The Thing About Thugs Read Online Free PDF

descriptions like‘Hindu’ or ‘Muslim’; instead, it employed the supposedly safer euphemism of ‘one community’ and another community’ when describing the bodies discovered in charred houses, the amputated limbs recovered from railway tracks. The writer, surely with the best of intentions, tried to clean the bones of the atrocity of flesh and skin and gore, of the passions and anger and bitterness which hung from it like a rat in the claws of a crow. But it was to no avail. My Hindu classmates were convinced that the victims of the riot were Hindus; my Muslim classmates as convinced that the victims were all, and only, Muslims.
    No, it is not easy to clean the bone of all that accretes to it: skin, flesh, tissue. Bone is as stubborn and possessive as books in a private, shuttered, small-town library. But John May has a system. In his home on the fringes of East London, he has worked out a scientific routine that he follows every time with characteristic diligence: after locking the door on his children and his wife, he first scalps the head, taking the hair off as cleanly as any mythical Red Indian on the warpath. Because the hair, if undamaged and lush enough, can be sold separately. Nothing goes to waste if one is prudent, and John May is a careful, prudent man. There is no nonsense about him.
    There is no nonsense about him now as he unlatches the broken gate leading to the small barren plot in front of his two-bedroom house in an alley of East London that does not yet have a fixed name. All the houses here are alike: a kitchen attached to a closet — like scullery and a drawing-dining room on the ground floor, and two rooms, one hardly bigger than a cupboard, upstairs. Outside, in the backyard, there is a shed that functions as a toilet. Behind the backyard, there are a few more houses: this is where East London starts petering out into expanses of miasma and sickness, into bare fields and marshes.
    John May can hear his family — wife and three children — in the drawing-dining room. His wife must be laying the plates for dinner. She knows her husband’s routine and respects it. She is a good woman, though somewhat inclined to melancholia.
    John May walks purposefully across to the small kitchen. There is a broth bubbling on the stove. But the kitchen smells less of food and more of formaldehyde. When John May opens the locked door to the scullery, the smell of formaldehyde and sulphate grows stronger. John May lights a couple of candles and takes them to the scullery. He closes the door behind him. He closes it with a loud enough bang to intimate to his wife that he is working. She will have to delay dinner. No one interrupts John May in the scullery. No one but John May enters the scullery. And no one eats in the family until John May sits at the head of the table.
    Inside the scullery, John May looks at the head: it still lies on the dark-stained wooden shelf where he had deposited it last night. This will take time. He cannot do much now. Death needs time to ripen into art. All he can do is strip off the rotting skin and flesh, make two holes in the skull where the eyes used to be, and start to empty the contents with a selective use of acids and chemicals, knife and scalpel. Later, when the skull has been cleaned and emptied, he will have to let it soak in an aqueous chemical solution for some time, before drying and treating it.
    In his many professions since the day when, at the age of fifteen, he ran away from a violent and mostly unemployed father and an alcoholic mother in Liverpool, John May has tried his hands at various skills. True, they have been mostly in a rather unspecified capacity. He has been an errand boy rather than the waiter; he has been the butcher’s help rather than a butcher; he has been a lawyer’s clerk rather than a lawyer. Sometimes John May is amazed at his success: in less than thirty years, he has not only a family but a house, and some money saved up. What is more, he