{"id":603,"date":"2012-06-26T20:51:06","date_gmt":"2012-06-27T02:51:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=603"},"modified":"2012-06-26T20:51:58","modified_gmt":"2012-06-27T02:51:58","slug":"tabish-khair-the-thing-about-thugs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/tabish-khair-the-thing-about-thugs\/","title":{"rendered":"Tabish Khair: The Thing About Thugs"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cStories, true or false, are difficult to escape from\u2026Especially the stories we tell about ourselves.\u00a0 In some ways, all of us become what we pretend to be.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>This exquisite little volume would be a lovely addition to the library the narrator describes as belonging to his Indian grandparents.\u00a0 Their dusty old house was a treasure trove of books and as the narrator discovers, of stories.\u00a0 His own story is elegantly told but complicated and layered \u2013 you have to pay attention, though the light shines brighter about midway through the book when certain narrative identities are confirmed.<\/p>\n

The narrator is a framing device for a story set mostly in London in the 1840\u2019s, with flashbacks to India.\u00a0 It is clear that the main actors are Amir Ali, Captain Meadows and a shady crew led by John May and working for a certain M\u2019Lord.\u00a0 Interspersed with love letters and the recounting of Ali\u2019s adventures as an Indian Thug, is the relating of the story where M\u2019Lord is looking for interesting skulls for his phrenology collection.<\/p>\n

Phrenology is a long discredited \u201cscience\u201d whereby people \u201cread\u201d the bumps on someone\u2019s head to determine their personality.\u00a0 To the Victorians, it seemed to make sense, and to M\u2019Lord, slowly accumulating a museum of skulls, it\u2019s meant to prove his theories to the world.\u00a0 How the skulls are acquired are another story, and as headless corpses begin to appear all over London, there\u2019s an outcry, fanned by a reporter who is certain the killer couldn\u2019t possibly be an Englishman.<\/p>\n

While the story Khair relates here is is technically a crime story, his concerns are more about prejudice and appearance.\u00a0 His main theory seems to be that how people appear to the world \u2013 including their skin color \u2013 colors what happens to them and what they do, how they behave.\u00a0 As he relates the various and sundry stories of many different kinds of people in the book \u2013 set apart by class, race, sex, and simply having a bit of cash \u2013 you can understand, from your far away viewpoint across time, how and why these people behaved as they did.\u00a0 The author finds something inevitable in the way the world has forced them to present themselves.<\/p>\n

As the story itself is an interesting one and you become more invested mostly in the life of the spiritually delicate and lovely Amir Ali,\u00a0 you\u2019re also caught up in the crime story.\u00a0 The twist concerns how<\/em> the villains are caught, not in who<\/em> they are, as you know their identities from very early on in the narrative.\u00a0 Even the villains\u2019 actions are presented as somehow inevitable.<\/p>\n

As well as the rich food for thought this novel provides, we are also gifted with a visual portrait of 1840\u2019s London and the far-away perch of India.\u00a0 How, the narrator asks at one point, could I like Jane Austen?\u00a0 Austen\u2019s books are on the shelves of his grandfather\u2019s library.\u00a0 But as the narrator realizes, while the clothes and customs and classes are different, the behaviors are universal.\u00a0 The same applies to the characters in this novel, some of whom may seem familiar to you.\u00a0 This is a book well worth devoting your time and attention to.\u00a0 It\u2019s full of rewards for any thoughtful reader.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cStories, true or false, are difficult to escape from\u2026Especially the stories we tell about ourselves.\u00a0 In some ways, all of us become what we pretend to be.\u201d This exquisite little volume would be a lovely addition to the library the narrator describes as belonging to his Indian grandparents.\u00a0 Their dusty old house was a treasure … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[10],"class_list":["post-603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-historical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=603"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":606,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603\/revisions\/606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}