by Tabish Khair
After the chanting from the Ramayana or the Koran or some other heathen Bible was finally over and sticky sweets had been distributed and consumed with relish (by everyone except me — I survive such occasions of infernal music by puffing on my pipe more strongly than usual), it was time for the real business. Qui Hy cleared her throat and leaned forward in her chair. The conversations in the room — in different languages, various pidgins of English and, I suspect, sheer gibberish for the bloody heck of it — subsided into an expectant hush. Qui Hy did not beat about the bush; she never does on such occasions. She got to the point directly.
‘We have to find them’, she told the gathering, ‘and not just because it is the only way to clear Amir of the charges that might be laid on him every time those murderers collect a head for whatever devilish purpose they need such things.
‘No’, added Qui Hy, ‘now we have to find them not only to clear Amir Ali’s name, but also to prevent the boy from murdering someone or getting killed in the attempt.’
Gunga cracked his knuckles. ‘Why prevent him’, he said. ‘Why not help him?’
‘And be strung up like chickens?’
I knew that Qui Hy was law-abiding to a fault: the fault being that she was willing to break almost any law but only if she could be certain of getting away with it. Paddyji, she told me on one occasion when I was contemplating a harsh action on some English provocation that I no longer recall, Paddyji, the law requires names, and neither I nor you want our real names to be discovered, do we?
Now she continued, softly, in the tone of someone discussing a recipe, ‘Look, I like Amir: he is a nice boy. But do not think I am doing this just for his sake. I am doing this because we have to. If the beheadings go on and, God forbid, if Amir does something rash, he will invite attention to all of us. From one thug to a gang of thugs -look, look at yourself, you, me, we are a band of thugs. Every man-woman of us has thug branded on his face! Every sooty inch of us is terrifyingly thug-like! But even without that, do we want their attention, Gunga? I have this small place here, with my husband. It took me years to set it up: I do not want soldiers and policemen nosing around. You must have your own nest egg, Gunga; Zaibun Ayah there has her little business that is not entirely legal, so do you, Thapa Bhai, and you, and you. Look around you: this place you call Qui Hy’s dhaba, is it only a place we meet for a cup of chai, or will it seem far more sinister a place in the eyes of the Peelers? What is there to prevent them from seeing thuggery in this place, or devilry, or conspiracy? So, when I say we have to help Amir, I mean that we have to help ourselves. Not land ourselves in deeper trouble. No. That is not what I want to ask of you, and of those you know who are not here. I know that each one of you has his or her own circle of confidantes. Go to them and ask about these men: the man called John May, whose name we know because he bribed a lascar in the opium den, a lascar who overheard the three men talking but unfortunately came to us only now.’
‘Who was it?’ asked a tiny, sharp-featured, white-haired ayah, famous in the crowd for her malicious gossip and her trips as an escort between India and England: on eleven different voyages she had nursed the children of various British families being sent ‘home’ for schooling.
‘That is my concern’, said Qui Hy, just a little sharply. ‘When you came to me with your, ah, little problem after your fourth voyage, did I ask you for names? Have I ever asked any of you for names? Let me keep the names this time. Trust me. Instead, ask around for John May and his two accomplices, the short, squat man and the tall, one-eyed one, who sometimes carries a stick or a cudgel. Looks like the Devil, they say, so it should be easy for us, devils that we are, to recognize him.’ She broke off to chuckle silently.
Then she continued. ‘We have an idea where they meet, the pubs and beer-rooms. But we need to know where they go afterwards. Mark my word, they are doing this for someone else. It does not make any sense otherwise. There is something or someone bigger behind them. And those of you who work with English families, try and find out why the English might want to collect heads. Is it some secret rite, like what the Tantrics do back where I and some of you come from? Is it some rare custom that we do not know about? Let me know what you hear, but remember — say nothing. You are my eyes and ears, but we do not have a mouth. A mouth is something we cannot afford in this place...’
89
Sometimes I am surprised by my wife of so many years; I am surprised by Qui Hy. The English collecting heads? Tantric rites in Stonehenge? Voodoo in Westminster? I had to stop myself from laughing.
How much of it was just talk, I wondered, and how much of it was exactly what she meant?
For Qui Hy knows this city intimately, and yet can evince swathes of ignorance, as if her elaborate map of the place contains unexpected blank spaces. On occasion, I know she is only pretending, but sometimes she is in dead earnest. Things that an English woman, even a tune-crazed Irish ex-soldier like me, would take for granted, small mundane things, suddenly they loom in front of Qui Hy, totally illegible, or she reads them in a way that I could never imagine, a way far from the truth as I see it. Tantric rites! Skulls placed at the altar of an idol wearing a demon’s face?
Overhearing and watching them, as the others now joined in with a cacophony on inexplicable England, I had to stifle a laugh more than once.
But I agreed with Qui Hy’s plan. We have always agreed on the important matters of life. For different reasons, we do not want the bobbies here. It is not just what we may have to hide. It is best not to be forced into a defence of your habit, an accountancy of your hours — which is what the law will demand. Once you have to explain, defend, justify yourself, it hardly matters whether you lie or speak the gospel truth — every word rips a bit of you out of yourself and strews it where anyone can trample on it.
90
Daniel Oates, intrepid journalist, had just returned after witnessing the latest crime. Not just any crime: a new horror by the Rookery Beheader. For about eighteen months now, London’s reading public had thirsted after news of the Beheader and his crimes with such avidity that Oates, who had set himself up as the authority on this particular criminal, had become a household name. News of other events paled in comparison; it needed something like the People’s Charter or the Myall Creek Massacre in Australia or Grace Darling’s heroism in rescuing survivors from SS Forfarshire for public attention to be momentarily diverted. Otherwise, the London Beheader — with his fourteen recorded victims till date (though there was some chance that one of them had been killed in a common drunken brawl over a dog fight and then beheaded to mislead the police) — was what everyone wanted to read about.
Oates almost looked forward to the Beheader’s crimes. In the weeks when nothing happened, he felt disappointed, as if the criminal had let him down personally. Nothing had filled Oates’ life, and furthered his career, as much as the mysterious beheadings. They had even given him the idea of going to the colonies to write about the murderous cults of superstition and irrationality. He was negotiating with another paper for a series of articles titled ‘Crimes from the Colonies.’ He would like to start with places in Africa, then move to India and finally, perhaps, go to Canada and the Caribbean.
And wouldn’t it be excellent if the London Beheader turned out, as Oates had depicted him, to be a Hindoo thug or a cannibal from Africa? Oates wished Major Grayper would pay more attention to his theories.
91
I read out from the ripped sheet to her. She was perched at the foot of my bed, still stitching a pocket. She asked me to read it out again.
‘It is not by that Danny Oates, is it, Paddyji?’ she observed at the end of my second reading.
‘No’, I confirmed, ‘he writes for a rag; this is a poster put out by the police.’
‘Read it out once again, will you’, she said.
‘It is not a bloody Hindoo mantra, woman’, I growled, but I looked at her and was shaken by the sadness in her eyes. Qui Hy is not a woman given to melancholy. What wa
s it in this poster that had moved her: the memory of a woman she had known, or the glimpse of a fate that might have befallen her too had we not met by accident so many years ago? Whatever it was, I looked away and did as she had requested. I read it out again.
GHASTLY
MURDER
IN THE EAST-END
DREADFUL MUTILATION OF A WOMAN
CAPTURE: ROOKERY BEHEADER
Another murder of a character as diabolical as that perpetrated in Back’s Row on Friday week was discovered in the same neighbourhood on Saturday morning. At about six o’clock a woman was found lying in a backyard at the foot of a passage leading to a lodging house in Old Brown’s lane, Spitalfields. The house is occupied by a Mrs Richardson, who lets it out to lodgers, and the door which admits to this passage, at the foot of which lies the yard where the body was found, is always open for the convenience of the lodgers. A lodger named Davis was going down to work at the time mentioned and found the woman lying on her back close to the flight of steps leading into the yard. Her body appeared broken, as if smashed on the ground or hit with terrible force a number of times, and not only was her throat cut but her head was also missing. An excited crowd gathered in front of Mrs Richardson’s house and also in the mortuary on Old Montague Street, where the body was quickly conveyed. As the headless body lies in the rough coffin in which it has been placed in the mortuary, it presents a fearful sight. The body is that of a Creole or Gypsy woman at least forty years of age. The height is estimated at five feet. The complexion is sooty but not negro black and there is a foreign-looking tattoo on the left arm.
92
Major Grayper was not fooled by the occasional lull in the murders. By now a pattern had emerged: there would be no murder for weeks, a month or two at times, and then suddenly there would be two gruesome beheadings in the same week. The Major felt that the lack of a proper and independent all-metropolis detective service was the main obstacle in clearing this mystery, for even with his special mandate it was not easy for him to obtain full cooperation from the other superintendents.
He was convinced that Amir Ali had nothing to do with the murders, though he still had his men looking for the absconding thug, if only to keep them busy and create the impression, so necessary for the preservation of public order, that he knew more than he did. The Major also did not like the idea of the former suspect disappearing into thin air: it made him feel that his grip on London was not secure enough.
He had evidence that at least one of the murders had taken place when the thug was in custody and he had the word of his future son-in-law, Captain Meadows, for the innocence of Amir Ali on the night of yet another murder. He also knew that on at least some of the other occasions, Amir had been seen in a very different part of the city than the one in which a beheading had taken place. It was difficult to imagine a recently arrived East Indian knowing the city so well as to strike in different parts of it, at random and always without witness. Still, he wished he knew where the man had disappeared to. Of course, he could have shipped out, or gone into the provinces, but the Major doubted that.
On his table, Major Grayper had spread out a detailed map of London. Painstakingly, he marked the site of each murder with a red spot. Then he marked the sites of other unsolved murders of a similar character — involving the slicing of a limb or an appendage — with blue spots. The blue spots, he noted, were spread much more widely than the red spots. He was convinced that the blue spots had nothing to do with the red spots. The red spots clustered around central London, seldom, if ever, moving farther out, while the blue spots appeared more randomly. This confirmed the Major’s suspicion that the beheading murders were a special case, perhaps the work of some religious cult after all, or at least some fanatic or lunatic, as that man Oates kept suggesting in his articles.
The main problem in understanding the murderer was the eclectic character of his victims. If they had all been women of the street, Major Grayper would have been able to imagine and perhaps trace a certain kind of man. If they had all been foreigners, he would have had another sort of clue. But the victims of this murderer were so mixed: an old woman who ran an opium den, a lascar, a nigger beggar, a gypsy or whoever it was, and so on. There did not seem to be any connection between them.
Major Grayper paused in his thinking. Of course, there was a connection. It was surprising he had not seen it before. All the victims were the very dregs of society. Was their murder then the work of some vigilante, someone who wanted to cleanse London of its sores and pus? The Major had come across such thinking aired over too many drinks in polite circles: the poor should be removed, sent to the colonies, etc. He himself believed that some drastic action was long overdue. London was swarming with the poor and the useless, not just indigenous folk but from all over the empire. Just last week at the club, one of his friends was complaining of the burden of empire, as he put it: we ship them civilization, he had said, and they ship us problems. Perhaps some other citizen, some vigilante, had felt more strongly on the subject.
But Major Grayper was also a pillar of society. He might sympathize with the feelings of this vigilante, but he would uphold law and order. What was wrong with people who wanted drastic solutions was exactly this, he thought: they did not realize that their solutions would unravel the intricate network of law and justice. It would be like opening Pandora’s box.
Major Grayper lit another cigar. This would be a difficult matter. It might even involve someone from the better circles of London, perhaps a medical man or a tradesman. But he would find the culprit. That was his job. Search, and you will find. Though it would have been easier if the poor of London had not been so suspicious of authority, so unlikely to give full answers to the superior classes — for surely someone or the other must have witnessed the gory murders.
93
The Head Cannibal Strikes Again
Sketch by Daniel Oates
There are officers to inspect and certify the goods that are downloaded at West India and East India docks at the Isle of Dogs and the London Dock Company’s docks at Wapping. But only if the goods are dead and inanimate. Every day hundreds of living goods are downloaded at those very docks, and they slip into the great city of London with hardly any inspection. There is no one to test if these living goods are of sufficiently high quality or not, to certify that they are undamaged and not rotted.
In the old Royal Exchange, there were separate walks even for merchants in the American, Italian, Norwegian, Irish and other trades, but the living goods shipped into London jostle with the rest of us on the same streets and alleys. Every day we meet these goods on the streets of fair London: men and women from every corner of the Empire who are now in our midst and can be often found associating with the worst of our own native crop of scoundrels. From the far points of the globe they come, from places with wondrous riches and sights but also, as our missionaries and colonists remind us, with strange rites and heathen customs, with extreme political views like anarchism, with devilish practices like cannibalism and suttee and thugee. Why then do we throw up our hands in horror and surprise when another person — this time a beggar from the West Indies — is found murdered and decapitated in our streets?
This morning your correspondent was called to witness, in an indescribable corner of Bethnal Green that reeked of misery and manure, the latest handiwork of the Rookery Beheader. During the night, this monster had fallen upon, battered to death and decapitated an old beggar from the West Indies who was often seen in the streets of London, dressed in a tall hat with green tissues shaped to resemble palm fronds and singing a jolly tune in a kind of English.
Once again, there are no witnesses to the crime. But it has been whispered in the streets that the murderer is some heathen, recently imported into our parts, who either practices a devilish and esoteric rite or consumes human flesh. The practice of some island tribes that shrink the skulls of their enemies has also been raised as a clue to the identity of the monster who is often called t
he ‘head cannibal, for his victims have all been found without that vital appendage.
Whatever may be his identity, perhaps it is time to think about the nature and significance of all the goods that are brought into the docks of England by its mighty fleet of globe-spanning ships.
94
I enjoyed observing how Qui Hy went about her investigations, for — need it be said — this was not the first time I had seen her embroiled in solving someone else’s problems. She always had a rational argument for it. No, it was never due to the goodness of her heart, the devils of Hindoostan forbid! She always had a reason. Whatever it was, for me her cases were an education every time. But this time the matter was much more in the public eye than any of her earlier cases.
Of course, Qui Hy never left the house; she seldom does, now that she suffers from gout and swollen knees, but even when she was younger she would wait for people to come to her. She would sit there, her eyes hooded and appearing only vaguely interested, patiently stitching her pockets, and they would sit with her, sipping tea or munching the paan she prepared. If you did not know, if the surroundings were not so different, and especially if her guests were ayahs or women, you would think it was a scene in India. She would ask them about their health or about news from ‘home’ or of ‘family’, if they had family. They would ask after her health. She would complain about her knees: that took at least ten minutes. And so the conversation would continue. Somewhere in the middle of this flaccid banter would be inserted a kernel of information. After the guest or guests had left, she would come into my room and make me a new pipe or fetch me something I needed. Then she would say, write this down, Paddyji, will you. Out would come the name of a place or a pub, some detail to add to what she knew already, nothing more than a word or two usually, and I would add it under the appropriate heading in the notebook that she had bought and now kept, with a stub of pencil, on the floor under my bed.
