news bulletins and nightmares’—Mint

  ‘Stunning . . . Meera weaves history, romance and the politics of the present together into a narrative of incredible complexity . . . . J. Devika’s translation is superb, and she captures the rich detail of Meera’s Malayalam: descriptive, textured and evocative . . . Reading Meera, in Devika’s meticulous and inspired translation, we experience the author’s spectacular ventriloquism. And we are also reminded of the tradition that Meera comes from, which she has burnished and transcended with her epic novel’—Caravan

  1

  When we first heard the news on TV that the governor had rejected Jatindranath Banerjee’s mercy petition, the first hearse of the day had just rolled towards Nimtala Ghat. It passed by our house—in which huddle together a hairdressing salon, a dirty single-room shrine and a tea shop lined with small earthen cups—on Strand Road. Chitpur, where our house stands, was always of the black folk. We have been here for ever so long—long before the Europeans divided Kolkata into White and Black towns, before the Basaks and Seths set up villages besides the Hooghly. Though cramped, grimy and smothered by moss today, the heart of Chitpur lies in Rabindranath Thakur’s family home, Jorasanko Thakurbari. If you start from Lal Bazar and walk along Rabindra Sarani on which the trams crawl, past the printing presses, the knife sellers and the tabla shops on Madan Chatterjee Lane, you come across Jatrapara, the offices of the drama troupes. Straight ahead are the red-lit streets of Sonagachi and Kumortuli, where idols of gods and goddesses are sold. Turn right, and you will find Macchua Bazar, which sells fruit but no fish. Turn left along Nimtala Ghat Road towards Strand Road, and you will reach the ancient burning ghat of Nimtala beside the Ganga, where all end their journeys. The tea shop facing north, and the salon and shrine to the east, which made up our sphere of existence, lay on the three-way junction on the turn from Strand Road into the lane towards the cremation ground. Night and day, the road in front of our house bustled with mourners, loaders, barbers, cobblers, ear cleaners, vendors and beggars, pushing and shoving in the flow towards Nimtala Ghat. Motor vehicles, pushcarts, horse carts, the bells ringing in wayside shrines and the bleating of sacrificial animals created a din louder than the circular trains. The mingled scents of sweetmeats cooking in ghee and sunflower oil, and corpses burning on pyres enveloped us.

  A group of sannyasis singing Hare Rama walked behind the hearse. Most of them were young men in saffron robes, fair, bony, bearded. As they walked along taking in streetside sights, chanting, chatting with each other, joking and laughing, a stern-faced sannyasi with a greying beard and thick glasses stood up beside the saffron-shrouded corpse in the saffron-covered hearse, which had Om written on all its four sides. Shaking off the lather from the washing on my hands, I wondered which one was really the corpse—the one that reclined or the other which stood up straight? It was just then that Uncle Sukhdev, whom I call Kaku, and others Sudev, ran up from the salon, face beaming, to give us the news that the mercy petition had been rejected. Seeing him l
augh, Phanibhushan Grddha Mullick, whom I call Baba, growled in anger: ‘Chi! Beast! To be a man you need some tact . . .’

  That blew into a fight. So, coming over to give the glad news when a job had surfaced after ten or twelve years is a big crime, grumbled Kaku. Brainless oaf, Father put him down. Hearing the squabble, my grandmother, whom I call Thakuma, pulled the tattered pallu of her sari over her head and hobbled in. Bhuvaneswari Devi, my father’s mother, was over a hundred years old, and so shrivelled that she seemed no bigger than Father’s arm. I continued washing Ramu da’s clothes on the washing stone in the moss-covered and crumbling little courtyard shared by our rooms. When Kaku returned to his salon, Father stroked his grey-tinged handlebar moustache and smiled to himself. It was then that I realized that I had, in that little interval, tied a noose with the hanging end of my dupatta. The dupatta was old and frayed, but the noose was perfect. Even the infants born in our family could tie a perfect noose. It is the very first thing we Grddha Mullicks learn to do with our hands.

  That was the eighteenth of May. The whiteness of the clouds had begun to dim and the faint rumblings of thunder now and then reminded us that the monsoon was on its way. Thunder rang—as if a cellar, way beyond the skies, was being thrown open. It made me hope for hailstones. When we were children, Ramu da and I used to run into the street to gather the hailstones. The last time it hailed, large hailstones fell which looked like tiles of the sky’s glass roof. By then I had grown up so I could only stand leaning against the wall, making a noose with my dupatta and watching them melt. In the skies that day, the crows had flown twisting, flailing, screaming desperately. A lapwing had fallen, hit by a hailstone before my eyes; it thrashed about on the ground. The hailstones lay melting leisurely in the dim light upon the battered road from which the concrete had loosened. The first hearse that rolled over them after the rain was an expensive, fancily decorated one, with wreaths and roses and all. But there was no one to accompany it, weeping or otherwise. I stepped out to catch another glimpse of the vehicle which looked as if it was studded with gold and silver. A woman in a red kasi silk sari lay stiff and very straight upon the flowers, her hands placed lightly on her chest, impatience and defiance upon her face. A woman as tall as me, her face smooth-skinned. As the hearse passed, her pallid feet—their toes tied together—pressed against the glass window through the lilies. That whole night the thought that my toes had broken off left me panicstricken.

  The truth was that from the time I was in my mother’s womb, I was already tied up in the umbilical cord. My mother’s belly had to be cut open so I could be taken out. Thakuma bragged that the noose I’d tied even as a foetus was a faultless one. That would always drive my mother, the fair, thin Sachinamayi Devi, sindoor liberally strewn in the parting of her white hair, into a fury. ‘Born to her old man all right! And she put it on her own neck!’

  Hey, you donkey, go and ask the Sarkar of this land what the Grddha Mullick is worth, challenged Thakuma. Then as usual, Ma, with her sunken eyes and dried-up high nose, would pull out her ace: ‘Go and ask the whores of Sonagachi what he’s worth . . . And even they weren’t enough, it looks like—made me carry this load again . . .’

  Ma was alluding to the story of how, twenty-three years ago, Father had spawned me the day he had hanged a serial killer who had snuffed out seven lives. After finishing his work at dawn he had drunk through the day, and then at noon, he grabbed Ma while she was buying vegetables in the market and tried to fuck her in full public view. He was sixty-five then. Mother had me at forty-five. Father was called to duty only a few times after that. But I learned by seeing. Before I was five, I could fashion a noose on my own. I also learned how to fix it on the human neck—tested it on the child next door. That’s an interesting story, for later.

  After Kaku retreated, I hung the washing to dry in front of the salon and the shrine. Inside, the sound of Ma and Thakuma bickering. Maybe the corpse of the sannyasi that passed by was burning; the air was filled with a foul stench. Somebody else’s relatives streamed into the tea shop, their clothes wet from the dip in the Ganga after the cremation. As always, Father sat behind the cash counter proudly, head held high. Behind him, on a rusted iron bar hung the framed page of the Statesman which had published the very first news item on him in 1960. When that piece of paper had yellowed with age, and the picture of Father as a very young man with the noose had faded, he hung below it yet another news item about him that had appeared fifteen years ago in an English magazine. This was a colour picture. Sometimes customers cast their eyes on the wall, forgetting the pain of loss and the fatigue of the funeral. Father pounced on them and asked, ‘Why, Dada, can’t you read?’

  Then he would call me or Ramu da. ‘Child, read it out for them . . .’

  We, Ramu da or I, would read aloud for them, ‘All Set for Hanging: Grddha Mullick’, or ‘Hanging Is No Child’s Play, Says Grddha Mullick’. It was Father who explained it in Bangla. Ramu da and I learned our English reading news articles about him. That’s how Father learned English too.

  Sometimes people looked deep into the tea cup and stayed downcast. Father caught their attention by banging on the table and saying: ‘Brother, death is a timeless truth. Someone dear to you has passed away, isn’t it? But it is time for him to go. Who are we to stop him? Look, as a hangman who has sent off four hundred and fifty-one people, let me tell you—pay heed—death is never in our hands.’

  Every single person who heard it jumped in shock. So dramatically did he utter the word ‘hangman’. When they raised their eyes to the picture on the wall, Father would stroke his greying handlebar moustache and roll his round eyes with the same dramatic effect as in his jatra performances. ‘Not one, not two, all of four hundred and fifty-one . . .’

  On the day Jatindranath Banerjee’s mercy petition was rejected, however, Father sat with a grave face, silent, head high; he did not look at anyone who came in for tea, nor did he say anything to them. Pushing back the red-and-green checked gamchha which lay on his left shoulder and tightening the strap of the ancient steel wristwatch which kept coming loose, he seemed lost in thought. Once or twice he went into the inner room and sipped from the bottle tucked away behind the framed picture of Ma Kali. And smoked cigarette after cigarette. That day was busier than usual at the shop. Ma and Syamili Devi, Kaku’s wife, whom I call Kakima, were taking turns at making the tea. The earthen tea cups were being flung out into the front of the shop, sometimes broken, sometimes not. I was pouring some water for Ramu da when the black telephone in Father’s room rang—tr . . . ing . . . tr . . . ing. Father ran in to pick it up. Recognizing the voice on the other side, he drew the unlit cigarette away from his lips. That was a sign of respect. For he was easily capable of even bellowing with it resting on his lips.

  ‘Babu, yes, Babu . . . But will anything really happen, Babu? Or will the crow snatch it away like in 1990?’

  Kaku, who had scampered in from the saloon upon hearing the exchange, whispered to me that the voice was on the other side was either that of the jail superintendent or the DGP. Though he carried a lot of flab, Kaku is puny compared to Father, who is six feet and two inches tall, swarthy and strong. But they share the same dark complexion and protruding eyes. We have been known as Grddha Mullick from the days of royalty for those bulging eyes that reflect the hunger of vultures.

  Father continued, paying no attention to us. ‘Ah . . . what are you saying, Babu? Bhagawan Maheswar be my witness . . . I am sick of this sin . . . I am an artiste, Babu, an artiste . . . but this is the government’s affair . . . our family profession too . . . If twenty thousand rupees and a job for my daughter is too big a demand, do find someone else, Babu . . . I am eighty-eight years old now. If I were to collapse today, there is no male who can shoulder the burden of my family . . . and I don’t have to tell you again and again how that happened . . . May Bhagawan Mahadev bless you . . .’

  As he talked, that right hand which had fastened th
e fatal noose on four hundred and fifty-one necks wiped off the sweat with the gamchha, still holding the cigarette between the index and middle fingers.

  ‘Is money the only consideration in this affair, Babu? I’ll give you one lakh rupees, Babu, will you do this job? Just involves pulling a lever? Babu, when I reach the other world, God will ask, Phani, why did you murder a fellow who did you no harm at all? Why didn’t you say no? Don’t I need a reply for that, Babu? Bhagawan, to give my girl who’s grown so full-bodied that she fills the house a life; to get medicines for my loving, aged mother; to give my son medical treatment; to buy my dear wife food and clothing—I did it for all this. What other excuse do I have? Yes, Babu, yes. I will come over . . .’

  Then, without even moving his head, Father raised his voice like an actor: ‘Arre, Sudev, come here . . . Tomorrow morning we’ve to see Chakrabarty babu. Don’t forget to get ready early! All right then, Babu. Let’s decide when we will meet . . .’

  He noticed Kaku only when he turned around. But ignoring that awkward moment, face expressionless, he smoothed his moustache and grimaced at us: ‘“Grddha, is money the most important thing in the world?” Indeed! Sounds as if fellows like him pay the government every month so that they can serve the people . . . such crooks!’

  I stood there, looking at Father. As always, I felt uncertain about him but also proud. I have never seen an anchor on a TV show like him. Never seen a character like him in the movies or in the theatre. No one has ever been able to predict his words. But one thing is clear: Father’s words are always extraordinarily precise. On every occasion, he says precisely what everyone longs to hear. Later, whenever I have had to speak, I have always racked my brains, trying to recreate in my mind what he would have said in my place.

  I sat in the red plastic chair, so worn that it was nearly white now, near Ramu da’s cot and flipped casually through the English textbook that Kaku’s daughter Rari had studied last year. I was reluctant to look at Ramu da’s face. In the past there were days on which the house overflowed with happiness. Once hangings became rare our source of income dried up. A high-pitched wail rang outside; I got up and peeped out through the door. One after the other, four or five hearses were passing by; the first two were fancy ones. Well-fed, fair-skinned men in gold-rimmed glasses and women in silk saris and sleeveless blouses walked behind them silently. It was a young girl of ten or twelve who belonged to the middle-class family that followed the high-class mourners who had let out that heart-rending cry for her father. Seeing the older people hold her as she walked, I became gloomy.