THIS novel, full of suspense and mystery, is about human relationships and crime at a fast-moving pace.
The story is told by a boy sitting in the library of his grandfather’s house in Phansa, Bihar. He envisions the entire tale by putting together the jumbled pieces of information he procures by reading Captain William T Meadows’ book entitled Notes on a Thug: Character and Circumstances, a bunch of letters written in Farsi by Amir Ali and addressed to his jaanam and a London newspaper clipping.
What he gathers is that Amir Ali is a thug and is taken by Meadows to London in order to divulge details about the oriental cult of thugee, in which killings are carried out in the name of Allah and Goddess Bhawani. He spends a year there and narrates his life story to the English officer but it greatly contradicts the one he had written down for his love, Jenny, to read some day. Whether Amri is a thug or commoner is a big question; the other question is the disappearance of a scholar of phrenological science, Lord Batterstone, who, on a ship, the SS Good Hope, sets out from Africa.
As the story moves from India to London, the author peoples the trans-Atlantic landscape with a string of edgy and inventive characters, most of whom emerge from the gloomy shadows and stinking, muck-laden by-lanes of London. Cheating, lying, murdering and beheading, they shuffle through the pages in a miasma of odours, eccentricities and transgressions.
While the Indian thug Amir Ali with a complexion that is “almost fair and a demeanour that seems upper class, is a reluctant recruit”, his unwashed British counterparts, slink about in opium dens and gutters. It is here that the author reveals the seedier side of Victorian England.
The book is a delight to read and the author’s quality of being a poet comes to the fore when he writes.
(Fourth Estate, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers India, A-53, Sector 57, Noida- 201 301)
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