The Thing About Thugs (24 page)

I had hoped you would come tonight, and I could lose myself in the cascade of your hair. But I know that there are evenings when you cannot get away early enough to come to me. Each such night is a dark emptiness to me, and I cross that emptiness only in the hope that there will be other nights...

This is where the Farsi notebook that I found in my grandfather’s library peters out and my narrative is plunged into darkness. It is a darkness as sudden as the black of the powercuts which, with the years, have become epidemic in Phansa. Houses would be humming with activity — children playing, students reading, women cooking, men talking or working — when suddenly the lights would go off, the fans would clatter to a stop. Load shedding, someone would announce unnecessarily. The many threads of our activities would unspool and fall inert on the floor. The stories we were living out would be dunked in darkness. But, of course, the stories never stopped. There were sounds and smells and movement; sight is not all. And then someone would light a candle, or the moon would show from behind the clouds, sending a sliver of silvery light through the curtains. The darkness was never absolute.

No, the darkness is never absolute.

Paddyji this, Paddyji that, oh, she can go on for ever, worse than the most anti-Papist Englishman, ignoring my real name — not that it is my original name — and pestering me with the nickname I used to hate before she turned it into something else. Not Paddy, but Paddyji. All right, I said to Qui Hy, all right, all right, all right, you Punjabi gorgon. There was no point in pretending to be asleep. Qui Hy was too perturbed to make me my pipe, and even I was disturbed despite my grumbling. I remember that much.

It must have been a little later when we woke up Amir Ali with the news. I went along, because Qui Hy insisted on it. Her knees were acting up again and she could not walk the distance. So, for some Oriental reason beyond my comprehension, I had to go in her place.

When Amir was shaken awake in the dark basement of the house in the Mint where Qui Hy had tucked him away, he knew something was very wrong. Because I had come to wake him up. He rubbed his bleary eyes and looked at my face; a handsome face once, I must say, but now scarred with age. Beside me stood Gunga and Karim.

At that moment, he looked vulnerable and wary, in a way that only the very young, who are still tentative about life, can look. Surprisingly, his face also displayed the weariness of the aged, of people to whom bad news has come more than once.

‘Have they arrested her instead?’ Amir asked me. The boy never calls me Paddyji; strangely, none of them do, despite hearing Qui Hy address me as Paddyji. None of them calls me by any name. I know that, among themselves, they refer to me as Qui Hy’s husband. Or, if inclined towards greater precision, Qui Hy’s Irish husband.

I shook my head in response to Amir’s query. ‘Come with me, son’, I said. ‘Come to the dhaba. Qui Hy will tell you.’

The streets were deserted. It was still half dark. The clouds piled up in the sky, like bales of hay dumped into a grey sea. We walked quickly from corner to corner until we reached the narrow house they all call Qui Hy’s dhaba, though it belongs to me. Not that I mind: let it be known by Qui Hy’s name, which is as much her real name as Paddyji is mine. Names are like clothes: you wear them only as long as they are not too tight or threadbare.

A parsimonious fire had been lit in our small stone fireplace. Tea — boiled with milk, spices and sugar, the Indian way — was bubbling over it, stirred absent-mindedly by Qui Hy.

When Amir Ali is given the news of what happened to Jenny, he feels as if he has been through it all before: the voices of concern, the faces that reflected some, if only a fraction, of the pain, anger and frustration that he feels. He recalls the morning in his village when Haldi Ram and his people intercepted him and told him of the fate of Mustapha Chacha and his family. Once again, he is surrounded by people who barely know him, and with whom he can claim no kinship. Their unmerited concern for him, the crudeness of their decency, is visible in their faces. Their past is as murky, if not more; they must have known hatred and anger and jealousy; they must have manipulated, betrayed, perhaps murdered. But at this moment, by a strange twist of circumstances, they stand with him in the essence of their crude humanity.

Amir has imagined many possibilities. Getting married to Jenny, not marrying her, leaving her behind in London while he makes a fortune elsewhere, taking her with him, perhaps even to India, staying on in London and seeing her occasionally, as he already does, as he moves from job to job. He has imagined almost every possibility. All except this. Even death would have been imaginable, but not in this shape, not a death like this.

He feels bewildered; if the news had come to him from other people, he would not have believed it. This is the capital of the power that is seeking to bring law and order to the world. This is the city of light. How can such things happen here?

For a moment, such is his bewilderment that he almost comes to see himself again through Major Grayper’s and Nelly’s eyes: he fears he has brought and unleashed the ghosts of his narrated homeland in this place of reason and science. As if the spectres with which he paid for his passage to England, the soucouyants with which he revenged his uncle and family, all those bloodthirsty ghosts of his narrative have come alive in this city. He has brought them here. And now they have chosen their victim, for what they want is not just blood but suffering.

I was surprised at how calm he was. It is strange, isn’t it? One does not expect an Oriental to be calm. There is something about how they talk perhaps, their hands like birds, their faces like waterfalls. Perhaps that is how the English see us Irish too. And how differently people react under pressure: Irish or Oriental, they always escape your idea of them at the crucial moment. As did Amir. He remained frighteningly calm.

‘Her head?’ he asked Qui Hy.

It was Gunga who understood first. ‘No, no, Amir. She was clubbed and perhaps garrotted. It was someone else. Her body was found intact...’

‘Thank God’, he muttered. Then he burst out, in the first and only sign of anger: ‘I will kill the person who did it. I swear I will kill him, if that is the last thing I do.’

‘But carefully, son’, I said, stirring the chai, ‘this is not India.’

This ain’t inja, said Qui Hy’s Irish husband.

Amir looks up at him, startled, as if seeing him for the first time. He feels like shouting, yes, it is, this is the India that Captain Meadows wants from me. This is India as you people imagine it. You have made it come alive here in the streets of London.

But even as the thought forms in his mind, he feels a sense of shame. He thinks of Captain Meadows in his carriage, and hears Qui Hy speak, slowly, softly like she always does, stitching together her words in English with the slow care with which she stitches pockets, her voice sometimes revealing a slight Irish brogue just as her husband’s voice sometime betrays a North Indian lilt. Qui Hy, always cautious, is urging them not to be hasty.

We all understand revenge. Even I, an opium-befuddled white man though I might seem to them, a half-crazy Irish man with tunes running in his head, an ex-soldier with tall tales of colonial campaigns who never leaves his house except to get drunk in the pubs. We understand revenge because we do not fully trust law and justice. From where we stand, I and they, justice is the revenge of the rich and the powerful. And, by inverse logic, it makes revenge our only justice.

Not that any of them saw this: they came to revenge as their last recourse, a violent urge. But then, they had not lived with a woman like Qui Hy and learned to turn thoughts over, examine the nature of each necessity, the artificiality of every urge.

Amir hears himself demand vengeance. It is like hearing a ghost. The jaws of the past have gaped wide again. The words are similar to those he uttered in the presence of Haldi Ram and the other villagers so long ago. He can see their faces react in sympathy and understanding, even Qui Hy’s addict of a husband. But Amir feels a hollowness in his words. His loss and anger are as great as the last time, when his uncle and aunt were murdered. Still, there is a hollow ring to his cry for vengeance.

Qui Hy calmed them down, as much by her words as by returning to her fireplace seat and to her meticulous stitching of pockets. But over the next few days, she also tried to find an eyewitness to Jenny’s murder. She was convinced someone would have seen it. When you have lived with the woman as long as I have, you come to mirror her convictions without noticing it. She is opinionated at times, no doubt about that. But she is also almost always right.

In this case, she was convinced, with her Indian peasant logic, that someone must have seen the murder. It was just that no one had come up and told the police. The sort of people who were out in those parts at that time of night were unlikely to go to the police, she reasoned. I felt that in this she was more Indian than she realized, her mind still terrorized by memories and tales of Oriental despots. But perhaps she was right. Perhaps we are all more Indian than we realize.

No, she proclaimed, such witnesses would not go to the Peelers.

Instead, they might come to her. So, once again, she summoned her ragtag army of ayahs, lascars, whores, opium addicts, gypsies and servants of the lowest order. Such an invisible lot they were; before I fell in with her, even I had looked through them on the streets of London. Even I, an opium-addled ex-soldier, not a gentleman by any means, had failed to see them. But they were there; I knew this as surely as Fetcher claimed to know that the Mole People lived in the tunnels, ruins and caverns of the city. And so the word went out: Qui Hy wants information. And I, her lawful husband for years, know exactly how far into the many realms of invisibility Qui Hy’s word can reach.

It didn’t take long. On the fourth night, a woman walked in. Qui Hy was reclining in her rocking chair, as she always did in the late evening, stitching pockets for those new contractors who had started distributing work: a pocket stitched here, a seam there, the buttons put on somewhere else, and hey presto, a dress was ready to be sold to the affluent classes, a dress brought into existence by the magic of a dozen invisible hands all over London. Qui Hy, with her mysterious connections and her Indian love for silver, had caught on early and was now meticulously stitching pockets for three different contractors in her spare moments. My pocket money, she would call it, shaking silently with laughter. I never understood how that woman could laugh so heartily without emitting a single sound.

So, as I said, on the fourth night, a woman, an English woman, walked in. I watched her; I always watch them from the cot in my room, smoking my sweet pipe. She wasn’t Cockney; she spoke with a genteel accent, mostly. It was either an accent she had meticulously tried to learn without entirely succeeding, or it was an accent she had picked up as a child, but whose sheen had been dimmed by years of disuse.

Gunga and Amir, who usually joined us late at night, were the only other people there when the woman entered. She was around fifty, garishly painted and dressed in the faded style of an older generation, in a worn silk paletot. It was obvious that she was a streetwalker, and Qui Hy, who did not like her place being frequented by whores she did not know, made a gesture of repugnance. Place closed, luv, she said to the woman.

‘I am looking for Qui Hy’, the woman replied in a slurred voice. She was more than a little drunk.

‘You have found her’, Qui Hy said, putting aside her thread and needle.

‘Qui Hy, the Chinaman?’

‘There is only one Qui Hy, luv, and that’s me.’

‘You are the one who wants to know what happened in, you know, the alley.’

‘Yes, luv. But you didn’t see anything, did you?’

‘Maybe I did. Maybe.’

‘Or maybe you imagined it because you want a drink?’

The woman looked at Qui Hy for a moment, then burst out laughing. She had a deep, frank laugh, an infectious one, and Qui Hy’s broad face relaxed into a smile.

‘A drink will make me remember better, missus’, the woman said with a wink.

At this, Qui Hy laughed in turn and indicated to Gunga to get the bottle of gin that she kept for her own use in a cupboard.

Cups and glasses were filled all around, the gin diluted with water. The woman gulped her drink down in one go, gave a satisfied gasp, and extended the glass again. Qui Hy filled it and said, ‘The story now, Miss...’

‘Miss No One, ma’am’, said the woman. ‘Miss No One. You get my story but you do not get my name.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘And I want to see that shilling you promised. I want to see it exists.’

Qui Hy took a gleaming coin out of the many folds of her dress and tossed it once. It glinted in the firelight and disappeared into Qui Hy’s fleshy fist again.

‘There, Miss No One. It exists. But you get to feel its weight only if we believe you. Now, your story if you please.’

‘I don’t usually work late, ma’am’, said the woman. ‘There was a time when I used to go to the Alhambra and the Argyle, and would be escorted back in a coach. But it is hard now. I usually work in the Haymarket area and have to walk all the way back home. The times change and we change with the times.’

She squared her shoulders and gestured with her hands, as if to suggest stoic acceptance of the great wrongs inflicted by time.

‘That night I had stayed a bit longer at a pub and, after a long day’s work, you can imagine, ma’am, I was very tired when the pub closed. I decided to take a shortcut, but halfway into the... alley, my feet could no longer support me. I had worked long and hard all day, ma’am, and I decided to take a short rest in a dark corner, you know how it is, ma’am.’

Qui Hy nodded impassively, but I noticed that Gunga had to tug at his forked beard to prevent himself from smiling.