The Thing About Thugs (12 page)

That evening, for my protection, Haldi Ram insisted that, if I did not mind, I should sleep in their village. I agreed: it was too late to go back to Patna, and this low-caste part of the village, at some distance from the upper-caste sections, was the last place where anyone would look for me, should Habibullah get wind of my arrival.

I knew that Haldi Ram and the headman still had their scouts on the road leading to the village, so as to intercept Hamid Bhai if he followed me there as well. But I was certain Hamid Bhai would be away on business for at least a few days. Now that I was calmer, I was trying to devise a method by which I could avenge Mustapha Chacha and his family without confronting Habibullah either physically, which was bound to be a failure,
or legally, which Hamid Bhai would insist on and which was even less likely to succeed, for Mirza Habibullah had the wealth to buy lawyers and also henchmen to intimidate witnesses, poor and vulnerable as these were in any case.

Early that night, however, I insisted on being shown the mound under which my family lay buried. It was, as I think I have already written, near a straggly neem tree that grew over an abandoned well, just inside the extensive fields of Habibullah, not far from the main road leading to Patna. It marked the outskirts of the fields that belonged to our village. We stole up to the place, because Haldi Ram insisted on it, and it was a good thing we did — for Habibullah had stationed a few of his men by the grave even at night. Obviously, they had instructions to prevent the bodies from being recovered. Having committed the murders, pre-planned or not, Habibullah knew that he had to bluster his way out of it, and it was part of his bluster, if not part of his twisted nature, to bury his enemies without the proper rituals, in a place where even the fatiha could not be said over them. I stood there, hidden, looking at the mound, and I would have stood there all night if Haldi Ram had not tugged at my sleeve and said, Let’s go back now. There is a storm brewing.

The storm broke while we were returning from the grave. It was unseasonal. Lightning streaked the dark heavens, thunder reverberated across the land. Large drops, heavy as pebbles, fell on us, and as we sprinted for the village, a river of rain descended from the clouds. I had to force myself to run with them, for a part of me felt no desire to do anything, and a part of me was dead, and it hardly mattered whether I got drenched or drowned. It continued to pour for three hours.

And in some ways, jaanam, it gave me the answer I had been searching for. Because when I woke up the next morning, after a night of fretful sleep, the horizon had changed perceptibly: a palm tree had been uprooted, branches wrenched off the tamarind tree outside the hamlet, the thatch over some huts had been blown
away. But the grass by the road and in the fields was wavy and green, unaffected by the storm. It was then that I knew the way out: I had to be like the grass. And I remembered the gossip that I had heard in Patna. It was one of those tales that often circulated, about the craziness of the Firangs who were taking over our land, their strange ideas and ways. This time it was about one Captain Meadows, who was convalescing in the Company hospital in Patna, on his way back to his country.

My grandmother’s whitewashed house, before it gradually emptied of things and people and then, surprisingly, of memories, used to contain the usual quota of family servants. One of them was the family ayah, a woman from Punjab who had somehow ended up in Bihar. This was against the usual trajectory: usually it was impoverished Biharis who left for affluent Punjab. But this large, fair, somewhat manipulative woman with her Punjabi Urdu had brought us up, the children who, after a few years in the house, left for other places, bigger cities, foreign countries, sometimes with a few books from my grandfather’s library for company or as a memento. When I write of Qui Hy, I inevitably think of her. And because of this superimposition of persons, I can see Qui Hy more clearly than I manage to imagine Amir Ali, whom I have met only through some Farsi notes: his own words both define Amir Ali and remove him from my grasp. Language is always slippery, but Qui Hy exists in flesh and blood in my mind, and my memories. I do not need her words to see her. And I see her now, in her house that is known as a dhaba, surrounded by Amir Ali and his random friends and acquaintances.

Qui Hy is a large, short woman, broad-faced and big-bosomed, and when she laughs, every bit of her — cheek, jowl, chin, bosom, stomach, shoulder — seems to shake as if an earthquake has occurred in the centre of her being. She does not utter a sound, though: she laughs silently.

And that was what she did now. She laughed silently but heartily at Karim’s account of his brush with an English prostitute, as she folded a paan and handed it to Gunga. Karim was describing the prostitute’s attributes, which had been advertised in a printed booklet, and much of the humour was in his droll interjections, mostly in Hindustani, between the descriptions: ‘Nancy has a good deal of vivacity (if plied with sufficient gin, interjected Karim, before continuing to read from the booklet) and a pretty face (when seen in the dark), she has a pleasing aquiline nose (and quite a lot of it), excellent teeth (though not too many), she does not much care to give her company to anybody whose person is not in some measure pleasing to her (without they make it well worth her while)...’ Karim was, or had pretensions of being from an aristocratic family, and his mannerisms and language were accordingly elaborate: his gestures, like his alphabets, for he wrote a fine hand, came adorned with curlicues and effete flourishes. This, for the gathering of mostly illiterate or semi-literate Indians in Qui Hy’s dhaba, naturally increased the humour of his many narratives about his encounters with various kinds of women in London.

Qui Hy’s place was known, at least among the Indians who lived in the attics, abandoned houses, overpriced rented rooms, docks and street corners of London, as the only place where one could get, at any time of the year, a proper, well-folded paan. She would, if you paid enough, tuck a kernel of akbari opium into it for you — the solid akbari opium which was as hard to come by as betel leaves in London — but she never allowed any kind of opium to be smoked in her premises. It could only be eaten, in the traditional Indian way, in her dhaba.

The only person who could smoke opium was her Irish husband, an ex-sailor and soldier who had lost the will to exert himself
somewhere in India. There were rumours that he had made a fortune through some undiscovered crime or that he had abandoned his ship or regiment, but it was hard to reconcile these with the old man who lay supine on his bed, except when he danced around the room to some mysterious tune in his head. It was known for certain that he had inherited the place and, it was said, married Qui Hy when she was abandoned on the streets of London by the family that had brought her to England. She was in her early twenties then, and the Irish man perhaps closer to fifty. Now, he was an old man, racked by mysterious bouts of pain which would subside only when a treacly drop of chandu opium was placed in the clay bulb of his bamboo pipe and roasted into sweet smoke over the flame of a candle. Qui Hy would repair into the room that he occupied inside and prepare his pipe for him.

The advertisement read out, Karim, with Gunga and Tuanku, the Malay, went back to their jargon, which Amir could barely comprehend. The others in the room, three men and one woman — a dark and wiry ayah from Madras — were only vaguely familiar to Amir.

The two candles sputtered as someone opened the door. It was Fetcher — not Fletcher, as he was known to insist, but Fetcher. They had been saying it to him since the age of two or three, when he began running errands on the streets of London: ere boy, fetch that for me, boy. Fetch im. Fetch er.

Like a trained dog, he had fetched and carried his way into adolescence, squirrelling over fences and walls like other street Arabs at the sight of a bobby, a thin dark-skinned boy with a cheeky, gap-toothed grin, some of his teeth victims of various accidents and fights. He always carried a leather water bag, which he called his chagoul: it seldom contained water. Speaking his own version of English, mixed with words from a dozen languages, and living as often in the tunnels and sewers of London as on its streets, Fetcher boasted that he knew more shortcuts, below, in and over the city, than anyone else. It was a boast borne out by his ability to materialize in a surprisingly short time from any faraway spot.

Behind Fetcher walked in a woman Amir had seen only occasionally on the streets: from her attire, he knew she was what Jenny would have called a ‘tinkler.’ Elf locks bristled under the rim of her hat, her gypsy complexion passing for European in this room of Asians, though on the streets she would have been called ‘black as a crock.’ The room tensed with her entry but Fetcher reassured them by describing her as a friend. An’ wha’s more, babulog, her’s gonna read you yer fremtid.’

‘No one reads me my future, boy’, said Qui Hy.

‘What about you, Karim?’ nudged Gunga. ‘Don’t you want to know if the next white whore you approach will let you between her legs or kick you away like the last one did?’

‘Kick me away? No woman, white, black or purple, kicks Maharaja Karim Shah away!’

At this Gunga and Tuanku dissolved into laughter, interspersed with swear words and back-slapping.

But all of them let the gypsy read their palms, all but Qui Hy, who refused, and her Irish husband, who remained as usual in his room. The gypsy did her mumbo-jumbo well and came up with standard answers: promising a passage home to one and a great voyage to another, health to some, wealth to others, disease and recovery, a major joy or a minor sorrow. Just like any tonsured palm-reader in India, thought Amir. That is, until she came to Amir’s palm. She grasped it like she had grasped the palms of the others, but then she frowned. She held his hand tighter, spat on his palm and rubbed vigorously. Then she peered again and let his hand drop.

‘What?’ asked Gunga on Amir’s behalf. The room was suddenly quiet, pervaded by the smell of tobacco and paan, and a trace of opium from the room occupied by Qui Hy’s husband.

The gypsy woman shook her head.

Amir insisted. I want to know, he said, though he only half
believed in such things. Mustapha Chacha had taught him not to believe in prophesies — they were both illogical and unIslamic, he had believed. But Amir had grown up among villagers who feared omens and signs.

The gypsy looked at him and said, ‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’ echoed Gunga and Amir together. Even Qui Hy looked interested now.

‘Nothing’, the gypsy repeated, ‘there is nothing.’

Fetcher sensed the shadow of fear fall on the room and he hastened to shoo the gypsy away. ‘Off with yer’, he said, giving her a coin, ‘off’n buy yersel’ some al-kuhl.’

But the gypsy’s abrupt prophesy had left a burden hanging in the atmosphere, and first Amir, then Gunga and the others slipped away in ones and twos into the evening gloom, leaving Qui Hy alone with her husband. She hummed a Punjabi song as she cleaned up after them. Once she interrupted herself to snort and say, ‘Palm-reading, ha! That man Fetcher’s nothing but a baby-fool.’

Jenny carried the brush and the pail, cold water slopping in it, from room to room, floor to floor, spotting the grease from the candles and removing it with a hard scrub. Then she returned to the scullery to dissolve a bar of soap, shredded for the purpose, in two gallons of hot water. She carried this bucket of dissolved soap, a bucket of fresh water and a third bucket of vinegar around the rooms, scouring the floor first with the soapy water, then sponging it with vinegar and finally wiping it with water and drying it. The entire process took time and it left her aching in the arms, though she was used to hard work. But she had promised Nelly Clennam, Captain Meadows’ housekeepercook, that she would finish the job today, no matter how long it took, so that tomorrow the house could be prepared for the grand dinner the day after. Nelly was in a tizzy over the dinner: nothing like it had taken place since before the Captain had left for India, and that was years ago. Since his return, he had not shown any inclination to invite more than two or three people over for dinner, and these were usually members of his society who spent more time examining Amir Ali’s skull than they did appreciating the cook’s efforts. But this time it was different: a dozen guests were expected, and all the servants knew that it had to do with the Captain’s wooing of that lovely young lady, Miss Mary Grayper.

It was getting late, and Jenny still had to stop in the house of the Collinses, two kilometres away, where she helped their maid do the dishes for the day: it was one of the many places where she helped out, being paid in cash or kind. After that she had to negotiate the dark streets back to her aunt’s den in the rookery. Jenny was not afraid of the dark and the streets — she was capable of looking after herself — but lately there had been all kinds of news of murders and hauntings, and something like fear had slithered its way into her mind. She felt a sense of foreboding. If only Amir were around, filling the house with his brooding but calm presence, perhaps catching her for a kiss or a fumble in a dark corner. But today he had left early — probably for Qui Hy’s place — and he was yet to return.

John May thinks of wearing a mask. But he finally abandons the idea: it would attract too much attention; he does not have a fly to fetch him, like M’lord. Instead, he wears a low-brimmed hat. Shields wears his usual cap and One-eyed Jack has turned up bareheaded as usual,
still clad in the clothes he wore when May first met him. Now that night has fallen, Shields is visibly nervous, but May is glad to see that Jack goes about in his usual languorous, garrulous manner, unaffected by the prospect of what they are about to undertake, twirling his heavy wooden cudgel with ease. As for May, he has made up his mind that this is necessary, even desirable — and he is a man who does not have qualms about what needs to be done. In any case, unlike Shields, he does not believe in ghosts.