Hangwoman

by K R Meera

  ‘Jatindranath Banerjee’s hanging will be the first to happen in India in thirteen years. But after hangman Phanibhushan Grddha Mullick made it clear that he will not work unless his demands have been met, plans for Jatindranath’s execution take a new turn.’ The handsome young man looked into my eyes and announced this.

  Then it was Father’s face on TV. Smoothing down the ample grey moustache that grew almost on to his bulging cheeks, Father began to speak, holding an unlit cigarette between his index and middle fingers.

  ‘In 1982, they had given this to me in writing when they decided to execute Jabbar Singh. Government jobs for my children . . . but later, when my son Ramdev Mullick was seriously injured . . . then they conveniently forgot the promise. How did he suffer that injury? The government ought to have had a care. I have sacrificed my life and my family’s too, for the sake of this country. Doesn’t the government have any obligation towards me? This business of hanging, is it a picnic? Babu, we don’t tie the noose around the neck of a hen or a snake. We tie it around a human being’s neck. Here, pinch me, and see for yourself, I am no block of iron or stone. A man, just like you. I too have a family. A wife. Mother. Brother. Children. He, the condemned man I am to hang, is not even my son’s age. I am ending his life. Is that like smoking this cigarette? No, brother, no . . .’

  Father lit his cigarette and let out a puff of smoke. When the camera panned sideways, Alipore Central Jail appeared. Father was coming out after seeing the Inspector General. He struck a jatra pose, gazing reverentially at something in the distance and folding his hands in salutation. Then he continued: ‘I am a person who calls to God every day. I don’t know what lies ahead of this life. I have hung four hundred and fifty-one people with these hands . . . not even one of those four hundred and fifty-one has returned to tell me what death is like and what lies beyond. Look here, you, I am an old man. May leave any time . . . if I leave and reach there, will the four hundred and fifty-one people be waiting for me? I don’t know. Will they fry me in oil? That, too, I don’t know . . . Everything ends after death, scientists say. But to know if it is really like that, we have to go by ourselves.’

  ‘Do you believe in life after death?’

  ‘No, brother, that is not the issue. The issue is the big risk I have taken. Risk, Babu, risk . . .’

  Father pointed the cigarette at the camera and puffed hard once more. He wiped the sweat with his gamchha.

  ‘Till which class did you study?’

  ‘See? This is the problem with you. Why do you worry about the class up to which I have studied? Isn’t it enough to ask how much I know? I know enough to read an English newspaper. To make sense of it. I know enough of maths and chemistry and physics and everything else to do my job. Why, won’t that do?’

  Father raised his eyebrows and laughed mockingly. His face really looked like that of a vulture.

  ‘Are you saying that the government must compensate you for the torture you may have to undergo in the afterlife?’

  ‘I said I know nothing of afterlife . . . there is risk even in life till death.’

  ‘What risk do you face?’

  ‘My son Ramdev . . . my son was cut down by the father of Amartya Ghosh whom I hanged at the gallows in 1990 . . .’

  Father pulled hard on the burning cigarette. Suddenly my heart fell. We never spoke of that day. In 1990, Ramu da had been my age, twenty-two. Father’s height, luxuriant hair and moustache, and Ma’s fair complexion and gentle eyes made him handsome. All the girls in the neighbourhood were fastening nooses around his neck, I would tease; they threw look after look in longing. He was a good student. And reluctant to become a hangman. He argued with Father over it all night sometimes.

  Those days, there were no twenty-four-hour channels. That was the heyday of newspapers. The news of Amartya Ghosh’s execution continued to appear. Our family was all agog, having got a job after two or three years. But two days later, Ramu da, who was returning from college, was attacked by Amartya’s aged father. The old man hacked off his fair, slender, delicate limbs.

  ‘Didn’t the government offer compensation for the injuries Ramdev suffered?’ The young man continued to question Father.

  ‘They gave fifteen hundred rupees then . . . and now a pension for the disabled . . .’

  The image of Father flinging away the cigarette butt appeared on the screen.

  I thought it would end there. But the young man’s voice rang again. ‘Only your son is disabled. You still have a healthy daughter. Are you not keen to hand over your job to her?’

  I was stunned. Father too looked somewhat startled.

  ‘I haven’t ever thought of that . . .’

  Father took out another cigarette, lit it, took a drag and continued without wasting any time. ‘Uh-uh . . . why not? She can easily do it. But, brother, that is not for me to decide. It is for the government, right?’

  Ma, Ramu da and I sat transfixed as Father turned around and looked at us with a smile. The scenes that followed were these: the young man’s face appeared. ‘Grddha Mullick made it clear that unless his daughter is granted a government job, he will not accept the court order and perform the hanging. While committed to the position that the children of a hangman may be given the same job, law minister Pallav Dasgupta announced that Grddha Mullick’s demand that his job be given to his daughter is unacceptable.’

  Followed by the minister’s face: ‘No, no, no . . . this is not a job a woman can do . . . it requires a lot of strength . . . of mind and body . . .’

  The young man’s face: ‘Do you mean to say that women lack in strength of mind and body?’

  The minister: ‘No, not that . . . but this is not a job like any other.’

  Now the young man’s face, again. ‘This is not just a matter of the conduct of justice any more. The question of whether a woman has the right to work as a hangman cannot simply be denied, given the backdrop of arguments in favour of women’s reservation. And at a time where the death penalty is being abolished in many nations of the world. This is the topic of debate today in CNC’s Face to Face. Viewers may take part in the live discussion. This is the question: Can women be appointed executioners to hang criminals? To voice your views, call us on . . .’

  I was deeply shocked. Still, I thought it would end there. It didn’t.

  ‘When we reached the house of the country’s most famous hangman, Grddha Mullick, his first condition was that no images of his family members be made public. But CNC received images of his daughter secretly. Eighty-eight-year-old Phanibhushan now bargains with the government to make the life of this young woman secure—she who passed the Plus Two examination with very high marks but was unable to continue her studies because of financial problems.’

  Footage of me began to roll on screen. Me about to turn right after taking money from Kaku. Then turning left. Walking towards the camera. Passing by the camera, swinging my arms merrily. The camera stays on my back till I reach Hari da’s shop. As I return, my faded and tattered dupatta and the breasts it does not fully cover appear on the screen. Then my face comes into view on the screen, magnified. I saw the small wart on the left side of my nose, the smooth shiny hair of my eyebrows, and the bulging eyes, the same as Father’s. This is how others see my face—now I saw too.

  As I sat there dazed, the young man concluded: ‘From Bhavanipore, for CNC, along with cameraman Atul Kishore Chandra, this is Sanjeev Kumar Mitra.’

  ‘Sanjeev Kumar Mitra!’ Father jumped up, furious. ‘I’ll finish him with my bare hands!’

  Father was wrong. He was to die by my hands. That’s why I was attracted to him from that very moment. He was special, with his exceptional height, thick straight hair, long straight nose. It took me much longer to be convinced that the feeling I had for him was what people call love. The kinds of love that the likes of us experienced were all like the noose fixed between the third and fou
rth vertebrae. Either the noose tightened and the person died, or the cord broke and the person escaped. But even those who broke the cord could never completely untie the noose from their necks. Like Chinmayi Devi who married Radharaman Mullick, we writhed and flailed without breath, all our lives.

  3

  I actually believed that Sanjeev Kumar Mitra was handsome only when I saw him on the morning news, reporting the CPM violence at Purbasthali against a rally organized by the Trinamool Congress in which two people had been killed. He had a fine high nose, curved eyebrows and a broad forehead. His glasses were dark-tinted; his eyes eluded me. He alone appeared in my thoughts. That he was so close at hand sent a thrill through my heart. I was up early at dawn and had turned on the TV by the time the flower-laden carts from the Mullick Ghat flower market hurried over Strand Road towards the shops in front of the cremation ground. As if answering my prayer, his image popped up during the news. Nothing that he said sank in, but his voice made me feel weak; I longed to see him in flesh and blood. My heart whispered what I wanted to tell him. My body now knew how it felt to sprout; to break through the skin of the seed. All this was utterly new to me. When his report was over, I switched off the TV, sighing. Pankaj Mullick’s Aayi bahaar aaj . . . blared from a passing vehicle. Ramu da shook his head to the rhythm without opening his eyes. My hands reached out again towards the TV. Happiness was making me restless. It was that very moment when a roar sounded from outside.

  ‘Grddha da, are you crazy?’

  I went into the kitchen and looked out through the window. There stood the editor of the hundred-and-twenty-year-old Bhavishyat, Manavendra Bose. Whenever I saw him, my heart filled with awe and admiration.

  ‘She is a young girl! You shouldn’t have got her into such a fix.’

  He kept scolding Father in a voice that rang and echoed like the roar of a tiger trapped in a well. The Bhavishyat office was on Chitpur Road, behind the percussion instruments shop just next to Thakurbari. When I worked at Maruti Prasad Yadav’s press, I used to linger in front of it, munching a phuluri or piyanji from the nearby shop. I would try to peep into the inner rooms of the old British-style building stuffed with newsprint, past the iron handrails and grilles. Bose babu had a long white beard on his fair-skinned face. He bustled about inside, dragging his right leg which the police had broken during the Emergency; it was quite a sight. He used to come every month to Kaku’s salon for a haircut. Strands of his thick, silver locks stood out with a special gleam in the heap of cut hair that Kaku swept out.

  ‘Bose babu, do the gallows know the difference between old and young, male and female? What is it to the condemned anyway?’

  The sound of Father flipping a page. Father was done with his morning tea and was now reading his papers and smoking a cigarette. He never stopped getting the newspapers even in our direst days. Not the English papers, though. Those, the agent gave him—the previous day’s unsold papers. Father returned them in perfect condition after reading them.

  ‘The hands and legs of the condemned have to be tied securely. Then the head must be covered. And then the noose. Bose babu, Sudev can do all this. The only thing the hangman does is check whether the noose is in the correct spot or not . . . Then what else, just pull the lever—that any small child can do. When my dadu began to work under the British, he was just eleven years old, did you know? Kalicharan Mullick . . . big artist. Did you know? People used to call him Maha Mullick as a mark of respect.’

  ‘But still! How bright she is! Grddha, you should not have sacrificed her to this kind of job.’

  ‘Babu, our line has always been brave and strong. There’s nothing to fear—this is our mission. She is my daughter, she too has the courage which runs in my blood and that of my forefathers, and Ma Kali’s blessings as well . . .’

  I expected Father to ask immediately, isn’t that a thumping line? After a second, he said, ‘Nothing to fear if the Sarkar appoints her; I am here for now. She needs to come as a formality, that’s all. And then, what is the guarantee that there will be another hanging soon? Isn’t everyone against hanging criminals? It is against human rights, indeed! Uh-uh

  . . . what human rights do murderers have, that the butchered do not? Threw a cockroach into the hangmen’s food for nothing! There used to be twenty or twenty-five hangings a month, and now . . .’

  Father did not complete the sentence. I felt Ma’s scared eyes staring at me when I turned around.

  ‘Your old man’s never had a heart, ever. If he did, would he even think of dispatching our only daughter to such a job? To go to a jail full of thieves and murderers, to hang them! Won’t you be scared, my girl? Is this child’s play?’

  Ma vented her sorrow. I sighed heavily. Ma has never known much about me. But that May morning, her question did make me think. Was hanging a person at the gallows child’s play? Sitting with my back against the wall, I tried to imagine the procedure that I had heard about umpteen times from Thakuma and read about in Father’s words as printed in newspapers. I had watched with my own eyes Father and Kaku bidding us goodbye and departing at night after the puja. I had seen pictures of Alipore Central Jail only in the pages of newspapers and on TV. High red walls topped with barbed wire. Bright streetlights all around. Somewhere inside, the gallows built of sturdy rosewood. The rope that fell from the tall mast. The black planks on which a white circle was drawn. The lever, rendered smooth from my father’s and forefathers’ touch over the centuries. When pulled, it drew the planks apart with a massive sound, revealing a gaping dark cellar beneath. The sound of the pulled lever would reverberate everywhere in the prison like the boom of a battle drum. It was the sound of death. I imagined for a moment how I would execute a condemned person. My hand jerked and trembled.

  The most famous hangman in our family was Grandfather Dharmaraja Mullick. Local folk used to call him Mosh Grddha Mullick. His build reminded one of the wild buffalo. But no one in our family was as inclined to charity as he had been. He was witness to five different dynasties of kings in his lifetime. Each hanging was rewarded with considerable generosity in those times; he would distribute that money among the poor and the orphaned. Finishing this work early in the morning, he would return, have a bath, worship Maheshwara and Ma Kali, pick up his shovel and be off to the fields. He prayed fervently for the condemned before leaving for his duties at the gallows. Before putting the hood on the condemned’s face, he would caress and kiss him on the forehead. He would then place his hand on the condemned’s head and whisper: ‘Son, do not fear.’

  Lovingly, caringly, allaying fears, he would lead the condemned towards the doors of death as if he were taking his little son to school for the first time. Do not fear, he assured the condemned as he mounted the wooden planks, I am by your side. Lord, do not make your son weep, he would pray, as he placed the noose on his neck. Grandfather Mosh hanged a thousand and one people at the gallows. His fame spread far and wide. Many times, he was invited to other lands to execute notorious criminals. In those days, criminals believed that it was a great honour to die by his hands. Because he would give away all that he received as reward, the Raja of Gwalior rebuilt his house and gave Grandmother a hundred bags full of gold coins. Thakuma still had one of those coins. She kept it safe in her betel box, its shine dulled by specks of tobacco and opium. The truth is that it was the only bit of evidence in our house of all our two-thousand-year-old family traditions.

  Manavendra Bose took his leave when a vehicle belonging to a women’s organization which we knew of from the Bangla papers drew up near our house. I was lost in thought then, wondering if I, like Grandfather Mosh, could make the condemned man feel better.

  The leader of that organization, Sumati Singh, spoke in Hindi. She said in a loud voice: ‘Grddhaji, you must file a case. The Constitution promises equal opportunities to women and men. Don’t let this pass.’

  Sumati Singh had flown down hurriedly from Delhi. I, who was peeping out o
f the kitchen, really liked her expensive cotton sari, the wooden ornaments that went with it, and her flowing hair.

  ‘Ah, Madam, we have no money for all that. She wishes to continue in the family profession . . . and that too, only if the good people of this land allow. It is God who settles birth and death, Madam. It is that Big Hangman who decides who is to die by whose hands and who must kill whom.’

  Father raised his hands to the heavens dramatically.

  ‘But Chetna must not lose this opportunity just because she is a girl.’

  ‘All that God decides, Madam. If it is written in her fate everything will work out well . . . if not, it will not . . . everything that happens is for the good . . . everything that does not happen is also for the good.’

  Father had reached top form rather quickly.