Hangwoman

by K R Meera

  ‘Oh no, Grddha da, don’t kill me!’ Amalendu acted as if he were trembling with fear and bowed down to Gautam.

  All of us laughed. That’s how the game began. Gautam’s noose came undone in the middle of the game. Then Amalendu tied one; he didn’t make a good one. The others tried, they couldn’t manage either. Then the rope came to me. Somebody rolled a rock under the tree to make a platform. Amalendu climbed on it. When we removed it he held the branch with his hands, swung his legs and pretended to die. My hair stands on end whenever I think of that day. It was only much later that I realized my fingers had knotted the noose as though someone was guiding me, like the way someone holds your hand when you learn to write. Amalendu put it around Gautam’s neck; I fixed it there. Amalendu tied the other end to the branch of the tree. Each of us took turns at playing the hangman. Then there was a fight between Champa and Amalendu about who would be the hangman next. He hit her and she ran away crying. Everything that happened afterwards surfaces in my memory as sound. The sound of Amalendu’s mother calling him. The patter of his soiled black feet. Champa calling Aparna loudly; of her thin legs running away. The sound of the gravel grating beneath my feet as I turned back towards home, suddenly feeling bored when everyone had left. The sound of Gautam calling to me from behind. When I turned I saw Gautam standing on the platform looking angry and hurt; the noose was still around his neck, its other end tied to the branch. It made me laugh. Then his legs slid off the stone and he began to struggle. It was fun to watch. I returned there much later, only after I heard loud and desperate wails. Weeks after his death, our picture—the picture of Gautam, Champa, Aparna, Amalendu and me running away, laughing—appeared in the English magazine Sunday. Because I looked at that photo for so long, the image of Gautam that filled my memory was that of him running away, his face turned towards the photographer. Jatindranath Banerjee’s photo, which appeared earlier in the Statesman, was of a man turning to look back as he got into the jeep. Only there was no smile on his face.

  I could not sleep that night. Outside the hearses waited in a row. The queue for free food distributed after someone’s last rites snaked on. The sight of men and women squatting impassively on the ground that was moist with the rain that had fallen sometime that evening made me uneasy. The smoke from the pyres on the banks of the Ganga filled the sky above like fog. It announced: four days from now, Jatindranath Banerjee’s body too will turn into dust and smoke in this very same cremation ground.

  ‘The wedding’s not even been fixed. We have only his word for it . . .

  It’s not proper, this, you going around with him . . .’ Ma’s voice was unnecessarily loud; she had started her harangue when she saw me come in.

  ‘Your father does not have the slightest sense. Give him a bottle and some cash and he’d swing from a tree like a monkey. Aren’t you an educated girl? Shouldn’t you have some concern about your future?’

  ‘What was to be my future, Ma?’ I asked her vacantly.

  Ma was like Devi Sitala, with the broom and the winnow, the pot of sacred water and the basin to fetch more of it. Sweeping and cleaning and sprinkling the ground with water, and bursting in hot oil like a mustard seed—that was all there was to Ma’s life. Even her food was like Sitala’s sacred food: leftover rice gruel. Cold and stale, the previous day’s food. Both of them had seats of dignity—the donkey was their mount. That night when Father quarrelled with her, how I wished her mustard seeds would turn into the pustules of smallpox.

  ‘You are useless, you ill-omened female! Women ought to love their husbands if they are women at all! A woman who’s of no use to her husband shouldn’t be alive!’

  Knowing that what followed next would be the sound of a hard slap falling on Ma’s face, I turned over. Anger smouldered on Ramu da’s face.

  ‘Try questioning me and I’ll hang you by the neck!’

  ‘Oh ho, indeed! Hang me? Hang me! Really, try doing that!’

  ‘Ma . . .’ Ramu da called, as if at the end of his patience.

  Ma came out of Father’s room hurriedly and stroked Ramu da’s forehead gently, glancing at Thakuma and me.

  ‘Do you want a sip of water?’

  ‘No, I want some peace . . .’He closed his eyes, irritated.

  ‘Okay, I won’t say anything.’

  She admitted defeat and went into the kitchen. The next day, I was helping Ma when Kakima came running in. ‘Didi, look, what a pretty child!’

  I left the half-kneaded dough in the kitchen and went out of the house. A procession had crossed over, twisting its way in between the rows of vehicles waiting for the railway gate to open. A lean man of forty or forty-five held a child’s body in his arms. The child was not even five. He lay in his father’s arms—they had decked his hair with a peacock feather and dabbed a spot of black on his cheek. His mother kept swooning as she tried to walk. As the eight o’clock Prinsep Ghat Circular juddered past, the waiting vehicles began to move, spitting black smoke. The child’s father, drained of life, made his way through the bustle, carrying his son’s body. When we came face-to-face and his eyes fell on me, he started heavily and fixed me with a terrible stare. Fear overtook me. Though moving ahead in the push of the traffic and the crowd, his eyes stayed on me. The child too had played the hangman’s game, I realized.

  I ran back into the house where I collapsed on the floor, panting wildly. Ramu da looked up, very concerned. ‘Just yesterday, three children . . .’ There was deep sadness in his voice. Father just laughed when he got to know that the child had played hanging.

  ‘Chetu, don’t you worry. None of us—neither you, nor I, nor our family—has done anything wrong. Hanging is our duty. When we speak of it to a thousand people, if even six of them mend their ways, that’s big.’

  Father filled his jug with water and went back to his room. Just as I had induced Sanjeev Kumar to steal, the world was urging me to steal Jatindranath’s life, I felt. As with theft, when meting out death too one needs a quick hand and a quicker tongue to distract other people’s attention. There is but one difference. In this case, the stolen goods would be lost to the thief too. I sat leaning against Ramu da’s cot, a void opening deep in my mind. Niharika’s feet had been adorned with a pair of anklets with delicately carved silver leaves. When she walked, they tinkled gently. Even when her body had swayed slowly from the beam in Father’s room, they had tinkled softly. When he was hanging from the branch of the guava tree, Gautam Deb was smiling. He must have died of a broken neck in a split second; by the time we ran there hearing his mother’s scream, he was motionless. He was sent to heaven by me, with the first-ever noose I had fashioned.

  That day, the Ghat was unusually crowded. Whenever I peeped out, I saw children with eyes like risen brown suns calling me to play the hangman’s game. I stared at my own hands in terror.

  24

  three days to the hanging—hangman starts bargaining screamed the Telegraph’s headline. There was a picture of Father sitting on the dirt-covered wooden chair in the tea shop, his six-foot-two frame drawn up with all the dignity it could amass, an expression of determination tinged with sadness on his face. Even the tiny curl of smoke from the half-smoked cigarette in his right hand and the small tear in the gamchha on his shoulder could be seen. I was reading out this news to Ramu da when the irritating buzz of the crowd outside distracted me. I went up to the doorstep and instantly realized that the ambulance on the road was carrying the body of the Bengali football player who had been shot dead, Pranoy Chatterjee. The crowd was following it. Garlanded portraits of Chatterjee were propped up on the front and the back of the vehicle which was decked with white orchids. In the picture on the back of the ambulance of Pranoy Chatterjee, clad in a white t-shirt and shorts, chasing the ball, the ball could not be seen.Two days ago, in Jamshedpur, Pranoy Chatterjee had barely stepped out of his house on his way to work when a stranger approached him with a piece of paper with someone’s addres
s on it. When Chatterjee looked down to read it, the stranger pulled out a gun from his pocket and shot him. Hearing the gunshot, Pranoy’s wife Premlata Chatterjee came running. She hugged him, screaming. Ran after passing vehicles, crying for help. Finally, jumped in front of a taxi and took him to the hospital. Waited outside tearfully as the doctors fought to save him. Kept vigil at his bedside without a drop of water. TV channels and newspapers went into a tizzy extolling Premalata’s extraordinarily passionate wifely love. And when Pranoy finally succumbed to his injuries, her wails were so loud that the whole hospital shook. But just when the wailing and weeping reached a crescendo, the police entered to arrest her. Now the channels and the newspapers went into yet another whirl: Pranoy Chatterjee had been murdered by a hitman hired by his wife’s lover, their neighbour, and she had paid the money! Thakuma, who had just returned from the Shiva temple at the Ghat in her tattered white sari, cursed Premalata loudly: ‘Women like her ought to be hanged! Pray to Mahadev that it happens by your hand!’

  I heard that and smiled involuntarily. I was sure that no woman had ever received the death sentence in independent India. In this, the nation and the courts have conceded special status to women. As we watched, the ambulance and the other vehicles crossed the railway tracks and turned towards the cremation ground. The T-junction in front of our house became completely empty, something that happened very rarely. After a very long time I could see clearly the two shops right opposite our house: Suraj Das’s photo studio, Photo Divine, and Gyan Nath da’s sweetmeat shop. Two huge bulls that had been foraging in a pile of rubbish near the Port Trust workers’ basti past Hemant da’s Kali temple shook their jowls as they walked leisurely in the middle of the road. A young boy—a new face—with a swastika on his forehead and a trident in a greenish yellow plastic jug walked along the street, begging in the shops. The plastic water pot that Gautam Deb’s mother Aruna had flung away on seeing her three-year-old son dangling from the tree branch had been the same greenish yellow colour. Plastic pots to store water had made their appearance in our lives a little before Gautam took leave of us. Champa’s and Aparna’s father Subrato used to sell mud pots. Once these light and unbreakable plastic pots became popular, he and his family went away. I never saw them again. My last memory of little Champa is of her in a brown petticoat, touching me as I stood in front of Hemant da’s Kali temple sucking at a sweet Ramu da had given me. She was begging for a piece of the sweet, looking rather silly. The orange-coloured sea of sweetness in my mouth, I gave her an irked look. I then bit into the sweet, broke it, and swallowed it straightaway. This memory makes me feel more guilty than the one in which I put the noose around Gautam Deb’s neck. It is a human being’s past that makes him weak.

  Because the water supply revived only at eleven-thirty, I was late to bathe. As I was getting ready to go to the tiny bathroom behind the house, where one person could just about squeeze in, Father called from the tea shop. I went up to the door of the kitchen. Sitting under the photo frame which held the article ‘Hanging is no child’s play: Grddha Mullick’, Father looked at me with a serious expression as he took a cigarette from the table, lit it, and put it between his lips. ‘Don’t forget to tell the channel chaps that we will be busy from tomorrow and that you can’t go to the show after today.’

  That was a bit surprising. I could sense he had something in his mind.

  ‘The contract with the channel . . .’ I tried to say in a low voice.

  But Father just rolled his eyes at me. ‘Contract? What contract? Chetu, this is our chance . . . after the twenty-fifth, we will be completely useless, do you understand?’ A large puff of smoke wafted from his mouth.

  As I got ready to leave for the studio that day, I wondered what role had been assigned to me in this new drama of his. Earlier, there used to be just a small can of Cuticura powder next to our spotty old mirror; but now, there was not only face powder and talcum powder, but even Pond’s cream. As I was doing my face, I heard him speaking in the tea shop.

  ‘No! No interview, no nonsense. Is some mad thing rushing around in my head that I must keep on chattering? It is a busy day today. It would be better if you left without wasting my time . . .’ Father was playing hard to get with some correspondent of a newspaper or channel.

  I stuck a large red bindi on my forehead. My face looked like a watercolour on which an ink bottle had been splashed. I felt like measuring up my good looks all over again in the mirror. But perhaps Ramu da was not asleep; perhaps he was watching me?

  And indeed, Big Brother was watching me. He half-opened his eyes and smiled sarcastically. ‘It’s going to be hard to kill time from now.’

  ‘Huh?’ I asked in the common Bengali sing-song tone.

  ‘Yes . . . Baba’s on the azar already.’

  As I searched for my purse and umbrella, Ramu da let out a heavy sigh. ‘Every day, the papers have some news or the other about you. The first woman in Indian history to occupy the hangman’s post! The only one anywhere in the world . . . you’ve become history, Chetu!’

  ‘I fear history.’

  ‘All women do . . .’ He smiled again.

  I looked at him and felt what he said was wrong. It is not women who fear history; it is history that fears women. That’s why there are so few of them in it. My place in it was assured only if I managed to put the noose around Jatindranath Banerjee’s neck and he died in a flawlessly executed hanging. I went out into the road expecting the channel’s vehicle to be there any minute; a few handcarts passed by carrying dead bodies accompanied by weeping women in tattered, soiled saris, and a group of villagers. Cutting straight through that dreary line, paying no attention to anyone, Sanjeev Kumar Mitra came over from the other side of the street and strode into the tea shop. He was flushed with anger. I hesitated for a moment, but moved to the side of the shop past the saloon and waited on the road.

  ‘Phani da, tumi amaar shaathe erokom korte parona!’

  That was the first time I heard him burst out so loud in Bangla.

  ‘What did I do, Sanju babu?’

  Clad in a white jubba and dhoti, Father sat up in his chair, drawing himself up as if he were on stage. He pretended to be looking for a matchstick to light his cigarette.

  ‘Didn’t you promise that you’d set apart the last three days before the hanging exclusively for our channel? But I just heard that you’ve signed a contract with someone else for the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth?’ Sanjeev Kumar said with barely controlled agitation.

  Father took a long time to light the matchstick.

  ‘I was completely humiliated in front of my boss, Phani da. At the very least you should not have forgotten that I am to be your future son-in-law.’

  ‘Son-in-law!’ Father laughed out loudly. ‘Have you heard of Mir Jafar Ali Khan, Sanju babu? He was the nawab of Bengal? Do you know who betrayed him? His own son-in-law. You should study history, Babu, history.’

  Sanjeev Kumar’s response to that was to fling a searing glance at me. I doubted if he knew that Mir Jafar Ali Khan had ruled Bengal in the time of Grandfather Manohar Dev Mullick. Mir Jafar, who had conspired with Jagat Seth, the richest merchant of those times, and the British to defeat Siraj-ud Daula, had an insatiable appetite for power. When Mir Kasim, his son-in-law, plotted against him and assumed power himself, Mir Jafar allied with the British and, after four years, returned to the throne, defeating Mir Kasim. In return, however, he had to surrender the land completely to the British.

  When Father went inside to change, Sanjeev Kumar turned towards me.

  ‘The old man’s started haggling, hasn’t he?’ The muscles in his face had become taut, tight, I felt that it was his real expression; a cruel one. A smile seemed to cross Kakima’s face as she made the tea. Sanjeev Kumar paid her no attention: ‘Your father knows that this is the time he can quibble, Chetu. You have to stand by me now. I launched this programme to help you. You got this job because
I pushed. You must realize that all the good things you’re enjoying now are because of that . . .’

  As I stared back at him, I remembered the story of Raja Nandakumar, and Thakuma’s warning that one should never receive favours from the high and mighty—for one may have to bear the burden of their evil deeds. No one can ever amass riches and power without cheating someone in some way, she said. All the mighty mansions of wealth and power are built that way. Russomar Dutt, who began as a clerk in Hack and Davis Co. earned a monthly salary of sixteen rupees. When the company’s fortunes plummeted, the bosses promised him ten thousand rupees to forge the accounts. Overnight, he became one of the city’s richest men. A member of the Tagore family let out his building near Esplanade to the employees of the East India Company for eight hundred rupees a month. The Kerr-Tagore Company ventured into shipping, banking and coal mining; Shyam Sunder Sen joined hands with Richard Oakland to start cotton mills. Many Indians who waited worshipfully at the port to receive the Englishmen who came to grow fat on the riches of the Indian people became owners of lakhs and crores of rupees through the benevolence of their masters. And much later, the servants got together to get rid of their masters.

  Inside the car, Sanjeev Kumar Mitra scolded me again and again in fits of agitation.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I richly deserve this . . . all the journalists in this land had warned me, don’t trust them. But I didn’t believe them. I could not, whenever I saw your face . . .’

  ‘I can’t say what decision Baba will take, and when.’

  He glared at me.

  ‘Can’t you wriggle out of the other contract? You are not some ordinary female, remember. You are the symbol of the power and self-respect of Indian womanhood!’