The night had advanced considerably. The train was rocking to its own rhythmic jolts and swings. It was cold inside. The housekeeping staff must have gone to sleep without checking the air conditioner settings. I was shivering under the blankets. The other bomb in my bag, the unread letter, must have contributed to my restlessness. Securing the magazine and the letter safely in my bag, I decided to go to sleep. It can keep till tomorrow. I switched off my reading lamp.
Needless to say, I got hardly any rest. Woke early. I went to the door to gaze at the horizon still untouched by first light. I took advantage of the unoccupied toilets, finished my morning ablutions and returned to my seat to find that the attendant had begun his rounds with the morning tea; I accepted a welcome steaming cup from him.
‘So you have finished reading Prof. Ali’s article then?’ Hasan began his letter. ‘I knew you would choose that first. But then, Ameer Ali too, like me, is not unknown to you. No, don’t try to tell me you have never met him. After all, seeing is not the only way of knowing a person. Who, among the large number of people who know Ameer Ali, has actually seen him? You cannot see a character, only know him. Just as you cannot see him, so too he can never die. Medows Taylor did not write his death in. So Ameer Ali will never die and will never be seen. Articles, letters … all very effective means of keeping the protagonist behind the screen. But whom am I instructing! You are, after all, a master at the art. Characters of fiction often appear more real than characters in real life. However, Ameer Ali is also a real thug. Medows Taylor might have created a name, but he did not create the character himself; he wrote from life, as far as the thugs were concerned.’
What was all this humbug? The professor who wrote the article is a character from a nineteenth-century novel? This man was trying to string unrelated events on a flimsy thread of names rather than real individuals. And he himself, a name attached to the same tenuous thread! Is he too just a name? It is a strange breakfast this man has prepared for me, I thought uneasily. And this, after a supper that still lay inside me, undigested. I shuddered at the thought that he himself might be on this train, perhaps even in the next compartment, keeping an eye on me. Once again, my co-passenger. Or, perhaps, he was actually within me, as a name. The thread might in fact be a garland of fear instead of real events. Like the venerated Ali sitting eternally on the throne among the clouds, here was Ameer Ali, invisible and beyond death. For all I know, Hasan could be envisioning Ameer Ali as a metaphor just like the great Ali. Perhaps Hasan too was a metaphor, speaking to me through this letter. But what about the magazine, the very real paper, ink, printing machines, street boys …
‘The destroyed are loyal to their destroyers,’ Hasan continued. ‘As a character is, to his or her creator. As for the thugs, Sleeman and Taylor who destroyed them are also their creators. They are the ones who immortalized them. Their code language, their rituals, beliefs, everything really, including their origin. Sleeman’s shot in the dark, that the thugs were the descendants of some vagrant tribes that wandered into India in the wake of the Turko-Afghan-Mongol invasions from Central Asia, although completely baseless, was swallowed whole by Ameer Ali. The professor of history could not see the falsity in it.
‘I always wonder how Ameer Ali manages the department of history at the university. He wrote to me just a couple of weeks ago. There was also a mention of you and your works in his letter. I quote, “This fellow dabbles in novels, history and even sometimes philosophy; he doesn’t seem to possess either a creative mind to write novels or the methodological training to handle history. Forget that, my question is, can one person be a Sleeman as well as a Taylor, a researcher and a fiction writer, as this chap seems to aspire to be?” Poor Ali. He, of course, does not know that Medows Taylor was also a good researcher. He was the first to discover the megalithic tombs in the Deccan. He opened a number of them and compiled an accurate description of their structure and contents; the three scholarly papers he published on the subject testify to his having developed a technique for excavation far in advance of his time. Among archaeologists in India, he was the first to grasp the true function of excavation as he actually drew and described sections of the ground with various strata clearly marked out.
‘My dear friend, I have not read your works. So I shall make no comment on them. But one thing I can say. A hashishin like me, who sees poetry in killing, has no trouble seeing that a person can be a fiction writer, a researcher and so many other things at the same time. Such a compliment coming from this unwelcome corner might be making you uneasy. But be assured, I do not say this to flatter you. I merely point out that an uncultured thug such as Ameer Ali is not always capable of digesting anthropological knowledge.’
The jolt that ran through me was no less electrifying than the one I had got when Seshadri had confessed to me that he was a thug. And, like Seshadri, this man too was drawing me into an argument that I was not equipped to handle. I felt like I was caught in a tug of war between thugs and professors, and businessmen and assassins. And, curiously, a philosophical argument seemed to be unfolding before me between two sects of killers in the name of their cultural greatness or perhaps mere bickering. One claiming to be a historian and the other fashioning himself as an anthropologist! It didn’t give me any consolation that I was being turned into a pawn in this battle; a battle between two names, two unreal real characters.
‘Though he said many things, Ameer Ali left out one story,’ Hasan continued. ‘And the omission is an important one. There is an event described in Medows Taylor’s novel, where Ameer Ali and his father Ismail’s band of thugs finish off a rich Rajput merchant and his servant. You can read it on page 73 of the 1883 edition of the book. A strangler called Badrinath was allotted the merchant while Ameer Ali was to deal with the stouter servant. Ameer Ali did not find it easy to handle the servant but he managed it in the end. The gravediggers had dug the graves inside a tent, well hidden from prying eyes. Ali was all praise for the gravediggers. The holes were filled and beaten down and plastered over with mud in such a way that no one could have told the earth had been disturbed by human hands. The sleeping rugs of the father and the son were then laid over and that night they slept over the graves. Only thugs would do such a thing! We hashishins would never sleep over the graves of our victims — we would sleep in the graves along with them or, shall I say, under the debris of our actions? Obviously, our philosophy of killing is quite different, rather, far advanced.
‘Yes, both of us look at the killing as a privilege for the victims. But the important difference between us is that their victims are merely offerings to the goddess, while we bestow upon our victims the honour of being martyrs for a higher purpose. As an act of good faith and as our endorsement of their fate, we join them in their ultimate sacrifice. We have gone far ahead of the thugs on the path of destruction; we are nothing at all like them. It is beyond me how anyone can say that the thugs were our descendants. True, we lived in the eleventh century and they in the eighteenth. The chronology should not make a difference to anyone sensible enough to understand the theory of evolution! And, may I remind you that Sleeman and Darwin were contemporaries and published their papers in the same decade?