Hangwoman

by K R Meera

  I was rooted to the spot as the minister’s fat white face appeared: ‘It is pure absurdity to say that these deaths are hunger deaths. Have any of you have visited the place? Well, I have—it’s a place where it would be hard for hunger deaths to take place. Plenty of natural resources there, yes, natural resources! For example, you get babui grass throughout the year there. It can be woven into rope; the adivasis can get ten rupees a kilo for it, do you know? And besides, every house has cattle, plenty of them . . . every house I went to has eighteen to twenty-five goats.’

  ‘So you mean to say that none among the dead are poor, sir?’ someone asked.

  ‘Yes, of course. All the young fellows I saw were smartly dressed . . . they even had watches. When I asked them, they said they play cricket and watch it on TV too. There’s no starvation there. No poverty either.’

  From my earliest childhood I had grown up hearing how mindful the state was—even of trifles like the deaths that their citizens deserved.

  The newsreader had begun to read the next bit of news. ‘A US bank survey conducted recently reveals that there is a twenty-two per cent increase in the number of millionaires in India this year. Observers point out that although of the seventy-seven lakh millionaires around the world only sixty-one thousand are from India, the increase in their numbers has been substantial, indicating India’s robust economic growth in the recent years . . .’

  I finally exited the studio without listening to the rest.

  I was outside, looking for the vehicle to go back home, when Sanjeev Kumar came up to me, his make-up still intact.

  ‘Chetna, I need to talk with you about something serious.’

  I looked up but with no interest at all in what he had to say.

  ‘Since we have come so far now, my life has no meaning at all if I don’t marry you.’

  ‘Marriage should only take place between equals.’

  ‘It’s true, I have been up to naughty things. But that’s only because I adore you. Like Protima Ghosh’s husband, I too have set my heart on you.’

  The reference to Protima di’s story made me feel weak-kneed. Like an immensely skilled hangman, he threw the noose around my neck and pulled hard, all in the flicker of a second. And it landed right in the middle of the third and fourth vertebrae.

  18

  Eight days before the hanging, Sanjeev Kumar Mitra tightened the noose around my neck once more. That was a terrible day. The cry Maa ektu faan diyo . . . rang from afar in the silences that fell between the steady sounds of vehicles on the road, arising from a throat that could not be classified as human or animal. Thakuma leapt up in fear.

  ‘Bhagawan! The famine . . . famine!’

  Ramu da and I were jolted from our sleep by her cries. In my sleep I had been all alone in the vast yard of the Alipore Correctional Home one relentless noon, hanging someone to death. In the blazing midday sun, darkness rushed into my eyes and the face of the condemned man became invisible. I felt something tightening around my throat when I jumped awake. Thakuma’s scream made certain that I would not sleep again. At the word famine images of Amlasole rushed back into my mind. The adivasis there had had no food rations for many months. A local trader had taken away all their ration cards. And when news of the hunger deaths broke, he went promptly into hiding. The villagers did not even know how much food they were to receive as rations every month. Still half asleep, Ramu da tried to console Thakuma—don’t worry, if there is famine, the government will provide food. That made her furious: ‘Huh! I am not educated, but I do know it is the government that lets the famine come in the first place. Did I not see it with my own eyes in 1943? My mashima went mad hearing the cry for a drop of rice gruel, did you know? Every morning we woke up to see the crows and the dogs feed on the bodies of the dead in the streets . . .’

  That cry continued to be heard from a distance. Thakuma, who was about to lie down in her bed, sat up instead, distressed, saying that it was indeed a cry of hunger. I then thought of the tale of Aloknath Grddha Mullick who was the brother of my own grandfather. He worked as a sweeper in Writers’ Building which was then a structure used by the lower officials of the government. Hearing the talk of his masters all the time, the sweeper turned into a scholar. He would say, if only Gandhiji had not pitted Pattabhi Sitaramayya against Subhash Chandra Bose, who had been elected president of the Indian National Congress in the Haripura Congress of 1938, so many people would not have died in Kolkata. Subhash Bose was wounded by Gandhiji’s groupism and he resigned to form the Forward Bloc. He was accused of fomenting subversion and put under house arrest; he, however, escaped and sought refuge in Germany. From there he went to Japan in a submarine. Once he had formed the Indian National Army, he declared war on the Allies. When Japan overran Burma, the Bengalis, who had depended on rice imported from Burma for seven years, faced massive want. And then a terrible rain wiped out the harvest. The crops in Midnapore and 24 Parganas rotted completely. Farmers who had some surplus hid it away. And on top of that, in the summer of 1943, even the entry of boats and bullock carts into the region was restricted. The people in those areas were completely isolated. After months of grinding starvation, they lost all hope and began to flow into Kolkata.

  ‘Everywhere there were corpses, vultures, wolves . . . even to feed the hungry was a frightening experience. Once a woman who ate the rice my thakuma served her died right in front of our eyes—her stomach split open.’

  At that memory, Thakuma wiped her eyes again. Something flared up inside my stomach too when I tried to imagine people who had lost their crops, sold their farmlands, even loosened the main pillar that held up the roof of their homes to sell it, and then stood dazed and helpless. They first asked orphaned relatives and then senior members to leave. Then left their children at the doors of the rich. Abandoned their villages and wandered in strange places. Ate even grass. Ate even cow dung and waste and struggled to keep living. Sold their children for just a few coins. Most of those who drifted into Kolkata were women. Most of the men had perished in the whirlwind. When they were served free food in the city, the bellies of those who had not eaten for months swelled like balloons; their skin became translucent, like egg whites. They died content, having finally eaten a decent meal.

  Thakuma kept mumbling these stories till daybreak; the cry continued to sound. When dawn broke, she went in search of the sufferers. Much later, when I sat down to have my rotis in the kitchen, our neighbour Hari da came in to tell me that Thakuma wanted me. I put away my food and went out. Hari da pointed to the road that turned left from our house, away from that which went to the Ghat. Thakuma stood in between the row of houses to which our house belonged and the next, a lane so narrow there was barely space for a man’s outstretched arm. A drain ran there. A family was beginning to settle on top of that.

  ‘Chetu chotdi, come and look,’ Thakuma called me with a look of sorrow.

  Bowing my head as if I was entering a hencoop, I went in—and was stunned. There lay a young boy, ten or fourteen, naked. A body with a swollen head and belly, like a corpse that had rotted in water for many days. The candle beside him was dim; so I did not see him clearly at first. But when my eyes got used to the light I saw that what trickled out of the corners of the child’s eyes was not pus—it was a row of termites. Seeing brown ants pour out of his nostrils and blue flies come out of his ears, I stood there dumbstruck with shock. He was completely exhausted and drawing his last breath; when the mouth opened, red gnats jumped out. And when he squirmed, out of his penis flew silver-winged moths, soaring towards the flame of the candle.

  I could not believe my eyes. My stomach clenched and my mouth was filled with bitterness. A year ago, there had been reports in the papers and on TV about flies coming out of a child’s body. His family too had come to Kolkata from Midnapore seeking work after the crops had failed. They had arrived in Howrah with all their worldly belongings gathered up in a meagre bundle. As
they hung on, spending the nights at the bus stop or on the pavement, one day moths began to fly out of their older son Ratan’s penis. People crowded to see the wonder. A beggars’ agent took him around Kolkata for a while and collected money. When the news of this appeared in the papers, the government ordered that the child be treated. The newspapers lost interest a week or two after. The boy’s family had no money; the doctors and hospital staff lost interest too. His illness was never diagnosed. And the newspapers did not seek him out again. By then termites had begun to come out of his eyes, and ants from his nose. Creatures crawling in his nose and ears caused him unbearable pain. Other families that lived on the pavements and in the bus stops drove them away and they had ended up in the drain. His mother Mrinmayi, who had arrived with the scavenged remains of vegetable waste, looked at the creatures flowing out of her son’s wasted body and said, her voice laced with sympathy: ‘Poor things! They can find nothing to eat inside!’

  As I stood there unable to say a word, Thakuma pressed my hand and whispered: ‘The signs are that he won’t last the week . . . God is merciful!’

  The death sign that Thakuma saw was in his eyes; when she fed him rice gruel, the sunken eyes in the emaciated face did not reflect her image. I looked at him again. Despite his weak effort to smile, I could not see even his eyeballs, let alone my image, in those sockets. As we watched, he burped and a vague smile crossed his lips. The creatures that had flowed out of him now rushed back inside.

  That day when I went to the studio to record Hangwoman’s Diary, Sanjeev Kumar Mitra, who was chatting with Harish Nath, tried to be friendly, asking me if something was wrong and why my face looked so wan. Looking at his made-up face and his tinted glasses, now set in their new gold frames, the memory of Ratan’s eyes sunk in their sockets made me convulse.

  ‘Someone died near our house . . . a young boy,’ I said impassively.

  ‘Oh!’ Sanjeev Kumar’s response was casual.

  I continued. ‘Many kinds of creatures were crawling out of his body. I heard the news when I was sitting down to breakfast. I left the

  food . . . couldn’t eat after that.’

  A small streak of recognition passed over their faces.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The insects were crawling in my food . . .’

  They were silent for a moment. Harish Nath tried to smile then. ‘Oh yes, we’d done one such story last year. That was before you came, Sanju da.’

  I paid no attention and kept talking: ‘His skin was like fields bereft of moisture at the height of summer. His eyes overflowed with yellow termites, his ears with flies . . . white moths came out of his penis . . .’

  I stopped and looked at them.

  ‘But the worst was the gnats that flew out of his mouth . . . how they stank! Even though they tied his chin and jaw together, they kept coming out relentlessly.’

  ‘Enough! Enough.’ Sanjeev Kumar stopped me, very uneasy now.

  But I did not stop. ‘They did not cremate him. They have no money for that. They put him in a boat, took him to the middle of the river and threw him into it.’

  The furore around the starvation deaths in Amlasole had abated, and a human rights activist had been drafted to make Hangwoman’s Diary meatier that day. This was the well-heeled Sankar Prasad Majumdar, president of the Anti Death Penalty Organization. His air of supreme confidence, shining clean-shaven face and spruce, trim suit troubled me.

  ‘The death penalty is a barbaric practice. No civilized nation favours it. In such circumstances, the fact that a young woman like Chetna Grddha Mullick, who does have some education, has agreed to do such work is regrettable indeed. If Chetna had been unwilling, perhaps this death sentence itself may have been averted. A human life would have lasted longer . . .’

  When he paused thus in the discussion, Sanjeev Kumar Mitra turned towards me. ‘What do you say to that, Chetna?’

  ‘Starvation deaths abound in Amlasole. There, children die in pain; there are worms eating their bodies and creatures crawling in and out. I wonder, really, why human rights activists are not bothered about extending those lives. Tell me, Majumdar babu, why does the nation condemn the guiltless to worse agonies than the guilty? By what standards can that be permitted?’

  ‘If you are referring to Amlasole, Miss Chetna, then there are facts you do not know . . . it’s not that there was no help from the government. It was not distributed properly.’

  His bhadralok self-confidence made me very impatient once again.

  ‘These very same words were said by a British minister in the British Parliament in 1943, Majumdar babu. India has no dearth of food, he said. Just that the bread couldn’t be buttered evenly, he was sure! In that year, till July, the British had taken away eighty thousand tons of food. The great famine that had broken out sixty years ago was also because the British had exported ten lakh tons of rice and one lakh tons of wheat . . .’

  ‘We seem to be wandering off track now. Many such things might have happened under the British!’ Sanjeev Kumar interrupted, impatiently.

  I looked at him emotionlessly. ‘All I mean to say is that all governments offer the same justifications, at all times. In July 1943 when a member of the Assembly demanded that Bengal be declared a famine-stricken area, he was not opposed by the British, but by the food minister, Suhrawady. Those were days in which people were forced to eat dogs and cats and even cotton swabs with blood and pus on them. But he declared in his speech that the shops in Calcutta were filled with plenty of food . . .’

  Majumdar shook his head, expressing distaste. ‘That is another matter, Let’s go back to the death penalty. Just think—Jatin Banerjee has been in jail for more than a decade. Many whose crimes are worse than his have received clemency. It is not the mark of civilization that people convicted of the same crime should receive such different punishments.’

  ‘In a country where crores of people suffer in dire poverty and just sixty thousand possess a sizeable share of wealth, how can the guilty alone hope for equal treatment? On what grounds, Babu?’

  ‘Miss Chetna Mullick, you are mixing up two entirely different things! Poverty is one thing; the death penalty is another . . .’

  ‘No, never. My father has hanged four hundred and fifty-one convicts. Of them, four hundred were miserably poor. With no money to hire good lawyers . . .’

  ‘What about the others ?’

  ‘They were pitted against people much stronger than them.’

  Majumdar shook his head again to indicate that all this was wrong.

  ‘If, as you said, all those who receive the death penalty are poor, surely they stand to gain from abolishing it?’

  ‘I do believe that it is better to kill the poor through the death penalty than kill them slowly by abandoning them to starvation.’

  ‘That is a very cruel statement . . . How can a woman like you say such things?’ He pulled up his collar, his face filling with worry and pain.

  ‘Because I grew up in the midst of poverty. The people we see on Strand Road by Nimtala Ghat are very poor. They have no one. They die on the roadside; their bodies are torn apart by street dogs . . . I believe they would be better off dying quickly and painlessly, in two minutes, on the gallows; it is much better than being killed slowly in hunger and want.’

  My voice began to turn harsh. The very uselessness of this conversation made me uneasy. When the show ended, I sighed in relief.

  ‘I don’t agree with you, Chetna,’ Sanjeev Kumar said when we were about to leave after the show. ‘Most people in our country believe that poverty is their fate. That’s not true—it is a choice. Poor people stay poor because they are not willing to work hard and spend wisely.’

  I looked at him obliquely. His eyes were hidden behind the tinted lenses. Bitterly, I thought of Ratan. I too had gone to see him off at the Ghat. When his body was thrown into the still black waters that lo
oked as if they were marked by ugly dark warts all over, a large cloud of insects had risen from it. His body floated for some time like a hollow log; the water drew him down only after a long time. Maybe those creatures had devoured all his inner organs. Poor things, like his mother said; they too were probably exhausted from starving inside.

  ‘Come out now, the time of the great famine has passed!’ Sanjeev Kumar Mitra got out and called to me, after stopping the taxi at Park Street.

  His words made no ripples in my mind. All I could do was float above, like a hollow trunk upon water. He took me to a restaurant meant only for the rich. When we entered, the drinkers lifted their heads and looked at us. We could hear women talk from the small cabins around.

  ‘The food here is good,’ Sanjeev Kumar told me.

  As my nostrils filled with many kinds of appetizing aromas, I became truly ravenous. While we waited for the food, Sanjeev Kumar folded his arms on the table, rested his head on them and looked at me. The tenderness in his look upset me. The words ‘I want to fuck you at least once’ rang in my ears.

  ‘Years before, I had the urge for biryani one day . . . I was just ten or twelve then. But I didn’t have money . . .’

  His eyes were now warm. It stirred my heart.

  ‘I was the son of a poor sick man . . .’

  He removed his glasses. They reflected the pain of a wounded child.

  ‘Do you like biryani? The yellow one with a white boiled egg on top?’ He sighed and looked at me. ‘In 1988, it cost forty rupees. When the waiter brought the bill, I didn’t have enough cash. He slapped me hard. The manager hit me on the head. Shouted that I looked like a crook; scolded the waiter for having taken my order. All those who were there felt that I ought to be severely punished if I were not to grow up into a seasoned thief. They shoved me into the kitchen, pulled off my shirt and pants, and made me wash the dirty dishes . . .’