The Thing About Thugs (30 page)

It begins to drizzle, and Amir seeks shelter under a ledge. The fly passes him on its way back to the house. There is only the coachman; no M’lord descends from it.

Amir walks up to the coachman, who is leading the horses to the mews. ‘I need to see His Lordship’, he says boldly to the giant. The coachman is surprised. He laughs. ‘Come back in a year or two’, he replies.

‘A year or two?’

‘A year or two, lascar; his Lordship is on his way to the dark continent...’

Amir starts running towards the docks even before the coachman has completed his reply. The slight drizzle cuts into his face. The emptying streets of London seem to fill with his footsteps, as if he were a monster chasing himself. He brushes past the few pedestrians; he runs into the wet darkness.

Gunga and his men were given the usual quarters: the worst in the ship, well below the deck. Gunga did not mind. He was used to it all. Even this ship, with its drunken skipper, its motley crew, not one of whom Gunga would show his back to if he could help it, its mysterious owner, some rich lord who had filled the hold with crates full of equipment for some ‘scientific expedition’ in Africa.

Good Hope
, the ship was called. Good hope for whom, Gunga wondered; perhaps for the Lord-owner and perhaps for Gunga and his men, who could finally start the long journey home, for he doubted the crates contained hope for wherever they were headed. He had sailed the seas long enough to know that hope does not ship well; it is usually spoiled across long distances.

But that was not what worried Gunga. He was worried about Karim: he did not know if Karim would last to the Congo, though perhaps warmer climes would revive him. And he hoped that he would be able to go out just once at dawn and look for Amir. He had told Qui Hy and Fetcher to send the boy to these docks.

Amir wakes with a start, and that is when he realizes he must have fallen asleep. The wood is cool and hard against his body, the sound of the waves soothing despite the stench. All is still and clear. By the stillness he knows it to be late in the night, perhaps just a few minutes before the first light of morning. For the docks — with their pubs and taverns, biscuit bakers and block makers, pawnbrokers and rope spinners, knocking shops and grog shops — are never quiet until long after midnight, and they come alive again with the faintest light.

He is not surprised that he fell asleep. His last memory is of the men in the tavern. He had run without stopping when he left Lord Batterstone’s mansion. The drizzle had stopped by the time he reached the tavern, leaving his clothes moist rather than wet. He rushed up to the sailors and dock hands in the drinking den, jostling the crowd so that one of them spilled his ale. Luckily there was a man, a recently arrived Burmese lascar, who knew him from Qui Hy’s place; knew him not as Amir Ali, but by his new Ustad-given identity. It was this man who answered Amir’s desperate, madly repeated question.

‘No’, the lascar replied in the jargon that Amir can just about comprehend.
‘Good Hope
sailed hours ago. It is not docked here any more, bhai.’

Amir cannot believe it. He scrambles to the piers — to be met by an empty, dirty stretch of water where he saw
Good Hope
anchored a few days earlier. He rushes around, peering at the names of the ships still anchored here, hoping against hope to find on one of them the cursive letters of
Good Hope.
There are so many ships, but not one of them is
Good Hope
. It is then that fatigue falls on him like a cloak, and he sinks onto the wooden planks of a pier, resting his tired body on a pile of ropes, his fists clenched, his mind undecided between frustration and relief. He has failed Jenny. It is too late now. And yet, a burden has been lifted from his soul. It is then that he falls asleep without even realizing it.

Loneliness wraps the dock, its closed stalls and shacks like sightless eyes. With dawn now limning the horizon, the dark masts of ships seem to stand solitary and mute, aspiring to heaven but failing to reach it; the riggings are spread like empty nets. Water laps against the ships, dirty, but mysteriously insistent, as if it is telling the caulked planks stories that are beyond human hearing.

Slowly an eyelid lifts in the sky. The sun is rising in the east. Waves of light spread behind the clouds, pulsing like a mighty heart.

Then Amir hears Gunga shouting for him. He knows in that instant that
Good Hope
has not sailed. Perhaps it was moored somewhere else; perhaps the lascar was misinformed. Gunga is shouting for him, asking him to hurry up, they are going to lift anchor soon, they have to go aboard now, he cannot wait any longer, all the other boys are already there, where are you, jahaajbhai? Oh, where are you, nawabzada?

He half turns towards the voice and hesitates. He hesitates, and half turns towards the voice.

Nawabzada, jahaajbhai, where are you?

At that instant, the morning or the wind passes a thin blade across the belly of the clouds to the east and sunlight spills out like blood.

The sudden stab of light after a powercut was always greeted with shouts and comments. Allah be praised, my grandmother would mutter, not without irony. The bulbs and mercury tubes would burst into light, blinding us for an instant. Darkness would be defeated, but sight would still take a few seconds to be restored. No, let’s put this differently: eyes that had gotten used to seeing in the darkness would be blinded by light. Who says only darkness is blinding?

As the dawn bursts over Amir Ali in London, I am blinded by it. I see him hesitate and turn towards Gunga’s voice; I see him turn and hesitate. The sunlight falls on him. He stands drenched in sunlight.

Amir Ali knows he can duck into one of the corners and the ship will sail without him. Or he can respond to Gunga and sail with the ship. But whatever he does, he has already embarked on a new story — the Hindustani from Patna, the thug of Captain Meadows’ science, suspected murderer in the streets of London, a lascar in Gunga’s gang, the instrument of love’s revenge... There are so many possibilities, some already visible, some still lurking under the surface of reality; some half-visible in darkness; some half-hidden by brightness.

Not one of the possibilities is Amir Ali, and yet he is in all of them. No choice can ever be embraced whole-heartedly, no story will ever tell all of what he was, but one or more of the stories would have to be chosen, uttered, lived out. Any choice would leave him with the option of spinning another set of stories, stories that would sweep him on to other voyages, other destinies. But he knows now that all stories are not equivalent, no, not at all; each story relates to his illegible reality in a different way, each also relates to different realities. Perhaps he turns towards the voice. My sight fails me; the library in Phansa fails me; all libraries fail us at this instant of decision.

Forgiveness and vengeance are easy only in thought, when language pretends to tell us all about life.

But face to face, say, aboard a ship off the coasts of Africa, still some moments away from sighting land, a ship smelling of a long voyage, a stale, rotting, confined smell that even the brine of the sea breeze cannot blow away, on a ship like that, when one of the lascars turns and stares at the nobleman who has financed the voyage, what is it that appears in his eyes: vengeance or forgiveness? Does Lord Batterstone read the face on that skull, the new face of Amir Ali the Lascar? A squall has blown up. The sailors are running about on deck, pulling down sails, scampering up and down riggings. What happens when Amir Ali faces Lord Batterstone? Can my language dare to choose between the options? Can my language claim to tell all of Amir Ali? Or should I let the squall blow in the blind whiteness of a sea fog behind which I can hide my choice of words, the fact that what I have chosen, what I can choose is never enough, never complete?

I see Amir Ali look at Lord Batterstone, seasick and soul-weary. The sea is choppy; the wind is howling; the heavens press down on the earth, heavy with clouds. Lord Batterstone steadies himself against a sudden lurch and looks back at Amir Ali. He sees a lascar. He sees no story worth reading.

TABISH KHAIR is an award-winning poet, journalist, critic, educator, and novelist. A citizen of India, he lives in Denmark and teaches literature at Aarhus University.

Author photograph © Lars Kruse