The Thing About Thugs (3 page)

With great care, M’lord draws out a bunch of three keys from a secret pocket in his waistcoat; with precision, he unlocks each of the three locks on this massive door; with a practised movement in the darkness to which the groaning door has admitted him, he finds a candle and lights it. Then he lights another candle and another, each candle appearing to magically reproduce itself all over the room, for it is full of mirrors and glass cases. With what pride and scientific interest M’lord now looks around this room of a thousand and one flames and surveys its precious hoard of skulls: long skulls and short skulls, skulls of bone and cast skulls, skulls as smooth as marble and skulls knobbly as old oak, small skulls and big skulls, skulls on tables and skulls in glass showcases, all labelled and catalogued. And here we stand, by him, in this massive house wrapped in the fog of a London night, admitted to a temple that few outside the London Society of Phrenology have been admitted to, allowed to gaze on the great scientific project of M’lord, his indelible contribution to the glory of his race and family name, his proposed Theatre of Phrenological Specimen. Above all, the theatre would be his answer, not to those who scoffed at head reading, for they had long been answered by Daniel Bell and Dr Gall and Johann Spurzheim and H.C. Watson if they only cared to listen (or read), but his answer to the followers of that Scottish upstart, George Combe, who had, M’lord was convinced, done as much to harm phrenology as to champion it. With the finished Theatre of Phrenological Specimen, M’lord would stop the mouths of the Combians in the London Society of Phrenology, and see the mark of defeat stamped on the effeminate features of that Captain William T. Meadows who had, since his return from India with his reprieved thug Amir Ali, taken society by such storm.

[WILLIAM T. MEADOWS, NOTES ON A THUG: CHARACTER AND CIRCUMSTANCES, 1840]

‘No, sahib, I have no hesitation in relating the full account of my life, for, as you say, you intend it for the delectation of your own people, and for their education as to the ways and beliefs of the benighted people of Hindoostan. I came to you when you lay in bed at the Firangi hospital in Patna, and many a dusty mile had I walked to get there, for word had gone out as far as Gaya and Phansa that in your illness you wished to hear the account of a real Thug, perhaps even a famous Thug, the full murderous account on condition of a full pardon, and if necessary, were the approver untainted by blood himself, you would take him with you to Firangheestan, the better to inscribe his tale and cause it to be printed on the miraculous machines you have in that land. And so it has transpired, for here I am, your devoted servant, in London, the city of cities, having served you for twelve months now, first in Hindoostan and then during the passage over the Black Waters, and I have told you all about the atrocious rites of my race, so that now all I have left to narrate is the story of my own life, which you say will be the last and shortest chapter of your book.

‘Life, sahib, is dear to everyone; to preserve mine, which was forfeited by the act of denouncing all my old confederates and revealing to you the nature and number of their heinous crimes, which I beheld and helped in, but only as a lookout, sahib, only as a young boy taken along by older men, I serve you now and hasten to tell you all you wish to hear. But unlike so many other approvers, I came to you on my own, and in my face and in my voice, and wonderfully from my skull, as you still lay recovering in Patna, you read, with the acuity that all sahibs are blessed with, the truth of my narrative. For others had come to you before me, attracted by the word in the bazaar that you had promised a large reward, and you had driven them away as braggarts and liars.
But something in my narrative, and I still wonder at the wisdom of Solomon that sahibs possess, made you listen and recognize that what I said was nothing but the truth...’

‘It is indeed true, Amir Ali’, said I, ‘but it was not the wisdom of Solomon that I exercised; it was the guidance of Reason, which is a God unknown to your race, for when the others came and spoke their lying stories to my face, all I did was listen, and Reason told me not to believe them.’

‘But sahib, surely it takes a blessed being to hear a God, even if the name of that God is neither one of the hundred names of Allah, nor one of the million names for Bhowanee, and surely sahib is blessed to hear the voice of his God...’

‘Alas, Amir Ali’, I replied, ‘I despair of making you understand, for you who grew up among men not afraid of killing other men, nay, having practised that crime as other people practise an art, you have learnt from the selfsame men to frighten yourself with painted dolls and empty Arabic words. Reason is not a tyrannical God like Allah, or a bloodthirsty demon like Bhowanee; Reason does not speak in my ears but gives me ears to listen with. For some came and told me of the murders they had committed or participated in, and I asked them about the cult of Thugee and they feigned ignorance or gave differing explanations, and hence I knew they were dissembling, for Reason told me that in the land of Hindoostan all is built on the scallold of superstitious faith. And others came and spoke of being Thugs and of the cult of Thugee, but claimed to have wandered into that murderous profession. They maintained that they had once been farmers, before the drought burnt all their crops, or that their fathers were carpenters or weavers, and Reason told me they lied because in the land of Hindoostan sons follow in the footsteps of their fathers as surely as the mango tree grows out of the stone of a mango, and a cat gives birth to kittens.’

‘Forsooth, sahib, but to an ignorant man like me, this is the veritable wisdom of Solomon, for we Thugs are master inveiglers, and know how to make a man look at the stars the better to pass the knotted scarf around his neck, and we are master scouts, watching out for passing witnesses to our murders and able to throw dust in the eyes of the wayfarer, but all this is nothing compared to the wisdom of your God, Mighty Reason, who makes material truths out of insubstantial words, and teaches you to verify them by reading the skulls of men, which you did after hearing me out on the first occasion in that hospital in Patna. Truly, sahib...’

‘Enough, Amir Ali’, said I. ‘There are matters your race cannot comprehend, or not yet, and perhaps it is best so. Let us not waste time; proceed with the story of your life.’

‘Forgive me, sahib. I will not tarry any more in regions you know so much better than my deluded intellect can ever comprehend; I shall proceed, like an arrow shot from the bow, straight to the target of my tale. My first memory, though somewhat dim as all memories of childhood are to the likes of us, is that of kites in the sky...’

‘Kites, Amir Ali? Birds?’

‘Oh no, sahib, kites of paper and wood, which we used to fly like children sometimes do in parks in London, the mother of cities, the jewel of the empire...’

‘And what was the significance of that, Amir Ali?’

‘Significance, sahib? Oh, I see what you mean. Being a superstitious race, sahib, we flew those kites in honour of our Gods and Goddesses, and it was then that I first heard the name of Bhowanee, the guardian deity of Thugs, both Muslim and Hindu...’

Jaanam,

There used to be kites in the air, pinned against the grey-blue skies brushed with the white whisk of clouds. Kites of many colours. Red, blue, yellow, two-coloured, multi-cofoured. We had names for each kind. Kites with tails and kites without. Sometimes
suspended in the breeze, almost immobile, a window in the sky. Sometimes dipping and twisting and turning, impelled by the wind, or manipulated by the flyer in the field or on the roof, in his bid to reach the string of another kite and cut it. And then the shout would go up, woh katee, katgayee re, giree, giree, giree, gireeee and we, the young boys and girls, would rush to catch the drifting kite, the kite that was now helpless without the guidance of the string that moored it to earth.

I had always admired Hamid Bhai’s ability to guess where the cut kite would alight, just as I admired his capacity to hold his breath for so long during our games of kabaddi. ‘Mind over matter, Amir’, he would say to me, laughing. ‘What’s bigger: the brain or the buffalo?’ But then, he was a few years older than I was and I suppose his seniority was a factor in my hero worship. That, of course, was before Hamid Bhai was sent to Patna.

We started flying kites around Dussehra and kept flying them till Hofi the next year, all of us, Hindus and Muslims of various sects and castes. if there was religion involved in this flimsy hoisting of paper in the air, it had long slipped from our memory. But of course, my moon-faced one, that is not something I mentioned to our mutual and, I must add, gracious employer, Kaptaan Wafi Mian Khet-Khaliyaan, as we used to call him (behind his back) in Hindustan, or Captain William T. Meadows, as he is known here. I discovered, a long time ago, even before I offered him my stories and was pressed into his service, that truth and credibility are two different things most of the time.

Mustapha Chacha was wrong about truth. I never met a man who was wrong so often, but always because he was too right for this world of ours. His wrongness was a sign — though I did not realize this until it was too fate — of a greater disorder in the scheme of things. He was wrong because truth and credibility might well be beyond reconciliation in our world. But I am anticipating myself; these are thoughts that came to me only gradually and with time.

To begin with, it was one of the things Mustapha Chacha preached to us: the need to reconcile truth and credibility in our lives. Perhaps preach is not the right word. He did not really preach; he would be pulling the strings of his kite as he spoke, manoeuvring it with practised ease along the invisible tunnels that the wind always makes in the sky.

Mustapha Chacha — I have mentioned his name to you before, and you have not raised an eyebrow at its difference from the names you are used to. You are the first and only person in London who has not accosted me with the first two questions of the catechism, one uttered — What is your name? — and the second — Who gave you that name? — in their expression when I speak my full name: Syed Mohammed Amir Ali.

I owe my knowledge of the catechism to Mustapha Chacha. He had prepared me thoroughly for the future, just as he had prepared himself. And he was convinced that, for better or for worse, the Firang were part of the future of Hindustan. Look at us, he would tell me as he tugged at the kite strings, for generations our family has held on to our ancestral lands by the simple expedient of passing it on to the eldest son, in lieu of some financial compensation at times, while the other sons, if any, sought service with the ruling powers. In the past, these were the Mughals, the Nawab of Awadh and others, and our family shed much blood and sweat in their service, as soldiers or clerks. But your father, God give him peace, who was he serving when he was killed? Who, indeed, but the Firang Company Bahadur forces? And your father, God bless him, was a prescient man: he knew the sun now rose from the west. So, my little nephew, the lamp of our family, if you want to face the future, look west into the rising sun.

Little good it did him though, this facing of a new future, the diligence with which he, in his youth, worked as a munshi before the death of his father called him back to the land, and the way in which he set himself to learn the customs and language of the Firangs. But that, jaanam, explains why I can speak fluently with you, far more fluently than Kaptaan Meadows suspects, while you do not understand a word of any of my languages.

Come to think of it, you cannot even read your own alphabets (which I can decipher with some effort), let alone this cursive Farsi script in which I write my letters to you, letters which I might some day translate for you, letters that remind me of all that I have left behind. For, jaanam, I do not know who I write these letters for, if not for you to whom they are addressed Perhaps no one will read out these fetters to you; perhaps no one will read them at all.

And yet I am driven to write them, stealing a candle-end from the Kaptaan’s kitchen under the eagle-eye of Nelly Clennam, the housekeeper and cook, who dislikes me more and more each passing day as familiarity dulls her initial terror of my past. Scribbling away in the murk of the scullery, I wish, perhaps, to leave an account of myself in words other than the ones Kaptaan Meadows uses in his notebook, the carefully inscribed pages that he intends to turn into a book about the infamous institution of thugee and my fledgling career in what he calls ‘ritual murder.’

Because, my dear, I was not, I am not what the Kaptaan wants me to be — I am not Amir Ali, the Thug.

If graveyards are places of absolute repose, then this place is not absolutely a graveyard. For late as it is and foggy, shadows move from gravestone to gravestone, from a marble angel, wings fixed in flight, to a plain sandstone crucifix, from a grave with elaborate lines and floral tributes to one with only a name and a date. There are far more graves like this one than graves with floral tributes and fine lines for, like the streets outside, this is a crowded graveyard, a busy graveyard, and often an anonymous graveyard. It is a graveyard that spills its secrets, so that a heavy downpour leaves a harvest of bones and skulls in the sludge, and gravediggers sometimes shovel through a rotten coffin in a bid to find an eternal resting place for the freshly dead.

The shadows pause in front of this plain, taciturn gravestone, this resting place with only a name and a date. There are two shadows; one of them carries a lantern which, at certain angles, multiplies the two into a hundred stealthy shades. And then there is a fierce whispering between the two, louder in the crowded emptiness of the graveyard than it would have been on the streets outside.

‘Are you sure?’

‘This is it, John May, I tell you. Here. Here. Look, the earth is still fresh...’

‘Damn you, Shields. If you have got it wrong again, I swear I will bury you in this grave.’