Hangwoman

by K R Meera

  That day too, on my way to the studio I sat in the car with firm resolve: I will not carry you on my head any more. It was an evening on which the city shone, freshly washed by rain. Even through the tinted windows of the vehicle I could see the fresh green of the leaves. The old yellow taxis and auto rickshaws gleamed as if they had received a new coat of paint. Even buildings covered with centuries of dust looked spruced and fresh. Schoolchildren squeezed their way in between the jammed traffic on the road, jumping in the puddles collected in the potholes, merrily splashing the water around. I wanted to laugh too. In the Maidan, football players covered with mud looked like live mud statues chasing a brown ball. The sight made me gloomy. To free my mind from thoughts that weighed it down, I imagined myself walking on Rabindra Setu on a rain-swept dusk. Without the cars, buses, rickshaws, lorries; without the beggars, roadside vendors, or the villagers who flowed into town seeking work. Just me on the deserted bridge and the Ganga bubbling in the rain—that was the dusk I yearned for. Then I remembered the black Arabian horse with the golden mane that had swept down the hill in the thick of the windstorm.

  ‘We have a great programme today too . . .’ Sanjeev Kumar Mitra, who already had make-up on, came up to me with a smile that filled his face. ‘Today too we will outsmart your father, Chetna.’

  I looked at him, worried. Though I hadn’t studied beyond Plus Two, I could well predict that the nooses that he made would fit my neck perfectly. When I changed and went up to the chair before the camera, Sanjeev Kumar opened the glass door and led in a diminutive old woman. The faint scent of cow dung trailed behind her. She wore a worn green sari and a white blouse which had been tailored in better times for it now hung loose on her; her arms and neck were bare, as was her forehead. Without a trace of nervousness or fear, she sat down in the seat which Sanjeev Kumar pointed out to her and clipped on the lapel mike. The fair shoulder that was exposed when the loose blouse slipped a bit gave away the fact that the burned-out face with its sunken cheeks had once been fair and plump. Another woman like my mother. Sanjeev Kumar did not bother to introduce her; he had begun the show.

  ‘Welcome again to Hangwoman’s Diary. As Jatindranath Banerjee’s execution draws nearer, and debates about the ethics of the death penalty continue all over the world, we have with us in our studio today along with Chetna Grddha Mullick, who has been deputed to hang him, Protima Ghosh, mother of Rameshchandra Ghosh, the last convict who was hanged at the gallows . . .’

  Like any daughter who had to come face-to-face with a mother whose son had been hanged by her father, I felt my breath falter. Ramesh Ghosh was one of the last two prisoners Father had executed. His father Jitendra Ghosh, too, had received the death sentence in a case involving the brutal murder of six members of a family including an infant. The victims had been hacked to death. But taking into account his age and ill-health, the court had commuted the sentence to life imprisonment.

  ‘Welcome, Chetna! Welcome, Protima di!’

  With a triumphant smile that I felt was meant to remind me of the look of fury hidden behind his tinted glasses, Sanjeev Kumar Mitra continued.

  ‘Welcome to CNC. Protima di, as a mother whose son was sentenced to death, what is your opinion about Jatindranath’s death sentence?’

  Seventy-year-old Protima Ghosh tilted her head sharply towards Sanjeev Kumar and glared mutinously at him.

  ‘Opinion? What opinion, Babu? Did anyone ask my opinion when this girl’s father hanged to death my son and his friend? Forget that, did anyone ask my views when my son and his father were given the death sentence? Did anyone ask me what to do with the bodies of my son who died on the gallows and my husband who died in his prison cell? Asking for my opinion after so much has happened, after so

  many years? Bah! I may be seventy, but my hand is one that wields the hoe . . . I’ll slap you tight on the cheek, mind you!’

  Her voice was at the same time impassive and deeply penetrating. With great delight, I watched Sanjeev Kumar shrink and fold into himself as if he had indeed been slapped. But he bounced back with a smile, agile as a cat that manages to land on four feet, always.

  ‘That’s precisely my question, Protima di. What is your opinion about the demand being made now that the death penalty be abolished? Now, after so many years, so late?’

  ‘My view is that it should not be abolished. For people like us, it is better to be hanged to death rather than suffer for years together! I have always felt relieved that my son is no more . . . otherwise he would have suffered a living death today. I am even more grateful that his father too was jailed and killed. Now I have nothing to fear, no one to worry about . . . Oh, I am only too grateful to you all . . .’

  ‘Protima di, surely it wasn’t us? Wasn’t it the police that filed the case? Wasn’t it the court that found him guilty and handed out the death sentence?’

  ‘Yes, it was the police and the courts, the other side was rich . . . so the police slapped a case on my son. We had no money to hire a good lawyer, and so the court found him guilty.’

  ‘But six people . . . your son . . .’

  ‘Yes, six people. But why—did you ever inquire? We had eight

  and a half acres of paddy fields. We toiled on them so hard that our

  bones were ground to dust. And then, thirteen years back, the harsh

  summer . . . there was no rain . . . the crop died. He had to take a loan on interest to start again . . .’

  Her story was one that had been told and retold, read and seen over and over again in the papers and TV channels. Farming, drought, loss, debt, interest, penal interest . . .

  ‘We sold all that we had to pay the moneylender back. But he made false accounts . . . grabbed our land . . . when he learned that he would lose all his land, my son went to the usurer, and begged and begged and wept . . . then he challenged the evil man. The usurer sent his goons to beat up my son and his father. That made my son lose his mind . . . he picked up the first thing he saw and marched to the usurer’s house. His father and his friend Dipak ran after him to stop him. But in the pushing and pulling there . . .’

  She shook her head without emotion. ‘What has happened has happened.’

  ‘But six people including a mere infant . . .’

  Wanting very much to see her weep, Sanjeev Kumar Mitra thrust hard again. As if sensing his intentions, her face became even more impenetrable.

  ‘Yes, a tender infant . . . just nine months old. But even when he came back, my son was roaring, Kill them all, kill! I had never seen him before like that. He was insane then. Otherwise he wouldn’t even harm a fly. All of them made him insane. They made him awfully cruel . . . but in the end, he alone was punished . . .’

  When she reached this point in the story, a teardrop, thick as blood, oozed out slowly from the socket of her sunken eye.

  ‘My son would have been alive today if we had had money to pay bribes. If we had had enough to pay the party leaders, the police, the lawyer . . . to give them all that asked for. My son would have been out of jail and walking with his chest out and head high . . . but . . .’

  She flicked off the tear and calmly looked at Sanjeev Kumar Mitra.

  ‘There was no one to send a mercy petition on his behalf. No organizations were around to campaign for him. No one insisted that he should live. Yet now all of you raise your voices for Jatindranath Banerjee. Let me ask you—my son had gone to ask about a great wrong that had been done to him. He had planned nothing. But Banerjee? He planned for days together, snared a little girl, ruined her and killed her as well. Which is the worse crime?’

  Because he had no answer, Sanjeev Kumar turned to me.

  ‘Chetna, maybe this is a question you can answer better . . .’

  ‘Sanjeev babu, the hangman can only carry out the sentence . . . he cannot pass judgment,’ said I.

  ‘You are delighted, I suppose, to have got the chance to hang
someone who murdered a young girl?’

  ‘There is no male or female before duty, Babu. That’s what my father Phanibhushan Grddha Mullick has taught me. Fourteen years ago, the father of Amartya Ghosh—whom my father had executed—hacked off my brother’s limbs. Ramu da was just twenty-two then. Within a few years, my father had to hang Ramesh Ghosh and Dipak Lal . . . Our duty is our God, Father said. That is our prayer. But Father was deeply disturbed when he returned home after carrying out Ramesh’s sentence. So young, so much like Ramu da . . . For days, he would not speak . . .’

  That was true. When the black hood was put on him, Ramesh stood with eyes lowered like a young chap about to be caned by his schoolmaster. Tears flowed freely from his eyes. Dipak Lal collapsed in a faint. Scared, Kaku felt giddy and the new assistant Father had hired fled and was seen no more. The magistrate, the collector and some other eminent people had come to witness the hanging. For a long time, whenever he was drunk, Father would describe the terrible deathlike struggle he felt that moment.

  When we came out after the show, Harish Nath wrinkled his nose at us. ‘The stink of cow dung . . .’

  Flustered, I looked at Protima di. Her expression changed suddenly.

  ‘Will a woman who makes a living out of gathering cow dung from the wayside and making dung cakes smell of sandalwood?’ she exploded. ‘We used to smell of the good earth of the country. We lived by hard labour—what you gulp down three times a day are the fruits of our labour. And you dare insult me?’

  In a trice she had turned into someone else. As Harish Nath and Sanjeev Kumar Mitra drowned in embarrassment, many ran up from inside the studio upon hearing the commotion.

  ‘Didn’t you all kill my son? Didn’t you all bury my husband’s body without letting me have a glimpse of him? Didn’t you steal all his savings?’

  When she flung down her plastic bag and advanced towards Harish Nath, he leapt back in fright. Protima di placed her hands on her head, which was nearly bald, and wailed loudly. Her voice resounded in that air-conditioned room lit with several tube lights. The glass walls shook as her terrifying wail lashed out at them.

  ‘May you all be ground to dust, may the dust fill up in your mouths! May your mothers die peeing blood!’

  As we watched thunderstruck, her body shook violently and she fell on the ground. Foaming at the mouth, she gasped and flailed on the floor like a fish out of water writhing on the ground.

  ‘You will all be decimated . . . burned to ashes . . . in the days of reckoning you will have to settle accounts with Allah . . . beware . . . Ya Allah!’

  In a voice that seemed to have no connection at all with her body, she let out a terrible cackling laugh. While people stood by, stunned and unable to move, I ran to her and tried to help her up. She was lighter than Ramu da. She folded in my arms like a wilted branch. Somebody brought some water. I sprinkled it on her face. In a few moments, she sat up, wiped her face and looked at us. Then, even more composed than before, she stood up, smoothed her hair, pulled her sari right and picked up the plastic bag, and the few coins and a nearly burned out candle which had fallen out of it.

  ‘Do you need to go to the hospital?’ Harish Nath asked, thoroughly ruffled.

  ‘No.’ Her voice betrayed no emotion.

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘Near Mallick Bazar.’

  ‘Who lives with you?’

  ‘Fifteen hundred people.’

  Her voice rang with disdain.

  ‘In that case, Sanju da, do take her home,’ Harish Nath suggested, his patience wearing out. He then gestured to Sanjeev Kumar to come closer and whispered something to him.

  Protima di was ushered into the same taxi which was to take me home. Given what had happened, I did not worry too much when Sanjeev Kumar got into the front seat. As she got in, Protima di told me that this was her first car ride. There is always a first time for everything, she added as she leaned against the seat, and murmured to herself, Ya Allah . . . Then turning to me in the dark, as if reading my mind, she said: ‘I was a Muslim. My name was Rukhiya. I converted to marry my husband.’

  I stared at her with surprise that bordered on shock. In my mind, someone else rolled her head side to side. I saw before me the long arms of the Turkish adventurer Iqtyaruddin Muhammed Bin Bakhtyar Khilji. Flushed by victory over Bihar, he turned towards Bengal but only eighteen of his horsemen could match the swiftness of his Arabian steed. That’s why the war on King Lakshman Sen became a campaign with just eighteen horsemen. Unable to imagine eighteen riders as a hostile army of invaders, the guards opened the gates of the fort to them, thinking that these were merchants’ animals. King Lakshman Sen was eighty then, a renowned poet and scholar. He was sitting down to dinner when Khilji and his eighteen men surrounded him. The wise king admitted defeat and retreated to the southeast. Hearing the news that the invaders had overcome King Lakshman Sen and taken over his palace, Hindus ran helter-skelter in fear, trying to hide.

  The youth mounted on the black steed with the golden mane was very handsome. He had set off to see the countryside when the terrible screams of a young woman bound to a pillar inside an abandoned house reached his ears. He saw just the dark side of her face and it jolted him. As Ratnamalika gaped at the exceedingly handsome horseman, her veil dropped and he saw the beauty of the fair side of her face. He cut down the pillar to which she had been bound and, lifting her up by the loose end of the thick rope, he set her on his horse and rode away. Many years later, a remarkably beautiful Muslim woman arrived at the doors of the same house in a sandalwood palanquin with a baby in her arms. It was Ratnamalika. The bear-like half of her face was totally altered; the dark mark had vanished.

  When I asked her how this could happen, Thakuma laughed: ‘Isn’t that the miracle, Chetu di? A handful of love is worth more than a hearthful of bread.’

  ‘But how, Thakuma?’

  ‘Some men can do it,’ Thakuma said breezily.

  I imagined the mole which looked like an ink drop on my left nostril dissolving in my tears and spreading all over my face. My tongue itched to predict the doom of all the people I saw around me through the dark half of my face. And I prayed for the hoof beats of the golden-maned black Arabian steed that would bring to me, swifter than the wind, the handsome warrior who would make me a princess in the end.

  When we turned from AJC Road towards Mallick Bazar, a rath-mela group passed us. We waited inside the vehicle until the group of children shouting ‘rath, rath,’ had crossed us and their voices faded in the distance. A horde of beggar children surrounded us. But seeing Protima di alight from the vehicle, they dispersed quickly. It was my first visit to that slum. In the dark, it looked as though an unending row of dog kennels thatched with grass and plastic lay stretched out before me. The stench of cow dung, shit and piss rattled my head. Sanjeev Kumar Mitra walked behind Protima di. Men who gave out the sharp smell of bhang and women reeking of sweat drifted past. In some places, slivers of yellow from electric bulbs and the flickering light from black-and-white TV screens fell on us. Somewhere, children were crying. Elsewhere, women spoke in loud voices, men bellowed. The air was alive with the sound of animated talk and radio music. We turned four times on the path and then Protima di stopped. She groped in her bag for that piece of candle which had fallen on the floor in the studio and lit it. Hers was a little hut of twigs and palm-leaf fronds, so frail that it looked as though a strong wind would knock it down. I went in with a very heavy heart. She lit a bottle-lamp, and laid out two torn grass mats for us to sit. I saw in the dim light that the floor was neatly polished with cow dung. Dung cakes were tidily stacked in a corner. On the bamboo poles that were hammered into the ground in lieu of a wall hung a small cloth bundle, a faded black-and-white photo and a calendar with an image of Mecca.

  Protima di had come to the city from her village in Purulia to fight the case. She had fought it for ten long years. She sold her
house. They lost. Her son was hanged. Her husband was given a life sentence. When she saw him in jail two months before he was to be released, he told her that he had saved some money working in jail. A whole month passed after the date on which he was to be set free but he did not return. When she went to find out, they told her that he had died and his body had been thrown into the Ganga. She never got the money. Some two thousand rupees it would have been, she sighed, if only I could have it. Just then four or five mice ran between us. I jumped to my feet in fright.

  ‘Never seen mice?’

  When she sent me a wounding look through the dim light, I sat down again. She washed two glasses, filled them with water and brought them to us. Then she picked up the lantern, searched around for a few coins and found them. ‘I’ll go buy us some tea.’

  ‘No, Didi . . . I don’t want anything . . .’

  ‘No, you must. If my being a Muslim is the problem, don’t worry, the fellow who makes the tea is a high-caste Hindu.’

  As she swept out of the hut, like a breeze, I was left alone with Sanjeev Kumar and the candle. The dim light threw wisps of gold on his face and hair. When the same mice returned I rose up quickly and went to the bamboo wall where the calendar with the image of Mecca hung.