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Authors: Tabish Khair
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has been eaten as a medicine and relaxant in India for ages, not the kind that your countrymen smoke. And not only in the opium dens, jaanam; you would be surprised by how often the sweet smell of opium has assailed me in the houses of society.
But this city of yours, jaanam, that is what I want to write about. Like these polite houses, your city is deeply segregated, much more than any city I saw in my land. I have been walking in your city regularly, and I have also discovered its drawing rooms and kitchens. Behind each drawing room, a scullery, a lavatory, or worse. Behind Westminster, the Devil’s Acre, through which they are now ploughing a new road, for what better way is there to remove a populace or open up a land than to force new routes through it? Perhaps, jaanam, the trains that have started running to this city, and the new roads being built or projected by royal commissions are meant simply to substitute places like your aunt’s den and Qui Hy’s dhaba with something safer and nicer.
Qui Hy’s dhaba, now, that is a place Kaptaan Meadows and even his household servants have never heard of: it is in one of the mouldering quarters of the Mint. When I was first taken to it by January Monday — who is a West Indian, jaanam, not an Indian as you told me — I thought it would be run by a Chinese man. It was a strange house, narrower than the other houses on that street, though those were no broader than a dozen paces themselves, and the front door did not open into a lobby. It opened directly into a room, which must have been a shop in the past.
I entered, expecting to be accosted by an old, whiskered Chinaman. But the place turned out to be run by an ayah, who is known as Qui Hy, or Koi Hai, which was the call she responded to in the family that brought her over to London almost twenty years ago. Or is it because in Company parlance ‘Koi Hai’ was what, as Mustapha Chacha told us, those British officers and traders were called who had been in India long enough to become ‘someone’? Because Ayah Qui Hy is ‘someone’ in those crooks and crannies of London in which you may find asleep, a dozen to the floor, lascars and ex-slaves, ayahs and prostitutes of the poorest sort, gypsies and stowaways, urchins and pickpockets. People know her. And she knows people.
Will this save her from the fate that is perhaps even now being designed for her in some careless, powerful quarter? For Mustapha Chacha knew people too, and they knew him, yes, jaanam, even loved and respected him. But did it avail him at that final moment when the henchmen of Mirza Habibullah raised their lathis and spears and settled an old score in the traditional way?
My apprenticeship in Patna was coming to a close when word came from the village, in a worryingly roundabout manner, that Mustapha Chacha required our presence back home. I immediately went to Hamid Bhai’s house, but Bhabhi told me that he was out on business. Hamid Bhai had risen in the ranks of the clerks who worked for the lawyer he was attached to, and now the lawyer sent him to get affidavits, petitions, etc. from adjoining courts, kacheris and thanas. He could be away for days. So I proceeded to the village alone.
It took a day and a night before I came in sight of the village. Part of the journey I had accomplished on bullock carts and buggies, begging or buying a ride when I could, and part on foot. It was morning: I had started walking with the first light of the sun. Something had worried me all night. It was not the first time I or Hamid Bhai had been called back: There were regular disputes over water channels with Habibullah’s people, and we were called back for strength and support. Still, I had bad dreams throughout that night. I set out, as I have written, jaanam, at the break of dawn.
How peaceful it is, the break of dawn, in the villages of India. You would have no idea of it, jaanam, for here the fog and the buildings obscure the sun and the sky. But that
But this city of yours, jaanam, that is what I want to write about. Like these polite houses, your city is deeply segregated, much more than any city I saw in my land. I have been walking in your city regularly, and I have also discovered its drawing rooms and kitchens. Behind each drawing room, a scullery, a lavatory, or worse. Behind Westminster, the Devil’s Acre, through which they are now ploughing a new road, for what better way is there to remove a populace or open up a land than to force new routes through it? Perhaps, jaanam, the trains that have started running to this city, and the new roads being built or projected by royal commissions are meant simply to substitute places like your aunt’s den and Qui Hy’s dhaba with something safer and nicer.
Qui Hy’s dhaba, now, that is a place Kaptaan Meadows and even his household servants have never heard of: it is in one of the mouldering quarters of the Mint. When I was first taken to it by January Monday — who is a West Indian, jaanam, not an Indian as you told me — I thought it would be run by a Chinese man. It was a strange house, narrower than the other houses on that street, though those were no broader than a dozen paces themselves, and the front door did not open into a lobby. It opened directly into a room, which must have been a shop in the past.
I entered, expecting to be accosted by an old, whiskered Chinaman. But the place turned out to be run by an ayah, who is known as Qui Hy, or Koi Hai, which was the call she responded to in the family that brought her over to London almost twenty years ago. Or is it because in Company parlance ‘Koi Hai’ was what, as Mustapha Chacha told us, those British officers and traders were called who had been in India long enough to become ‘someone’? Because Ayah Qui Hy is ‘someone’ in those crooks and crannies of London in which you may find asleep, a dozen to the floor, lascars and ex-slaves, ayahs and prostitutes of the poorest sort, gypsies and stowaways, urchins and pickpockets. People know her. And she knows people.
Will this save her from the fate that is perhaps even now being designed for her in some careless, powerful quarter? For Mustapha Chacha knew people too, and they knew him, yes, jaanam, even loved and respected him. But did it avail him at that final moment when the henchmen of Mirza Habibullah raised their lathis and spears and settled an old score in the traditional way?
My apprenticeship in Patna was coming to a close when word came from the village, in a worryingly roundabout manner, that Mustapha Chacha required our presence back home. I immediately went to Hamid Bhai’s house, but Bhabhi told me that he was out on business. Hamid Bhai had risen in the ranks of the clerks who worked for the lawyer he was attached to, and now the lawyer sent him to get affidavits, petitions, etc. from adjoining courts, kacheris and thanas. He could be away for days. So I proceeded to the village alone.
It took a day and a night before I came in sight of the village. Part of the journey I had accomplished on bullock carts and buggies, begging or buying a ride when I could, and part on foot. It was morning: I had started walking with the first light of the sun. Something had worried me all night. It was not the first time I or Hamid Bhai had been called back: There were regular disputes over water channels with Habibullah’s people, and we were called back for strength and support. Still, I had bad dreams throughout that night. I set out, as I have written, jaanam, at the break of dawn.
How peaceful it is, the break of dawn, in the villages of India. You would have no idea of it, jaanam, for here the fog and the buildings obscure the sun and the sky. But that
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