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among Thugs not to take from their victims anything that is alive, be it a child or a pet, if it cannot be sold immediately. If we do not kill all that is alive, we abandon it, taking only coins and jewellery and such items. It is true, sahib, that Thugs take horses and such beasts to sell, but we are careful even with horses of pedigree, because they can be easily identified. This time, however, Habibullah, my father’s main chela, took a fancy to a parrot that belonged to the murdered holy man. It could recite entire surahs from the Quran. My father tried to talk him out of it, but Habibullah, as you know, sahib, was a proud man and not willing to listen. He kept the parrot in its cage, and that proved to be my father’s undoing.
    ‘For, in the bazaars of Jehanabad the very next day, the parrot was identified as belonging to the head maulavi of the Nawab of Saleempur, and my father and two of his companions were arrested by the nawab’s men. How could it have been otherwise? Are there many parrots who repeat, in the tone of an old man, the surahs of the Quran? The rest of us, even Habibullah, managed to melt into the crowd, but sahib, you can imagine my sorrow and terror as I beheld, hidden in the crowd, my father being marched away in manacles to imprisonment and death. Then, sahib, I again had doubts about my profession, and it was a bad time for such doubts.
    ‘For now Habibullah was in charge, and he made it clear that he expected me to throttle the first victim we met after leaving Patna. He had long been angry at my father for not forcing me into the real business of our profession, and he proclaimed, with no thought of remorse for what had befallen me, that the rules of Thugee demanded that I be fully inducted into the order by offering a life to Bhowanee as sacrifice.’ ‘Strange are the hearts of men, Amir Ali’, said I, ‘and perchance they grow stranger in a land of so many hidden rites and superstitions as the ancient country of Hindoostan.’
17
    Jaanam,
    How strange this place is, this London of yours.
    Now that my account to Kaptaan Meadows is drawing to a close, he does not call me to his library for days. This leaves me with a lot of free time, for the servants in the kitchen, unlike you, have never taken to me. I am never allowed into the kitchen if they can help it; my place is in the scullery. And they look positively relieved when I leave the house for a ramble in the city.
    They are strangely alike, these houses of polite society and, as a much exhibited thug, I have been taken to quite a few. More than you, I suspect, my love, for you once told me that Kaptaan Meadows’ house is the grandest home you have ever worked in, while I, I must confess, have been taken by the Kaptaan to much grander houses. They are all segregated in the same way: drawing room, parlour, dining room, morning room, kitchen, pantry, scullery... And it is in the bare scullery, on its hard, damp floor, that there is space for the likes of us: the thug from nowhere, the charwoman from somewhere. The better servants sleep in the kitchen or pantry, don’t they? Or, in some cases, they have rooms in the attic. Though you, of course, seldom sleep in any of the houses — despite, I hear, occasional invitations by the men, master or servants. You mostly return to your aunt who lives in the rookery, which even the Kaptaan’s servants seem to dread. You are wise not to tell them that you sleep there. You took me there a few times, though I do not think I would be able to find it again, so circuitous and crowded were the routes and side alleys by which you led me. And yet, I knew by the smell that the place was nothing but an opium den even before I entered, though you insist on calling it an ‘eating place.’
    Opium is something I am sensitive to; for me, it is not an addiction, but a medicine. Perhaps in one of these letters I will tell you how I came to cultivate the habit, though what I take is the dry akbari opium which