சுஜாதா குறிப்பிட்ட குறும்படம் - ஜார்ஜ் ஆர்வெல்லின் ‘எ ஹேங்கிங்’ ஆக இருக்கலாமோ

விடுப்புதின விடியற்காலையான பத்து பத்தரை வாக்கில் எழுந்து பல்விளக்கி ஹிண்டுவைப் பிரித்துப் புரட்டிக்கொண்டிருக்கையில் ஜார்ஜ் ஆர்வெல்லின் தூக்கு பற்றிய கட்டுரை பார்த்தேன். படிக்கத் தொடங்கினேன். பாதியைத் தாண்டுகையில் பளீர் என ஒரு மின்னல். பல வருட அலைகழிப்பு நிலைக்கு வந்ததில் ஒரு நிம்மதி. அப்போதே இதை எழுதத் துவங்கினேன். ஆனால் சுந்தரின் குரல் என்னை அவருக்காய் இழுக்க அதை எழுதப்போய்விட்டேன். பிறகு முஹமத் பாயின் கடிதம் கொஞ்சம் குற்றவுணர்வில் படுத்திவிட்டது. திரும்ப வில்லுப்பாட்டுக்குப் போய் ஒருவழியாய் சில குறைகளையும் செப்பனிட்டு இதற்கு இப்போதுதான் வர முடிந்தது.

எப்படியோ இன்றைய விடுமுறையும் கதை எழுத முடியாமல் கழிந்ததில் ஒருவித நிறைவு. கதையாக எழுதினால்தான் ஆயிற்றா என்ன?

1982ல் கணையாழியின் முதல் குறுநாவல் போட்டி பரிசளிப்பு விழா முடிந்தபின் லஸ்ஸில் இருக்கும் கோகலே சாஸ்திரி ஹாலிலிருந்து நண்பன் ஷங்கர் ராமனும் நானும் சுஜாதாவுடன் மயிலை வடமொழிக்கல்லூரியின் பின்புறம் இருந்த (அவரது மாமியார் வீடெனச் சொன்ன நினைவு) சிறிய மரக்கதவு வாசல் திறந்திருக்க குட்டிப் படிகள் சுருள்போல் நெட்டுக்குத்தாய் ஏறிசெல்லும் தோற்றம் தெருவிலிருந்து தென்பட்டதை நினைவு சொல்கிறது. சிறிது நேரம் அந்த வாசலிலேயே நின்றும் பேசிக்கொண்டிருந்தோம்.

பள்ளிக்காலத்தில் மிகவும் பிடித்த சுஜாதா, தீவிர இலக்கிய அறிமுகத்திற்குப் பின் பிடிக்கும் பிடிக்காது என்கிற ஒற்றைப் பெயர் பட்டியலில் சேர்ந்துவிட்டார். எனினும் பரிசளித்துப் பெரியவர்கள் குறுநாவலைப் பற்றி விழாவில் சிலாகித்துப் பேசியவர் என்கிற மரியாதை மற்றும் வெகுஜன எழுத்தின் ஆளுமையை அருகில் பார்க்கும் 22 வயதுக் குறுகுறுப்பு.

அந்த நடைப்பேச்சில் சுஜாதா குறிப்பிட்ட சில விஷயங்களில் முக்கியமாய் என்னிடம் தங்கிப்போனது ஒரு குறும்படம் பற்றியது. அதைப்பற்றி டைனோ பாயிடம்கூட (- என்ன பெயர் இது?) ஏதோ ஒரு சாட்டில் குறிப்பிட்ட நினைவு. இன்று காலை ஹிண்டு படிக்கும்வரை அதைக் குறும்படம் என்றே நினைத்து இருந்தேன். சுஜாதா விதந்தோதிக் குறிப்பிட்ட, நானும் ஷங்கர் ராமனும் ஹாவென வாய் பிளந்த விஷயம் இப்பொது குறும்படம் அல்ல கட்டுரையோவெனக் குழப்பமாக இருக்கிறது.

அவர் ஒரு காட்சியை இரண்டு வாக்கியங்களில் விவரித்தார்.

அவ்வளவுதான் அதைக் கேட்டதும் சிலிர்த்துவிட்டேன். அந்தக் காட்சி அப்படியே ஜார்ஜ் ஆர்வெல்லின் இந்தக் கட்டுரையில் வருகிறது. படித்துப் பாருங்கள். அது எந்தக் காட்சி என்பதை படித்து முடித்ததும் நீங்களே கண்டுவிடுவீர்கள். இல்லையெனில் இறுதியில் சொல்கிறேன். அதற்காகக் குறுகுறுப்பில் பதிவின் கடைசி வரியைப் படித்து கட்டுரையின் வாசிப்பு அனுபவத்தைக் கெடுத்துக் கொள்ள வேண்டாம்.

A Hanging

by George Orwell

It was in Burma, a sodden morning of the rains. A sickly light, like yellow tinfoil, was slanting over the high walls into the jail yard. We were waiting outside the condemned cells, a row of sheds fronted with double bars, like small animal cages. Each cell measured about ten feet by ten and was quite bare within except for a plank bed and a pot of drinking water. In some of them brown silent men were squatting at the inner bars, with their blankets draped round them. These were the condemned men, due to be hanged within the next week or two.

One prisoner had been brought out of his cell. He was a Hindu, a puny wisp of a man, with a shaven head and vague liquid eyes. He had a thick, sprouting moustache, absurdly too big for his body, rather like the moustache of a comic man on the films. Six tall Indian warders were guarding him and getting him ready for the gallows. Two of them stood by with rifles and fixed bayonets, while the others handcuffed him, passed a chain through his handcuffs and fixed it to their belts, and lashed his arms tight to his sides. They crowded very close about him, with their hands always on him in a careful, caressing grip, as though all the while feeling him to make sure he was there. It was like men handling a fish which is still alive and may jump back into the water. But he stood quite unresisting, yielding his arms limply to the ropes, as though he hardly noticed what was happening.

Eight o'clock struck and a bugle call, desolately thin in the wet air, floated from the distant barracks. The superintendent of the jail, who was standing apart from the rest of us, moodily prodding the gravel with his stick, raised his head at the sound. He was an army doctor, with a grey toothbrush moustache and a gruff voice. ‘For God's sake hurry up, Francis,' he said irritably. ‘ The man ought to have been dead by this time. Aren't you ready yet?'

Francis, the head jailer, a fat Dravidian in a white drill suit and gold spectacles, waved his black hand. ‘Yes sir, yes sir,' he bubbled. ‘All iss satisfactorily prepared. The hangman iss waiting. We shall proceed.'

‘Well, quick march, then. The prisoners can't get their breakfast till this job's over.'

We set out for the gallows. Two warders marched on either side of the prisoner, with their rifles at the slope; two others marched close against him, gripping him by arm and shoulder, as though at once pushing and supporting him. The rest of us, magistrates and the like, followed behind. Suddenly, when we had gone ten yards, the procession stopped short without any order or warning. A dreadful thing had happened — a dog, come goodness knows whence, had appeared in the yard. It came bounding among us with a loud volley of barks, and leapt round us wagging its whole body, wild with glee at finding so many human beings together. It was a large woolly dog, half Airedale … For a moment it pranced round us, and then, before anyone could stop it, it had made a dash for the prisoner, and jumping up tried to lick his face. Everyone stood aghast, too taken aback even to grab at the dog.

‘Who let that bloody brute in here?' said the superintendent angrily. ‘Catch it, someone!'

A warder, detached from the escort, charged clumsily after the dog, but it danced and gambolled just out of his reach, taking everything as part of the game. A young Eurasian jailer picked up a handful of gravel and tried to stone the dog away, but it dodged the stones and came after us again. Its yaps echoed from the jail wails. The prisoner, in the grasp of the two warders, looked on incuriously, as though this was another formality of the hanging. It was several minutes before someone managed to catch the dog. Then we put my handkerchief through its collar and moved off once more, with the dog still straining and whimpering.

It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back of the prisoner marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with his bound arms, but quite steadily, with that bobbing gait of the Indian who never straightens his knees. At each step his muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet printed themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.

It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working — bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming — all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned — reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone — one mind less, one world less.

The gallows stood in a small yard, separate from the main grounds of the prison, and overgrown with tall prickly weeds. It was a brick erection like three sides of a shed, with planking on top, and above that two beams and a crossbar with the rope dangling. The hangman, a grey-haired convict in the white uniform of the prison, was waiting beside his machine. He greeted us with a servile crouch as we entered. At a word from Francis the two warders, gripping the prisoner more closely than ever, half led, half pushed him to the gallows and helped him clumsily up the ladder. Then the hangman climbed up and fixed the rope round the prisoner's neck.

We stood waiting, five yards away. The warders had formed in a rough circle round the gallows. And then, when the noose was fixed, the prisoner began crying out on his god. It was a high, reiterated cry of ‘Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!', not urgent and fearful like a prayer or a cry for help, but steady, rhythmical, almost like the tolling of a bell. The dog answered the sound with a whine. The hangman, still standing on the gallows, produced a small cotton bag like a flour bag and drew it down over the prisoner's face. But the sound, muffled by the cloth, still persisted, over and over again: ‘Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!'

The hangman climbed down and stood ready, holding the lever. Minutes seemed to pass. The steady, muffled crying from the prisoner went on and on, ‘Ram! Ram! Ram!' never faltering for an instant. The superintendent, his head on his chest, was slowly poking the ground with his stick; perhaps he was counting the cries, allowing the prisoner a fixed number — fifty, perhaps, or a hundred. Everyone had changed colour. The Indians had gone grey like bad coffee, and one or two of the bayonets were wavering. We looked at the lashed, hooded man on the drop, and listened to his cries — each cry another second of life; the same thought was in all our minds: oh, kill him quickly, get it over, stop that abominable noise!

Suddenly the superintendent made up his mind. Throwing up his head he made a swift motion with his stick. ‘Chalo!' he shouted almost fiercely.

There was a clanking noise, and then dead silence. The prisoner had vanished, and the rope was twisting on itself. I let go of the dog, and it galloped immediately to the back of the gallows; but when it got there it stopped short, barked, and then retreated into a corner of the yard, where it stood among the weeds, looking timorously out at us. We went round the gallows to inspect the prisoner's body. He was dangling with his toes pointed straight downwards, very slowly revolving, as dead as a stone.

The superintendent reached out with his stick and poked the bare body; it oscillated, slightly. ‘He's all right,' said the superintendent. He backed out from under the gallows, and blew out a deep breath. The moody look had gone out of his face quite suddenly. He glanced at his wrist-watch. ‘Eight minutes past eight. Well, that's all for this morning, thank God.'

The warders unfixed bayonets and marched away. The dog, sobered and conscious of having misbehaved itself, slipped after them. We walked out of the gallows yard, past the condemned cells with their waiting prisoners, into the big central yard of the prison. The convicts, under the command of warders armed with lathis, were already receiving their breakfast. They squatted in long rows, each man holding a tin pannikin, while two warders with buckets marched round ladling out rice; it seemed quite a homely, jolly scene, after the hanging. An enormous relief had come upon us now that the job was done. One felt an impulse to sing, to break into a run, to snigger. All at once everyone began chattering gaily.

The Eurasian boy walking beside me nodded towards the way we had come, with a knowing smile: ‘Do you know, sir, our friend (he meant the dead man), when he heard his appeal had been dismissed, he pissed on the floor of his cell. From fright. — Kindly take one of my cigarettes, sir. Do you not admire my new silver case, sir? From the boxwallah, two rupees eight annas. Classy European style.'

Several people laughed — at what, nobody seemed certain.

Francis was walking by the superintendent, talking garrulously. ‘Well, sir, all hass passed off with the utmost satisfactoriness. It wass all finished — flick! like that. It iss not always so — oah, no! I have known cases where the doctor wass obliged to go beneath the gallows and pull the prisoner's legs to ensure decease. Most disagreeable!'

‘Wriggling about, eh? That's bad,' said the superintendent.

‘Ach, sir, it iss worse when they become refractory! One man, I recall, clung to the bars of hiss cage when we went to take him out. You will scarcely credit, sir, that it took six warders to dislodge him, three pulling at each leg. We reasoned with him. “My dear fellow,” we said, “think of all the pain and trouble you are causing to us!” But no, he would not listen! Ach, he wass very troublesome!'

I found that I was laughing quite loudly. Everyone was laughing. Even the superintendent grinned in a tolerant way. ‘You'd better all come out and have a drink,' he said quite genially. ‘I've got a bottle of whisky in the car. We could do with it.'

We went through the big double gates of the prison, into the road. ‘ Pulling at his legs!' exclaimed a Burmese magistrate suddenly, and burst into a loud chuckling. We all began laughing again. At that moment Francis's anecdote seemed extraordinarily funny. We all had a drink together, native and European alike, quite amicably. The dead man was a hundred yards away.

"A Hanging" by George Orwell was first published in Adelphi, August 1931. 

சுஜாதா குறிப்பிட்ட காட்சி:

கைகால்களில் விலங்கிடப்பட்ட ஒரு மனிதன் தூக்கு மேடைக்கு அழைத்துச் செல்லப்படுகிறான். வழியில் மழைபெய்து கொஞ்சம் நீர் தேங்கி நிற்கிறது. அதை மிதித்துவிடாமல் அவன் கொஞ்சம் சுற்றிக்கொண்டு செல்கிறான்.

பி.கு: இயன்றவர்கள் இதைத் தமிழில் மொழிபெயர்க்கலாமே. என் போன்ற பெரும்பாலோருக்கு உதவியாய் இருக்கும். ஆயிரம்தான் சொன்னாலும் தமிழில் படிப்பது தமிழில் படிப்பதுதான்.