by Tabish Khair
The body was found on the banks of the Thames in Deptford, by the mouth of a sewage opening. Enmeshed in green dank deposit and rotten wood and next to a dust heap abandoned by tosh-hunters and rag-pickers, it was, to put it with a modicum of decency, in an extreme degree of undress. In fact, like the head, which was missing, the dress, if there had been one, was also gone. Modesty forbids a full description.
The victim is yet to be identified. It is a male of indeterminate age and a very pale texture, so translucent a skin that, experts say, it indicates a life led solely in places not much exposed to the sun. Local people claimed that the victim was one of the Mole People, the lost tribe that is reputed to infest the underground caverns, tunnels and pathways of London. This, of course, is a tall tale, and was dismissed by Major Grayper, who has assured your correspondent that the murderer will soon be apprehended.
We know more about the identity of the murderer than we can reveal to the public at this juncture of our investigations, the Major told your correspondent. He added that the murderer will be identified very soon and trapped in the net that the Metropolitan force has been weaving for him. The Major declined to comment on a recent letter published in this newspaper by an anonymous correspondent who claimed that the murderer is a cannibal from one of the tribes that shrink heads in the South Pacific, originally for ritual purposes and now for sale to those in our beloved islands who suffer from the inexplicable and unchristian fad of collecting heathenish curios.
102
Amir lookes at the house. He has to be careful on these streets: there are more gaslights here than in other parts of London. It is a fashionable quarter; people like him are unusual here. An ayah or a black footman, yes, but not a lascar hanging around, doing nothing.
He knows that the house he is watching is far more impressive than the one Captain Meadows lives in. He saw M’lord drive up once; his coachman, a giant of a man, jumped down and opened the door for him. Standing across the road, Amir watched the man he considered responsible for the death of Jenny. The others can go looking for the henchmen, but Amir believes that he can spot a Mirza Habibullah even in this land of different faces. And if Amir has scores to settle, he surely has scores to settle with the Mirzas and M’lords.
Amir does not know how to avenge the death of Jenny. He does not even know if he wants to seek revenge once again: revenge, he feels, always changes you into something else, something much worse than what you might otherwise be. But he cannot tear himself away from the house. Evening after evening, he comes back and watches it. He does not know why.
103
Qui Hy shook me awake. ‘Too early’, I muttered and tried to turn around, though I knew it was afternoon. She would not let me go back to sleep. ‘Paddyji, wake up’, she said, ‘wake up. I need to discuss something with you.’ I murmured in irritation and ignored her. She went off and returned with a wet cloth which she threw on my face. ‘Get up, Paddyji, you hooligan’, she said. She knows I hate being called a hooligan. I gave up. I sat up reluctantly and rubbed my eyes.
‘What is it, you Punjabi gorgon’, I asked her.
‘I want your advice.’
‘Yes’, I said, ‘I gathered as much. Why else would you wake me at this unearthly hour?’
‘It is well after midday’, she replied.
I shook my head.
She continued. ‘I want to ask you. Why isn’t Major Grayper reacting to the letters?’
‘How would I know’, I retorted.
‘He is one of your people, Paddyji’, she said.
‘He is not one of my people, Qui Hy.’ I was offended. ‘He is bloody English.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘You want me to tell you why I think Major Grayper is not acting on the letters you have had Mrs Duccarol send him?’
‘Yes, yes, yes.’
‘How would I know? These are strange people. They do not think like you and me.’
‘You worked for them, Paddyji, you fought under them’, she retorted. ‘You used to be a soldier; he used to be an army officer.’
‘I never understood my officers.’
Qui Hy paused for a moment. ‘I think I will have to try something else’, she said.
‘Why’, I asked her.
‘Why?’
‘Yes, why?’
‘Because otherwise they will kill more people.’
‘Oh, come off it, Qui Hy. Don’t tell me you have a bleeding heart. I have known you too bloody long to believe that.’
‘Maybe it bleeds more than you know.’
‘And maybe the Queen is Irish.’
‘It’s Bookman’, she said then. ‘I am worried about what he might do, or what Amir might do.’
‘That is their headache’, I retorted. I quite like that boy, Amir, but I did not see why we should be so upset over his travails.
‘No’, she replied, after a pause. ‘It is our headache too. If they get arrested in the process, we will all be involved. Maybe that Oates whose articles you read out to me will make us out to be a heathen cult of cannibals. Whatever happens, we will have our places, names and lives poked into. And you do not want that, do you, Paddyji?’
I shook my head. We had had this discussion before. We always have this discussion when she gets embroiled in one of her cases. No, I do not want that. All of us have a past and all of us have reasons — small but inevitable reasons — not to want it back.
104
Gunga, Karim and Tuanku lit up the chillum that they had between them: Gunga had managed to obtain some tobacco and opium. They passed it around carefully. It was ages since they had been able to afford a smoke.
There were several bundles scattered in the dark room which they shared with five other lascars. Eleven marooned men slept every night in that foul, dank room, streaked with coal dust: the room had been used to store coal in the past. It was bare of furniture but littered with bundles of rags, newspapers and blankets. Some of these bundles belonged to another gang of abandoned lascars, who were now out on the docks or scavenging in the streets. Both the gangs had come together, the flotsam and jetsam of gangs that had been abandoned, and Gunga was once again hopeful of finding work on a ship. At least he had enough men to offer, though he knew that most of the ships leaving London already had their required quota of sailors. It was ships sailing back from Asia and Africa — decimated by illness or by the better job prospects offered by local princes to European sailors who knew, or pretended to know, new technology and army drills — that took on lascars more readily. Still, Gunga kept looking. He was not a man who gave up easily.
‘Two winters. Two winters in this city. I tell you, by God, two winters are two too many. I would like to feel real sunlight on my back just once more’, said Karim, coughing, ‘not this moonlight that passes for the sun. Who would even believe that winter is over?’
He pointed to the narrow, barred window.
‘A drunken pig at the docks told me that the English have won in Afghanistan’, Tuanku replied.
Gunga was going to say something, when he stopped himself. Why had they started speaking like this, no one really talking to anyone else, each conversation a boat set adrift in the sea? Was this what happened when jahaajbhais started dissolving the sacred links that bound them each to each, before they started moving apart?
105
Just when you think that you have got used to people, that they cannot possibly do anything to rattle you any more, they go and spring on you a horrific surprise. I had been out drinking with the blokes and came in, not drunk, you understand, not drunk but happy. I opened the door — have I mentioned that my house used to be a shop, and hence the door opens directly into what they (and at times even I) call Qui Hy’s dhaba? — so, yes, I opened the door at midnight, expecting the place to be empty, unless Qui Hy was still stitching away a fortune in pockets by the fireplace and, Lord help me, what did I find? Not only were there three or four people in the room, Gunga and that boy, Fetcher, and one or two othe
rs, there was an Indian I had never seen before. Seen him? No, let me be honest. I had never seen anything like him before.
I had seen ugly people, deformed people. Believe me, I had lepers dangling their faces before me for baksheesh in India, their skin dripping like sweat; I had seen soldiers with noses or ears cut off and faces sliced into ribbons. But never had I seen a face so naturally ugly. A great brute lump of a skull on a lascar with lips and eyes that had been slapped on in a God-almighty hurry. I shuddered. I might even have screamed.
‘You have had a drop too much, Paddyji’, Qui Hy whispered, coming up to me and guiding me firmly to my room.
I knew what she meant; she did not want me around. There was some heathenish devilry going on. I let her guide me to my room and light my pipe for me. I knew she would come to me with news of her devilry when the time was ripe. She always does.
106
Amir has a strange feeling the entire time he is out on the streets near Lord Batterstone’s mansion: not so much during the evenings or the nights, when the neighbourhood is hooded in darkness and mystery, but during the mornings and afternoons. At first, he thinks it is merely his fear of being accosted or identified. But then he realizes that it is something else.
Night fits in with his expectations of the mansion, so glorious on the outside and so hideous inside. Day does not.
In the daytime, the neighbourhood fills with tokens of normality — carriages, men on horses, babies being taken out to the park, children, ladies going for a stroll, porters, servants, dogs, birds, vendors, tradesmen. Amir has lived in London long enough to identify such things with the quotidian. And it is this that imposes on him a sense of unreality. For in such a setting, Lord Batterstone’s imposing, impressive mansion is a monster.
In it, or so Amir imagines, are hidden piles of skulls, bone gleaming white like ivory, while from the outside the mansion appears the very epitome of all that is honourable, cultured and beautiful, and from it emerges, on occasion, Lord Batterstone, a man honoured and rich, but in Amir’s eyes, a thing monstrous and free. There is something disturbing about the mansion, its elegance and freedom, the fact that its monstrosity is not revealed or shackled. There is something monstrous about the very normality that envelops it.
So Amir Ali prefers the night, for it restores a semblance of balance. It claims neither more nor less than what is: it obscures both monstrosity and normality from sight, momentarily erasing distinctions.
107
There were days when I thought Qui Hy had forgotten all about her investigations, about the beheadings, so tranquil was she as she sat by the fireside, stitching pockets.
Then one day Qui Hy turned to me and said, ‘We will do it tonight.’
‘Do what?’ I said.
‘Get the three.’
‘Kill them?’
‘Don’t be a fool, man. Don’t talk like one of those damnfool lascar boys.’
‘What then?’
‘We will get them arrested. Just don’t smoke yourself asleep this evening...’
‘I am not needed, I am sure’, I said.
‘Oh yes, you are. And you have to bring along two or three of your boys.’
‘What boys?’
‘Those Irish pals of yours, the no-good ones you go out to drink with every Friday.’
‘Why them?’
‘I will tell you’, she said. ‘I will tell you later today. Just bring your boys along to the pub at the corner, you know the one under the sign of that goat man...’
‘Pan’, I said.
‘Pan or pot’, she replied, ‘who cares? Just be there with as many of your drinking chums as possible, and don’t tell them anything now or later.’
108
Captain Meadows watched Nelly fuss over the flower arrangements. Now that he was formally engaged, Nelly made every visit by Mary into something of a dress rehearsal for their forthcoming wedding. He smiled.
The Captain was in a joyous mood. He had just finished revising his book. He had settled on a title for it: Notes on a Thug. Maybe he ought to add a subtitle too: Character and Circumstances. He would ask Mary about it. He trusted her judgement even when he differed from her, as he did on the issue of Dumas’ French romances, which she had started devouring ever since the Papal ban against them had been announced. But though their reading differed — the book he was currently perusing was titled A Summary View on the Principle of Population — Mary was receptive to his commentaries and not at all a bad advisor, when it came to that.
If only the matter of these beheadings could be cleared up. He could not possibly publish a book based on interviews with someone who had been, and was still popularly suspected of being the Rookery Beheader. Especially someone who had disappeared, skipped port, as they say. This did not surprise the Captain. He had always known that Mr Ali intended to return to his homeland.
But it would not be out of order to wait for a few more months before sending the book to the printers. It was a precaution worth taking: the Captain did not want to start his married life embroiled in controversy. Yes, he would wait until the murders were cleared up. His prospective father-in-law, Major Grayper, never ceased to say that it was only a matter of time before the culprit was caught. He would not say more than that. He was incredibly tight-lipped over the details these days. When pressed, he would only stare levelly at you and say, the trap will spring shut, the trap will spring shut any day now. Then he would tap the ash off his cigar with immense authority.
109
The normality of Lord Batterstone’s excellent neighbourhood has not shattered, but Amir can sense ripples under its surface. He knows something is happening, or about to happen. Twice he sees boxes being brought into M’Lord’s house. Once, he sees boxes being carted away by hired men. He follows them to a ship at dock.
The ship is called Good Hope. It stands tall and stark against the cloudy water, the brooding sky. It is being loaded.
110
I have to hand it to that woman. You cannot beat her at planning and intrigue. If she had been a man, she would have made a famous general.
I heard her lay out the plan. She had long given up hope of getting Major Grayper to respond. Instead, she decided to stage the arrest of the three. It was a simple plan. She knew that they went for destitute people with strange or damaged skulls. So she had found a lascar with a strange skull and thrown him into their path so often that they were now trailing him.
‘That devil you had tucked away in here that night, the night I almost screamed?’ I asked, and she nodded absent-mindedly.
‘Thank God’, I said, with some bitterness. ‘For a moment I thought you had finally gone and sold your soul to Ol’ Nick, woman.’
‘No firangi Nick can afford my soul, Paddyji’, she retorted. ‘But listen to me now.’
Qui Hy continued her tale. She had arranged for the lascar to sleep regularly in an abandoned house on Draper’s Alley, a dark street on the other side of the Mint: it was full of abandoned buildings and cheap lodging houses. Somehow, through her eavesdropping spies, or a sixth sense, or some witch’s brew she had cooked in an off-hour, who knows, she was convinced that the three would strike tonight. And she wanted us to be stationed nearby, so that we could come running when the lascar raised an alarm.
‘Why us?’ I asked. ‘Why not you?’
‘We will be there. Gunga and his men will be there. That boy Fetcher will be there too: he or one of the lascars will give you the signal. But they will only detain the three until you all get there. We cannot get Peelers to arrest white men. You know that. You have to hand them over.’
‘But what if the three simply deny what they were up to?’
‘They won’t’, she said.
‘Why?’
‘You will see. I know them now. I have had them trailed and watched for weeks. At least one of them will fall to pieces, and he will pull the others down. They are men, Paddyji, just men. We know how you men are. You just have to shout loud enough that t
hey are the beheaders, get an angry mob going and, for all our sakes, bloody well keep them alive until the bobbies get there. At least one of them will confess. And then they will have to look into their backgrounds and living quarters: they will find enough there. You just get your boys there on the quick when you hear the signal.’
She was referring to the boys — most of them ex-soldiers like me — with whom I occasionally go for a drink in the pubs. She seldom lets them come to this place because, she says, they get drunk and start fighting the battles of India and Africa all over again in front of her guests. (To be honest, most of them do not feel comfortable drinking in the company of niggers.) But now, quite unabashedly, she was requisitioning them.
Then she added, ‘Do not say anything to Amir. I do not want him to know before all this is over. He should not even be in the vicinity.’
111
John May walks past St Paul’s on his way to Draper’s Street. He had agreed to meet Jack and Shields at the corner. He walks slowly. There is no rush; it is not even dark yet. He looks up at the impressive dome of the cathedral. He had climbed its iron stairway once. The view from the top had been strange: the fog was like a brown sea. It covered the houses, so that only the chimneys, spires and towers jutted out of the brownness, making London resemble a vast graveyard of ships, ships sunk in the water with just their masts and top sails and steam funnels jutting out of the waves.
This evening, John May knows, will be their last evening of profit. Unlike Shields, he has few qualms about it. The lascar they have been trailing literally fell into their clutches. He crossed their path at least twice, with his large globe of a head, with knobs and depressions that John May knows will thrill M’lord. But, of course, it was difficult the last time even to get M’lord to meet him at the Prize of War. Their usual method of leaving a message with the one-armed publican, which would be collected by a large, gypsy-looking man, has entailed greater and greater delays in eliciting responses from M’lord, and John May, despite being tempted, has avoided trailing his mysterious customer. He is too much in awe of the aristocratic masked man and his class to take such a risk.
