The Thing About Thugs (11 page)

The men leave in fifteen minutes, and when they push aside the flap that serves as the curtain of the door, they almost run into the young woman coming in. Her clothes are dirty and she smells of sweat and dust, but she is uncommonly pretty, with straight, well-formed limbs and high cheekbones, long hair done up in a clean bun; the men notice her. They are also too sober a group and at least John May is too well-dressed for this place; she notices them too, if only in passing.

‘Oy Jenny, yer back’, says the old woman in a voice, like her life, of bits and pieces, saving and borrowing and patching and hoarding. An’ ain’t no Injun prince wi’ yer, m’gul? Wuz’t ’is granpa the Great Mogul they ses just upped and died in Inja?’

She chortles at her own joke and starts hustling the customers out, for she knows that Jenny does not like to see too much evidence of her trade, and it is time for the aunt and daughter to retire for the night. It has been nineteen or twenty years now, she recalls, that they have been sharing these smelly, dank quarters; ever since Jenny’s mother first handed her the girl, then a baby of four, or was it three, before being taken to Newgate and from there to that upside-down place, the land of black swans, Australia. That is where she must have died, for they never heard of, or from her, again.

Mrs Grayper and Mary withdrew for a few moments, as was proper, and the men moved to the parlour fireplace to smoke. Carried away by the conversation and Mary’s presence, Captain Meadows had drunk and eaten more than he should have, and he welcomed the opportunity to stand up and smoke a pipe. Major Grayper never smoked a pipe; it was one of his idiosyncracies: he lit his trademark cigar, studying its end for almost a minute before biting it off instead of using a clipper. The men puffed in silence, Meadows reclining against the fireplace, the Major sitting in his favourite armchair in one corner of the room.

The two men were used to such silences between them: they preferred them to discussions which were likely to go awry. For, while they were polite and courteous to a fault — the Major because it was the wish of his wife who considered Meadows a good catch for her daughter, and Captain Meadows for the sake of Mary — the two men seldom agreed on anything.

It was a sign of the high esteem in which he was held by his peers that, despite Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Rowan’s and Richard Mayne’s total agreement with Sir Robert Peel on the issue of not employing gentlemen of the retired officer class, Major Grayper had been made a superintendent in the new force. He was known to be one of the most successful Metropolitan police superintendents in the land, once praised by Sir Peel in person and reportedly admired even by the famous private investigator, Mr Seaton Holmes, but he was also known as a man who did not give criminals, or anyone, a second chance. No, Major Grayper did not hold much hope for those who had failed even once. One life, one chance. You needed to be the Son of God to raise the dead, and even He did not raise them from death twice, did He?

It was only when Mary and Mrs Grayper returned to join the men that the conversation resumed. And it resumed on the topic that had engrossed the three, under the Major’s bemused gaze, through most of dinner: Captain Meadows’ pet, the thug he had brought from India and whose tale he was transcribing. Major Grayper sat back, his eyes half closed, and listened to the women enthuse about the thug, Mr Ali as his wife called him, who, it appeared, had been displayed yet again to the gathering at that society of phrenology his wife and Captain Meadows kept asking him to subscribe to. Major Grayper had nothing against phrenology, but he did not need to feel the skull of a man to know whether he was a criminal: you could tell from any scoundrel’s background, language, gait, clothes, eyes, from so many things. Criminality always revealed itself: only the blind refused to see it.

‘It impresses me, Captain’, his wife said, gasping a little as she often did these days when she got excited or exerted herself, ‘the way you underline the possibilities of the science not as an instrument of condemnation but as a corrective, a possibility, and I suppose this is what Lord Batterstone cannot accept.’

‘There is a lot that Lord Batterstone cannot accept, Mama.’ Mary laughed, her yellow hair rippling like her laughter in the firelight.

‘No, Mary, I think what he finds most difficult is exactly this. In Captain Meadows’ hands, Mr Ali is proof of what a proper study of character can be used for, how it can be employed to redeem a person, perhaps even an entire race. But for Lord Batterstone, everything has to remain the way it is, people cannot be changed.’

‘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.

[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 perceived 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.’

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.