by K R Meera
After the programme, when I changed back into my faded old garments and came out, Harish Nath was speaking with Sanjeev Kumar Mitra. Seeing me, his lips twisted into a smile. ‘When the ratings come there’s going to be stiff competition between daughter, father and uncle. Let’s see who wins!’
‘Baba has a lot of experience,’ I said, my head bowed.
‘It’s not experience that counts on television; it’s how you present it.’
His voice was disdainful.
I did not respond.
That day too Sanjeev Kumar Mitra had arranged for a taxi to take me home. When he came up as if to see me off, I gathered all my mental strength and, sounding as warm as I could, asked, ‘Aren’t you coming?’
Because he wasn’t expecting that question, he looked at me quizzically. I smiled at him again. His face, on which a dark shadow had fallen because of the yellowish light outside, changed in expression slightly. Trying to control my fingers, which had already begun to twist my dupatta, I got into the back seat of the vehicle, throwing him an inviting look. After a moment’s hesitation, Sanjeev Kumar Mitra accepted it. When the purple-on-white signboard of the textile shop where he had taken me the previous evening came into view, I asked the driver to stop. The bangle seller was in the same place as the day before, selling his wares. Come, I invited Sanjeev Kumar Mitra again. My body ached from top to toe.
A few young women were crowding around the bangle seller. The alluring scent that wafted around them announced these women were rich and glamorous. I slunk in through that crowd towards the bangle seller, and told him, ‘Dada, weren’t some bangles stolen from your shop the other day? I have come to return them.’
The man grabbed the bangles I held out to him. When he was sure that these were indeed the missing bangles, he became very angry. He threw a sharp look at Sanjeev Kumar Mitra, who was standing behind me petrified, and jumped up and caught hold of his collar.
‘Thief! No one will catch you if you wear white trousers and shirt, eh? Do you really need to grab from the rice bowls of poor folk like us?’
The young women now looked at us.
‘Oh God! Sanjeev Kumar Mitra!’
Recognizing him, they raised their shrill voices. I saw with my own eyes Sanjeev Kumar Mitra crumble like the Pala king in Thakuma’s tale. I will never forget the sight of him shrugging off the bangle seller’s arm and running away to safety. In the melee and the darkness, I too escaped into the taxi.
‘Where is . . .?’ asked the driver.
‘He’s not coming. Let’s go to Strand Road.’
The scent of fish doused with mustard and green chillies cooking in the shorse bata khal greeted me when I reached home. I went straight to the tap and had a long bath. Then I shared the news of the city with Ramu da and Ma; consoled Thakuma who was murmuring to herself about the lost gold coin, her hand-held fan moving mechanically; and heartily ate my dinner of parathas and fish curry. I went to bed that night with the same sense of relief I had felt when I dipped myself three times in the Ganga and got rid of Sircar mama’s stolen wealth. In the heady heights of victory I wanted to hum a song. The same Tagore song which I had proofread in Maruti Prasad’s press: Jodi tor dak shune keu na ashe tobe ekla chalo re . . . Suddenly I remembered, during the Emergency, they had broken Manavendra Bose’s leg for singing this song aloud. Twenty-six of Rabindranath’s songs were banned in those days. If no one answers your call, then set out alone . . .
13
‘What place is this, Dada?’
We were trapped in the middle of an unbroken chain of traffic. The lustreless sun of six o’clock looked like a burned-out cow dung kiln. Bored, I turned to the driver.
Surprised at my ignorance, he said, ‘Lal Bazar.’
My eyes widened in enthusiasm as I looked out. I spotted an old two-storeyed building with banyan saplings growing in its windowsills and pipes, and a new one with five floors rising up next to it with fancy glass panels and all. Sweat-soaked people hurried up and down the street. They crowded in front of the shops selling bags and belts. A thin boy was selling cotton candy, which I had craved when I was a schoolgirl. Sadness and pity overcame me when I saw in my mind that little girl who had skipped down the Ghat road whenever she managed to get a few coins from her mother, ecstatic at the taste of the hair-like strands of that whitish-coloured sweet in her mouth. I leaned back against the comfortable seat of the air-conditioned vehicle like a rich woman and tried to see if the bangle seller from the day before was around. The Coolie Bazar was probably somewhere near. That was the place where the Indian named Nandakumar, who had borne the title of maharaja, was put to death. The day he ascended the gallows, everyone in our family fasted and prayed. The hangman of those times, my ancestor Manohar Dev Grddha Mullick, fasted continuously and observed a vow of silence for seven whole days. The sun of justice has set, he lamented, and the hangman is but a hired assassin now. He gave up the executioner’s job and took up farming for the rest of his life. He had been a hangman for forty-four years. He was just sixty when he left the job. He lived another forty-four years as a farmer.
Maharaja Nandakumar’s was a story which always left Thakuma choked with passion. He was a faithful courtier of Nawab Mir Jafar and was respected all over Bengal. It was the nawab who had bestowed upon him the title of maharaja. When Warren Hastings demanded bribes from the nawab’s widow Munni Begum, an infuriated Nandakumar complained to the governor-general and the Bengal Council of the East India Company. There was evidence that proved that Warren Hastings had amassed forty lakh rupees illegally, he contended in his complaint. But Hastings sent him to prison, claiming the evidence was forged. A jury consisting of the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Sir Elijah Impey, ten Englishmen and two men from elsewhere, heard the case. They ruled that the three witnesses Nandakumar had produced were not trustworthy. They were punished for bearing false witness. On
5 August, Nandakumar was hanged on a special platform erected near Coolie Bazar.
That was a day when the pride of the Indian flew high in British Kolkata, Thakuma would say, completely overcome. When he walked from the jail to the gallows, Nandakumar was serene and calm. His walk was as dignified as a maharaja’s. Thousands of people had gathered there to witness the hanging early that morning. When he went up to put the mask on him, Grandfather Manohar held the maharaja’s hands and sobbed uncontrollably. ‘Do your work,’ commanded the maharaja with a smile. Grandfather Manohar made him wear the mask, still tearful. He then slipped the noose around Nandakumar’s neck. It was all over in a few seconds. My precursor did not claim his customary remuneration; he ran straight to the Ganga. Immersing himself in the river a thousand and eight times did not give him back his breath. As she described this event, Thakuma would cull out its lessons for me: ‘Never accept favours from the high and mighty. If you do, you will have to put up with all their evil deeds.’
Thakuma’s story always raised questions in my mind.
‘Did Lal Mohan Seth really dig Lal Digi?’
‘Of course! That’s why it has his name.’
‘The British built the red-walled Fort William near Lal Digi and because its red shadow fell on the water, it got the name Lal Digi,’ Ramu da, who had been listening, intervened.
‘Did Lal Mohan Seth dig it all on his own?’
‘No, no, he hired thousands of labourers. Some poor members of our family were there too.’
‘Then how can it be in just the seth’s name?’
‘My dear girl, people remember only the names of those who
spend the money. There are many who labour, but very few provide the cash . . . it’s easier to remember them,’ said Thakuma.
This never convinced me, neither then nor now. I had already found out for myself while learning to calculate profit in class seven that if labourers were given fair wages then no one could possibly become rich. All the stories told me that throughout h
istory the life of the poor was the same. In the 1700s when Manohar Dev Mullick and Dharmaraja Mullick lived, every white man’s bungalow in Kolkata was served by hundreds of servants. They carried water in leather bags from Lal Digi for their masters and washed their dirty dishes. The sahibs received huge sums from London ostensibly to pay the servants’ wages. All the sahibs who set foot in Kolkata amassed tens of thousands of pounds. Beware of traders, Thakuma reminded me again. If the poor could not be bought, there would be no rich people at all, added Ramu da.
When I reached the studio, Manna Dey and Indrani Sen were singing Rabindra Sangeet on TV in a programme meant to raise funds for the poor children in Tollygunje Cheshire Home and Shishuteertha at Santhiniketan. I sat to get my make-up done listening to the line Aloker eyi jharna dhare . . . I wore a new blue dress this time for the camera. But when I saw that someone else was in the anchor’s seat, things looked dim all of a sudden. My wish to sit in the chair opposite Sanjeev Kumar Mitra and bestow upon him in return precisely the smiles he had showered upon me remained unfulfilled. The new anchor, a gentle person, started that day’s talk by telling me that Sanju da was busy and couldn’t make it.
‘In no country has the death penalty reduced the number of crimes or criminals. Given this, is the state not committing a major transgression against humanity by denying a human being the right to stay alive? By expressing your willingness to take up such a line of work, Chetna, aren’t you too participating in this transgression?’
A streak of lightning flashed through my body. The memory of four rings rolled up in a bundle, and the bead-studded bangles on my wrists, surfaced suddenly, making me uneasy.
‘Are we not party every single day, in many ways, to the crimes of others? If one must run away from all that, the only way left is renunciation, taking refuge in the Himalayas.’ I smiled softly.
‘What crimes do you mean, Chetna?’
‘All of it . . . from dawn to dusk . . . how many are the injustices we bear . . . how many we let past ourselves, not uttering a word . . . that is the biggest crime.’
‘All right, tell us about your father, Chetna.’
‘Baba is someone who loves this job. You should have seen his excitement when he first took me to visit the prison. When we went down the long veranda to the locked strongroom where we saw the ropes that had been kept safely in boxes he was like a child who had found a lost storybook!’
‘Do you talk of death at home?’
‘Death lingers in our home like the scent of fish curry or luchis fried in ghee. We cannot remember our forefathers without speaking of death. And neither can we speak of death without speaking of our forefathers.’
I sighed heavily.
‘From the time I grew up and became old enough to think, I have been hearing of death. And also, we live right opposite Nimtala Ghat. We wake up and sleep to the juddering and humming of hearses and the sound of their horns. On some days almost a hundred and fifty bodies are cremated there. That is about six bodies every hour. There are no clear intervals for this like there are for the circular trains that run on the railway track nearby. Deaths—they happen anytime. Completely unpredictable. I will never forget a particular death I witnessed in my childhood—that of Alok Nath dadu, the father of Narayan da, who makes bamboo litters in which people carry corpses to the cremation ground. He was a very hardworking man. Each morning, he would make several litters and stack them against the tin wall of the shed. One day, he came to our tea shop at eleven in the morning and had a cup of tea. Raising the cup after he had finished, he said, this is all there is to man—from the soil and back there again. In between, this cup is good for some people to drink tea, to take their medicines, and maybe to poison themselves too. Then he returned to his shop and lay down on a litter. Everyone thought he was asleep. But when somebody who came to buy a litter tried to shake him awake, they found that he had died.’
The anchor looked at me, amazed.
‘What really shook me up was this: when he came into the tea shop for tea, my thakuma, Bhuvaneswari Devi, said, “It is time, it seems, for Alok Nath to leave. Can’t you see the flies are already devouring him?”’
I paused. The anchor was completely tongue-tied.
‘I was just six or seven years old then. I ran into the shop and found that she was right. There were flies scouring his back and thighs. And many more flying around him, biding their time.’
We shared a moment of silence, looking at each other.
‘Flies can sense the impending death of a human being. And
not just flies, ants too. They will keep reminding the human concerned in many ways—it is time you became our food. My thakuma can guess a person’s approaching death from their face even when it is a year away.’
The anchor now looked at me, fear flashing in his eyes. The scent of death now spreads in the studio like the fragrance of luchis, I thought. The half hour just flew. As we got up, a stylishly made-up young woman with shoulder-length hair went over to the desk at the far end of the studio to read the news. I heard it in the make-up room.
‘Namaskar . . . the main news today . . . The chief minister announced that the CPM will drop two ministers from the Cabinet to conform to the rule that the number of ministers should not exceed fifteen per cent of the strength of the Assembly . . . Italy promises support to conserve historic buildings in Kolkata . . . The young woman who was found dead in the Maidan has still not been identified, say police sources . . .’
I wiped off my make-up and changed into my clothes. Yesterday’s triumph had lost its gleam. Some lack—like that of salt in one’s food—continued to plague me. The news was still on when I stepped out into the corridor with a sigh.
‘In the middle of all this, complaints about theft in the roadside shops in Lal Bazar are growing. The police have spread the net for young women who pilfer from the shops. Yesterday, local people nabbed a young woman named Chetna who has been stealing bangles from a bangle seller in Lal Bazar. The seller said that he could not see Chetna’s face properly in the dim light and she managed to escape into the dark . . .’
I froze. My mouth went dry; the darkness rushed into my eyes.
The old bangle seller appeared on the screen with a stupid grin on his face. ‘Uh-uh . . . Really, she tried to get away with the bangles. I caught hold of her, Babu. And so many people were watching too! I can make out her face . . . Our life is very difficult, Babu . . . who do we have to speak for us?’
And then Sanjeev Kumar Mitra appeared with the microphone.
‘The biggest threat faced by these poor folk who slog day and night, in rain and shine, for each meal is such theft. The experience of this poor man in Lal Bazar is not an isolated one . . .’
Darkness clouded my eyes. I was alone in the taxi that evening. Seeing Lal Bazar again on the way back, I was seized with fright. I longed to escape from the White Town to our Black Town. There, somewhere, is Coolie Bazar. There, a Bengali who tried to tell the truth was hanged to death once. The editor of the Bengal Gazette, which published an editorial affirming that truth, was sent to prison by the governor-general; the newspaper was shut down. During the same period, Ramjoy Ghosh, an Indian who was caught stealing ten pennies, was thrown into prison. He was whipped all the way from Lal Digi through Lal Bazar till Bowbazar up to Bara Bazar for four hours and then thrown into the river from Chitpur Bridge. I sat, utterly choked, in the middle of the traffic jam. A demonstration of CPM workers protesting against the Trinamool passed by parallel to the vehicles. A little later, a counter-jatha of Trinamool workers followed. I realized fearfully that the faces of the people in both groups looked the same. Those who were killed, they too had the same faces. I tried to call up in my mind the names of all the four hundred and fifty-one convicts whom Father had sent to their deaths in his lifetime. Most of them had been guilty of murder. They did not regret that their actions had deprived another of the right to be aliv
e.
I sat in the car, soaked in sweat. Outside, the city’s night scene hummed. Women and men with tired faces returning from work crossed the streets. I shut my eyes, exhausted. When I finally reached home and stepped inside, I could hear Father’s tipsy laugh. He was in Father’s room. They were talking about the arrest of two Trinamool leaders for immoral activities.
‘In truth, Sanju babu, did they err?’
‘I don’t know . . . maybe they were trapped . . . it is quite common in my father’s place too.’
Seeing me standing outside, he smiled sarcastically, taking off his glasses. Our eyes met, and I looked into his dreamy eyes again. I knew then that the emptiness I had felt till that moment was because of his absence. When Father called, I went in, my body shuddering from the insult.
‘Did you see what Sanju babu has brought you?’
Father opened a little plastic box. Two gold bangles glinted inside. Sanjeev Kumar took a piece of paper from his pocket and held it out to me.
‘Here is the bill. I bought them . . .’
I dashed into my room without taking the bangles. I struggled for air. The darkness spread in front of my eyes. I couldn’t see. There was now only the dark, everywhere. The sun of justice that had once shone for all beings had set long, long ago!
14
The rains fell upon us all of a sudden in jarring sounds. The sky flung translucent nooses on to the earth with demonic energy. In Burdwan, Rabia Khatun died, struck by lightning. She was just twelve. The nine girls who had been with her suffered burns. They were all children of the poor. All through the morning, I lay curled up under my sheet making an excuse of the rain. I had not slept at all the night before. Tears erupted in my eyes but froze before they could pour out. This had been my greatest challenge ever since I had grown up—breaking into tears. I could never do it. I lost my balance completely when Ramu da, still half asleep, hummed the lines Aamare tumi ashesh korecho at dawn. I have known since I was a child that Tagore’s Gitanjali began with that line: Thou hast made me endless . . . On sad nights, Father would look at the pictures that hung on the walls of his room and sing the whole song loudly. When he reached This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life, renewed vigour would surge through his voice. But when Ramu da sang it in a voice that would never rise from the sickbed, only deep sadness welled up within my heart. Thakuma, who was groping inside the pillowcase to see if the gold coin was lodged somewhere in the sewed-up border of the pillow, sang the rest of
