by Tabish Khair
To begin with, it was one of the things Mustapha Chacha preached to us: the need to reconcile truth and credibility in our lives. Perhaps preach is not the right word. He did not really preach; he would be pulling the strings of his kite as he spoke, manoeuvring it with practised ease along the invisible tunnels that the wind always makes in the sky.
Mustapha Chacha — I have mentioned his name to you before, and you have not raised an eyebrow at its difference from the names you are used to. You are the first and only person in London who has not accosted me with the first two questions of the catechism, one uttered — What is your name? — and the second — Who gave you that name? — in their expression when I speak my full name: Syed Mohammed Amir Ali.
I owe my knowledge of the catechism to Mustapha Chacha. He had prepared me thoroughly for the future, just as he had prepared himself. And he was convinced that, for better or for worse, the Firang were part of the future of Hindustan. Look at us, he would tell me as he tugged at the kite strings, for generations our family has held on to our ancestral lands by the simple expedient of passing it on to the eldest son, in lieu of some financial compensation at times, while the other sons, if any, sought service with the ruling powers. In the past, these were the Mughals, the Nawab of Awadh and others, and our family shed much blood and sweat in their service, as soldiers or clerks. But your father, God give him peace, who was he serving when he was killed? Who, indeed, but the Firang Company Bahadur forces? And your father, God bless him, was a prescient man: he knew the sun now rose from the west. So, my little nephew, the lamp of our family, if you want to face the future, look west into the rising sun.
Little good it did him though, this facing of a new future, the diligence with which he, in his youth, worked as a munshi before the death of his father called him back to the land, and the way in which he set himself to learn the customs and language of the Firangs. But that, jaanam, explains why I can speak fluently with you, far more fluently than Kaptaan Meadows suspects, while you do not understand a word of any of my languages.
Come to think of it, you cannot even read your own alphabets (which I can decipher with some effort), let alone this cursive Farsi script in which I write my letters to you, letters which I might some day translate for you, letters that remind me of all that I have left behind. For, jaanam, I do not know who I write these letters for, if not for you to whom they are addressed Perhaps no one will read out these fetters to you; perhaps no one will read them at all.
And yet I am driven to write them, stealing a candle-end from the Kaptaan’s kitchen under the eagle-eye of Nelly Clennam, the housekeeper and cook, who dislikes me more and more each passing day as familiarity dulls her initial terror of my past. Scribbling away in the murk of the scullery, I wish, perhaps, to leave an account of myself in words other than the ones Kaptaan Meadows uses in his notebook, the carefully inscribed pages that he intends to turn into a book about the infamous institution of thugee and my fledgling career in what he calls ‘ritual murder.’
Because, my dear, I was not, I am not what the Kaptaan wants me to be — I am not Amir Ali, the Thug.
6
If graveyards are places of absolute repose, then this place is not absolutely a graveyard. For late as it is and foggy, shadows move from gravestone to gravestone, from a marble angel, wings fixed in flight, to a plain sandstone crucifix, from a grave with elaborate lines and floral tributes to one with only a name and a date. There are far more graves like this one than graves with floral tributes and fine lines for, like the streets outside, this is a crowded graveyard, a busy graveyard, and often an anonymous graveyard. It is a graveyard that spills its secrets, so that a heavy downpour leaves a harvest of bones and skulls in the sludge, and gravediggers sometimes shovel through a rotten coffin in a bid to find an eternal resting place for the freshly dead.
The shadows pause in front of this plain, taciturn gravestone, this resting place with only a name and a date. There are two shadows; one of them carries a lantern which, at certain angles, multiplies the two into a hundred stealthy shades. And then there is a fierce whispering between the two, louder in the crowded emptiness of the graveyard than it would have been on the streets outside.
‘Are you sure?’
‘This is it, John May, I tell you. Here. Here. Look, the earth is still fresh...’
‘Damn you, Shields. If you have got it wrong again, I swear I will bury you in this grave.’
‘Run down by the mail, he was. Cross my heart, John May. Bowled over like ninepins. Carted over from Portugal Street and buried only this afternoon...’
It is believed in this neighbourhood that the unquiet dead walk at night in the graveyard, for the ground here is too cluttered, dug and disturbed to ensure eternal rest. But the dead do not shiver, as these two shadows do at times, when a gust cuts through the still night. Moreover, the hooded lantern that one of them carries hints at the need the living have for light. The heavy burlap bag the other one unburdens tinkles with metallic sounds that attest to the hunger the living have for all — iron in the hands, iron in the heart — that is in excess of the frail mortality of flesh. Slowly, warily, the two shadows take out the instruments of the trade they will practise tonight: a spade, a pickaxe, an iron bar, ropes, a small saw, some sacks. Taking turns, they start digging up the earth on the fresh pauper’s grave.
It takes time, but they work doggedly, skilfully. They are careful, because even though the watchman has drunk himself to sleep in a neighbouring pub, only a few yards and the darkness and fog separate the graveyard from the backs of the houses on Clement’s Lane. They are poor houses, falling to pieces, slimy and stinking, and they are inhabited by poor people, falling to pieces, but both the shadows know that it is such people — not the wholesome rich — who are likely to charge to the rescue of one of their like, finally fallen to pieces, being dug out of eternal rest by body-snatchers, resurrectionists, lifters, grabs. So they dig carefully, only occasionally stopping to exchange labours and to curse: Why did they plant the devil so deep?... Damn the body bugs, do they have to be out even at night?... Lord, it stinks!
Finally, they reach the coffin, a flimsy affair, easily wrenched open with the iron bar. One of them — the one who is often cursed and does not curse back in reply — jumps into the grave and passes the rope around the corpse. Then he climbs back up and helps his accomplice haul the body out.
His accomplice is not impressed with the corpse. He drops the rope as if it has singed his hands. ‘Damn it’, he says. ‘Damn you.’
‘But John May’, the other replies, ‘it is a well-preserved Thing. Look. Look at the arms.’ He bends down and wrenches open the jaws of the dead man with his thick, stubby fingers. ‘Look’, he adds, ‘a perfect set of grinders. Those teeth alone will fetch two guineas.’
‘Who cares for grinders, you fool? It is the skull that matters.’
‘And what is wrong with it, John May, if I may ask? I have not seen a better skull in my life. Even the hair is clean and unmatted. Will fetch at least...’
John May curses under his breath. ‘It will have to do’, he says finally. ‘You take the body — I will expect five guineas as my share, mind you, at least five — and I will take the head.’
‘I get to keep all I get over five? Everything over? Your word on it, John May?’ Shields rubs his hands, perhaps to keep them warm, or perhaps he is gloating in anticipation of the money that will come his way once the Thing is sold to any one of London’s medical schools or seventeen private anatomy schools.
‘Yes, damn you. Get on with the saw. Don’t stand yapping till dawn; it is getting colder.’
And so, in that empty crowded graveyard, shrouded in fog, smelling of decay, a muffled grating sound is heard as the head of the corpse is separated from its body. Then Shields, a short, powerful man, bundles the body into a sack and carries it out to a waiting cart. John May carries the head in a smaller bag, still cursing the dead man for having such a smooth, normal skull. Will have t
o do though, he mutters. M’lord will be upset, but something is better than nothing. Then John May sees the possibility of humour in the sentence and reformulates it, emitting the choked grunt that passes for a laugh with him: A Thing is better than nothing.
Soon the sun will be out and the shadows will disperse. Soon someone will discover the open grave and the missing body. Soon a pen-pusher such as Daniel Oates will come to describe the scene for his broadsheet, an artist will sketch the gaping hole for some one-dime pamphlet. Soon the marketplace will buzz with the news and the drawing rooms thrill with the knowledge of the crime. For a few hours at least, the dead man will be missed more than he ever was in his lifetime.
7
Things change, and do not. I recall, around the time I discovered the notes of Amir Ali, reading my first report — or the first one that I fully understood and hence recall — of a riot between Hindus and Muslims. The news report, as was the custom, did not use descriptions like‘Hindu’ or ‘Muslim’; instead, it employed the supposedly safer euphemism of ‘one community’ and another community’ when describing the bodies discovered in charred houses, the amputated limbs recovered from railway tracks. The writer, surely with the best of intentions, tried to clean the bones of the atrocity of flesh and skin and gore, of the passions and anger and bitterness which hung from it like a rat in the claws of a crow. But it was to no avail. My Hindu classmates were convinced that the victims of the riot were Hindus; my Muslim classmates as convinced that the victims were all, and only, Muslims.
No, it is not easy to clean the bone of all that accretes to it: skin, flesh, tissue. Bone is as stubborn and possessive as books in a private, shuttered, small-town library. But John May has a system. In his home on the fringes of East London, he has worked out a scientific routine that he follows every time with characteristic diligence: after locking the door on his children and his wife, he first scalps the head, taking the hair off as cleanly as any mythical Red Indian on the warpath. Because the hair, if undamaged and lush enough, can be sold separately. Nothing goes to waste if one is prudent, and John May is a careful, prudent man. There is no nonsense about him.
There is no nonsense about him now as he unlatches the broken gate leading to the small barren plot in front of his two-bedroom house in an alley of East London that does not yet have a fixed name. All the houses here are alike: a kitchen attached to a closet — like scullery and a drawing-dining room on the ground floor, and two rooms, one hardly bigger than a cupboard, upstairs. Outside, in the backyard, there is a shed that functions as a toilet. Behind the backyard, there are a few more houses: this is where East London starts petering out into expanses of miasma and sickness, into bare fields and marshes.
John May can hear his family — wife and three children — in the drawing-dining room. His wife must be laying the plates for dinner. She knows her husband’s routine and respects it. She is a good woman, though somewhat inclined to melancholia.
John May walks purposefully across to the small kitchen. There is a broth bubbling on the stove. But the kitchen smells less of food and more of formaldehyde. When John May opens the locked door to the scullery, the smell of formaldehyde and sulphate grows stronger. John May lights a couple of candles and takes them to the scullery. He closes the door behind him. He closes it with a loud enough bang to intimate to his wife that he is working. She will have to delay dinner. No one interrupts John May in the scullery. No one but John May enters the scullery. And no one eats in the family until John May sits at the head of the table.
Inside the scullery, John May looks at the head: it still lies on the dark-stained wooden shelf where he had deposited it last night. This will take time. He cannot do much now. Death needs time to ripen into art. All he can do is strip off the rotting skin and flesh, make two holes in the skull where the eyes used to be, and start to empty the contents with a selective use of acids and chemicals, knife and scalpel. Later, when the skull has been cleaned and emptied, he will have to let it soak in an aqueous chemical solution for some time, before drying and treating it.
In his many professions since the day when, at the age of fifteen, he ran away from a violent and mostly unemployed father and an alcoholic mother in Liverpool, John May has tried his hands at various skills. True, they have been mostly in a rather unspecified capacity. He has been an errand boy rather than the waiter; he has been the butcher’s help rather than a butcher; he has been a lawyer’s clerk rather than a lawyer. Sometimes John May is amazed at his success: in less than thirty years, he has not only a family but a house, and some money saved up. What is more, he can read and write.
He remembers his various professions and jobs (at least from the time he turned eighteen and became aware of his own thoughts; became a man, as he puts it) in terms of what he had when he went into it and what he had when he left it. As a rule, he has come out of each profession a richer man. He is a self-made man, that he is, and he takes no nonsense. Well, most of the time. There were a few occasions when a profession seemed to be a complete waste. For example, when at the age of twenty-one, he worked for a taxidermist in Leeds. It paid little, and left him with a smell in his nostrils that deprived him of sleep for days. When he gave up the position after two years and left for London, where he was finally headed, thank heavens, he could only think of the experience as a dead loss, a complete write-off in the narrow account book of life. For he had not even saved money in that position; he would have had nothing to show for those two years if he had not made off with some of the taxidermist’s recent work. And yet now, years later, even that experience was coming in useful.
As John May slowly peels and slices the rotting skin off the skull, he wonders if M’lord would have continued to employ him without the skills he had picked up at the taxidermist’s. For John May, while he can do nothing but admire someone in M’lord’s position, is not blind to the fact that M’lord is unlikely to prepare his phrenological specimens himself. And there are few who can do it as well and as quickly as John May.
For, thinks John May, slicing and drilling away, preparing a skull as a phrenological specimen is much simpler than stuffing an animal. Take the skin, for instance. With an animal, the skin has to be taken off carefully, with minimum incisions. After all, it has to be put back on a stuffed animal, and show as few flaws as possible. But here, well, here you can hack it off as you wish, as long as the skull is not damaged. And once the brain has been dissolved and emptied, you can colour the skull exactly the right ‘natural’ shade. This too, John May learned from that miserly, brutish old taxidermist in Leeds, for stuffed animals need to look natural: marble eyes, hide paint, fin and fishtail colours... He had his version of skull paint, and that was his secret, for it enabled him to prepare the skulls for exhibit more quickly than nature would permit. But now, John May is done for the evening. The acid will need time to work. He needs to wash his hands and join his hungry family for dinner. There is a time for everything, and this skull will have to await John May’s procedures the following morning. He walks into the kitchen and locks the scullery door behind him. His wife and children get nightmares if they see a skull. John May considers this a sign of weakness and is faintly disappointed, not in his wife and daughter (for they are women), but in his two sons. He does not believe in such things as ghosts: he is a no-nonsense man, a self-made man.
Outside, the wind picks up; it fumbles with the chimney cowls, spins the weathercocks, bangs loose shutters all over East London.
8
[WILLIAM T. MEADOWS, NOTES ON A THUG: CHARACTER AND CIRCUMSTANCES, 1840]
‘Bhowanee is a many-armed goddess, sahib. A mischievous devil to you, for you are favoured by your God of Reason, who enables you to read men like books. But to us — to me too, before you shed on me some of the illumination of your greater God — she is the mother of the world, protectress and patroness of our order. All this you know, Kaptaan Sahib, for I have already narrated the tale of my order to you. I will not tarry here, nor repeat myself, but pr
oceed with my own story, the story of how I became a Thug.
‘When I was about twelve or thirteen, my father came up to me and my mother and said, it is time. At this, my mother looked both sad and proud. I knew my father went out for “trade” with his friends, sometimes for months on end. And I understood that this time, I would be taken along, like my older cousins were when they approached adulthood. Imagine, sahib, the pride in my ignorant young heart, which swelled at the thought of being accepted as a man amongst men.
‘The next morning — it was in early February — my father and two other jemadaars, who led the gangs of Thugs, assembled with lesser members in the village maidan. All three gangs — for I learnt that my father was a jemadaar too — were to depart in different directions, but before that the ceremonies of initiation and embarkation had to be performed.
‘Of the two, the former was simpler and closer to what I was accustomed. Verses were read out from the Holy Quran and then a Hindu pundit applied vermillion from the plate of offerings to Goddess Bhowanee to my forehead. A bit of consecrated molasses was brought from the temple of the Goddess and placed on my tongue. I swallowed its brown sweetness amid much murmuring of approval and invocation of deities, Muslim and Hindu.
‘I was now a member of the gang, though I did not yet know the purpose of my initiation. Then my father carried the consecrated kudalee-pickaxe to the field and walked the entire length, holding a lota brimming with water, suspended from his mouth by a string. Whether the water spilled or did not spill was an augury of the success of our enterprise; every jemadaar performed this ritual before embarking on an expedition. Were the lota to fall, it was said, nothing would avert the death of the jemadaar in that year, or at the furthest in the year following, and the expedition would be doomed to great losses. But, sahib, I never saw a lota fall — and yet I saw so many deaths, such huge losses in my years as a Thug.
