The Thing About Thugs (20 page)

But Nelly’s hopes were scuttled when the door of the library was flung open and Jenny appeared, drying her eyes, followed by the Captain, who marched out in a hurry, calling for the coach and his hat. Oh well, oh well, one never knew these days, the times being what they were...

There are walls. There are voices. The voices come through the walls.

Amir has been given a cell to himself. He is uncertain whether this has been done to torment him or to protect him from his fellow prisoners, for word has gone out that the terrible Indian cannibal who had been feeding off the brains and eyes of the English poor has finally been apprehended.

At first it was just the one man, probably drunk: Prepare thyself, cannibal, for mine is the vengeance. Then other voices joined in. And now there is a storm of voices raging around him. It is quelled for a few moments when one of the warders comes down and strikes the bars or threatens them. But then it starts again.

Not all the voices are hostile. Some are bored. Some are joking. One is, Amir is convinced, merely curious: ‘What did it taste like’, this one asks in the quieter intervals, which always sets the louder voices off again. But no matter what their tenor, they are voices, and they penetrate Amir Ali’s cell of isolation, making him feel vulnerable and threatened.

It is dark down here, and Amir has been confined for so long that he is no longer sure if it is day or night. His cell has no window, not even a slit. The only light he gets is from the lamp in the corridor outside. He has prepared himself for a long stay. Here, time is a currency he can neither spend nor hoard. He has written off time.

He is surprised when footsteps reverberate up to his cell. This time it is not just a warder or a Peeler. It is Major Grayper himself, flanked by two men. Amir is surprised that he has come to the prison in person. Grayper gestures to the men to release Amir, and Amir follows him dumbly up the stairs. He does not notice one of the men wrapping up his meagre belongings: the notebook, the quill pen, the bottle of ink and his blanket. Upstairs, Amir can sense that it is day outside. He stands there, confused.

‘You are free to go’, says Major Grayper.

Amir does not react.

‘Go, nigger, go’, says one of the Peelers, thrusting Amir’s wrapped-up belongings at him and shoving him towards the door. Amir walks as if in a trance. It is surprisingly sunny outside. For a second, his mind is tricked into believing that he has stepped into India. Then he blinks at the light. His eyes hurt. He does not recognize the street.

During his short imprisonment, Amir envisioned various fates for himself: trial, exoneration, imprisonment, deportation, hanging. It was his way of preparing himself for any eventuality, and Amir believes in being prepared. The only eventuality he did not envision was this sudden and unexpected release. He does not know what to do.

The street is not crowded at this time of afternoon, yet Amir knows he has to disappear soon. It will not take long for some passer-by to connect Amir’s face with the news of the arrest of the ‘head cannibal’, and soon he will have a mob baying for his blood. Even as this thought crosses Amir’s mind, a carriage rattles to a stop right in front of him. Its door opens and a hand pulls him in. Perhaps Amir would have resisted, were he not so bemused by what had happened to him, this sudden freedom and surprising daylight. He lets himself be pulled in and the carriage sets off immediately, at a brisk pace.

Jenny walked the streets alone, as she always had. But she felt lonelier than ever before. Lonelier than she had felt when the shock of her aunt’s grisly murder had finally sunk in. How could the disappearance of a man she had known for just a few months, a man from another land, a man who spoke her language with a strange accent and whose language — languages, he would have corrected — she had no inkling of, how could the disappearance of such a person from her life make her feel so lonely? She, who had grown up being alone on the streets and in her head? She, who had learned, since the age of four or five, not to place her trust in anyone — no, not even Amir, for if one’s mother could disappear into the vast spaces of life, what was there to keep one’s love within reach for ever? And if the man she loved could lie so fluently to Captain Meadows and his much-travelled friends, what was there to prevent him from lying to an illiterate, stuck-in-the-mud girl like herself?

And yet, ever since she had been told that Amir had been arrested on suspicion of murder, she had felt as if the distance between her and other people had increased; as if she was at the bottom of a well, hearing the rest of the world only as an echo. At first, she had reasoned that Amir would be released: after all, she knew, as did Qui Hy and his other friends, where Amir had been on almost all the nights on which the beheadings had taken place.

But the more she thought about it, she realized that Qui Hy and the others would not count as witnesses.

Would her evidence suffice? Perhaps, but only as long as her relationship with Amir was not made public. Once it became public, her credibility would vanish. And how could she vouch for Amir, how could she tell them he had been with her in the middle of the night, without the truth of their relationship being bared? Ridicule she would have put up with, if it gained Amir his freedom, but she was not certain it would. She did not know enough about the world of law and order. It was a world whose steps she had wiped, whose floors she had swept, whose kitchens she had kneeled in, but it was not a world whose language she understood.

Her only hope had been Captain Meadows, and she had gone to him with her story. Captain Meadows who, she knew, had trusted Amir; Captain Meadows, who was one of the very few truly respectable men she had met. Now even that hope was gone, for Captain Meadows had left her in such a rush, as if repelled by what she had — at immense cost to herself — been forced to reveal to him. He had rushed out as if she were a foul smell.

Jenny trudged to her next chore, careless of bumping into other pedestrians or their swearing when she did, not even heeding the tumult in one corner where some street musicians had got a crowd dancing: men and women holding hands and swirling around before the scandalized eyes of gentlemen and ladies stuck in a lock of horses, carts and carriages. It was all so far from her now; so far away that they appeared to be on another continent altogether, a different breed and race of people. She plodded on, forgetful even of that persistent feeling of being trailed or watched occasionally that had sometimes come to her in recent weeks. Solitary, she walked in her mind.

As Amir’s eyes get used to the gloom of the carriage — all the curtains are drawn — he realizes that the man who pulled him in is Captain Meadows.

Meadows is looking steadily at him, as if trying to see him more clearly. Or, as if seeing him for the first time.

Amir tries to speak but what comes out is an incoherent mumble.

‘I thought it would be best to remove you from these parts and take you to some neighbourhood of London where you might not be noticed much’, says Captain Meadows.

The carriage rattles over cobbled stones.

‘But...’ Amir lets the sentence hang in the air, incomplete. He does not have to frame the questions that rush to his lips. They are, he knows, fully audible to the Captain. After months of answering questions and telling stories, all of them embroidered lies, after months of deceiving the other in ways that are welcome to each, after nights of not quite asking and not quite answering, suddenly, by a process that is impossible to understand, the two men have reached a stage where they can ask and respond almost without the use of language.

‘I must be the last person you expected to see, Mr Ali’, says the Captain with a faint smile.

Amir nods.

‘I was never convinced of your guilt. No, Mr Ali, let me rephrase that: I was as convinced of your innocence as a person could be under the circumstances. And then Jenny came to me.’

When Amir does not say anything in reply, the Captain continues, ‘She told me where you were that night.’

Amir looks alarmed.

‘No, Mr Ali, I didn’t tell the Major what Jenny told me’, says the Captain gently. ‘I gave him an assurance that you were innocent and that, unless proved guilty, you could be released on my word as a gentleman. I think he had no choice but to accept my assurance. There isn’t much evidence against you, Mr Ali, nothing but hearsay.’

The carriage jolts at that moment and both men steady themselves.

Amir tries to speak.

‘There is nothing to say, Mr Ali. I did what I would have done for any Englishman, had I come to know him as well as I came to know you, had I formed as strong an opinion of him as I had formed of you. It was not what you said, but how you said it; your demeanour, your careful tending of me when I fell ill on the voyage back, your politeness in the face of Mrs Clennam’s prejudices, little things like that. I just regret that I needed the evidence of Jenny to make me act on my own convictions. That will remain a matter of shame for me, for I know that I would have acted sooner had you been an Englishman.’

Amir is still struggling for words. His English is suddenly not sufficient. He feels ashamed to look at the Captain.

‘Sir’, he says, ‘I have to confess, I am not, I have never been...’

Meadows holds up his hand.

‘Mr Ali’, he says, ‘sometimes I feel that what we are, what we appear to be, what we pretend to be and what we are said to be are four very different things. Such is the nature of life, one of its many imperfections, you might say. But just as one cannot condemn a man, or so I believe, because of a bump or two on his head, surely we cannot write off life because of its imperfections. I have thought much about these matters in recent months, while preparing my book for the press. But let us not talk about all that. We have driven long enough. If you would now inform the coachman of the address you wish to be taken to, I am sure he will have no objection to driving you there.’

There is something deceptive about cities. Qui Hy knew that. And London, this city of cities, how could it be trusted? It hid so many stories and layers, its paths above the ground were devious and twisted, its tunnels and sewers and dungeons numberless and unmapped. Even the one central fact about it — River Thames, Father Thames — was deceptive, for London was not a city of one river. No, it was a city of many rivers, some lost, some lurking. Not just the Thames but also the Wandle and Falcon, the Tyburn and Effra, Neckinger and the Fleet, Stamford Brook and the Ravensbourne.

Qui Hy did not trust cities. She had memories of her own childhood in a village of the Punjab. It was a long time ago. At the age of eleven or twelve — her age was mostly her parents’ guess — her mother sent her to work in the kitchen of a rich Sikh family in Amritsar. They moved to Lucknow after a few years, where she was loaned to an English officer’s family. The wife had been in childbirth then. After that, Qui Hy passed through three different European families in quick succession, mostly working as a nanny: she was popular with Europeans because of her knack for picking up their languages and her inexplicable skill with children. She had lived in cities since she started working for the family in Amritsar. But she never lost her distrust of cities, or of people who grew up in them.

She tried to say as much to Amir Ali. If a city person, even a gentleman like Captain Meadows, helps someone, there is always an ulterior motive, Amir. People in cities do not help each other unless they stand to gain by it. The ones who do, she said, stitching her pockets by the low fire, without looking up at Amir, the ones who do have come from villages, from small towns.

But Amir was too overwhelmed by the goodness of Captain Meadows to hear her.

Gunga was there too. He sat still, a tall man with a forked beard, thin as a wire, noncommittal. But Qui Hy knew he was worried. She had sensed the bond that existed between this semi-literate, uncouth lascar and the youth, Amir Ali, not a rich man but nevertheless a man of education and culture. Perhaps it was more on Gunga’s side, the love of an older man for the son he would like to have had, or perhaps the son he had lost or left behind. Or was she transferring to Gunga her own feelings for Amir? And Amir? Amir, though not inconsiderate, was too wrapped up in the haze of his love for Jenny and now the storm of the fate that was creeping up on him. Qui Hy knew that it was this looming storm that creased Gunga’s leathery face with worry and made him pull at his beard in thought.

Like Qui Hy, Gunga knew that the mysterious murderer, the man who was beheading his victims, had to be identified soon. Otherwise, even Captain Meadows’ word would not save Amir Ali. His past as a thug would catch up with him. Either Major Grayper or one of the other superintendents would choose to sacrifice Amir to satiate the vengeance of law, or the London mob. Something had to be done. And Qui Hy knew that she was the only one who could do it.

Karim flung open the door, entering the room with a gust of wind and noise from the street. Despite his illness, he still opened doors with abandon, as if springing the pleasure of his presence on those in the room. He banged it shut behind him and rushed up to embrace Amir. ‘Just heard, just heard’, he gasped, breathless with excitement and exertion, ‘just heard that you have been released. Did they catch the murderer?’

When the matter was explained to him, he grew thoughtful.

‘You know what this means, Gunga Bhai’, he said. When no one spoke, he answered his own question: ‘It means that Amir Bhai has to get himself a haircut.’

‘Haircut?’ Amir was surprised.

‘Haircut, moustache cut, whatever. New papers, if you can. New identity. You cannot go out into the streets as you are. You never know who you might run into. There are people who might have read descriptions of you. And you will be stopped by every Peeler on his round, every night-watchman with nothing better to do.’

‘That is true’, said Qui Hy, intercepting Amir’s resistance to the suggestion. ‘But we have to do something more. We have to try and find out more about the murders.’