Free The Thing About Thugs by Tabish Khair Page A

rookery, which you would not have her do, it was she who brought you up when your mother was deported. Or perhaps you will not understand my feelings, for you have had your share of fights and disagreements with your aunt, and I, strangely, do not recall one harsh word from Mustapha Chacha or Chachijaan. Sometimes they scolded their sons; sometimes they had disagreements with Hamid Bhai; between me and them, there was nothing but an unbroken stream of understanding and love. I could not have imagined better parents. No, jaanam, even parents could not have been as good to me as they were, for one needs to strain against the leash of parenting sooner or later, and parents do resent, if only in part, the fact that children, especially sons, grow into lives of their own.
    Even today, scribbling these words as I kneel beside a single candle in the scullery, I can feel my eyes fill with tears of sorrow and frustration when I think of that morning. Aren’t there moments when you wish time could be wound back, that you could change one thing, just one thing, in the past? How often, after listening to Haldi Ram that morning, have I wished the same!
    Haldi Ram was frightened. I could see it in his face, in his unusually dilated eyes, his occasional stutter, the tense manner in which he clutched his lathi. And so were the other members of the community: they were all frightened. Almost all of them were outside, crowded around the khaat on which they had seated me. Of course, I was the only person sitting on the khaat. Haldi Ram and an older man who, I knew, was their headman, squatted on their haunches in front of me. The others, men, women and children, stood, faces strangely impassive but postures fraught with tension. Haldi Ram’s wife brought me chai; I was in no mood to eat or drink but I accepted it as I thought my refusal would be seen as a recognition of their low caste and Mustapha Chacha had always maintained that both Islam and humanity — ‘insaniyat’ was a word he relished — refused to recognize such divisions between human beings. It was only when I had sipped a bit of the tea that Haldi Ram commenced his explanation. His words are still stamped on my memory, and I could write them down verbatim but for the fact that the language he spoke was not the language I write in and the language I write in is not legible to you, jaanam.
    Forgive us, Amir babu, said Haldi Ram. Forgive us for interrupting your journey, not even providing you with a decent breakfast, for what can we poor people serve to a gentleman like you, son of the noble Syed Zahid Ali sahib, nephew of the learned and gracious Mustapha Ali sahib.
    Small, wizened, much darker than I am, with a tiny, thin moustache, reddish eyes and a pockmarked face, Haldi Ram was a hard worker and a harder drinker, but he was also a cautious man. My heart in my mouth, I had to make the appropriate noises until he got to the matter that was troubling him. But for once Haldi Ram’s vernacular eloquence failed him. As soon as he started giving me an account of ‘the sacrilege that took place yesterday’, he broke down and started to cry like a baby. I was worried now. Haldi Ram did not cry easily; he came from a long line of impoverished peasants who had borne more than most people, suffered more, lost more, and tears did not come easily to his eyes.
    The headman took up the narrative and this, jaanam, with some interpolations and exclamations from me (which I will leave out), is what they said:
     
    Headman: Forgive him, Amir babu. His soul is burdened by the many kindnesses of Mustapha sahib, kindnesses he can never repay in this lifetime.
     
    (At this, some of the women in the crowd started weeping too. But the way they wept was disturbing. These were women who usually wept in a public manner, deriving the only relief sometimes available to them from an extravagant explosion of grief. But this time, they were sobbing into their pallus, stifling their