The Bus Stopped

By Tabish Khair

A very angry bus driver, abandoned by his wife and going nowhere in his career; a sanctimonious conductor; a hijra, or eunuch, a remnant of India's Muslim glory days; a nervous, half-Indian businessman clutching a briefcase-full of cash; a right-wing Hindu matriarch; a young boy returning to his village after robbing his employer . . . They meet – and witness a tragic event – only because they are all travelling on the same bus, in the same direction, on the same day.

With exceptional poise and beguiling simplicity, Khair introduces a range of voices, thoughts, ideas and identities, allowing each individual’s story to unfold gradually.

‘A novel that reflects deeply into the nature and circumstances of human mobility in our modern, unforgiving world’ Siddhartha Deb, Outlook

‘There is much to enjoy here . . . The twist at the end is hilarious. Khair’s talent is as a miniaturist’ Fiona Hook, The Times

‘It’s a fine work: short, sweet and brutal’ James Smart, Sunday Herald

‘A lyrical journey through small-town India’ Independent

‘[The Bus Stopped] allows stories to emerge with immediacy and leisure, with abrupt shafts of humour’ Guardian

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Release date: Jul 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9781447230939

Tabish Khair

Tabish Khair is an award-winning poet, journalist, critic, educator and novelist. A citizen of India, he lives in Denmark and teaches literature at Aarhus University.

Book preview

Again

More than the sahabs, bibis and babus, it was the servants who knew the lay of the two houses I grew up in, their scratched geography, their shadowed histories, their many voices of noon and curtaintude, evening and smokeliness. Because, more than the masters, it was the servants who had been midwives to the birth of the two houses that cradled our lives. Both the houses had grown up and wizened with them.

And yet, the two houses had also been painstakingly built by their masters: built not only with the material available but also with their dreams, hopes and eccentricities. Pillared with the breath of masters, mistresses, servants, the two houses had been home to us in childhood and early youth; for, as the adage goes, houses are built of brick but homes are made of breath.

I walk through one of the houses – the white one – with careful, muffled steps. The dust of my history lies heavily on this house. I do not wish to disturb these visible layers of accreted time. This is the house I will always know as Ammi ké yahan. At Ammi’s place. Ammi’s house. Though it was Ammi’s husband, my grandfather, who built it. But Ammi – mother to my father and aunts, ‘mother’ to all her grandchildren (forcing our actual mothers to adopt more plastic designations – Amma, Mummy, etc.) – Ammi took over and reordered the house in the years when we were growing up, years in which her husband was first confined to a wheelchair by Ahlzheimer’s and then, after a comatose state lasting seven years, buried in the family graveyard with genuine grief and genuine relief.

I skate across the other house’s newly polished mosaic tile floor at the age of five or six. My shiny black school shoes slither and skid, and I imagine I am wearing roller skates. This house I have approached with a shout for many years. This house I still approach with something like a shout once a year. But the house no longer shouts back. Like an aged retainer, it smiles and grunts in reply. This house is the house of my parents. This house is simply house. Home. Ghar. There are times when I feel that this is the only home I have ever known, will ever know. No matter where I go, no matter how many years I stay away, this will be home.

Both sprawl in the compound bought by my grandfather, a compound approximately one kilometre long and half a kilometre broad. Opposite them, across the narrow Barrack Lines Road planted with rare tall teak trees, lie the barren brown fields and the marching barracks of the local police force. To the south and the east lie broken ranges of half-wooded hills. Only one of them has a history and a name that lingers – Brahmjoni, the womb of Brahma. To the north starts the town. A town named after a holy asura. Not a demon, an asura. For both the houses border the heart of a space that does not lend itself easily to translation. It is a space of many shades of skin, many dialects and languages spoken by servants and family members; a space of people, memories and practices that see no need to be called by another name. As jalebis are not just ‘sweetmeats’ and rotis and parathas are never just ‘unleavened bread’, an asura cannot be just a demon.

Ammi’s house, the white one, was built by my grandfather – doctor, educationist and amateur archaeologist with some minor finds to his name. It was built during the Second World War, when cement was strictly rationed. As such, it was built not with cement but with a compound of lime and earth that, claimed my grandfather and the ancient master mason who supervised the construction, was the mix favoured by the Mughals for centuries before the hard certainties of cement and concrete. The area from which the soil was removed was turned into a large pond with grassy banks, into which my grandfather released zeera – of the delectable rehu fish. It lay behind the servants’ quarters next to the white house, Ammi’s house. The rest of the compound was developed into a landscaped garden, a tasteful combination of Mughal and Victorian elements, with a south end of fruit trees and a north end of the original wild growth, and a walk skirting the entire compound.

The white house had its particular relationship with servants. They lived in servants’ quarters, an enclosed space constructed around a large courtyard and attached to the kitchen and the storeroom. Breakfasts and dinners were cooked in the kitchen and carried on large brass trays covered with thin cloth at least 200 metres into the drawing room. It was usual, Ammi would tell us later with a mixture of pride and complaint, it was usual to have at least ten guests eating at each mealtime. Breakfast, lunch or dinner. Invited guests, unannounced visitors, passing relatives, poor relations being educated by my grandfather, travellers from the ancestral village. People who would only eat with fork and knife and people who wouldn’t care to touch them or know how to hold a fork, all eating together and as it suited them. Such a house craved its own quota of servants. It threw up servants – like the massive khansamah, Wazir Mian – who would never adjust to any other kind of house.

Not even to the house that my father built in the late sixties. My father’s house, ghar to us, was just as massive a structure, built in the north end of the compound. Like his father, my father believed in continuity. It was built to resist the major earthquakes which hit the region once every fifty years or so. It stood, it stands, with the kind of beauty only silent strength can confer. It was built to defy time and house the next generation. It had a large dining table that could seat twelve people. All these things ought to have pleased Wazir Mian. But, alas, things had changed. Ghar had only a three-room servants’ quarters at the back. And even these were seldom used, most of the newer servants preferring to sleep in the verandas or one of the guestrooms. Its dining table would usually see only a guest or two during mealtimes. Wazir Mian was disappointed not in the house, but its accoutrements. Ghar required – and got – its own kind of servants. And the first sort could not always get along with the second.

But what about the servants themselves, you may ask. Didn’t they have houses of their own?

Some did and many didn’t. Some spent the years in Ammi’s house or our house saving up to build a house and buy (or buy back) land in some distant village, to which they ultimately returned. Others did not bother, moving on from one house of service to another. But such was the distance between their houses and ours and so fleeting the occasions, such as a marriage, when we entered their houses that to tell of the houses of our servants would be impossible for me. We saw their houses only once or twice, if ever. They were in places where the bus stopped only for a minute, or not at all.

1 –

When he steps into the clearing it is not yet fully light. He walks to one of the buses parked in the clearing, an area which looks a bit like an abandoned field and a half-hearted attempt at starting a garage; he walks slowly, listlessly. There is no point getting worked up about another day, another dawn, though it is hardly a day or even a dawn yet, and the fat bastard would still be snoring on his cushioned khaat. There are tyres piled outside a corrugated shed. A crowbar lies half embedded in mud where he had dropped it a month ago and where it would lie until one day it caught the fat bastard’s eye and gave him an apoplectic fit, serve him right, the mother-fucker. Some discarded motor parts are scattered around: a rusted mudguard, two or three handles, a cracked windscreen, small engine parts that he could name with his eyes closed. Tyres have worn deep grooves into the earth, though further down, near the barbed-wire fence, there is a stretch of irrigated and ploughed land where the fat bastard’s wife, his own second cousin (on his mother’s side), the once attractive Sunita, plants onions and garlic, cabbages and potatoes, all according to the season.

There are dewdrops on the windowpanes of the bus. Once in a while a drop quivers, hesitates and starts rolling down. Of its own volition or encouraged by the slight chilly breeze, it rolls, slowly at first, and then faster as it collects more drops, until it appears to be a narrow stream hurtling down, down, down, until it drops to the dirty earth.

He is a man who notices such things, he is a man who only notices such things; it seems to him, if he had noticed other things he would have been another man and not a bus driver plying one of the buses of his second cousin’s husband. He sees life in still small images, almost frozen, and does not really know what image – momentous or incidental – would etch a particular moment or day or trip into his memory. Some people collect stamps or bottles or coins; he collects images, you have to collect something as worthless as images, don’t you, no market value to them, and he has to collect them, nothing but them, images! images!, one from each trip of his life, thousands of them now, all meticulously remembered, just those single images, a colour, a scene, a face, an act italicized on the pages of memory. Not that he chooses the images consciously; that is simply the way his mind orders the seamless and yet unravelling days of his life.

He unlocks and opens the front door of the bus and a foul smell, the document of yesterday, is wafted away on the morning breeze. The man pulls himself up into the driver’s seat, which is immediately illuminated by the yellow light that comes on. The passenger sections behind him are still dark, separated from his cubicle by rods that have been painted yellow to match the colour of the bus outside, with a narrower strip of brown and then a thin layer of bright red at the bottom of each rod – so that they almost look like pencils. Like a writer’s pencil. Typical, he thinks, typical that everything should conspire to remind him of his failures, for once, before he dropped out of college, he had hoped to write novels, had even written fifty-seven pages of one in Hindi, that was long ago, long ago, and now he has to be penned in by these pencils that, like a writer’s pencil, empower him – each trip a narrative made of the criss-crossing of other stories that board his bus and then go on unconcerned – even as they separate him from all that happens back there.

Over the dashboard is written this legend in Hindi, scrawled unevenly in what might have been scarlet lipstick, what is scarlet lipstick, he knows, for he still has that stubbed lipstick left behind by a whore with the huge metal nose ring, over the dashboard is scribbled: ‘This place belongs

Reviews for The Bus Stopped

[bluepigeon-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Thank you Goodreads First Reads for the advanced readers copy of The Thing about Thugs.

Thugs was a great read. Sure, there isn't much of a mystery; we know who is doing what and why. The fascinating aspect of Thugs is the life of the street riffraff and immigrants in London, the mix of cultures and languages in the bustling city, and the historical backdrop. I felt like I was reading a subdued Rushdie, except the events were taking place in London, though part of the narration originates in India. The letters written to the lover are perhaps a bit cheesy, though this is intended and well-placed. The font of these letters did not bother me; I found them to be perfectly legible.

Khair is a good writer. Language flows, and each narrator seems to have a distinct voice, and often even a distinct accent. The plot was well done, as well. Unlike some other readers, I did not have trouble following the different lines of narration. Khair does a good job with the narrative voices to lead the reader through the stories, past and present.

I don't recommend the book to people who expect a murder mystery. Historical fiction fans should enjoy it.

[mainecolonial · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A young man sits in an old house in an ancient town in Phansa, India. It is his grandfather's house and, though it is no longer anyone's home, it is alive with memories and stories. In one of his grandfather's books, he finds sheets of letters, written over a hundred years earlier, by a man named Amir Ali. The young man, our principal narrator, tells us what Amir Ali wrote, and tries to fill in the gaps to provide the rest of the story.Amir Ali is a young man in India when he meets Captain William Meadows, an enthusiast of phrenology (the notion that skull shapes and measurements reveal intelligence and even character). Because of certain events affecting his family, Amir Ali spins a yarn for Meadows, telling Meadows that Amir was a member of the notorious Thuggee Cult, a band of cutthroat murderers, but has now seen the light of the reason and morality brought by the British to the lowly Indians. Meadows is persuaded to take Amir back to London with him, where Meadows exhibits Amir to various scientific society meetings and takes down Amir's long Thug story for the book Meadows is writing, titled Notes on a Thug.* Meadows is anxious to use Amir as a weapon in his war against his chief phrenological rival, Lord Batterstone, whose ideas are far more extreme.Amir is a keen observer of Victorian London, with its teeming streets, strict class differentiation and racist attitudes toward the many people of color coming to London from Britain's far-flung empire. Amir expresses his thoughts in the letters that the young man finds in Phansa. The letters--never sent, since they are written in Farsi--are to Jenny, the servant girl Amir has fallen love with. Amir's Thug story is presented in the book's excerpts from Meadows's Notes on a Thug. We also read a narrative about a trio of grave-robbing criminals and other members of London's underclass of opium addicts, street performers, prostitutes, and even sewer dwellers called Mole People. On top of those multiple story threads, with their different styles, the book includes excerpts from newspaper articles written by a hack journalist named Oates. It was a little confusing at times, as I moved from one storyline to another but, after awhile, I got into the rhythm and style and went along for the ride. And what a ride it was.After a deliberate start, the pace accelerates when a series of gruesome killings--complete with beheadings--rocks the city. The sensationalist press proclaims that no Christian could be responsible for the killings; they must be attributed to the riff-raff slipping into the country from Hindoostan and other parts of the empire, with their "strange rites and heathen customs," "extreme political views" and "devilish practices." Oates theorizes in his newspaper that the killer must be an "Oriental cannibal," and Amir Ali soon finds himself the key suspect in the murders. Of course, his story about being a Thug is the prime piece of evidence against him. It seems all of London is out for blood, and the police are happy to assume, with no investigation, that he must be the killer. Amir and his underclass friends must crack the case on their own, before Amir finds himself dangling at the end of a rope or torn to shreds by a mob.Tabish Khair's book is a kaleidoscope of styles: florid Victorian novel, musty pseudoscientific article, tabloid-style sensationalism, historical mystery and police procedural. But that's just part of the story. Khair uses all of these styles to point a finger at the British imperialist attitudes of the Victorian era. Complaining of the burdens of empire, one clubman says, "We ship them civilization and they ship us problems." Enthusiasts like Batterstone and Meadows use junk science like phrenology to justify notions of their racial and class superiority, which underpin the era's colonialism. These attitudes are so pervasive and unexamined throughout British society that Meadows's cook proclaims that the members of the working class, of which she is obviously a member, are all untrustworthy.Khair's lesson about colonialism could have been dull and didactic but, instead, he has fun with it. Amir Ali's story about his supposed life as a Thug and his recognition of the superior wisdom, morals and reason of the English are comically over the top but, of course, it's taken as gospel by Meadows and his self-satisfied ilk. The grave-robbing criminals bamboozle their betters, and Amir and his friends run rings around the professionals put in charge of the serial killer/beheader case.Amir is a thoughtful and appealing hero, and the depiction of his love story with Jenny and friendship with his motley crew of compatriots is heartfelt and memorable.Congratulations to Tabish Khair on this genre-bending, colorful novel.* Presumably, Captain Meadows and his book--as well as Amir Ali in his fictional Thug persona--are based on Philip Meadows Taylor's 1839 novel, Confessions of a Thug, about a character called Ameer Ali. The novel was a sensation in England when published, and popularized the modern use of the word "thug."Disclosure: I received a free review copy of this book.

[a_reader_of_fictions · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Originally posted here. Also, I'm giving away my ARC - enter by the 13th.

The Thing About Thugs is not precisely my ordinary reading material. Howe cover, I have always been morbidly fascinated by books about serial killers, although I'm not sure that designation is quite right for what happens here. At any rate, I was also drawn in by the racial tensions and the unique sound to the story. Sadly, The Thing About Thugs did not turn out to be precisely my kind of read.

What was really cool about this book was all that I learned about the study of phrenology, or trying to read the human skull, something I knew little about previously. I think I'd heard of it, but that's about it. The study itself, while creepy, is also scientifically and psychologically interesting. While the debates about phrenology might tire some readers, I found those sections to be most illuminating.

So, too, did I enjoy the parts about the murders. More than that, I enjoyed the whole way the scientific process sometimes worked back then, with some men robbing graveyards for the bodies to be used in experiments. What grisly work! People would go to such lengths to study such things. It amazes me that there was a whole underworld industry for that.

What lost me more than anything else as a reader, though, was the structure Khair used to tell this story. While Khair's writing itself is good and not without appeal and skill, I didn't care much for the organization or narration style used. I found that I was constantly withdrawn from the story and that the focus was often on the least interesting (to me) aspects.

Khair told the story through multiple media: newspaper articles, letters written by Amir Ali to his love (though never sent), transcripts of Amir Ali's story to William T. Meadows, first person narration (though we don't know whose for a long time), and even (I think) some omniscient third-person narration. This was just too much. I feel like it would have been a stronger novel with more of the third-person narration. The first person narration was jarring, especially following third person sections. I had so much trouble trying to figure out what was going on and I don't think that added to the story in any way.

Amir Ali's story is an interesting one, and he is a compelling character. However, I didn't feel like I particularly came to know him, probably because all I really learned about him was from his letters. This means I was only TOLD who he was, rather than getting to see him interact with anyone too much.

Obviously, this book has been lauded, what with being shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Though it was not my cup of cocoa, I think other readers will likely enjoy this Victorian mystery, in which prejudices are generally wrong.

[unkletom_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I chose this book because I was intrigued by the premise of a Thugee being the innocent suspect of a series of brutal murders in Victorian England. While the idea is good, the delivery is disappointing. The story is told in a semi-epistolic fashion wherein the author tells a story he patched together from letters, journals and books found in his grandfather’s house in India. The language is stilted and hampers the narrative’s flow. While some may consider “I have no hesitation in relating the full account of my life…for the delectation of your own people” may sound poetic to some, I found it to be a struggle to wade through.The parts I enjoyed were those where Amir Ali, the Thug, relates his introduction to and role in the infamous Indian murder cult that gave birth to the word ‘thug’. Unfortunately, these represented a small part of the story. The rest of what I read was painfully slow and not at all engaging. Had I not held myself to my 100-page rule I would have missed all of the “series of murders”. As it was, the first murder came in just under the wire and by that time I had lost interest. DF: Quit at page 100.*Quotations are cited from an advanced reading copy and may not be the same as appears in the final published edition. The review copy of this book was obtained from the publisher via the Amazon Vine Program.

[theboylatham_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Three out of ten.

Bizarre stories about a group of people on a bus travelling through India. No real story or plot and tenous links between the different characters.

[wandering_star_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A light, warm read which gives us glimpses into the life stories of several people who are all taking the same bus journey in Bihar. Bihar, of course, is one of the poorest and least developed states in India, but the focus of this book is very much on the human stories - the different things that the passengers are running away from or hurrying to, and other stories from lives which touch theirs. We are shown daily life in a city block, childhood reminiscences of a boy from a wealthy family about the family cook, the tension between the lazy, sensual driver and his more upright conductor. All this is told in deceptively simple but moving prose.

[smithsj01_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I quite liked reading this but it was quite difficult to follow. Lovely little insights into people's lives along the route of a bus. I have a great interest in the Indian culture which I think will help if you choose this book. For me the style represents the Indian lifestyle (or the bits I have experienced anyway) but the challenge of reading it and trying to piece everything together may not be worth it for some. It does help that it is well written and relatively short.