The Thing about Thugs

by Tabish Khair

  ‘I would not worry too much, if I were you, sir. The heathens we have here are no worse than our own criminal classes. It is unlikely that they would go about beheading people on a whim.’

  ‘Perhaps, Major, perhaps, though I distinctly recall that you suggested otherwise at Captain Meadows’ place. You know, I suppose you do, though to be honest I did not until it was brought to my notice, that there are natives in places like Burma (or is it Borneo or Brazil?), who chop off heads and shrink them to keep as talismans. Surely, sir, it could be a cult, as young William suggested. Someone like that thug our good friend Captain Meadows has imported into the land. I must confess that with his pointy moustache, flowing tresses and dark, shifty eyes, he looks the very part of a vindictive murderer, a practitioner of barbarous, unspeakable rites. It surprises me that the learned Captain harbours him in his house.’

  To this the Major did not volunteer a response, for it was a feeling he shared. He had never liked the idea of his daughter Mary visiting a place that housed such a villainous-looking Moor, and one who openly confessed to being a ‘reformed thug.’ Reformed, my foot! The Major was not a missionary: he did not believe in reforming the criminal soul. He hoped that the Captain would keep his word and turn the thug out once his narrative had been completed.

  40

  Jaanam,

  Three days ago, I moved out of the Captain’s house. Now we will be able to meet without worrying about Nelly. I only wish the circumstances were not so sad for you. When I discovered at Qui Hy’s — just a day before I moved out — that the headless woman that Captain Meadows’ friends and guests had been talking about was your aunt, I ran all the way back to the Captain’s house, hoping to find you there. But, of course, you had still not reported back to work. Nelly was complaining about it, about the unreliability of the working class, as though she belonged to some other strata of society. There was nothing I could tell her. I knew why you had disappeared but I had to be alone in my knowledge. Any association with the opium den murder would have been too much for Nelly: not even the Captain would have been able to talk her out of firing you. I remained quiet. But I was restless and Nelly noticed this; she looked at me strangely for the rest of the day.

  The next day I waited again for you to return. When you had not come by noon, I could not bear it any longer. I left the house without telling Nelly, something she dislikes, and searched for you in every passing face.

  The streets were crowded; it was late in the afternoon. I felt a desperate need to see you, and I ran in the direction of your aunt’s home but I could not find it: there are places in this city where I still lose my bearings. By the time I had calmed down, it was almost evening and the air had grown chilly. The weather had taken a turn for the worse a few days ago, and winter — so dreaded by Gunga, Karim and all the other lascars I know — was creeping up.

  I lingered on a path of cobbled stones near the Thames and then made my way back to the Captain’s house. When I got there, Gunga and Karim were standing outside, and it was then I remembered that I had arranged to meet them there early in the evening. They were to help me cart my wooden trunk and an old cot, both of which the Captain had given me in one of his gruff gestures of generosity and affection, to my new lodgings in the Mint. All my possessions fit into that trunk.

  I went up to see the Captain and take my leave. I was in a bit of a hurry, as we wanted to get the trunk and cot to my lodgings before it became dark: we had been told that the law forbade furniture being moved out of a house after dark. The Captain was in the library, reading as usual, and he did me the honour of asking me to sit down. Then, addressing me as Mr Ali, he expressed the hope that I would continue to sustain the good reputation and character that he had observed in me during our year or so together. I was touched by his address, but perhaps I appeared even more moved than I was, as I was still distraught over the news of your aunt’s murder. When I took my leave, he shook my hand and wished me luck and a good voyage back. The Captain assumes that I will be returning to India. He loves to believe that everyone belongs somewhere and that people can always return to where they belong. It is a belief which, I suspect, has to do with wealth.

  After that, conveying the trunk, balanced on the cot, to my new lodgings took us deep into the night. The place that I have, and which I hope you will visit as soon as you can, contains two rooms. I will be sharing them with Gunga and his boys, all of them, at least until you decide to join me. It was the least I could do with my money: Gunga and the four men left from his gang had been sleeping in a damp basement with a family of tinkers.

  When we fell asleep, Gunga winked at me and said, Amir Bhai, I promise we will disappear as quietly as ghosts whenever your jaanam visits you.

  I lay in bed, the Captain’s cot, worrying about you and getting used to the noise from the streets — the Captain’s house, as you know, is in a much quieter neighbourhood — until finally, I fell into a fitful sleep disturbed by nightmares. I do not remember my dreams like you do, jaanam, nor do I seek significance in them. Perhaps our dreams do indeed tell us something about our hours of wakefulness. That is probable. It may even be inevitable, for how can half of one’s life be completely disconnected from the other half? And yet, how can we be certain of remembering what we dream, remembering it exactly and entirely? And if what we remember on waking up are only shards of images and sounds, as in my case, isn’t the sense, the story we make of them, just an arbitrary shape that we impose on our nights after waking into the difference of the daylight?

  41

  Outside my grandfather’s library, a different world pressed against the wrought-iron gates at the end of that driveway of red pebbles. I knew it was different even when I was a teenager as, preceded by the jangle of my grandmother’s keys, I slowly unravelled the stories I am threading into a book here, unravelled them in Dickens, Collins and Mayhew as well as in smudged snippets of paper, a mouldy notebook in Farsi, and many other fragments of text and language that were to follow.

  But even then, in my teenage, when I was less aware of the world within and the world without, I could sense the difference of those hands at the gate, those eyes on the streets. I could sense that they gazed at another horizon, or none — not like my eyes which, from my early years, had been forced by family tradition to focus on a career in engineering or medicine. It was then that I started realizing the privileged ease of my learning, haphazard as it was (having been picked up in the clutter of a provincial town), and the angle my learning made to their living. For, no matter how haphazardly, I could still afford to access life through books, while for them, books existed, if at all, only to make life possible, or easier. To earn a livelihood: two square meals a day, or a reputation. How many of them refrained from pushing themselves over the precipice of crime, and how many succumbed, who knows?

  It was when I saw their world pressing against the wrought-iron gates of my reading that I began to see John May. Not understand him — for how could I claim to understand someone across such a stretch of space and time? — but to see him well enough to be able to write of him. It was then that I noticed how he changed from place to place, his voice when confronted with M’lord, his clothes when they passed through the layered streets of London. I saw his anger and pride, his desperation, his constant, cruel, courageous cunning crawl towards a precipice of his own making. John May. Never just John, never just May. Always John May.

  John May was a man much used to figuring things out, thinking dispassionately and objectively, and acting finally in his own best interests. These, he believed, were the characteristics that distinguished the better classes from the worst. The lower classes tended to be hasty, emotional, impractical, imprudent; the higher classes deliberated, planned and acted calmly. Even their morality was restrained and practical. As John May picked his way up the hundreds of rungs leading from the puddle of the lower classes to the tower of the upper ones, he liked to believe — and not without reason — that his success was attributable to h
is ability to keep a cool head.

  For instance, he never got completely drunk, unlike Shields, who was at that moment sitting head in hands, elbows on table, in a Haymarket café, lonely despite the company of John May. They had started meeting in different places to discuss their business, for John May did not want to risk the same bartender or waiter overhearing them twice. The café was full of elegantly dressed women and men in close proximity to each other, and it appeared very much the hub of society to John May. It was not the sort of café that had one spoon dangling by a dirty thread next to the counter, used by all patrons to stir in the sugar; in this café, each cup was served with its own spoon.

  Shields was already quite drunk, though it was only late afternoon, the sunlight not much more than a rumour. John May had been plying him with expensive wine, for he had a proposal to make, and he knew that Shields’ entrepreneurship was inversely proportionate to his sobriety. John May felt distinctly ill at ease in the plebeian company of Shields in this place of polished tables and glittering people, though perhaps, if he had known more of real society elsewhere, he would have felt at ease — for the cafés, casinos and supper-rooms of Haymarket were seldom frequented by the better set of men and women. The company around John May was, like John May himself, a shoddy replica of what existed elsewhere, at Mott’s for instance, or in the Burlington Arcade.

  But unfamiliar with the society he aspired towards, John May steeled himself and bought Shields another drink, hoping the charms of the place would render the man pliable to the proposal he had in mind. For John May had thought much about the rights and wrongs of the matter. He had thought dispassionately and coolly. He had thought as he imagined the better class of people would think. And, as soon as Shields was drunk enough, he would walk the man out and tell him about the Italian boy who could be seen with his performing white mice all over London, or perhaps the ancient lascar who sold tracts and sang psalms on a fiddle. Both had skulls of the most interesting shape.

  42

  Man Beheaded by Monster

  Sketch by Daniel Oates

  In a city as thriving and magnetic as Mother London, some crime and disorder is to be expected. And yet, what happened last night was a crime no Christian could have expected — or imagined. It was the sort of crime one only associates with other, hotter climes, with people reared on superstitions and barbarities, and not on the milk of human mercy that flows through Christian veins in the lands of civilization.

  Mr Stanton, doing his midnight rounds in the notorious district of the Mint, was distracted into a dark alley by what sounded like a noise. Not daring to enter the murderous alley on his own, he whistled to a colleague who he knew was in the neighbourhood. The two policemen ventured resolutely into the alley, which was, as mentioned before, dark and foul and smelly, paved with filth and bordered by houses of a mean sort. Such was the filth in the alley that the two policemen, guided by the pale beams of a flickering lamp, almost failed to spot the crime on evidence. It was only when they were returning to the street that Mr Stanton’s feet struck a musical instrument that let off such an alarm that hearts less stout than those of our resolute heroes would have suffered an immediate collapse.

  Bending down before what appeared to be a pile of rubbish, Mr Stanton and his colleague, Mr Drew, retrieved a fiddle of the sort that is used by the gypsy musicians who cater to the public’s taste for a lively tune on various streets of our fair city. Intrigued by their finding, the two men brought their lamp closer and discovered that the pile that they had taken for garbage was actually a man. On turning over the body, Mr Stanton could tell, by the evidence of the clothes and some tracts lying next to the man, that it was the body of a gypsy who has often been seen in these parts, selling Christian tracts and singing psalms in a passable accent to the accompaniment of a fiddle.

  Mr Stanton and Mr Drew quickly discovered that the man was dead, and that he had obviously been murdered recently, as his body was still warm in the chill of the winter night. However, their horror was increased by the discovery that the man was lacking a head: yes, gentle reader, the man had been beheaded by the monster who had deprived him of life. Despite a search of the alley, the missing appendage was not recovered — which reminded at least this correspondent of the unsolved murder of an old woman in an opium den some weeks ago. In both cases, the bodies were, it appears, ceremonially decapitated.

  That crimes take place in a teeming city is a matter of regret. But that such crimes should take place in Mother London is more than a matter of regret: it is a matter of alarm and condemnation. If the authorities have not yet woken up to the nature of these two crimes, then perhaps it is time they did so. We have a monster loose in this fair city: a cannibal who consumes the heads of his hapless victims.

  43

  Jaanam,

  Time is such a cheat. The more importance you give it, the less you have of it. I could see it in the people around Captain Meadows: they were always looking at their pocket watches, tugging at their fobs, running from appointment to assignment, and they were always the people who had less time than anyone else. On the other hand, there are people in the villages, like my uncle Mustapha, or even people here, like your fate aunt, who order their calendars more by the seasons than by the clock, and it is these people who have hours to spend. Time, jaanam, is not like money: it seems as though one needs to waste time in order to have more to spend.

  In these weeks on my own, I have been both niggardly and a spendthrift with time. I hoard the hours that I spend with you with the intensity of a miser, and these are the hours that fly past most swiftly. The rest of the time, the hours and minutes go by slowly, as I walk the cobbled streets or sip chai with Qui Hy and Gunga, or try and find a profession for myself, or an enterprise into which I might put my savings with good chances of success.

  Return has never struck me as an option. Would it have been an option if I had not met you? I doubt it. I fear that some people have no desire to return, for to return is to disturb a past which, whether good or bad, is better left well alone. So the only return I have in mind is the moments when you return to me.

  Days pass, sometimes news comes and goes — news from nearby which concerns me (as that of the singing gypsy who was beheaded just a month ago, or the fire at Lloyd’s Coffee House and at the Royal Exchange) and news from afar (gossip about a rebellion in Canada or the proposal for Jewish emancipation in Sweden, places and events that mean nothing to me) which keeps the city agog. Time passes, and I measure it by the frequency of your coming and going.

  44

  Qui Hy had her basket of garments and pockets next to her, and was stitching away diligently, earning some extra money even in her spare time, while listening to Karim ramble on, in the gossipy girly way he had, about the latest beheading. It was someone Karim knew vaguely, having once shared a street corner with him during a night of drunken stupor. Gunga nudged Amir at this, for the murder victim was a young boy — Greek or Italian — who lived off the streets of London by exhibiting a cage of performing white mice, and Karim was known to his friends for his penchant for young boys, whom he befriended with the utmost generosity.

  Karim caught the gesture and cursed Gunga in mock seriousness, switching from Urdu to the lascar patois which Amir understood only vaguely. Then he returned to his flowery Urdu, which he spoke far more fluently than any of his jahaajbhais, and continued the narrative.

  Evidently, the Italian boy had been discovered only late in the morning, his body discarded on one of the middens behind the slaughterhouses of Newgate market. The body must have lain there at least a couple of nights, for it was decomposing — its stink mingling with the smell of decomposing meat and bones discarded by the butchers of the market.

  Amir had never been to the market, but he had heard about it from Jenny, who always spoke of it in terms of extreme revulsion. Some years ago, she had worked there as a porter: carrying everything from hides and Colchester baize to entire sheep, from shop to shop, side-steppin
g rivulets of bloody water on which floated large blobs of fat. Porterage was women’s work in all such markets and Jenny had made good money, being young and strong enough to carry entire carcasses, running from shop to workhouse on the slippery, blood-and-water smeared paths of the market. But she had found the smell and work repulsive. It was this experience, she had told Amir, that had made her determined to work in polite houses, even if it meant longer hours and less pay. Of course, most of the houses she worked in, Amir knew, were hardly polite: they were the houses of tradesmen and poor gentry, who could not afford more than one full-time servant and had to depend on the services of part-timers like her. Captain Meadows’ household was perhaps the only exception. And Jenny had lasted there simply because the Captain, with absent-minded generosity, had told Nelly to keep her on; Nelly had been far less willing to try out a young girl without any respectable recommendation and with the easy ways and accents, no matter how desperately camouflaged, ‘of the streets.’

  Karim continued his story. ‘So, hazraan’, he said, ‘the poor boy had been killed at least a night earlier and left on the midden, where he might have been foraging for some food for his mice. He must have been murdered some nights back, for bodies do not decompose in just twenty-four hours in this cold. The mice were discovered, all except one, dead and half-eaten in their cage, next to him. Evidently, some animal, a cat or a rat or a dog, had managed to get at them through the bars.’