The Thing About Thugs (18 page)

They walked on together, hand in hand, in the growing darkness of this rough neighbourhood full of dogs and homeless people, of houses with broken shutters, of people with abandoned dreams; they walked on like any other couple down a street that had seen and borne so much that it felt no surprise at the sight of a young Asian man, dressed like a lascar, walking with a slightly older English maid. When the clouds parted and the moon was revealed as almost full, the two lovers felt alone in the slight fog, wrapped in themselves, though the street was still teeming with people, carts and horses, urchins and sellers, porters and burglars, lascars and gypsies, Malays and Moroccans, tinkers and beggars, drunks and prostitutes returning home or, in some cases, going to work.

If Amir and Jenny had not been so intent on each other, perhaps they would have noticed the ‘Singing Salesman’, January Monday, on one of the streets they passed on their way back to Amir’s house. They would have known him. He was known by sight to many in London: his name purportedly taken from the month and day when he arrived in London on a ship from Jamaica.

Perhaps because he had already made enough money, at that moment, January was not singing the songs that he wrote on paper and sold to passers-by during the day. They were mostly hymns or ballads celebrating some English victory and hero, particularly Lord Nelson, and many people bought them out of patriotism or altruism, for they could not really take the texts seriously as poetry, though everyone agreed that the man sang handsomely. But then he was black, wasn’t he, and the Negro race was good at singing and dancing, being closer to nature; it was at athletics, sports, literature and science that Negroes showed their inferiority.

So Amir would not have been exceptional in recognizing January Monday, wrapped in his sails and rigging, fashioned with stylish care if only one looked at them with different eyes. He was a fixture in these parts. But January knew Amir too, and perhaps if the two men had seen each other, he would have joined Amir and gone on to Qui Hy’s or some other place. Had he done so, he might have escaped the fate that had been trailing him all evening, in the shape of three men, one of them one-eyed and armed with a cudgel. For January Monday was not only a gifted singer and poet, a man who had stitched himself into a future in an alien land; he was also a man with a deformed, indented skull.

Having cultivated a meagre moustache, I left Phansa for the first time. I had finished high school and there were no decent colleges in town. With a few other boys from my class, I went to Patna. We were not the best students, I must say: the best students were accepted by colleges in Delhi or by the various government-run medical and engineering colleges. Those who went to Patna were average students, unable to study science’ in better places and not willing, due to family pressure or career expectations, to study Humanities.

Suddenly, from living in a large compound with sprawling houses — my grandfather’s whitewashed one in the middle, flanked by the slightly smaller houses of his two sons — I had to live in a flat. The flat was only slightly bigger than the library in my grandfather’s house. And I had to share it with three other boys, two of us in each of the two rooms. There was a kitchen with a grilled window, which looked out on the dirt-streaked walls of another building. There was a bathroom with a window covered with wire. The wire had rusted and a hole had been poked into it, for cigarette stubs to be thrown out; they littered the window ledge outside.

I felt constrained. I felt imposed upon, observed. But then I looked around, and all around me there were people living two to a room, four to a room. I had never realized life took so little. This constrained, corralled space, not my grandfather’s spacious whitewashed house, was (I realized) closer to the common inheritance of humankind. When I try now to imagine Amir Ali, Gunga and his friends in London, I think of such rooms in places like Patna. How fine a thread — the silk of surviving — links them apart.

Gunga and his gang were as good as their word. For the third evening in a row, the moment they heard Jenny come in, they rolled up their blankets and, after a short conversation, sheepishly excused themselves, leaving the two-room half-house entirely to the young lovers. Jenny and Amir had no place but the half-house to be intimate in. Jenny was no longer living at her aunt’s house: she could not afford to rent it alone and the landlord had foisted two other young women on her after her aunt’s murder.

Amir used to feel uneasy on such occasions, for all the men — everyone except Gunga, who remained as he had always been, wiry, alert, indefatigable (despite having lost his job) — were showing the effects of being landlocked in a cold place. Karim, despite his tall stories about encounters with English and Irish women, was coughing much of the time and occasionally spat out blood. Even Tuanku, a tough, gnarled little man, was thinner and less ebullient than before. Amir knew that if it had not been for his house, they would have subsisted in some dilapidated room, damp and dark, sharing with others like them. He also knew that when they went out, they had few options regarding shelter: Qui Hy’s dhaba was never open to anyone after midnight, and it was seldom that the gang had money for drinks in dockside pubs.

Sometimes, when Karim felt better, he sold biblical tracts on the streets: he had invested in a pile and he knew some English hymns. Amir had heard him on some of those occasions. He gave the same story to all the kind ladies and gentlemen who interrogated him. ‘I was born in Calcutta and was Mussulman — but I Christian now. I have been in dis countree ten year. I come first as servant to a military officer, Englishman. I lived with him in Scotland six, seven mont. He left Scotland, saying he come back, but he not, and in a mont I hear he dead, and den I come to London. I wish very often return to my countree, where everything sheap, living sheap, rice sheap...’

He would follow this up with a hymn in his melodious voice, maintaining a conscious balance between the crispness of English intonation and the fluidity of Hindustani rhythms, pronouncing and mispronouncing the words in the way he knew he was expected to, and it would almost always charm the gentleman or lady into purchasing a tract. But with his consumption exacerbated by the recent winter cold, it was seldom that Karim had the energy or the voice for this livelihood now. Instead, he tagged along with the rest of his gang of jahaajbhais, pilfering, scavenging, grateful to Amir for providing them with a warm and free shelter. Only Gunga still went to the docks, looking for work on some departing ship.

Jenny had cleaned herself thoroughly for the visit to Amir’s place — her hair still smelt of vinegar and she had put on a fresh, if threadbare, dress. Her only shawl — which she kept as carefully as her hair — was wrapped around her sturdy shoulders, over a plain dress that reached her ankles and had, despite the attentions of a darning needle, obviously seen better days. In the gloom of the sparsely furnished room, she took off her petticoats in a matter-of-fact way that Amir found fascinating: it combined the knowledge of the tawaifs he had known in Patna with the demureness of the girls from his village. He waited and watched as garment after garment was discarded, methodically, and in some cases folded away. Jenny seemed to reveal herself more and more with each gesture: the half smile that belonged to a shy girl, the measured movements of an experienced woman, the hair that cascaded down unreal as a dream, the slender work-hardened muscles of reality that her bare arms exposed... but when she came to the last garments, she bent and blew out the only candle in the room. She would have considered it improper to be seen fully naked. She was a woman used to seeing other women importuning from doorways, half hanging out from windows so that the pedestrian could look down and beyond their breasts; it had left her with a revulsion for any stage-setting.

The Batterstone mansion was not lighted with gas. It was lighted in the traditional way: with candles and lanterns, torches and fireplaces. Even the library. And it was in the library that Lord Batterstone had taken refuge after dinner this evening, assuming that he was most likely to be left undisturbed in this room of shelves and books. But he was not left alone for long. The young Reginald B. Sangrail — of all people — came sidling in and almost bumped into the armchair in which Lord Batterstone was incumbent. Having refitted his pince-nez and discovered his reclusive host, Mr Sangrail overcame his initial surprise and seated himself in an adjoining chair, attempting to converse.

The host was just as surprised: Mr Reginald B. Sangrail, whose conversation seldom galloped without horses, foxes and hounds to inspire it, was the last person he had expected to encounter in his library. In any library. Had he been more perceptive, he would have read from the blush on Mr Sangrail’s handsome features that he had arranged to encounter someone else — of another age and gender altogether. But not bothering with faces, expert as he was of skulls, the lord asked Mr Sangrail if he, too, was interested in phrenology.

‘Yes, sir, what logic?’ yipped Mr Sangrail, still recovering from his surprise.

‘Phrenology’, repeated Lord Batterstone. He indicated the book he had been looking at, and the shelves in that part of the room — all of them stocked with books on phrenology and related matters.

‘Oh, of course, sir’, replied Mr Sangrail, following his general policy of agreeing with people as much as possible, ‘I am a great admirer
of phrenology. It is an intricate science, sir. Just the other day, I was reading that fellow Coombe...’

It was one of Mr Sangrail’s many talents that he picked up references and names in light conversation and quoted them, with much astuteness and deadly effect among females of a certain kind, on singularly appropriate occasions.

‘Combe, sir? Now which book was it, and what did you think of the author?’

Mr Sangrail was going to blurt out an inane eulogy, but he looked at his host’s expression and, being a careful reader of faces, modulated his reply significantly.

‘I cannot claim, sir, that I entirely agreed with the author.’

Lord Batterstone sat up abruptly. For the first time in days, the light of interest flickered in his chimerical yellow-blue-green eyes.

‘You were right not to, sir. The man hardly knows what he is talking about, at least not when it comes to the core issues...’

‘Exactly my feeling, Lord Batterstone, though of course I lack your knowledge of the matter.’

‘So does the world, sir, so does the world’, said Lord Batterstone, feeling a sudden desire to unburden himself to this sympathetic and knowledgeable listener.

Mr Sangrail made soft, obliging noises. Another of his talents was to produce noises so finely modulated that they could be made to carry the burden of any — or no — meaning.

Lord Batterstone grew more expansive. He poured himself and the fine young man some excellent claret.

‘It has been one of my endeavours, sir, to prove that man wrong. And I believe it will not be long — perhaps no longer than two or three years — before I crush his supporters under the weight of evidence, of solid proof, sir.’

Mr Sangrail raised himself to the occasion. ‘I am sure, Lord Batterstone, that your book will be a major contribution to science and society’, he offered encouragingly.

‘Book, sir? I shall not indulge in the vulgar conceit of writing a book. I am compiling something far more extensive and scientific. Haven’t you heard of my Theatre of Phrenological Specimen, sir?’

Mr Sangrail, who had not even dreamt of any such thing, hastened to assure the lord that word of this great monument had been circulating, admiring mouth to awestruck mouth, in the upper-most and most intelligent echelons of society, state and civilization.

‘You see, sir, my European collection is almost complete, and it proves me right and the Combians wrong. But next summer, perhaps even earlier, I am embarking on a voyage up the Congo which will enable me to expand the collection decisively.’

‘I am sure, sir, a voyage to India will be beneficent...’

‘India? India, sir? I am talking of the Congo in darkest Africa. It is there I hope to be around this time of the year, not here, surrounded by...’

Lord Batterstone waved his hands in a gesture of contempt and dismissal, which Mr Sangrail interpreted as aimed at the books in the room. As he harboured a similar contempt for books and never imagined that anyone could evince contempt for people like him, Mr Sangrail hummed and hawed in sympathy, drained his claret as fast as etiquette permitted, and sauntered off to his next rendezvous.

Major Grayper rolled the newspaper into a tube, folded it in half and threw it into the wastebasket. The cheek of the man! And to think that he knew him, knew Meadows, knew half the people in their
circle... But then, what else could one expect from a pen-pusher, from a grubby little hack!

Mrs Grayper looked up from her breakfast at this act of unusual violence by her spouse. She glanced at the paper lying in the basket. She looked back at the Major.

‘You shouldn’t let them bother you. They have to write something to sell their rags...’

‘It is not that’, said the Major, ‘it is the tone... the sower sows the word. It is the tone, and the man.’

‘The man?’

‘That Daniel Oates.’

‘Mr Oates! But he knows you. He knows us.’

‘Yes, my dear’, said the Major bitterly, ‘yes.’

Mrs Grayper retrieved the newspaper from the wastebasket and after locating the article and smoothening out the sheets with some effort, read it carefully while the Major bit into his bread and ham furiously.

‘The cheek of the man’, she exclaimed, neatly echoing the Major’s thoughts. ‘He implies that you are dragging your feet because the suspect is in the employment of a good friend. He as much as names poor Captain Meadows.’

‘Everything but the name, my dear.’

‘And it is not even true that the suspect stays with the Captain. Oates knows that Mr Ali moved out weeks, months ago.’

‘That is not the issue, missus. The implication is that I am not doing my job.’