The Thing About Thugs (21 page)

‘But how can we? And why us?’

Gunga replied for Qui Hy. ‘It has to be us, because the others might just find the most convenient culprit again. And we have a witness.’

‘A witness?’

‘Jenny. Have you forgotten? She saw the men who were leaving her aunt’s house that night. She remembers what they looked like. She has already described them to us so many times...’

‘How can we find them if the police cannot?’

‘We can find them, Karim’, said Qui Hy,
‘because
the police cannot. Why, the Peelers did not even record Jenny’s evidence, I am told! Three men, at least one of them from the better classes, walking down a street together, could not possibly be reason for suspicion. What they wanted was a criminal character they could recognize. But these three men will be visible to us, to people like us. They have been taking the precaution of hiding themselves from the police and respectable eyes, but would they even notice the beggar on the street, the lascar in the corner? What we need to do is ask around.’

‘But I do not want Jenny involved in this’, Amir interposed.

‘She won’t be involved. She will only have to identify them when we find them.’

‘If we find them.’

‘No, Amir, not if. When.’

‘And what then?’

‘We will see. Let us find them first. There are ways to make them visible to people like Major Grayper.’

Amir shook his head. ‘No’, he said, ‘no. I do not want this. It will blow away. Let us not do anything. Let Major Grayper find them. I do not want Jenny to be troubled or involved.’

‘All right, Amir’, Qui Hy gave in, ‘but at least do what Karim has said: change your appearance and name, buy yourself some false papers, references.’

‘It is not necessary.’

‘Listen to me, Amir beta. Listen to me. I know what is necessary. And it won’t cost much: you have more than enough money, but only one life.’

‘It is not the expense that I object to...’

‘Then just do as I say...’

‘You are right, Mai’, said Gunga. He always addressed Qui Hy as ‘Mai, though she was not much older than him and could certainly not have been his mother. ‘Amir needs another name, another identity. He has to shave off his moustache, clip his hair short, get a tattoo or two on his face and arms, and new papers, papers from old employers, ships, if possible, so that he can pretend to be one of my boys... And you know there is only one person who can do all that.’

‘Ustad.’

‘Yes, Ustad. But he won’t do it, he has disappeared, he has gone crazy.’

‘He was always crazy. Fetcher. Fetcher is the only one of us who can get him to listen now... I think he knows where Ustad is, though he won’t tell.’

‘Perhaps he will take Amir to Ustad.’

‘Perhaps...’

Daniel Oates opens the one tiny window that allows some light into the garret that he uses as his study. It is surprisingly empty of books. There are reams of newspapers and magazines lying scattered around, and various pamphlets, but not more than three or four books. He returns to his table, dips his pen in ink and begins to scribble:

It has been announced by Superintendent Major Grayper that his decision, reported earlier, to release the Oriental man who was arrested on suspicion of being the ‘head cannibal’, as the mysterious murderer and beheader who has been stalking fair London is referred to by the public, was based not only on the personal assurances of a respectable gentleman but also on a hitherto undisclosed event. The night after the arrest of the Oriental suspect, a woman, a lady of the streets, was attacked and beheaded by a mysterious assailant in East London. This murder, the superintendent explained, indicated the innocence of the arrested man, which was also vouched for by the afore-mentioned gentleman.

Various other suspects have been aired by commentators in the period since this revelation by Superintendent Grayper. The mysterious murderer has been identified as a Russian immigrant with a religious mania, which takes the form of murdering Magdalens in order that their souls may perhaps go to heaven. There has also been an attempt to prove that he is a butcher whose mind is affected by the changes of the moon, and who has been much impressed by reading the Book of Ezekiel, c. xxiii, v.25, 26, 33, 34, 46, 47 and 48. The chapter refers to the vicious lives of the sisters Aholah and Aholibah, and verse 25 is the key to the situation: ‘And I will set my jealousy against thee, and they shall deal furiously with thee: they shall take away thy nose and thine ears; and thy remnant shall fall by the sword.’

These are, however, nothing but loose conjectures, which do not take into account such facts as these: that not only Magdalens but also heathens have been killed, and that all the victims have been ceremonially beheaded. Any serious consideration returns us to the original Oriental cannibal theory, first propounded in the pages of this paper by your correspondent.

The Oriental theory of the atrocities is worth thinking out. The Orientals are a sensitive and excitable race, and mental exaltation is not only very common, it usually borders on insanity. We all know how political fanaticism will drive a Nihilist to the commission of murder, but it is not so generally known that religious fervour drives some sects to the most terrible acts of self-mutilation in Asia and Africa. The Orientals are very apt to rush into extremes, and they seem to have an idea that social and eternal salvation can only be obtained by means most repugnant to civilized and well-balanced minds. Orientals, however, unlike Negroes, who are also capable of such acts, are particularly devious, a characteristic evidenced by the Rookery Beheader. All rational consideration and logical thinking points a finger of accusation at an Oriental man, whether or not it is this man, now released, acting singly or in tandem with a larger cult of heathens. It seems hasty to have released the man as early as he has been released.

Daniel Oates dusts the sheets with sand from a wooden box and holds them up, one by one, admiring the words marching along them, his handy, hardy soldiers setting out to conquer the world in print tomorrow. The world of Captain Meadows and Major Grayper and other such born gentlemen. The world that has allowed him entry, though only through a side-gate. But he is a defender of that world; he defends it with the fanaticism of the new convert. For Daniel Oates, there is only this world — evidence of anything else, whether it is the world of Jenny or of Qui Hy, is a monstrosity or an aberration to be effaced in space and time as firmly as the world, whatever it was, garret or hut, he himself has left behind.

In later years, when I started going to university in Patna, my trips to my grandfather’s library in that whitewashed house in Phansa grew rather infrequent, confined largely to the summer or winter vacations. And it was only once or twice during the vacation that I would visit that cobwebbed, dusty, gecko-infested room, or read on its veranda. By then, all the interesting books had already been borrowed by my cousins and me; the library only housed unwanted books (in English), such as Mayhew’s accounts of London, and of course, many volumes in Urdu, Persian and Arabic. The few Hindi volumes and the easier ones in Urdu had been given away to the children of old family servants, whose gains in literacy were usually marked by fewer visits to my grandmother’s house.

But there was one winter — I must have been about nineteen or twenty then — when I spent almost every day of the vacation month in the veranda off that room, studiously retrieving the books that — or so I pretended even to myself — needed to be saved. Mayhew’s was one of them.

The reason I was there was not really the books. It was a ‘part-timer’, an incredibly healthy-looking woman in her early twenties with lush black hair, who had been recently employed in the house. She would arrive around ten in the morning from some remote slum, and so would I from my parents’ neighbouring house. She would leave around four in the evening, and so would I. It was my first real love — not an adolescent crush, of which I had experienced a few, but something close to an adult passion. If I had had the knowledge or the courage, I would have invited her into the shady corners of that library room.

She was not unaware of my interest. She took to sitting in the veranda, sunning herself during the afternoon hours when she had no work, and bringing her chores, such as winnowing grain, to the veranda. She sometimes offered to fetch me a glass of water. I was not unaware of her interest either. But there was such a gap between us — of class, clothing, family, education, literacy, even language (for the Urdu spoken in my family was very different from the rough dialect she uttered) — that I could not act on my passion (a passion that often threatened to gag my voice, bedazzle my sight) without the knowledge of betrayal. I would have liked to hold her, kiss her, make love to her; I felt — I knew from the unabashed way she walked and sometimes joked with other (male) servants — that she would know what to do if I so much as reached out and touched her, and that I would not be averse to her display of a knowledge still forbidden to me. But I did not touch her. And once when, by chance, we fell in together on the way back from the market — or, rather, she walked out of a crowd, said ‘salaam’ and walked back to the house with me — I burned with desire for her, but confined myself to the politest of formal talk. It was not just my ignorance that prevented me; it was also my knowledge- and here I give myself some credit — that our relationship was (in the terminology of the ism that interested me in those years) so ‘over-determined’ that it could only end in exploitation and betrayal.

That is how, sometimes, I see Jenny and Amir walking; passion holding them apart in the politer parks and avenues of London. And sometimes I see them walking alone, but still full of thoughts of each other; buoyed, disturbed, confused. That is when I stop myself: there is a danger in such retrospective crystal-gazing. I have seen signs of it in the well-meaning talk of Captain Meadows and his closest, kindest friends. Once, during one of those dinners in early Victorian London that I glimpsed from my grandfather’s library in Phansa more than a century later, I heard Captain Meadows defend some reviled Asian or African custom by waving his hands, taking in all of the great metropolis that stretched around him with that gesture, and saying, ‘This too has been one of the dark places of the earth.’

I had read enough by then, and not just in my grandfather’s library, to know what he meant. He meant well. He meant that perhaps a few centuries from now, India or Nigeria would mature into the civilization — the best of it, of course — that had evolved in England since the dark pre-Roman days. Some of my crystal-gazing might depend on this expansive, well-meaning and not entirely blind gesture of his. But unlike Meadows and his friends, I am aware of the dangers, the limitations of all such gestures. I see myself, at the age of, say, forty, looking at a nineteen- or twenty-year-old boy, seeing in his confused maturity a bit of myself, and a bit of Amir Ali. I see a family resemblance, a kinship in the confidence and confusion of early youth. But I hesitate to suggest that the resemblance points to me. For I know that when that nineteen- or twenty-year-old boy grows to be forty, he will not be me. Never. To comprehend his similarity, I have to prepare myself for this ultimate difference. No matter how much like me he seems from my retrospective point of perception, he will never be me; I have to narrate his story not only through claims of knowledge and visibility, which are inevitably based on my knowledge of myself, but also through conjecture, silence, darkness. It is these that make him other than me. It is these that make Amir Ali who he is, and make Jenny, Jenny.

That is how I see Jenny for almost the last time.

She is walking back from work, late again. Tonight she will not go to Amir’s house. I can sense that much. It is a chilly night and she does not want to send Gunga and the boys into the streets two nights in a row. She also needs to be alone. Or so I conjecture. She needs to settle the problem that her heart has become. She knows she is in love with Amir, she even shares her bed with him; she wants to marry him. But he refuses to convert to Christianity. And how else can they be married?

Her desire to escape the streets entails that she can marry him only in the correct manner, in the eyes of God and mankind. Perhaps there is suspicion too. How can love across a precipice not contain the fear of a fall? Perhaps her doubts about the stories of Amir Ali make her clutch at conversion, however superficial, as proof of his reality as the man in her life.

She has to think about all this, and it is better to think alone. With Amir, she cannot think of anything; with him, she feels too alive to bother about such matters.

Shields is haunted by the business. But he is also addicted to it; the excitement as well as the money it brings. Now, when they walk into a pub, they can buy and eat and drink what they want. It is a new experience for Shields. John May knows this, and he counts on it to keep Shields from getting frightened out of his senses, to keep him from seeing the ghosts that he hears all the time, that make him jump and fret and complain about being trailed.

Jack, on the other hand, shows no trace of their activities. Blood is just so much water off his back. John May wonders if the tall, gaunt man even thinks of their nocturnal stalking and killing. In his own case, it is with an effort of the will and exercise of reason that the ghosts are kept at bay. But Jack, one-eyed Jack, seems to lack that very appendage, whatever M’lord would have called it, which troubles Shields so much and which would afflict John May too, if he were a man with lesser strength of character.

He is aware of this difference between his two accomplices. As they leave the table, he watches them from a corner of his eye. They have just gorged themselves on a meal of fried fish and bread, washed down with mugs of ale. With a head to it, Shields had instructed foolishly every time they ordered a round. Shields is drunk, but not drunk enough to stop jumping at sudden noises. Jack is unperturbed, ambling along in his loose-jointed manner.