The Thing about Thugs

by Tabish Khair

  ‘It is a practice among Thugs not to take from their victims anything that is alive, be it a child or a pet, if it cannot be sold immediately. If we do not kill all that is alive, we abandon it, taking only coins and jewellery and such items. It is true, sahib, that Thugs take horses and such beasts to sell, but we are careful even with horses of pedigree, because they can be easily identified. This time, however, Habibullah, my father’s main chela, took a fancy to a parrot that belonged to the murdered holy man. It could recite entire surahs from the Quran. My father tried to talk him out of it, but Habibullah, as you know, sahib, was a proud man and not willing to listen. He kept the parrot in its cage, and that proved to be my father’s undoing.

  ‘For, in the bazaars of Jehanabad the very next day, the parrot was identified as belonging to the head maulavi of the Nawab of Saleempur, and my father and two of his companions were arrested by the nawab’s men. How could it have been otherwise? Are there many parrots who repeat, in the tone of an old man, the surahs of the Quran? The rest of us, even Habibullah, managed to melt into the crowd, but sahib, you can imagine my sorrow and terror as I beheld, hidden in the crowd, my father being marched away in manacles to imprisonment and death. Then, sahib, I again had doubts about my profession, and it was a bad time for such doubts.

  ‘For now Habibullah was in charge, and he made it clear that he expected me to throttle the first victim we met after leaving Patna. He had long been angry at my father for not forcing me into the real business of our profession, and he proclaimed, with no thought of remorse for what had befallen me, that the rules of Thugee demanded that I be fully inducted into the order by offering a life to Bhowanee as sacrifice.’ ‘Strange are the hearts of men, Amir Ali’, said I, ‘and perchance they grow stranger in a land of so many hidden rites and superstitions as the ancient country of Hindoostan.’

  17

  Jaanam,

  How strange this place is, this London of yours.

  Now that my account to Kaptaan Meadows is drawing to a close, he does not call me to his library for days. This leaves me with a lot of free time, for the servants in the kitchen, unlike you, have never taken to me. I am never allowed into the kitchen if they can help it; my place is in the scullery. And they look positively relieved when I leave the house for a ramble in the city.

  They are strangely alike, these houses of polite society and, as a much exhibited thug, I have been taken to quite a few. More than you, I suspect, my love, for you once told me that Kaptaan Meadows’ house is the grandest home you have ever worked in, while I, I must confess, have been taken by the Kaptaan to much grander houses. They are all segregated in the same way: drawing room, parlour, dining room, morning room, kitchen, pantry, scullery... And it is in the bare scullery, on its hard, damp floor, that there is space for the likes of us: the thug from nowhere, the charwoman from somewhere. The better servants sleep in the kitchen or pantry, don’t they? Or, in some cases, they have rooms in the attic. Though you, of course, seldom sleep in any of the houses — despite, I hear, occasional invitations by the men, master or servants. You mostly return to your aunt who lives in the rookery, which even the Kaptaan’s servants seem to dread. You are wise not to tell them that you sleep there. You took me there a few times, though I do not think I would be able to find it again, so circuitous and crowded were the routes and side alleys by which you led me. And yet, I knew by the smell that the place was nothing but an opium den even before I entered, though you insist on calling it an ‘eating place.’

  Opium is something I am sensitive to; for me, it is not an addiction, but a medicine. Perhaps in one of these letters I will tell you how I came to cultivate the habit, though what I take is the dry akbari opium which has been eaten as a medicine and relaxant in India for ages, not the kind that your countrymen smoke. And not only in the opium dens, jaanam; you would be surprised by how often the sweet smell of opium has assailed me in the houses of society.

  But this city of yours, jaanam, that is what I want to write about. Like these polite houses, your city is deeply segregated, much more than any city I saw in my land. I have been walking in your city regularly, and I have also discovered its drawing rooms and kitchens. Behind each drawing room, a scullery, a lavatory, or worse. Behind Westminster, the Devil’s Acre, through which they are now ploughing a new road, for what better way is there to remove a populace or open up a land than to force new routes through it? Perhaps, jaanam, the trains that have started running to this city, and the new roads being built or projected by royal commissions are meant simply to substitute places like your aunt’s den and Qui Hy’s dhaba with something safer and nicer.

  Qui Hy’s dhaba, now, that is a place Kaptaan Meadows and even his household servants have never heard of: it is in one of the mouldering quarters of the Mint. When I was first taken to it by January Monday — who is a West Indian, jaanam, not an Indian as you told me — I thought it would be run by a Chinese man. It was a strange house, narrower than the other houses on that street, though those were no broader than a dozen paces themselves, and the front door did not open into a lobby. It opened directly into a room, which must have been a shop in the past.

  I entered, expecting to be accosted by an old, whiskered Chinaman. But the place turned out to be run by an ayah, who is known as Qui Hy, or Koi Hai, which was the call she responded to in the family that brought her over to London almost twenty years ago. Or is it because in Company parlance ‘Koi Hai’ was what, as Mustapha Chacha told us, those British officers and traders were called who had been in India long enough to become ‘someone’? Because Ayah Qui Hy is ‘someone’ in those crooks and crannies of London in which you may find asleep, a dozen to the floor, lascars and ex-slaves, ayahs and prostitutes of the poorest sort, gypsies and stowaways, urchins and pickpockets. People know her. And she knows people.

  Will this save her from the fate that is perhaps even now being designed for her in some careless, powerful quarter? For Mustapha Chacha knew people too, and they knew him, yes, jaanam, even loved and respected him. But did it avail him at that final moment when the henchmen of Mirza Habibullah raised their lathis and spears and settled an old score in the traditional way?

  My apprenticeship in Patna was coming to a close when word came from the village, in a worryingly roundabout manner, that Mustapha Chacha required our presence back home. I immediately went to Hamid Bhai’s house, but Bhabhi told me that he was out on business. Hamid Bhai had risen in the ranks of the clerks who worked for the lawyer he was attached to, and now the lawyer sent him to get affidavits, petitions, etc. from adjoining courts, kacheris and thanas. He could be away for days. So I proceeded to the village alone.

  It took a day and a night before I came in sight of the village. Part of the journey I had accomplished on bullock carts and buggies, begging or buying a ride when I could, and part on foot. It was morning: I had started walking with the first light of the sun. Something had worried me all night. It was not the first time I or Hamid Bhai had been called back: There were regular disputes over water channels with Habibullah’s people, and we were called back for strength and support. Still, I had bad dreams throughout that night. I set out, as I have written, jaanam, at the break of dawn.

  How peaceful it is, the break of dawn, in the villages of India. You would have no idea of it, jaanam, for here the fog and the buildings obscure the sun and the sky. But that morning, my second morning on the road, the sky stretched above me, a grey-blue washed by streaks of white cloud, those to the east tinged with the colour of the rising sun. Birds sang. Now that I was close to my village, I could identify each birdsong: the sibilant cheee-ee of the shoubeegi, the scolding observations of the myna, the chit-chit-chit of the baya, the soft cooing of the wood-dove, the shocking beast-screech of the peacock. A jackal, late from foraging on the outskirts of some village, slunk past on the mud road. A couple of peacocks sat on a low branch, watching me pass.

  My part of India is not lush green wilderness, as you like to picture India. N
o, jaanam, it has been cultivated far too long to be the jungle that you imagine. But there are trees, sometimes twisted and deprived, sometimes wide and majestic. Sometimes there are patches of lush wilderness, sometimes barren, straggly land or a brown hillock, and everywhere there are more animals and birds than I can name. There are semi-arid stretches at times, and then there are rivulets and suddenly, across a brown mound, the gleam of a broad river, descending perhaps from the mighty Himalayas four hundred miles away, or flowing into the Ganga or the Jamuna further on.

  I walked on, and by the time I caught sight of the twin-hillocks that marked the passage to our village, the beauty of the morning had almost erased my misgivings. But nature, jaanam, can be as misleading as art.

  A kilometre from my village, still hidden behind brown hillocks, at the final turning of the road which would bring the village and its fields into view, I was hailed by a shout. It was the first vague indication that something was seriously wrong, for no one knew the time of my arrival. I was stopped by two young men, whom, after a moment of alarm that had me fingering the dagger hidden under my kurta, I recognized as the sons of Haldi Ram. Haldi Ram and his community, being low caste, resided in a hamlet just outside the main village. Could it be a coincidence that the two boys had run into me, perhaps having gone a little too far to relieve themselves this morning? But no, that was not the case. The men of the family had taken turns, all through the night, to keep an eye on this road, for they knew that I or Hamid Bhai would be coming down it sometime. Something very bad had happened the previous evening, and I had to be warned of it. More than that the boys would not say. They requested that I accompany them to their hamlet, instead of first going to Mustapha Chacha’s home in the village.

  You might not realize, jaanam, how worried I was by then. No, I had no reason to distrust the boys of the clan of Haldi Ram. He and his family had worked for mine when we needed extra help in the fields. I knew they were honest people, and grateful to Mustapha Chacha for various minor favours, not least the matter of that theft. But the invitation to first go to their hamlet was disturbing — not least because Haldi Ram was very conscious of his low-caste status, and though the Muslims of the village did not observe the rituals of caste purification, he would not easily assume the authority to invite any respectable member of the village into his lowly hamlet. But here he was now, running up to me, followed by other members of the family, all carrying lathis, and with much courtesy but no further information, he ushered me into the village. It was done in a way that made it clear that he did not want my arrival to be widely broadcast.

  How can I narrate to you, jaanam, the events of that early morning? I lack the words, and I can hardly explain to you the love and reverence that I bore towards Mustapha Chacha and his wife. Remember, my love, I was an orphan, like you, and I had been brought up by them.

  Perhaps you will understand my feelings for them if you think of your own feelings for your aunt. I have seen that you love your old aunt in your own way; though she runs an opium den in the rookery, which you would not have her do, it was she who brought you up when your mother was deported. Or perhaps you will not understand my feelings, for you have had your share of fights and disagreements with your aunt, and I, strangely, do not recall one harsh word from Mustapha Chacha or Chachijaan. Sometimes they scolded their sons; sometimes they had disagreements with Hamid Bhai; between me and them, there was nothing but an unbroken stream of understanding and love. I could not have imagined better parents. No, jaanam, even parents could not have been as good to me as they were, for one needs to strain against the leash of parenting sooner or later, and parents do resent, if only in part, the fact that children, especially sons, grow into lives of their own.

  Even today, scribbling these words as I kneel beside a single candle in the scullery, I can feel my eyes fill with tears of sorrow and frustration when I think of that morning. Aren’t there moments when you wish time could be wound back, that you could change one thing, just one thing, in the past? How often, after listening to Haldi Ram that morning, have I wished the same!

  Haldi Ram was frightened. I could see it in his face, in his unusually dilated eyes, his occasional stutter, the tense manner in which he clutched his lathi. And so were the other members of the community: they were all frightened. Almost all of them were outside, crowded around the khaat on which they had seated me. Of course, I was the only person sitting on the khaat. Haldi Ram and an older man who, I knew, was their headman, squatted on their haunches in front of me. The others, men, women and children, stood, faces strangely impassive but postures fraught with tension. Haldi Ram’s wife brought me chai; I was in no mood to eat or drink but I accepted it as I thought my refusal would be seen as a recognition of their low caste and Mustapha Chacha had always maintained that both Islam and humanity — ‘insaniyat’ was a word he relished — refused to recognize such divisions between human beings. It was only when I had sipped a bit of the tea that Haldi Ram commenced his explanation. His words are still stamped on my memory, and I could write them down verbatim but for the fact that the language he spoke was not the language I write in and the language I write in is not legible to you, jaanam.

  Forgive us, Amir babu, said Haldi Ram. Forgive us for interrupting your journey, not even providing you with a decent breakfast, for what can we poor people serve to a gentleman like you, son of the noble Syed Zahid Ali sahib, nephew of the learned and gracious Mustapha Ali sahib.

  Small, wizened, much darker than I am, with a tiny, thin moustache, reddish eyes and a pockmarked face, Haldi Ram was a hard worker and a harder drinker, but he was also a cautious man. My heart in my mouth, I had to make the appropriate noises until he got to the matter that was troubling him. But for once Haldi Ram’s vernacular eloquence failed him. As soon as he started giving me an account of ‘the sacrilege that took place yesterday’, he broke down and started to cry like a baby. I was worried now. Haldi Ram did not cry easily; he came from a long line of impoverished peasants who had borne more than most people, suffered more, lost more, and tears did not come easily to his eyes.

  The headman took up the narrative and this, jaanam, with some interpolations and exclamations from me (which I will leave out), is what they said:

  Headman: Forgive him, Amir babu. His soul is burdened by the many kindnesses of Mustapha sahib, kindnesses he can never repay in this lifetime.

  (At this, some of the women in the crowd started weeping too. But the way they wept was disturbing. These were women who usually wept in a public manner, deriving the only relief sometimes available to them from an extravagant explosion of grief. But this time, they were sobbing into their pallus, stifling their wails.)

  Headman: It is not right to fet our sorrow prevent you from learning, as soon as possible, what I can see you are anxious to know.

  Haldi Ram: It is my duty, the least I can do...

  Headman: It happened yesterday, Amir babu. Three of our boys, children of eight or nine, who were working in the adjoining field, saw it, though they were careful enough to avoid being seen.

  Haldi Ram: We think it had to do with one of your uncle’s cows getting into Mirza Habibullah’s fields of mustard. At least, that is what the boys heard him claim. In any case, the Mirza came with his men and started harvesting the crop in a part of Mustapha sahib’s fields. It was to compensate for the mustard cropped by the cow, he claimed Mustapha sahib and Shahid babu ran to stop it, but this time it appears that Mirza Habibullah and his men were prepared to go further than they had in the past...

  Headman (spitting on the ground in disgust): Habibullah has been doing this to us and to the Yadavs and Jollahs as well. But I never thought he would do it to a Syed, and that too a gentleman of Mustapha sahib’s piety and learning...

  Haldi Ram: But that is why he dared, because he knew that Mustapha sahib and his family would not stoop to such roughness, such coarseness.

  Headman: I think you can guess what happened, Amir babu. Habibullah’s men attacked yo
ur uncle and cousin and started beating them with lathis. They fought back but they were outnumbered.

  Haldi Ram: And that was not all, Amir babu. How we wish it had ended there! How I wish...

  Headman: Your Chachijaan ran out to stop the men and, we think, she was hit on the head by mistake. She seems to have died on the spot.

  Haldi Ram: Calm yourself, Amir babu. Listen: there is more, there is more...

  Headman: One of our boys had already run to fetch us. The others were watching from hiding, for they could do nothing against Habibullah and his henchmen. They thought the tragedy was over now. Your uncle had collected his wife in his arms and was rocking her back and forth.

  Haldi Ram: The boys say that Habibullah, may he rot in hell, was shocked and frightened. He approached your uncle and suggested, in his blustering way, that they should let the matter drop and his men would help carry the body back.

  Headman: But you know your uncle, Amir babu. Never was a man with more honesty and less subterfuge born in this village. He refused the offer. A lesser man would have pretended to accept it. But no, not your uncle, Amir babu, not that sainted man... Some things, he told Habibullah, cannot be forgotten, because they affect not the man you are or the man I am, but all of humanity...