BackK.R. Meera | The thing around her neck
A contemporary masterpiece that imagines a young woman fulfilling an unprecedented roleand the price she must pay for it
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“I wanted to shatter the reader, that’s why I wrote Hangwoman," says K.R. Meera, one of the most powerful voices in contemporary Malayalam writing, referring to her novel Aarachar (2013), recently translated into English by J. Devika. Published last year by DC Books in Malayalam, it has been a best-seller, exhausting several print runs and selling over 11,000 copies so far—a remarkable achievement for a literary fiction title that not only deals with an unusual subject but also runs for close to 500 pages.
But Meera, petite and unassuming in a sari, is sincerely modest about her work. “My first love remains journalism," she says with a spark in her eyes, “I envy you! I miss the excitement of the newsroom." Born in 1970 in Kerala, Meera was the first woman to join the newsroom of the prestigious, more than a century old publication, Malayala Manorama, where she worked on several memorable assignments.
“It was my husband who suggested I should take up full-time writing after reading my stories and poems," she says, almost with a tinge of regret. So many reporters in your place would consider themselves lucky, I tell her. More crucially perhaps, a modern masterpiece like Hangwoman may not have happened without the uninterrupted time Meera had to travel, research and write it.
Chetna’s father, Phanibhushan Grddha Mullick, a veteran of 451 hangings, is 88 years old, and in need of an assistant. Chetna’s brother, Ramdev, has been left in a vegetative state after his limbs were hacked off by the father of one of Phani’s victims seeking vendetta. Phani’s brother, a former political activist scarred by the government’s crackdown during the Emergency, lacks the will or strength to carry out the severe task. Therefore, the responsibility of helping her father implement the state’s order falls on Chetna, who is turned into an instant media sensation and a “symbol of Indian womanhood and self-respect". The epithet is a mockery of the reality, in which she is merely a pawn in the hands of her oppressive father and a mercenary lover, a television journalist called Sanjeev Kumar Mitra.
“I wanted Chetna to not only hang the perpetrator of a heinous crime but also male arrogance in general," says Meera. “This novel taught me that to write well I would myself have to hang the respectable, social being in me."
Even in her earlier stories, a handful of which were published as Yellow Is The Colour Of Longing (2011), Meera was unabashedly honest, exploring everything from “sex-rackets" to desire between a couple diagnosed with jaundice, and women’s suffering. Pithy, graphic, and honed by bleak humour, these Kafkaesque vignettes are not for the faint-hearted.
Aarachar, which abjures the feminine noun that the English title so emphatically evokes, is by far her most ambitious work, no less than a mini-epic. Generically, it may be best described as hydra-headed: historical novel, fantasy fiction, philosophical treatise, feminist thought, and psychological thriller are all rolled into its ambitious structure.
Set in the city of Kolkata, near the crematorium at Nimtala Ghat flanking Strand Road, it has been described as a Bengali novel by a Malayali—with good reason too.
Few Bengali writers have been able to conjure up the intimate realities of the locale with as much acuity as Meera does in Hangwoman. Her story reeks of the squalor and refuse of life and death associated with the area. A stone’s throw away from where Chetna lives is Sonagachi, one of the city’s most ancient red-light areas. There, too, the smell of burning flesh, wafting in from the ghats, dissolves into the heady fragrance of wilting jasmine. The voices of historical figures like Nati Binodini, Girish Chandra Ghosh, members of the Thakur family (the Tagores of Jorasanko), and 19th century Bengali aristocracy mingle with the cacophony of 21st century Kolkata, the shrill chatter of television channels, and the noise of buses spewing poison fumes.
In Hangwoman, life and death, desire and disgust, bloodlust and just retribution are balanced precariously—these binaries often become conflated and get woven into a tapestry of primal horror. Glib with stories of hangings going back thousands of years, the Grddha Mullicks have a macabre sense of pride, inflated by their gift for killing with perfection. From the length of the rope, to its texture, to the placement of the knot on the right vertebrae of the neck, they fuss endlessly over minute details with scientific precision.
Although the women in the family have never been formally appointed by the state as executioners, they have had their fair share of notoriety—one of them strangled each of her infants with their umbilical cords. Inevitably, Chetna, the inheritor of this line, is born tying a noose with the cord in her mother’s womb, a talent that sees a horrific fruition in a game she plays as a child with a friend from the neighbourhood, and later becomes her weapon of self-defence against men greedy for her flesh.
Chetna’s Thakuma, her grandmother, is over a hundred years old—unsparing in her cruelty and kindness, like the Furies of Greek mythology. In a heart-rending scene, Chetna accompanies her Thakuma to the body of a young boy, dying of malnutrition, already infested with fleas and maggots. While Chetna struggles to harness her revulsion, her Thakuma remains unshaken as she feeds the wasted frame the dregs of starch. Chetna’s mother, in contrast, appears more fragile and tormented by her father—though she, too, reveals a steely interior when a terrible secret regarding her sister-in-law comes out in the open.
“I had been searching for an inspiring and appropriate context to write a novel exploring the status of women in our country," says Meera, “when I happened to watch Joshy Joseph’s documentary One Day From A Hangman’s Life." A biopic based on the life of the late Nata Mullick, one of the last official executioners in India, it outlines the major debates around capital punishment that Meera tries to present in her novel as well.
Nata Mullick shot into the limelight in 2004, when he hanged Dhananjoy Chatterjee, accused of raping and killing a teenager in Kolkata, and became the focus of global media’s attention for a while. Like Phani in Meera’s novel, Nata too tried to use the occasion to make a different kind of killing—by selling off each strand of the noose (supposed to bring good luck) for ₹ 2,000, for instance.
In Meera’s depiction, Phani’s greed is put in context by the unspeakable poverty in which he has to live. While being an incisive critique of the barbarism of the death penalty, Hangwoman does more than explore the morality of the act: It gives us, instead, a glimpse into the inner lives of those who have been deputed to execute it through generations. Stories dating back to the Pala and Gupta periods, written by historians or preserved through oral traditions, are juxtaposed with real, imagined and apocryphal events. The result is a vast and riveting sweep of time, locked into the gritty interstices of the contemporary—a pastiche made of fact and fiction, news bulletins and nightmares.
Meera goes a step further by imagining a woman in the role of “hangman".
“Forgive me, I am but an instrument" is a sentiment that keeps echoing through the novel, spoken by the Grddha Mullicks to justify their work to those who question it. In Chetna’s mouth, though, the sentence takes on a sinister edge—for she is not only “an instrument" of the state but also that of her abusive father’s whims and of her lover’s self-serving interests.
If Phani wants to capitalize on Chetna’s sudden public prominence by getting as much money as he can for her media appearances, Sanjeev wants to own her exclusively for the advancement of his own career. Before he is led to the gallows, Jatindranath’s last wish is to meet Chetna—a hauntingly tender encounter—and put to her a bizarre request. All the men in Chetna’s life, with the exception of her employer Mano-da, want to co-opt her into their selfish schemes; she feels the tightening of an invisible noose of male domination around her neck even as she fashions one for the man who will die by her hand.
“A typical Indian man is the same everywhere," says Meera. “He might seem refined but his mindset is the same." Her interest in the psyche of this special creature was spurred by her stint as a journalist, when she worked on some compelling stories. “One of them was on women’s safety, for which I sent out six reporters to different parts of Kerala and asked them to record their experiences at the same time on a particular day in various public places," she says. From street corners, cinema halls, parks and railway stations, the women came back with experiences of violation—of being stared at, harassed, intimidated and abused.
“Compared to the north, there may be much less direct violence in the south, where women’s literacy is more widespread, but the level of emotional aggression in the south is probably higher," says Meera.
Even though Hangwoman abounds with moments of brutality, the most harrowing sections in it deal with the torment that the protagonist suffers in her soul. “It is her quest for justice—not what the courts dispense, but in her daily life—that makes Chetna do what she does at the end of the novel," says Meera. “I can suffer without food and water, but I can’t live without justice."
Also Read : Excerpt | Hangwoman
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