Reviewed by Aneeqa Mazhar Wattoo

TWENTY-TWO year old Chetna Grddha Mullick lives with her family in a crumbling house on Strand Road in downtown Calcutta, a road frequented by funeral corteges due to its proximity to the local crematorium.

The house is tiny and cramped. One of its three rooms is used as a tea shop by which the family supports itself selling tea to people from passing funeral processions. Chetna’s father, Grddha Mullick, an 88-year-old former hangman, “has sent off 451 people.” He was, however, not the first member of his family to do this job. The Mullick family has been in the hanging profession since before “Bharat became Bharat.”

Now, unemployed, Grddha Mullick drinks excessively and squanders most of the family’s hard-earned money at Sonagachi, the red light area nearby. As the frequency of hangings in India declined over the years, so did the family’s income.

But things change when Jatindranath Banerjee, a man convicted of murder, is sentenced to death. When Grddha Mullick’s demand for “a government job for his daughter” in exchange for his performance of the execution is refused by the government, the increasingly powerful media persuades him to hand over the job to his daughter. In what is a shocking decision for his family and the country, Grddha Mullick agrees, and Chetna becomes the focus of national attention as she is appointed India’s first-ever “hangwoman,” touted as “the symbol of women’s strength and self-respect for India and the whole world.”

This is the premise of K.R. Meera’s novel Hangwoman, translated from Malayalam. Chetna, we find out, has been adept at fashioning the noose used for hanging from before her birth. Her grandmother recounts how, as a foetus in her mother’s womb, she tied a perfect noose from the umbilical cord around her own neck. While it is the men in the family who have historically performed the hangings, the women in Chetna’s family are used to “obsessively mak[ing] and unmak[ing] nooses as they talk, whether with their sari or a dupatta.” It is unsurprising, therefore, that Chetna takes up, with chilling ease, her ancestral legacy; the art of tying the hangman’s noose; its precise shape and unwavering perfection; its exact, unchangeable method, practiced and perfected over ages. Yet, despite this unconscious absorption of the family profession throughout her childhood, privately Chetna feels the enormous weight of her work. Meera describes, with the starkness and simple force typical of her prose, Chetna’s thoughts: “If I hanged Jatindranath, the weight of his body would dangle forever from my fingers.”

And as if the emotional impact of her new profession was not enough, in the midst of this experience, Chetna falls in love for the first time. The object of her love, Sanjeev Kumar Mitra, is one of the journalists who constantly hound her in the days after her appointment. She feels love, we are told, like “a noose tightening around the neck, between the third and the fourth vertebrae.” That love, too, is related in the novel, in the language of death is emblematic of the originality and beauty of Meera’s prose. The consistent use of this image through the novel to describe their relationship renders a foreboding, even a macabre association with what should have been a comforting development in Chetna’s otherwise turbulent life. But the relationship is mercurial at best; Chetna’s feelings about Sanjeev vacillate between extremes — fear and hatred at one side and the ambivalence of a subdued but struggling impulse for love at the other.

Sanjeev, for his part, appears to be a quintessentially ambitious journalist; prying, diligent, unendingly motivated — one of the several characters in the novel who profit from the misfortunes of others. In an unforgettable scene, Sanjeev stands beaming before Chetna’s crippled and armless brother, Ramu Da, snapping pictures as Ramu shuts his eyes tightly, the only act of resistance he can muster in his disabled state.

This scene is just one of the various deeply discomforting moments in the novel that make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to locate and place blame in the world of this novel. Time and again, the reader feels compelled to ask: who are the real victims in this novel? Are they the criminals or the Mullicks who have hanged them for generations? Is it Sanjeev Mitra, the fatherless son of a prostitute who becomes rich as he capitalises on yet another person’s affliction, or the viewers of television who morbidly flock to watch Chetna speaking about how she will tie the noose around the convict’s neck?

Intense poverty is rampant in the world Meera depicts. The murderer Chetna is set to hang has a wife and children who have been pushed to destitution in his absence. The novel often compels the reader to see, in its utter baseness and despair, the human experience of such poverty. Yet, at its core, amidst the atmosphere of deprivation and despair, Hangwoman is predominantly Chetna’s story; the story of her growth into adulthood and into a deeper awareness of her own self-hood; of her venture into the previously unknown territory of love and her slow and gradual navigation of its sometimes gratifying and sometimes cruel geography. It is also the story of her transformation from a quiet, timid, 22-year-old to a professional hangwoman capable of taking a human being’s life. That her ‘coming of age’ happens at the expense of another’s life is a disturbing and intriguing paradox — one of the various such paradoxes that run through the neglected, poverty-stricken world of Nimtala, Calcutta.

There are few novels that make the reviewer fear her job. This is one of them. The greatness of the novel engenders the impossibility of categorising its sprawling achievements. There are abstract tendencies that permeate it that are difficult to name. A celebratory impulse, for example, is felt by the reader as the novel ends. But what exactly is this a celebration of? Certainly, that of the human spirit, of one person’s will against that of a society. But also, of loss. And the acknowledgement that inherent in this celebration is a colossal degree of grief. A grief that, like the hangman’s profession, has deep roots; roots that date back “420 years before Christ,” as claimed by the Mullick family.

Achievements such as these make one realise that some of the greatest novels we read invoke in us a basic instinct of recognition; a sense that something indefinably valuable has been identified again. They make the reader search in the halls of her memory for a character, a verse, a moment that is redolent of this new one. In the final, terrifying and simultaneously liberating moment Chetna feels “something stir in [her] blood and emerge into the open, shooting out through [her] flesh.” It reminds me of the sentiment captured in these timeless verses by Rainer Maria Rilke in his poem, ‘The Archaic Torso of Apollo’: “for here there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life.”

Hangwoman: Everyone Loves a Good Hanging

(NOVEL)

By K.R. Meera

Penguin Books, India

ISBN 978-0670086542

448pp.