The Thing about Thugs

by Tabish Khair

  ‘That is mostly true, missus: people cannot be changed’, ventured the Major, eyes still half-lidded, voice slightly sardonic.

  ‘Oh, how can you say so, Papa!’

  The Major poured himself some brandy and swirled it thoughtfully around in the frail glass.

  ‘I will tell you a story, Mary. You were still a child then, perhaps twelve or thirteen, and I had just joined the Metropolitan force, after retiring early from the army. It was my first case: a couple, a venerable old couple living in retirement in the countryside, were discovered murdered in their beds. Suspicion revolved around their footman, who was missing, along with much of the silver. Everyone was surprised, therefore, when I recovered the silver from the London abode of an Indian nigger, who had left the old couple’s employ five years earlier. It made my name, and people wondered how I was able to find the culprit, a man who had not been seen in those parts for five years. But I worked on two simple principles: those of precedence and elimination. I went through the list of servants and checked the two, the Indian nigger and a woman with a police record (who turned out to be innocent), who were most likely to have committed the crime. I eliminated the footman as a possible suspect because his background was impeccable: he was a solid Welsh serving-man. It later turned out that he had gone to visit an ailing sister in Bangor. If I were you, Captain, I would listen to your housekeeper and not keep that thug in the house. Leopards and spots, you know, leopards and spots...’

  Captain Meadows looked irked and was about to remonstrate when the tea was brought in and Mrs Grayper took advantage of the interruption to veer the conversation into safer areas. She disagreed only slightly with the Major, who was an admirable man in every way, if a bit unforgiving with people of less moral character than himself. But she also had Mary’s future in mind. Thug or no thug, with some luck Mary would be married and settled like her older sister — only in a much grander house — before next year. It was time. Her sister had married at a younger age but then, Mary was pretty and Mrs Grayper knew that beauty could be its own burden.

  24

  [WILLIAM T. MEADOWS, NOTES ON A THUG: CHARACTER AND CIRCUMSTANCES, 1840]

  ‘Imagine the state of my mind, Kaptaan Sahib. I had just lost my father. Deceived and fallacious though he may have been in the eyes of the All-Seeing God of Reason, he was a loving father, and my eyes were not yet dry of the tears shed at his fate — at least imprisonment, perhaps even death — when Mirza Habibullah began contemplating our next victim. And this time he was determined that I would have a hand in the killing.

  ‘The sun had dipped below the horizon. It was an orange orb, tinged a strange shade for the time of year, and on any other evening we would have noticed it and expected a change in the weather. But on that evening we were too distracted, I and my few companions, by the tragedy that had befallen us. Mirza Habibullah and his companions, on the other hand, clearly relished the free rein that the imprisonment of my father had handed them.

  ‘We had set up camp not many miles outside our village, for we had retreated after the arrests, initially with a view to flee if they were followed by further investigation. That, sahib, would have been the case if the Company Bahadur’s soldiers had been involved. But when we realized that the arrests did not go beyond the scope of the Nawab of Saleempur’s private force, Habibullah breathed a sigh of relief and decided to proceed with the expedition.

  ‘Do you remember that evening, sahib? It was just a day before I came to you. There was a freak storm that night, about three hours of lightning and thunder, and a downpour of the sort that occurs during the monsoon. Palm trees were uprooted in the region, some huts unroofed. We had to seek shelter in a neighbouring hamlet. But even as we sat there in one of the better huts, hearing the storm rage outside, Habibullah raged against my father and me.

  ‘We had been smoking. Habibullah, like so many others, often laced his tobacco with bhaang. As the smoke got to his head, he started denigrating my father for his lack of enterprise — he claimed that we had, over the years, let at least a hundred victims escape because my father had been too cautious. And to be too cautious is to lack faith in Bhowanee, he added. His men nodded in approval, for strange to say, sahib, even some of those who had sided with my father in the past had gone over to Habibullah now. Above all, he accused my father of breaking the rules of Thugee, most recently by initiating me into the order and then letting a whole year lapse without ordering me to kill my first human being. I should have been made a bhutotto much earlier, he argued, and most of the others sided with him.’

  ‘And why was that so, Amir Ali’, I interposed.

  ‘O Kaptaan Sahib, need I answer, for you are sagacious and have the God of Reason to guide you’, quoth Amir Ali, the Thug.

  ‘Was it then because your father was one of the bhutottoes, the men trained to despatch the victims of Thugee, and a leader of the order too?’ asked I in reply.

  ‘Forsooth, sahib, great is your wisdom. How well you know that in the deluded lands of Hindoostan, the son has to follow in the footsteps of the father: this is why Habibullah and most of his companions put the blame of the tragedy which had befallen my father solely on his own acts of omission. They reasoned, if one may ascribe such an august word to their muddled thinking, that Bhowanee had grown angry with him. For, most of us believed, sahib, that it is only when the great and terrible Goddess Bhowanee turns against a Thug that the law catches up with him.

  ‘All this will stop under me, Amir, said Habibullah to me, brushing back his hair and fixing me with a stare, his bushy eyebrows joined together in a frown. Under me, we will all do what our order and the rules established by our protectoress, the Goddess Bhowanee, enjoin us to do. And the first victim we take will be despatched by you.

  ‘Perhaps if this had been said to me a year ago, I would have been thrilled by the honour. But my year in the order had filled me with doubts, and the arrest of my father had left me particularly vulnerable to these doubts. If there was one thing I did not want to do, or imagine, at that moment, it was the murder of another human being, for my thoughts were filled with premonitions of the fate being suffered by my father. For all I knew, he might have been condemned to death too, at the ends of the gallows. I had, and still have, no knowledge of my dear father’s fate, for, as you know, sahib, I quit those regions soon after I came to you, and when you enquired of the Nawab of Saleempur, he claimed, with the slyness of all native potentates, to have no knowledge of the matter.

  ‘However great my horror at the act being forced upon me, I knew I could not display it to the gathering, especially to Mirza Habibullah. I feigned excitement and willingness. I knew I had at most twenty-four hours before our “hunt” began again. For the storm that night had left the roads wet and difficult to traverse: there would be very few travellers the next day. I knew from my experience of such storms that Habibullah and most of the Thugs would spend the day in camp or in the hamlet. Only the sothaees, the scouts, would go out, to look around, join other camps, select possible victims.

  ‘The next morning I joined the sothaees, much to Habibullah’s delight. Look, he shouted, the young prince wants to select his own victim. That is good, son of Ali Jemadaar, that is good, he said to me. By Allah, Bhowanee will be pleased.

  ‘But the only thing I really wanted was to be free of my companions for a few hours, so that I could think clearly. I would have run away, but I knew that Habibullah and his friends would track me down and punish me, that they would harass my family back in the village. I had to think my way out of the fate confronting me. I walked the few kilometres back to the weekly market, hoping that in the bustle of the haat I would meet someone who could help find a solution to my problem. It was, in any case, the best station for a sothaee, for what we do most of all is listen, overhear, collect and sieve the tiny grains of information and gossip that float around the marketplace. And, for once, sahib, providence took pity on me. Perhaps your great God of Reason had decided to watch over me, having pe
rceived in my faltering steps some indication that I could walk, if guided by those who knew better, on the road to redemption. For it was in the haat that I heard of you, O Kaptaan Sahib, and of your quest.’

  25

  Jaanam,

  Haldi Ram and the Headman did not let me go until I had promised them, by swearing on everything sacred to me, that I would not do anything rash to avenge my uncle and his family. I have no recollection of how long it took. The morning turned into afternoon and the afternoon into evening before the thoughts raging through my mind subsided, and I began taking stock of the situation in a somewhat calm manner.

  What I remember most is how I first became aware of my own thoughts, of having woken from a fever, from a delirium of vengefulness and anger into something resembling the person that I used to be. Perhaps they had drugged the tea I had been served later on — for in those days I was not used to opium — I recognized in the dreams of that night some of the figures and images invoked by that medicinal drug. if so, opium has been my companion in misery long before I chose it for comfort and forgetfulness during my passage to your land.

  Isn’t it strange, jaanam, that in my wrath (and perhaps because I was drugged) I had become blind to the place? When my anger subsided, what I noticed first was the smell of the village, which was largely the smell of cowdung cakes plastered all over the walls of the hut in which I had been given shelter. With that smell, the enormity of the situation returned to me: for the fact that I was there at all denoted a great wrong in the ordering of the normal structures of the village, and I could not simply hope to walk away and right that wrong with a word of accusation or a gesture of bravery.

  That evening, for my protection, Haldi Ram insisted that, if I did not mind, I should sleep in their village. I agreed: it was too late to go back to Patna, and this low-caste part of the village, at some distance from the upper-caste sections, was the last place where anyone would look for me, should Habibullah get wind of my arrival.

  I knew that Haldi Ram and the headman still had their scouts on the road leading to the village, so as to intercept Hamid Bhai if he followed me there as well. But I was certain Hamid Bhai would be away on business for at least a few days. Now that I was calmer, I was trying to devise a method by which I could avenge Mustapha Chacha and his family without confronting Habibullah either physically, which was bound to be a failure, or legally, which Hamid Bhai would insist on and which was even less likely to succeed, for Mirza Habibullah had the wealth to buy lawyers and also henchmen to intimidate witnesses, poor and vulnerable as these were in any case.

  Early that night, however, I insisted on being shown the mound under which my family lay buried. It was, as I think I have already written, near a straggly neem tree that grew over an abandoned well, just inside the extensive fields of Habibullah, not far from the main road leading to Patna. It marked the outskirts of the fields that belonged to our village. We stole up to the place, because Haldi Ram insisted on it, and it was a good thing we did — for Habibullah had stationed a few of his men by the grave even at night. Obviously, they had instructions to prevent the bodies from being recovered. Having committed the murders, pre-planned or not, Habibullah knew that he had to bluster his way out of it, and it was part of his bluster, if not part of his twisted nature, to bury his enemies without the proper rituals, in a place where even the fatiha could not be said over them. I stood there, hidden, looking at the mound, and I would have stood there all night if Haldi Ram had not tugged at my sleeve and said, Let’s go back now. There is a storm brewing.

  The storm broke while we were returning from the grave. It was unseasonal. Lightning streaked the dark heavens, thunder reverberated across the land. Large drops, heavy as pebbles, fell on us, and as we sprinted for the village, a river of rain descended from the clouds. I had to force myself to run with them, for a part of me felt no desire to do anything, and a part of me was dead, and it hardly mattered whether I got drenched or drowned. It continued to pour for three hours.

  And in some ways, jaanam, it gave me the answer I had been searching for. Because when I woke up the next morning, after a night of fretful sleep, the horizon had changed perceptibly: a palm tree had been uprooted, branches wrenched off the tamarind tree outside the hamlet, the thatch over some huts had been blown away. But the grass by the road and in the fields was wavy and green, unaffected by the storm. It was then that I knew the way out: I had to be like the grass. And I remembered the gossip that I had heard in Patna. It was one of those tales that often circulated, about the craziness of the Firangs who were taking over our land, their strange ideas and ways. This time it was about one Captain Meadows, who was convalescing in the Company hospital in Patna, on his way back to his country.

  26

  My grandmother’s whitewashed house, before it gradually emptied of things and people and then, surprisingly, of memories, used to contain the usual quota of family servants. One of them was the family ayah, a woman from Punjab who had somehow ended up in Bihar. This was against the usual trajectory: usually it was impoverished Biharis who left for affluent Punjab. But this large, fair, somewhat manipulative woman with her Punjabi Urdu had brought us up, the children who, after a few years in the house, left for other places, bigger cities, foreign countries, sometimes with a few books from my grandfather’s library for company or as a memento. When I write of Qui Hy, I inevitably think of her. And because of this superimposition of persons, I can see Qui Hy more clearly than I manage to imagine Amir Ali, whom I have met only through some Farsi notes: his own words both define Amir Ali and remove him from my grasp. Language is always slippery, but Qui Hy exists in flesh and blood in my mind, and my memories. I do not need her words to see her. And I see her now, in her house that is known as a dhaba, surrounded by Amir Ali and his random friends and acquaintances.

  Qui Hy is a large, short woman, broad-faced and big-bosomed, and when she laughs, every bit of her — cheek, jowl, chin, bosom, stomach, shoulder — seems to shake as if an earthquake has occurred in the centre of her being. She does not utter a sound, though: she laughs silently.

  And that was what she did now. She laughed silently but heartily at Karim’s account of his brush with an English prostitute, as she folded a paan and handed it to Gunga. Karim was describing the prostitute’s attributes, which had been advertised in a printed booklet, and much of the humour was in his droll interjections, mostly in Hindustani, between the descriptions: ‘Nancy has a good deal of vivacity (if plied with sufficient gin, interjected Karim, before continuing to read from the booklet) and a pretty face (when seen in the dark), she has a pleasing aquiline nose (and quite a lot of it), excellent teeth (though not too many), she does not much care to give her company to anybody whose person is not in some measure pleasing to her (without they make it well worth her while)...’ Karim was, or had pretensions of being from an aristocratic family, and his mannerisms and language were accordingly elaborate: his gestures, like his alphabets, for he wrote a fine hand, came adorned with curlicues and effete flourishes. This, for the gathering of mostly illiterate or semi-literate Indians in Qui Hy’s dhaba, naturally increased the humour of his many narratives about his encounters with various kinds of women in London.

  Qui Hy’s place was known, at least among the Indians who lived in the attics, abandoned houses, overpriced rented rooms, docks and street corners of London, as the only place where one could get, at any time of the year, a proper, well-folded paan. She would, if you paid enough, tuck a kernel of akbari opium into it for you — the solid akbari opium which was as hard to come by as betel leaves in London — but she never allowed any kind of opium to be smoked in her premises. It could only be eaten, in the traditional Indian way, in her dhaba.

  The only person who could smoke opium was her Irish husband, an ex-sailor and soldier who had lost the will to exert himself somewhere in India. There were rumours that he had made a fortune through some undiscovered crime or that he had abandoned his ship or regiment, but it was hard
to reconcile these with the old man who lay supine on his bed, except when he danced around the room to some mysterious tune in his head. It was known for certain that he had inherited the place and, it was said, married Qui Hy when she was abandoned on the streets of London by the family that had brought her to England. She was in her early twenties then, and the Irish man perhaps closer to fifty. Now, he was an old man, racked by mysterious bouts of pain which would subside only when a treacly drop of chandu opium was placed in the clay bulb of his bamboo pipe and roasted into sweet smoke over the flame of a candle. Qui Hy would repair into the room that he occupied inside and prepare his pipe for him.

  The advertisement read out, Karim, with Gunga and Tuanku, the Malay, went back to their jargon, which Amir could barely comprehend. The others in the room, three men and one woman — a dark and wiry ayah from Madras — were only vaguely familiar to Amir.

  The two candles sputtered as someone opened the door. It was Fetcher — not Fletcher, as he was known to insist, but Fetcher. They had been saying it to him since the age of two or three, when he began running errands on the streets of London: ere boy, fetch that for me, boy. Fetch im. Fetch er.

  Like a trained dog, he had fetched and carried his way into adolescence, squirrelling over fences and walls like other street Arabs at the sight of a bobby, a thin dark-skinned boy with a cheeky, gap-toothed grin, some of his teeth victims of various accidents and fights. He always carried a leather water bag, which he called his chagoul: it seldom contained water. Speaking his own version of English, mixed with words from a dozen languages, and living as often in the tunnels and sewers of London as on its streets, Fetcher boasted that he knew more shortcuts, below, in and over the city, than anyone else. It was a boast borne out by his ability to materialize in a surprisingly short time from any faraway spot.