A new entrant was initiated into the profession through an elaborate set of rituals. He was bathed and dressed in new clothes that had never been bleached and then led by hand by the guru into a room where the leaders of various bands would be seated on a clean white sheet. The initiator then asked the elders if they were content to receive him as a thug. If they answered yes, then the leaders accompanied the novice out of the room into the open where the guru raised his hands and beseeched Devi Bhavani to grant a good omen. If an omen in the form of a bird’s cry was received he was taken back to the room and a pickaxe and a white handkerchief were placed in his right hand. He raised them high in the air and took an oath invoking the goddess to whose service he was devoting himself. The same oath would then be repeated in the name of Allah and the Qur’an. A small hole would be made in the centre of the white cloth laid out in the room and the pickaxe planted in it with its handle pointing down. Pieces of gur would be placed around it and water sprinkled, accompanied by the chanting of prayers to the Devi and Allah, seeking their blessing and protection. The gur would then be distributed to everyone as a sacrament. All those who ate the gur were thus bound irrevocably to the profession.
At this point in the description I was struck by a memory of the Seshadri of forty-five years ago. He had refused the dormitory accommodation offered by the company and had built himself a small hut behind the company’s resident director’s bungalow. I had visited him there once. I remember noticing a prominently positioned, fresh, unsoiled pickaxe placed neatly over a white piece of cloth. Respect given to a mali’s tool of trade, I remember thinking. But when I also saw a two-inch model of the tool placed over the makeshift table he had created out of packing cases, I asked him about it. I can’t remember now what his answer had been.
I read on about the pickaxe. The pickaxe had not been part of the sacred symbols of the profession in the early days of thuggee, accounts say. Originally, the kerchief was the only holy instrument of thuggee and the act of thuggee was then limited to strangling the victim and plundering his possessions. Disposing of the bodies and erasing the evidence were the responsibility of the Devi, on whose instructions the thugs carried out the work of destruction. Once, some thugs became curious about how the Devi disposed of the bodies, and hid themselves behind some bushes after the killing to watch her in action. Foolish thugs, who thought they could elude the eye of the goddess! She appeared before them in a terrible form and upbraided them for their want of faith. She cursed them that thenceforth they would not be able to rely on her to protect them. ‘I will not remove the bodies of those whom you destroy; you must make your own arrangements for their concealment,’ she said. ‘It will not always be effectual and will at times lead to your detection by earthly powers and in this will lie your punishment,’ she added. She, however, agreed to grant them the retention of their cunningness and intelligence and agreed to assist them with omens for their guidance. Thus came into being the custom of killing only after the graves were ready. They also had to make gashes in the abdomen of the corpses before burial to prevent bloating that could unsettle the loose soil over the grave. Like the stranglers, thus came into being a new speciality, the gravediggers, and the pickaxe, like the original roomal, became a sacred object to be worshipped.
There were a number of people in those days who were not thugs, but were aiding and abetting thuggee, and among these abettors were sanyasis, fakirs and priests. The thugs thus had access to the retreats, ashrams and temples, often surrounded by forests, close to the villages, which provided convenient grounds for disposal of the dead bodies.
But, one might ask, why strangling and why no other method for killing? One story goes that Kali, who had been created by Siva expressly for killing the demon Raktabija, found herself faced with a problem when trying to destroy him. Raktabija, as his name suggests, had a boon from Siva that every drop of his blood that hit the ground would give birth to a new Raktabija. So Kali unleashed an army of soldiers armed with nothing but handkerchiefs who strangled the demons without spilling blood. The demons were destroyed and the army of her soldiers, in the course of time, became thugs. According to Hindu belief, the concept of the universe consists of two coexisting balancing forces, those of creation and destruction. Hindus believe that there is a constant struggle between the two. The creative power peopled the earth so fast that the destroyers had to struggle to keep pace with them and for this purpose was commissioned Devi Bhavani, or Kali, whatever you choose to call her. She sent forth into the world a number of her votaries endowed with superior intelligence and cunning, bidding them to carry out relentless destruction among humans. I was struck by the deliberate corruption and distortion of established myths and concepts. In Hindu mythology, the goddess known as Kali or Bhavani was employed to destroy a demon who had spread wild destruction among men. How and why was such a goddess made into a destroyer par excellence? I suppose the only explanation is that even people engaged in evil have to find divine sanction for their work in order to silence their conscience. And mythology, an ever-malleable medium, is at the service of every ingenious mind, however vile.
Fear pulled a brake on my hunt for information. What I had found was more than enough to chill my spine. The accounts were beyond gruesome; they were heinous. Thugs in custody made these depraved revelations with no qualms or remorse. They, in fact, accused the courts of incomprehension—‘Why don’t you understand?’ It became difficult for me to go on reading. At the same time I had been told that a much more vile document existed and I had been commissioned by the long-gone Seshadri to read it—The Book of Destruction. Where I would find it, he had not told me. Was it an actual document, or just a metaphor? I remembered that Seshadri, a teacher of literature, was in the habit of talking in similes and metaphors.
Fear had become the very air around me. Sitting in a bus, in a cinema hall, in a busy assembly or while attending a function, I found myself frequently looking over my shoulder. Is he there somewhere? In whose guise or wearing what apparel is he coming this time — a leader, a worker, an officer, a philosopher, a historian or a merchant?
Seshadri had described me as a fiction writer; I was a liar and deceiver according to him, though of a different kind. In one sense perhaps it was true. We writers disguise fiction as imagination and present it to our readers, who do not like lies. Writers argue that a totally realistic work would be like a dry newspaper report or documentary film. We labour hard to prove that there are several ways to present the truth and that imagination and fantasy are but some of them. That doesn’t however make the non-existent exist. Why am I justifying myself, making all these apologies? Am I scared of the accusations of a dead thug? But apologies are of no avail to a thug. For he wraps his roomal around my neck not because of any grievance against me. He has no ill feeling or emotion towards his victims. He does not even see their faces. All he sees is the neck. What carries him is his devotion to and faith in his goddess. He kills merely because his goddess has thrown you before him. And why is the goddess throwing you in his way? Because destruction, just like creation, is in the realm of the gods. Closing her eyes, she picks out some from her creation and makes them thugs. With eyes closed, she again plucks some others as victims!