The Thing About Thugs (7 page)

This then, jaanam, is what he suggested, and his suggestion was accepted after a vigorous debate in which Habibullah’s objections were discarded by the other members of the panchayat. It was an old and time-tested method to ascertain the truth of a statement in such situations, a method that was used, Mustapha Chacha said, in the Mughal courts of the past. This is how it went, my love:

First, Mustapha Chacha had the servants from the house brought to the panchayat square. There were five in all, and it was clear that one of them, though not necessarily Haldi Ram, had stolen the necklace. After soaking a quantity of rice in cold water and drying it in the sun, which does not take long in the glorious sunlight of my land, jaanam, he weighed rice equal to the weight of a rupee on a pair of scales. He arranged five such weights of rice. Then calling the five servants, including Haldi Ram, to him, he told them to swear by their gods and on the heads of their near and dear ones that they had not stolen the necklace, and that they did not know who had done so. When the oath had been taken, and Mustapha Chacha had impressed its solemnity on the gathering once again, he asked each of the five servants to extend their right hand, palm upward. On each man’s palm, he placed a weight of the soaked and dried rice. Each man was told to hold the rice in his palm, not allowing any grain to drop, until all five had been served in a similar manner. Then, after repeating their oath again, they were made to sit down with a plantain leaf in front of them. Mustapha Chacha then said in a solemn voice: Some person among you has taken a false oath. But God, who is everywhere, is among us too. Let every man put his portion of rice into his mouth, and having chewed it, let him, when instructed, spit it out upon the plantain leaf before him. When this consecrated rice comes out from the mouth of the false, it will be different from the rice from the mouth of the honest and true.

And so it was done, jaanam: from four of the mouths, including that of Haldi Ram, the chewed rice came out much like milk and water, and from the fifth it came out almost like dry sand, fine as powder. Then Mustapha Chacha said: He who is the thief, or knows of the identity of the thief, from his false mouth the rice has come out dry and stricken; from the mouths of those who are innocent, it has come forth wet and well chewed.

Even though Habibullah grumbled, the panchayat sent, as agreed upon earlier, men to ransack the quarters of the servant who was now considered guilty, having been indicted by the consecrated rice. Even before the men returned with the recovered necklace, the servant had broken down and confessed.

Great was the rejoicing in the village, jaanam, not least in Haldi Ram’s family and community, and the reputation of my uncle as a learned and devout man was further enhanced, though it was not a reputation Mustapha Chacha ever courted. That evening, when he joined us at the dastakhan for dinner, we asked him about the significance of the event, the means by which he had charmed the rice. He smiled and replied: The greatest charms reside in the human mind, my children. A guilty man will always find it impossible to chew — his gullet will be dry, his saliva meagre. God is not our servant: he does not run about and do our errands, but he gives us arms, and minds, with which to do them.

Yes, jaanam, now you know why I revere this man, this man of truth and vision who, finally, could not save himself or his family from destruction. For, my love, it is not only the greatest charms that reside in the human heart. So does the foulest evil. And when that heart belongs to the rich and powerful, like Mirza Habibullah, well then, jaanam, you should never cease to look over your shoulder. Never.

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

‘And thus, sahib, did my first year as a thug come to an end. How many did we kill that year? Close to seventy! And yet, I had no blood on my hands. Was it my reluctance or the vestiges of good sense in my father? Whatever the reason, for those five months, I was only trained to be a scout and camp follower. Even though some gang members criticized my father for it, and particularly so, the man who was next in command, Mirza Habibullah, my father never made me commit a murder. I returned to our village with my hands untainted by blood. But the second year, I knew, would be different. Alas, sahib, I had no idea just how different.

‘Strangely, I do not recall how the lota ceremony went that year: did my father spill a few drops, which went unnoticed? Or did the partridge, for us Thugs a bird of omen, call from the wrong side of the fields? Or was the sacred kudalee not properly consecrated? Something must have happened, sahib, for we all, not least my gentle if misguided father, paid for the oversight. Strange are the ways of providence!’

‘Surely, Amir Ali, said I, ‘surely providence cannot be blamed for meting out just deserts to such a horrible set of miscreants as you. What is the Thug’s life but a preying upon those weaker than him? Crueller than the tiger, craftier than the fox, with less scruples than a hyena is a Thug. It is a wonder that providence has allowed your ancient vocation to flourish for so long!’

‘I acknowledge, O Kaptaan Sahib, the justice of your criticism, for I have been exposed, however fleetingly, to the wondrous rays of your God of Reason, and I stand reformed of the evil ways of my ancestral order. But had you made this criticism to my father or his companions, they would have answered you thus: Are you English not passionately fond of sporting? A lion, a wolf, an elephant rouses your passion for destruction — in its pursuit you risk body and limb. How much higher game is a Thug’s, and how much more fair, for man is pitted against man, not against a dumb, bewildered beast. And are you not fond of the battles and wars by which you win a town here and a market there? How much less bloody is the occupation of a Thug!’

‘Enough, Amir Ali, evil thoughts are not meant to be repeated. Enough.’

‘Forgive me, sahib. You are right, as always. I was carried away by my recollection of what befell my father in my second year out with him. It happened not far from Patna, for that year too we took the same route as in the previous year. This time, we started our bloody business early into the trip. On the very night that we embarked, we fell in with a family — an elderly man, his wife and their ten-year-old son (you will recall the bodies, sahib) — who were also headed for Patna. Though my father was against it — for the man was obviously a mullah, bearded and holy in his demeanour and voice, the dark mark of regular prayer creased into the middle of his forehead, and we had not even left the region around our village — my father’s companions were impatient to begin and they garrotted all three and buried them in that place next to the neem tree from which your men later recovered the bodies. Then we set off, though not without an argument.

‘It is a practice among Thugs not to take from their victims anything that is alive, be it a child or a pet, if it cannot be sold immediately. If we do not kill all that is alive, we abandon it, taking only coins and jewellery and such items. It is true, sahib, that Thugs take horses and such beasts to sell, but we are careful even with horses of pedigree, because they can be easily identified. This time, however, Habibullah, my father’s main chela, took a fancy to a parrot that belonged to the murdered holy man. It could recite entire surahs from the Quran. My father tried to talk him out of it, but Habibullah, as you know, sahib, was a proud man and not willing to listen. He kept the parrot in its cage, and that proved to be my father’s undoing.

‘For, in the bazaars of Jehanabad the very next day, the parrot was identified as belonging to the head maulavi of the Nawab of Saleempur, and my father and two of his companions were arrested by the nawab’s men. How could it have been otherwise? Are there many parrots who repeat, in the tone of an old man, the surahs of the Quran? The rest of us, even Habibullah, managed to melt into the crowd, but sahib, you can imagine my sorrow and terror as I beheld, hidden in the crowd, my father being marched away in manacles to imprisonment and death. Then, sahib, I again had doubts about my profession, and it was a bad time for such doubts.

‘For now Habibullah was in charge, and he made it clear that he expected me to throttle the first victim we met after leaving Patna. He had long been angry at my father for not forcing me into the real business of our profession, and he proclaimed, with no thought of remorse for what had befallen me, that the rules of Thugee demanded that I be fully inducted into the order by offering a life to Bhowanee as sacrifice.’ ‘Strange are the hearts of men, Amir Ali’, said I, ‘and perchance they grow stranger in a land of so many hidden rites and superstitions as the ancient country of Hindoostan.’

Jaanam,

How strange this place is, this London of yours.

Now that my account to Kaptaan Meadows is drawing to a close, he does not call me to his library for days. This leaves me with a lot of free time, for the servants in the kitchen, unlike you, have never taken to me. I am never allowed into the kitchen if they can help it; my place is in the scullery. And they look positively relieved when I leave the house for a ramble in the city.

They are strangely alike, these houses of polite society and, as a much exhibited thug, I have been taken to quite a few. More than you, I suspect, my love, for you once told me that Kaptaan Meadows’ house is the grandest home you have ever worked in, while I, I must confess, have been taken by the Kaptaan to much grander houses. They are all segregated in the same way: drawing room, parlour, dining room, morning room, kitchen, pantry, scullery... And it is in the bare scullery, on its hard, damp floor, that there is space for the likes of us: the thug from nowhere, the charwoman from somewhere. The better servants sleep in the kitchen or pantry, don’t they? Or, in some cases, they have rooms in the attic. Though you, of course, seldom sleep in any of the houses — despite, I hear, occasional invitations by the men, master or servants. You mostly return to your aunt who lives in the rookery, which even the Kaptaan’s servants seem to dread. You are wise not to tell them that you sleep there. You took me there a few times, though I do not think I would be able to find it again, so circuitous and crowded were the routes and side alleys by which you led me. And yet, I knew by the smell that the place was nothing but an opium den even before I entered, though you insist on calling it an ‘eating place.’

Opium is something I am sensitive to; for me, it is not an addiction, but a medicine. Perhaps in one of these letters I will tell you how I came to cultivate the habit, though what I take is the dry akbari opium which has been eaten as a medicine and relaxant in India for ages, not the kind that your countrymen smoke. And not only in the opium dens, jaanam; you would be surprised by how often the sweet smell of opium has assailed me in the houses of society.

But this city of yours, jaanam, that is what I want to write about. Like these polite houses, your city is deeply segregated, much more than any city I saw in my land. I have been walking in your city regularly, and I have also discovered its drawing rooms and kitchens. Behind each drawing room, a scullery, a lavatory, or worse. Behind Westminster, the Devil’s Acre, through which they are now ploughing a new road, for what better way is there to remove a populace or open up a land than to force new routes through it? Perhaps, jaanam, the trains that have started running to this city, and the new roads being built or projected by royal commissions are meant simply to substitute places like your aunt’s den and Qui Hy’s dhaba with something safer and nicer.

Qui Hy’s dhaba, now, that is a place Kaptaan Meadows and even his household servants have never heard of: it is in one of the mouldering quarters of the Mint. When I was first taken to it by January Monday — who is a West Indian, jaanam, not an Indian as you told me — I thought it would be run by a Chinese man. It was a strange house, narrower than the other houses on that street, though those were no broader than a dozen paces themselves, and the front door did not open into a lobby. It opened directly into a room, which must have been a shop in the past.

I entered, expecting to be accosted by an old, whiskered Chinaman. But the place turned out to be run by an ayah, who is known as Qui Hy, or Koi Hai, which was the call she responded to in the family that brought her over to London almost twenty years ago. Or is it because in Company parlance ‘Koi Hai’ was what, as Mustapha Chacha told us, those British officers and traders were called who had been in India long enough to become ‘someone’? Because Ayah Qui Hy is ‘someone’ in those crooks and crannies of London in which you may find asleep, a dozen to the floor, lascars and ex-slaves, ayahs and prostitutes of the poorest sort, gypsies and stowaways, urchins and pickpockets. People know her. And she knows people.

Will this save her from the fate that is perhaps even now being designed for her in some careless, powerful quarter? For Mustapha Chacha knew people too, and they knew him, yes, jaanam, even loved and respected him. But did it avail him at that final moment when the henchmen of Mirza Habibullah raised their lathis and spears and settled an old score in the traditional way?

My apprenticeship in Patna was coming to a close when word came from the village, in a worryingly roundabout manner, that Mustapha Chacha required our presence back home. I immediately went to Hamid Bhai’s house, but Bhabhi told me that he was out on business. Hamid Bhai had risen in the ranks of the clerks who worked for the lawyer he was attached to, and now the lawyer sent him to get affidavits, petitions, etc. from adjoining courts, kacheris and thanas. He could be away for days. So I proceeded to the village alone.

It took a day and a night before I came in sight of the village. Part of the journey I had accomplished on bullock carts and buggies, begging or buying a ride when I could, and part on foot. It was morning: I had started walking with the first light of the sun. Something had worried me all night. It was not the first time I or Hamid Bhai had been called back: There were regular disputes over water channels with Habibullah’s people, and we were called back for strength and support. Still, I had bad dreams throughout that night. I set out, as I have written, jaanam, at the break of dawn.