The Strangler Vine (25 page)

I put my head in my hands. ‘How is it then that no one else has been granted this great revelation other than yourself?’ I said, wearily.

‘My dear young man, how many Europeans who read Sanskrit and speak Persian spent so much time in the filthier parts of the Calcutta bazaar?’ said Mountstuart. ‘How many know the native gutter as well as Jem? Not one, I should hazard. Besides, so many in the Company long for it to be true.’

‘As for Kali worship,’ Blake said scornfully, ‘every bilker, every knuckler and a thousand others will call upon Kali. She is the patroness of thieves and vagabonds, of wives and farmers and many others. Everything he writes of Kali shows no understanding of the Hindoos – but that of course is hardly surprising, as almost no Company man does. And as for that so-called Thuggee temple at
Bindachal, it bears no relation to Sleeman’s descriptions. I’d be surprised if he had ever been there. And the word itself means trickster or deceiver, not strangler.’

‘This is madness. We are in the clutches of a band of Thugs, and you are saying that day is night and night is day. I do not believe it.’

‘Let me give you some history, young man,’ said Mountstuart. ‘One can glean from Sleeman’s records that there were some years ago a number of bandit gangs from the Etawah district, north of here, that called themselves Thugs, but they were known as much as swindlers, cheats and mountebanks as murderers.’

‘In the bazaar in Jubbulpore,’ Blake broke in, ‘they tell comic stories about Thugs cheating men out of horses, or talking them out of their savings.’

‘But it is certainly the case,’ Mountstuart went on, ‘that the Thugs often preyed on travellers, like many dacoits. The truth is there are dacoits and bandits all over Hind that will kill their victims before robbing them so as to leave no witnesses. Sometimes they befriend them, sometimes they simply attack. Sometimes they throw them down a well, sometimes they strangle them first.

‘Now, in ’28 and ’29, the Company resolved to act against the Thugs, not because natives were being murdered on the roads – that had been happening for years – but because Dhunraj Seth, the richest banker in Hyderabad, had lost three huge caches of rupees and gold on the road between Hyderabad and Indore to a number of gangs who called themselves Thugs. He demanded reparation. The Company happens to be vastly in debt to Dhunraj Seth. But once the bandits were caught they were hard to keep in prison, because they would not confess, or they would change their pleas. So Major Sleeman did a thorough job of catching them; he executed Feringhea’s quite innocent nephew, you know, in order to persuade him to be captured. Then he prevailed upon them to confess, using many methods including his rack. Then he made certain that no one would go free.’

Blake nodded. ‘In Saugor and Nerbudda territory,’ he said, ‘two testimonies from an Approver or an informer are enough to condemn a man. Trials are conducted in English so the accused
understand nothing. If a native is arrested by the Thuggee Department, he will be found guilty.’

Mountstuart laughed. ‘Sleeman may be a hypocrite and a bore,’ he said carelessly, ‘but he has a formidable talent for organization and administration – not qualities I myself have ever aspired to, but the records and the maps have a certain genius, for all they have been put to ill-intended purposes. From Sleeman’s papers I judged there were no more than a few hundred men among the Thug gangs and their occasional hangers-on, and by 1832 they had all been caught. Some were hung, some transported to penal camps in Sumatra and Penang. The rest were sentenced to years of hard labour at the gaols in Jubbulpore and Saugor.’

‘Where almost all of them – the poor hangers-on, the lookouts, the grooms, the cooks – have died,’ Blake said. ‘Meanwhile, the chiefs who turned Approver – or who give Sleeman the folk tales he loves – live out their days in the School of Industry.’

‘But as the Thugs declined,’ Mountstuart continued, ‘the Thuggee Department grew ever greater, and Sleeman’s officers are now everywhere from Hyderabad to Rajputana. I believe that since ’32 some 3,000 more natives have been arrested and found guilty.’

‘Do not tell me they are all innocent men,’ I said, faintly.

‘No,’ said Blake. ‘Plenty are dacoits and brigands and common criminals from all over Hind. Many are the poorest and lowest castes; some take to crime in desperation, for some it’s a way of life. There has been great hardship in the countryside in the last ten years. Plenty are wandering people, vagabonds who might filch and steal a little, nomad tribes like the Gonds and Bhils who have fought the Company’s orders to settle in one place, unfortunates whose crime is little more than that they continue to travel around and they are poor. There are others who have been arrested on the basis of denunciations of informers, who make money from it. They are rounded up by Sleeman’s officers, who are now to be found in almost every part of Hind, all trained to see Thugs where there are none, and they are sent to Saugor and Nerbudda because it is quicker and easier to find a man guilty in the Territory than anywhere else
in Hind. But they are not Thugs, and their children are not bound to be Thugs, and it is a lie.’

‘Sleeman fell so under the spell of his own invention that he cannot see its fallibility,’ said Mountstuart. ‘He is in thrall to his system, and it has corrupted him. It began with the Approvers, who after a few beatings would tell him what he wished to hear, and then elaborated beyond his dreams. Did you see Feringhea? A fascinating succubus. A man who will fit himself to every situation. He’d sup with the devil and lick the spoon. Such a talent for survival and destruction. A mesmeric gift too, I fancy. A Thug in the old sense of the word, a trickster and deceiver. He saved his own skin by making himself indispensable to Sleeman’s vision of Thuggee, offering up blood-curdling tales and dark magical rituals that Sleeman longed for. The Thuggee we know is a mixture of Feringhea’s stories and Sleeman’s fancies. The final seal of Sleeman’s corruption was the rack, the breaking machine, whose existence he is so at pains to deny.’

‘And the Company loves it,’ Blake said. ‘The Thugs create fear and demonstrate the degeneracy of Hindooism, and the Thuggee Department shows that the Company is fitter to rule than any native prince, and it conveniently despatches those the Company wishes to rid itself of.’

‘But we saw Thugs hang,’ I persisted. ‘They invoked Kali.’

‘Those men were Gonds,’ said Blake. ‘If they had not worn kurtis and been covered with flower garlands you would have seen the scars which show their tribe and caste. They were told their families would be paid a subvention if they would call upon the goddess. If you remember, only one did.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I broke into the gaol and spoke to them, just as I broke into the Thuggee bureau to see the papers Sleeman guards so carefully, and other places.’

‘Mr Hogwood’s home?’

‘Yes.’

‘And his servant?’

‘Had a large bruise on his head, no more, I swear it.’

‘Jem is an extraordinarily talented lock-picker and house-breaker,’ Mountstuart said. ‘And if I may continue, I have written a report for the Board of Control in London, which our hosts have curiously shown no desire to divest me of.’

‘What are the charges?’ said Blake.

‘The first: that Thuggee as described by Major Sleeman does not, as you say, exist.

‘The second: that a system of justice has been allowed to develop in Saugor and Nerbudda whereby a native may be found guilty on the flimsiest of evidence; a state of affairs initially set up to sentence known criminals, but which has now been extended in a manner which is quite beyond control.

‘The third, and connected to the above: that in the interests of maintaining and extending the authority of the Thuggee Department, hundreds, if not thousands, of natives quite innocent of Thuggee or indeed any brigandage have been condemned in Saugor and Nerbudda.’

‘I am also of the opinion,’ said Blake, ‘that Thuggee is being deliberately used as a means of justifying intervention in independent states the Company regards as not sufficiently biddable. Those accusations that the Rao protects Thugs sit very conveniently by the attempts to assassinate him. I would not be at all surprised if there are imminent plans to depose him. And there will be plenty more of it.’

‘Oh, Blake! Surely now you go too far.’

‘Verily,’ said Mountstuart wryly, ‘Thuggee has a thousand uses. I must say I had not thought of that. I told Vishwanath a little about Jubbulpore, but I did not tell him as much as I might have. The old sense of loyalty to the Company, I suppose. I felt I should wait until I had presented my findings to the Governor General before I said more.’

No one spoke for a while. For myself, the first burst of excitement at finding Mountstuart was overtaken by a great wave of fatigue. I tried to doze, but I could not: their revelations raced about my head, seeming at one moment quite preposterous and at others horribly credible.

At last I said, ‘Might I please make two observations, gentlemen? You say Thuggee does not exist. But we watched that grave being dug up and saw a native party that had been killed not two months ago in the Thug manner. And why then are we imprisoned in a cave by a band of dacoits who behaved just as Thugs do?’

‘It is confusing, I know, my dear young man,’ said Mountstuart. ‘But let me tell you something most intriguing. My captors told me they have been brigands, Thugs, what have you, for many years. They used to despatch their victims in whatever way was most easy or appropriate – with a knife, with a blow, sometimes with the
rumal
. As for burial, sometimes they buried their victims, sometimes they simply left them, or threw them in a stream or a well. But now they always kill with the
rumal
and dig the round “Thug” grave. It is as if by describing Thug rituals, Sleeman has brought them into being.’

‘It seems,’ I said wearily, ‘a little far-fetched.’ My head was spinning.

‘How is it then do you think that Mauwle happened so easily on the Thug grave when the Approvers could not find it?’ asked Blake.

‘Hogwood said he had a nose for it.’

‘Nose, my arse,’ said Blake. ‘There were marks on the trunks, three identical marks cut into the trunks of the three mango trees nearest to the grave. A circle with two lines through it on each trunk. I noticed them as I watched Mauwle oversee the diggers. He must have known what he was looking for. I knew they must have some significance, but I could not see then what it was.’

‘I have begun to wonder,’ said Mountstuart, ‘whether this band, which was described to me as the last Thug gang, has been permitted to survive and to perform its gruesome murders just as Sleeman described, in order to keep the fear of Thuggee primed. An occasional Thug murder keeps the Company anxious.’

‘A mark on a tree!’ I said, now quite exasperated. ‘That could be anything – part of the Thug ritual! Listen to yourselves! You are suggesting that the man who launched the whole campaign against Thuggee, who has pursued the Thugs tirelessly for the last ten years, is deliberately allowing – encouraging even – this gang to do
its evil work, and that it then tells his men where it has left the bodies?’

‘I do not believe it is in direct communication with Jubbulpore, for if it were I do not think I should still be alive, but as Jem has said there are ways by which it may send messages.’

‘How did they realize what you were about in Jubbulpore, Xavier?’ Blake asked. ‘What did you do? Could you not have held your fire?’

‘I was not brimming with tact, Jem, it is true,’ Mountstuart said, a little tetchily, ‘but I could not resist baiting Sleeman. All his fine aspirations to raise up the natives, and that insistent lying about the rack. I found it sickening.’

‘Do you not think he is shamed by the machine and that is why he hides it? And was that all you did, Xavier?’

‘Don’t scold me, Jem. I am entirely well, you need have no fears on that account. Though it is likely,’ he conceded, ‘that my rashness drew their attention.

‘Sleeman cannot bear contradiction, I could not hide my disgust, and we argued. He decided I was poisoning his creation: his work, his town. His men, let us not deny, would do anything he asked. That prize monster Mauwle took to stalking my lodgings. Every night for that last week, he would walk in grinning, brandishing his sabre, and ask me how I still liked Jubbulpore. On the last night Sleeman quite lost control of himself. He told me my inability to understand his work and my misrepresentation of it threatened everything he strove for. I had never seen him so furious. Rashly, I told him he had no idea what I could do, and I laughed at him. He said I was mad and he would have me arrested. I left. I meant to return at once to my lodgings, but instead I decided to walk round the native environs of the cantonment, which I found less unbearably respectable. By the time I returned to my lodgings, it was very late. There were men in the compound, but I had the great good fortune to see them before they saw me.

‘They were armed with knives, and I knew they had been despatched to kill me. My monkey, Auckland, had returned earlier. I watched them wring his neck. I managed to hide in the shadows in
the lea of the outside walls of the compound. I was certain they would find me, and two of them came very close, but at the moment when I was sure they would come upon me – the moment I was sure I was as good as dead – they were called back to the compound. The others had found some money, which I was sorry to lose, and some papers – nothing important, scribbles, though they didn’t know that. They waited until just before dawn, then departed: their presence would have been quickly remarked upon by daylight. I slipped back into the compound to retrieve what I could as quickly as possible. The place had been torn apart, my possessions were strewn everywhere and every scrap of paper had been taken. I had, however, buried the important ones in the dirt. I left then and there, sleeping by day, travelling mostly by night. When I got to Doora I asked Vishwanath to keep my presence secret. It is hard to exaggerate the extent to which Sleeman is the great power in the central states.’