The Thing about Thugs

by Tabish Khair

  No, the darkness is never absolute.

  Time Future: Conjecture

  80

  Paddyji this, Paddyji that, oh, she can go on for ever, worse than the most anti-Papist Englishman, ignoring my real name — not that it is my original name — and pestering me with the nickname I used to hate before she turned it into something else. Not Paddy, but Paddyji. All right, I said to Qui Hy, all right, all right, all right, you Punjabi gorgon. There was no point in pretending to be asleep. Qui Hy was too perturbed to make me my pipe, and even I was disturbed despite my grumbling. I remember that much.

  It must have been a little later when we woke up Amir Ali with the news. I went along, because Qui Hy insisted on it. Her knees were acting up again and she could not walk the distance. So, for some Oriental reason beyond my comprehension, I had to go in her place.

  When Amir was shaken awake in the dark basement of the house in the Mint where Qui Hy had tucked him away, he knew something was very wrong. Because I had come to wake him up. He rubbed his bleary eyes and looked at my face; a handsome face once, I must say, but now scarred with age. Beside me stood Gunga and Karim.

  At that moment, he looked vulnerable and wary, in a way that only the very young, who are still tentative about life, can look. Surprisingly, his face also displayed the weariness of the aged, of people to whom bad news has come more than once.

  ‘Have they arrested her instead?’ Amir asked me. The boy never calls me Paddyji; strangely, none of them do, despite hearing Qui Hy address me as Paddyji. None of them calls me by any name. I know that, among themselves, they refer to me as Qui Hy’s husband. Or, if inclined towards greater precision, Qui Hy’s Irish husband.

  I shook my head in response to Amir’s query. ‘Come with me, son’, I said. ‘Come to the dhaba. Qui Hy will tell you.’

  The streets were deserted. It was still half dark. The clouds piled up in the sky, like bales of hay dumped into a grey sea. We walked quickly from corner to corner until we reached the narrow house they all call Qui Hy’s dhaba, though it belongs to me. Not that I mind: let it be known by Qui Hy’s name, which is as much her real name as Paddyji is mine. Names are like clothes: you wear them only as long as they are not too tight or threadbare.

  A parsimonious fire had been lit in our small stone fireplace. Tea — boiled with milk, spices and sugar, the Indian way — was bubbling over it, stirred absent-mindedly by Qui Hy.

  81

  When Amir Ali is given the news of what happened to Jenny, he feels as if he has been through it all before: the voices of concern, the faces that reflected some, if only a fraction, of the pain, anger and frustration that he feels. He recalls the morning in his village when Haldi Ram and his people intercepted him and told him of the fate of Mustapha Chacha and his family. Once again, he is surrounded by people who barely know him, and with whom he can claim no kinship. Their unmerited concern for him, the crudeness of their decency, is visible in their faces. Their past is as murky, if not more; they must have known hatred and anger and jealousy; they must have manipulated, betrayed, perhaps murdered. But at this moment, by a strange twist of circumstances, they stand with him in the essence of their crude humanity.

  Amir has imagined many possibilities. Getting married to Jenny, not marrying her, leaving her behind in London while he makes a fortune elsewhere, taking her with him, perhaps even to India, staying on in London and seeing her occasionally, as he already does, as he moves from job to job. He has imagined almost every possibility. All except this. Even death would have been imaginable, but not in this shape, not a death like this.

  He feels bewildered; if the news had come to him from other people, he would not have believed it. This is the capital of the power that is seeking to bring law and order to the world. This is the city of light. How can such things happen here?

  For a moment, such is his bewilderment that he almost comes to see himself again through Major Grayper’s and Nelly’s eyes: he fears he has brought and unleashed the ghosts of his narrated homeland in this place of reason and science. As if the spectres with which he paid for his passage to England, the soucouyants with which he revenged his uncle and family, all those bloodthirsty ghosts of his narrative have come alive in this city. He has brought them here. And now they have chosen their victim, for what they want is not just blood but suffering.

  82

  I was surprised at how calm he was. It is strange, isn’t it? One does not expect an Oriental to be calm. There is something about how they talk perhaps, their hands like birds, their faces like waterfalls. Perhaps that is how the English see us Irish too. And how differently people react under pressure: Irish or Oriental, they always escape your idea of them at the crucial moment. As did Amir. He remained frighteningly calm.

  ‘Her head?’ he asked Qui Hy.

  It was Gunga who understood first. ‘No, no, Amir. She was clubbed and perhaps garrotted. It was someone else. Her body was found intact...’

  ‘Thank God’, he muttered. Then he burst out, in the first and only sign of anger: ‘I will kill the person who did it. I swear I will kill him, if that is the last thing I do.’

  ‘But carefully, son’, I said, stirring the chai, ‘this is not India.’

  83

  This ain’t inja, said Qui Hy’s Irish husband.

  Amir looks up at him, startled, as if seeing him for the first time. He feels like shouting, yes, it is, this is the India that Captain Meadows wants from me. This is India as you people imagine it. You have made it come alive here in the streets of London.

  But even as the thought forms in his mind, he feels a sense of shame. He thinks of Captain Meadows in his carriage, and hears Qui Hy speak, slowly, softly like she always does, stitching together her words in English with the slow care with which she stitches pockets, her voice sometimes revealing a slight Irish brogue just as her husband’s voice sometime betrays a North Indian lilt. Qui Hy, always cautious, is urging them not to be hasty.

  84

  We all understand revenge. Even I, an opium-befuddled white man though I might seem to them, a half-crazy Irish man with tunes running in his head, an ex-soldier with tall tales of colonial campaigns who never leaves his house except to get drunk in the pubs. We understand revenge because we do not fully trust law and justice. From where we stand, I and they, justice is the revenge of the rich and the powerful. And, by inverse logic, it makes revenge our only justice.

  Not that any of them saw this: they came to revenge as their last recourse, a violent urge. But then, they had not lived with a woman like Qui Hy and learned to turn thoughts over, examine the nature of each necessity, the artificiality of every urge.

  85

  Amir hears himself demand vengeance. It is like hearing a ghost. The jaws of the past have gaped wide again. The words are similar to those he uttered in the presence of Haldi Ram and the other villagers so long ago. He can see their faces react in sympathy and understanding, even Qui Hy’s addict of a husband. But Amir feels a hollowness in his words. His loss and anger are as great as the last time, when his uncle and aunt were murdered. Still, there is a hollow ring to his cry for vengeance.

  86

  Qui Hy calmed them down, as much by her words as by returning to her fireplace seat and to her meticulous stitching of pockets. But over the next few days, she also tried to find an eyewitness to Jenny’s murder. She was convinced someone would have seen it. When you have lived with the woman as long as I have, you come to mirror her convictions without noticing it. She is opinionated at times, no doubt about that. But she is also almost always right.

  In this case, she was convinced, with her Indian peasant logic, that someone must have seen the murder. It was just that no one had come up and told the police. The sort of people who were out in those parts at that time of night were unlikely to go to the police, she reasoned. I felt that in this she was more Indian than she realized, her mind still terrorized by memories and tales of Oriental despots. But perhaps she was right. Perhaps we are al
l more Indian than we realize.

  No, she proclaimed, such witnesses would not go to the Peelers.

  Instead, they might come to her. So, once again, she summoned her ragtag army of ayahs, lascars, whores, opium addicts, gypsies and servants of the lowest order. Such an invisible lot they were; before I fell in with her, even I had looked through them on the streets of London. Even I, an opium-addled ex-soldier, not a gentleman by any means, had failed to see them. But they were there; I knew this as surely as Fetcher claimed to know that the Mole People lived in the tunnels, ruins and caverns of the city. And so the word went out: Qui Hy wants information. And I, her lawful husband for years, know exactly how far into the many realms of invisibility Qui Hy’s word can reach.

  It didn’t take long. On the fourth night, a woman walked in. Qui Hy was reclining in her rocking chair, as she always did in the late evening, stitching pockets for those new contractors who had started distributing work: a pocket stitched here, a seam there, the buttons put on somewhere else, and hey presto, a dress was ready to be sold to the affluent classes, a dress brought into existence by the magic of a dozen invisible hands all over London. Qui Hy, with her mysterious connections and her Indian love for silver, had caught on early and was now meticulously stitching pockets for three different contractors in her spare moments. My pocket money, she would call it, shaking silently with laughter. I never understood how that woman could laugh so heartily without emitting a single sound.

  So, as I said, on the fourth night, a woman, an English woman, walked in. I watched her; I always watch them from the cot in my room, smoking my sweet pipe. She wasn’t Cockney; she spoke with a genteel accent, mostly. It was either an accent she had meticulously tried to learn without entirely succeeding, or it was an accent she had picked up as a child, but whose sheen had been dimmed by years of disuse.

  Gunga and Amir, who usually joined us late at night, were the only other people there when the woman entered. She was around fifty, garishly painted and dressed in the faded style of an older generation, in a worn silk paletot. It was obvious that she was a streetwalker, and Qui Hy, who did not like her place being frequented by whores she did not know, made a gesture of repugnance. Place closed, luv, she said to the woman.

  ‘I am looking for Qui Hy’, the woman replied in a slurred voice. She was more than a little drunk.

  ‘You have found her’, Qui Hy said, putting aside her thread and needle.

  ‘Qui Hy, the Chinaman?’

  ‘There is only one Qui Hy, luv, and that’s me.’

  ‘You are the one who wants to know what happened in, you know, the alley.’

  ‘Yes, luv. But you didn’t see anything, did you?’

  ‘Maybe I did. Maybe.’

  ‘Or maybe you imagined it because you want a drink?’

  The woman looked at Qui Hy for a moment, then burst out laughing. She had a deep, frank laugh, an infectious one, and Qui Hy’s broad face relaxed into a smile.

  ‘A drink will make me remember better, missus’, the woman said with a wink.

  At this, Qui Hy laughed in turn and indicated to Gunga to get the bottle of gin that she kept for her own use in a cupboard.

  Cups and glasses were filled all around, the gin diluted with water. The woman gulped her drink down in one go, gave a satisfied gasp, and extended the glass again. Qui Hy filled it and said, ‘The story now, Miss...’

  ‘Miss No One, ma’am’, said the woman. ‘Miss No One. You get my story but you do not get my name.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘And I want to see that shilling you promised. I want to see it exists.’

  Qui Hy took a gleaming coin out of the many folds of her dress and tossed it once. It glinted in the firelight and disappeared into Qui Hy’s fleshy fist again.

  ‘There, Miss No One. It exists. But you get to feel its weight only if we believe you. Now, your story if you please.’

  87

  ‘I don’t usually work late, ma’am’, said the woman. ‘There was a time when I used to go to the Alhambra and the Argyle, and would be escorted back in a coach. But it is hard now. I usually work in the Haymarket area and have to walk all the way back home. The times change and we change with the times.’

  She squared her shoulders and gestured with her hands, as if to suggest stoic acceptance of the great wrongs inflicted by time.

  ‘That night I had stayed a bit longer at a pub and, after a long day’s work, you can imagine, ma’am, I was very tired when the pub closed. I decided to take a shortcut, but halfway into the... alley, my feet could no longer support me. I had worked long and hard all day, ma’am, and I decided to take a short rest in a dark corner, you know how it is, ma’am.’

  Qui Hy nodded impassively, but I noticed that Gunga had to tug at his forked beard to prevent himself from smiling.

  The woman continued, but only after some hesitation, as if she were no longer certain that she wanted to confess to this gathering.

  ‘So, you see, ma’am, I was very tired and half-asleep when I saw what I am going to tell you. I remember it only hazy-like...’

  Qui Hy nodded, impassive and understanding, and absent-mindedly brought out the shilling again, twirling it between her thumb and fingers as if about to perform a magic trick.

  The woman looked at the shilling and gave a short laugh. She squared her shoulders again.

  ‘But, of course, I remember enough, ma’am: one gas lamp was working further down the alley and it was not a dark night; there was a moon behind the drifting clouds. There were sounds of footsteps, and a pretty young filly came running. She was looking over her shoulder, and to be honest, ma’am, it did sound like there was someone running after her. But just before the turning up front, where that red-tiled house with dragon-shaped water pipes juts into the lane, a man jumped out in front of her and tried to grasp her just as she turned to look back. He was a short man, broadly built. The girl was taken by surprise, but she was a quick one, slippery and strong. She twisted in the man’s grip, half bending over and lifting him off his feet. She threw him over her hips, but he grasped her ankle and pulled her down too. They grappled in the mud, but she managed to thrust him down, and grabbing a brick or a stone, hit him on the head. At this the man let go of her, cursing, and she sprang up, ready to run away. It was then that another man, a tall one, stepped out of the shadows with a bludgeon and hit the girl a nasty blow on the head. I think she died right then, though of course, they did things to her that I will not narrate in the presence of men...’

  Qui Hy was not convinced. She quizzed the woman closely about the girl and the men. Amir could not bear it and twice walked to the door, only to come back again. But as the woman answered, it became clear that she had certainly seen Jenny that night. Her description of the girl was accurate. Her description of the men who had assaulted and murdered Jenny was less precise until she said, with a start, ‘Oh yes, ma’am, I forgot to say this, but the man who hit her, the tall man with the bludgeon, he had a patch over one eye.’

  At that, Qui Hy tossed the shilling to the woman. The woman grabbed it and disappeared with a hurried curtsy: she could sense the tense atmosphere in the room.

  ‘You were right, Amir beta’, said Qui Hy quietly. ‘It was not just any crime.’

  The description offered by the woman had tallied too closely with the description of two of the three men Jenny had encountered in her aunt’s den: she had often described the men to Qui Hy and Amir.

  Amir was sitting with his face in his hands. Qui Hy went up to him and put her hands on his shoulders. The young man — not much more than a boy, I thought — was sobbing. Then Qui Hy looked in my direction. She knew I had been watching, and I knew that later in the night, when they had all left, she would ask me to repeat what I had observed, matching it against her own observations. She is a meticulous woman in her own way, a deep one.

  88

  It was a strange gathering. Take my word for it. See, I have nothing against niggers, lascars, head-hun
ters and the like. Dammit, I live with one of them, don’t I? You won’t catch me wrinkling my nose at attar or burnt incense or fried curry smells. But Qui Hy’s gatherings still take some getting used to. They always have some religious excuse: a kirtan or a millaad, she is not exclusive in her choice of deities to flatter. But when a gathering is called, say once a year, everyone knows that there is something in the air, something more solid than religion.

  And the crowd that turns up: you cannot imagine a more villainous-looking and motley band of savages. You should hear the din they raise, in a dozen different languages. Had our house been in any other neighbourhood, the neighbours would have gone to the Peelers or the priest with nervous reports of the Devil’s Sabbath!

  This was one of those occasions. Qui Hy’s place was packed with lascars, ayahs, beggars, some impossible-to-place oddities like Fetcher, and riff-raff, mostly but not entirely from the lands of Hindoostan. Many of them had come on short notice, informed by word of mouth or fetched by Fetcher. One ayah even had a pram with a white baby in it: she was supposed to be taking the frilly baby out for a walk in some nearby park. It was obviously an occasion, you could tell even if you were new to the gathering. Qui Hy had put away her baskets of pockets and threads for the day; I was up too, hunched in a corner of the room. Only Amir Ali was missing and I knew that Qui Hy had arranged for him to be absent.