During the 1980s at least fifty mobsters from Z-Company and the Pashtos were killed in the continuing gang war. But in the end the Afghan mob was eliminated and godfather Zamzama had his throne.
After his older brother’s death Zamzama took the decision to dispense with a personal life. “Girlfriend is weakness,” Nero heard him say. “Family is weakness. This in others is valuable. But in the boss it cannot be permitted. I am the cat that walks alone.” Alone, that was to say, except for a twenty-four-hour bodyguard detail of twelve persons—that is, thirty-six persons working twelve at a time in eight-hour shifts. Plus a team of twelve trained countersurveillance drivers behind the wheels of armored Mercedes stretches, experts in the arts of dry cleaning, which was to say, making sure the motorcade was not being tailed. (Again, four drivers at a time, three shifts.) And the front door of his house was solid steel and the windows also were bulletproofed and boasted thick metal shutters, and there were heavily armed men on the roof at all times. The city was governed by a man living in a cage he had built for himself. Making himself invulnerable, he made the vulnerabilities of people’s persons, families and capital assets the foundations of his wealth and power.
(I am not an expert in the industry now known as Bollywood, but it loves its gangster movies as much as its gangsters. The film buff entering this universe might well start with Raj Gopal Varma’s Company, Apoorva Lakhia’s Shootout at Lokhandwala, Sanjay Gupta’s Shootout at Wadala, or Milan Luthria’s Once upon a Time in Mumbaai and Once upon a Time in Mumbaai 2. The extra a in Mumbaai is an example of a new numerological fad. People add or subtract vowels to make their names, or in this case the names of their movies, luckier and more successful: Shobhaa De, Ajay Devgn, Mumbaai. I am unable to comment on the efficacy or otherwise of such alterations.)
It was Aibak, the film about Qutbuddin Aibak the first of the Slave Kings and the building of the Qutb Minar, that showed the industry that the new godfather meant business. The high-budget historical drama had been a lifetime pet project of one of the grandees of Bollywood, the producer A. Kareem, and it featured three of the “six boys and four girls” who, according to common parlance, were the ultrastars of the time. Two weeks before the commencement of principal photography Kareem received a note informing him, a Muslim himself, that the proposed film was insulting to Islam because it referred to the new ruler as a slave, and demanding that the project be canceled, or, alternatively, that a “permission slash apology fee” of one crore of rupees in used, nonsequential banknotes be paid to the representative of Z-Company who would present himself in due course. Kareem immediately called a press conference and publicly jeered at Zamzama Alankar and his gang. “These philistines think they can phuck with me?” Kareem cried, pronouncing both ph’s as powerfully plosive sounds. “So ignorant they do not know that the names by which this dynasty is known, Mamluk or Ghulam, both mean ‘slave.’ We are making a banner production here, a landmark picturization of our history. No bunch of goons can stop us.” Four days later, a small heavily armed group of men led by Zamzama’s lieutenants Big Head and Short Fingers invaded the secure lot in Mehrauli near the real Qutb Minar where the extremely elaborate set for the movie had been built, and set it on fire. The film was never made. A. Kareem complained of intense chest pains soon after the destruction of the movie set and died literally of a broken heart. Doctors examining the body said that the organ had literally burst apart inside him. Nobody ever jeered at Zamzama Alankar again.
Nero continued to invite Zamzama to parties at his home, and the movie industry’s A-list continued to attend. Zamzama himself began to throw the most lavish affairs anyone had ever seen, flying planeloads of guests to Dubai, and everyone went. This was how it must have been in the heyday of Al Capone, the dark glamour, the seduction of danger, the heady cocktail of fear and desire. The Zamzama parties were reported in all the papers, the stars glittering in their nocturnal finery. The police sat on their hands. And sometimes on the morning after a great fireworks of a celebration, there would be a knock on the door of a producer sleeping off his overindulgences in a stateroom on a Z-Company yacht, perhaps in the company of a starlet who was too stupid to know that this was never, ever the way to the top; and there would be Big Head or Little Feet with a contract for the producer to sign, giving away all the overseas rights of his latest film at highly disadvantageous terms, and there would be a large weapon pointing at his head to help persuade him, and the days of gallantry were gone, nobody told the naked starlet in the bed to make herself decent and run. Party in the front, business in the back, that was the Z-Company way. Many of Bollywood’s leading lights had to ask for, and receive, police protection, and they were never sure if it would be enough, or if the men in uniform would turn out to be beholden to Zamzama, and the guns intended to protect would point inward at the principal rather than outward toward the dangerous inscrutable city. And the law? The law turned a nearly blind eye. Small fry were sometimes thrown in jail as a sop to public opinion. The big fish swam freely in that sea.
Daughter, daughter, Nero said. I was among the worst of them, because they never tried to extort me. I willingly did their money work, and they were good to me financially, and I accepted it all, it was the way of the world, I thought, and maybe it was, but the world is a bad place, you should look for a better world than the one we have made.
He was not a victim of the extortion racket but he didn’t have to be. The threats and assassination attempts and actual killings of those years had him scared stupid. He had a lot to lose. He had expensive property, he had buildings going up all over town, he had a wife, and he had sons. He had all the weaknesses Zamzama looked for and needed. It was not necessary for the Z-Company people even to mention these weaknesses to him. They were the unspoken bond between the mob and Nero. Who was he to them? They had the dirty washing and he did their laundry. He was their dhobi. They actually called him that, Big Head the dwarf and Short Fingers with the orange hair and Little Feet who had the biggest feet anyone had ever seen. “Hey, dhobi!” they said on the phone. “Got some washing for you. Come and take it to the ghat.” When he saw them they would snap their fingers. “Get it cleaned up,” they would command. “Chop chop.” Zamzama himself was more respectful, always using terms of respect along with Nero’s real name. Sahib, ji, janab. The respect was a way of expressing contempt. The meaning of the respect was, “I own you, motherfucker, and do not forget it.” Nero didn’t need reminding. He was not a hero. He didn’t want to lose his family or his toes. There was no chance that he would forget.
The villains were spilling off the movie screens, jumping down into the cinemas larger than life, movie-sized, and charging down the aisles and out into the streets, guns blazing, and he had the guilty feeling that the industry was responsible, it had created these monsters and made them glamorous and sexy and now they were taking over the town. Bombay meri jaan, he thought, humming the song, Bombay my life, my darling, where have you gone, the girls on Marine Drive in the cool of the evening with wreaths of jasmine in their hair, the Sunday morning jazz jam sessions on Colaba Causeway or Churchgate, listening to Chic Chocolate, to Chris Perry’s saxophone and Lorna Cordeiro’s voice; Juhu beach before people like him surrounded it with buildings; Chinese food; the beautiful city, the best city in the world. But no, that was wrong, the song which was to the city what “New York, New York” was to another metropolis had always warned that it was a tough town, difficult to live in, and it was that song’s fault, too, the gamblers and the cutthroats and the thieves and the corrupt businessmen it sang about had poured out of the lyrics like the actors leaping out of the movies, and here they were now, terrifying decent folk, folk like the naïve girl in the song who defended the great city, oh heart it’s easy to live in this town, but even she warned, look out, you will reap what you sow. You will reap just what you sow.
(Yes, it was the movies’ fault, it was the song’s fault. Yes, blame art, Nero, blame entertainment. So much easier than blaming human b
eings, the actual actors in the drama. So much more pleasant than blaming yourself.)
He went on doing it, the suitcases, the smurfing, the flipping. He even agreed to become one end of a big-money hawala chain, when “asked nicely” by Zamzama Alankar himself—with a little cascade of sahibs, janabs, and jis—one evening during a pool party at the Willingdon Club. They never tried to extort me. They didn’t have to. He was Zamzama’s willing pawn. He thought himself a king in the city but he was only a humble foot soldier. Zamzama Alankar was the king.
And he wasn’t completely telling the truth about the extortion. He admitted it. The truth was that they never tried to extort cash money from him. What they extorted was much, much worse.
Zamzama, the Cannon, was not a sentimental man. Once, according to his legend—he was a man who paid a lot of attention to the nurturing of his legendary aspects—Little Feet had kidnapped a mob pimp named Moosa Mouse who had been interfering with certain company girls, and had him sealed in a metal container at the docks, and had then hired a vessel to take the container out to the farthest reaches of the harbor where it was dispatched to the bottom of the sea. Two days later Mouse’s mother was on TV crying her eyes out. Zamzama said, “Get me her cell number now,” and a minute later, while she was still being interviewed on live television, he called her up. Bewildered, she answered the phone, and there was Zamzama’s voice in her ear saying, “Bitch, your mouse is now a fish, and if you don’t stop that noise you will shortly be keema yourself. Kaboom!” Keema was mincemeat. “Kaboom” was Zamzama’s favored sign-off and whoever heard that in his or her ear knew exactly who was speaking. The woman’s crying stopped, boom, like that, and she never spoke to any journalist ever again.
He also had no time for the kind of Bombay-meri-jaan romanticization of the past to which Nero was prone. “That city of dreams is long gone,” he told Nero unceremoniously. “You yourself have built over and around it and crushed the old under the new. In Bombay of your dreams everything was love and peace and secular thinking and no communalism, Hindu-Muslim bhai bhai, all men were brothers, isn’t it? Such bullshit, you’re a man of the world, you should know better. Men are men and their gods are their gods and these things do not change and the hostility between their tribes also is always there. Just a question of what’s on the surface and how far beneath is the hate. In this city Mumbai we have won the gang war but a bigger war lies ahead. Only two gangs in Mumbai now. The gang gang, the mafia, that is me. Z-Company, we only are that. And what are we, ninety-five percent? Musalman people. People of the book. But there are also the political gangs, and they are Hindu. Hindu politics is running the municipal corporation and Hindu politicos have their Hindu gangs. Raman Fielding, you know the name? A.k.a. Mainduck the Frog? You understand? Then understand the following: First we were just battling it out for territory. That battle is over. Now there comes holy war. Kaboom.”
Sultan Ameer “got religion” in later life but his was of the mystical, Sufistic kind. Zamzama Alankar by the beginning of the 1990s had become an adherent of a much more fiery version of their common faith. The person credited with making this profound change in Zamzama’s worldview and range of interests was a demagogic preacher named Rahman, founder and secretary of a militant organization based in the city and calling itself the Azhar Academy, dedicated to promoting the thought of a nineteenth-century Indian firebrand, Imam Azhar of Bareilly, the town which gave its name to the Barelvi sect of which the preacher Rahman was the leading light. The Academy had made itself known in the city by demonstrating against the ruling party, demonstrations that the ruling party described as “riots,” but which demonstrated, at the very least, that the Academy could put a substantial crowd on the street at short notice and then turn that crowd loose. To Nero’s great dismay Zamzama started parroting the demagogue Rahman’s words, often almost verbatim. The immorality and decadence of. The evil hostility and degeneracy of. Needs to be confronted head-on by. The pure and pristine teachings of. The correct perspective of. The true glory and splendor of. Our responsibility to save our society from. The benefit of the genius teaching of. Our resolve is greater than. Ours is a scientific mode of living in the world and in the hereafter. This world is nothing, only a gateway to the grandeur beyond. This life is nothing, only a clearing of the throat before the immortal song beyond. If it is required of us to sacrifice life we sacrifice nothing, only a clearing of the throat. If it is required of us that we rise up we will rise up with the flame of justice in our hand. We will raise the just hand of God and they will feel its tight slap on their face.
“Damn it, Zamzama,” Nero said to him when they met aboard the Kipling, Zamzama’s sailboat in the harbor, which was the Cannon’s preferred location for confidential discussions. “What’s got into you? You always struck me as a party man, not a praying mantis.”
“The time for loose talk is over,” the don replied, with a new note in his voice which Nero found menacing. “Now the time for hard deeds approaches. And also, dhobi, do not use blasphemous language in my presence ever again.” It was the first time Nero had been reduced from sahib to dhobi. He didn’t like the sound of that at all.
There were no more parties in Dubai. In the house behind the steel door, there was now a lot of praying. To a man of Nero’s temperament, it was bizarre. Perhaps the time had come, he thought, to detach somewhat from Z-Company. Complete separation would be impossible because of the mafia’s influence over the construction unions and even more over the nonunionized “immigrant” labor force converging on the city from all over the country without papers or legal standing. But perhaps he had worked on the money side long enough. Enough, perhaps, of smurfing, flipping and hawala. He was by now a legitimate tycoon and should divest himself of these shadier portfolios.
To Zamzama he said, “I think I’m getting too old and tired for the money work. Maybe I could train a successor to take my place.”
Zamzama was silent for a full minute. The Kipling, at anchor, its mainsail lowered and flaked, rocked gently on the water. The sun had set and the lights of the Back Bay glittered around them, an arc of beauty which Nero had never ceased to cherish. Then the mafia boss spoke. “Do you like classic American rock and roll band, Eagles?” he asked. “Glenn Frey, Don Henley, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera?” And, without waiting for an answer, he went on, “Welcome to the Hotel California.” Upon which, to Nero’s consternation, the don began—loudly, tunelessly, in a manner that struck fear into Nero’s heart—to sing.
“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
This was the beginning of the great darkness, Nero said in the darkness of his study in the Golden house. After this discussion I was in hell. Or, I had been in hell for a long time, but now I felt the fire burning the soles of my feet.
But also, you know the funny thing about that song, about the hotel? It wasn’t even true. Because leaving, when, where, how, that became his subject as well as mine.
You are shocked by me, he said. You are horrified by me and you haven’t even heard the bad part yet. You are frightened by what I have told you and there is only one question in your mind. You loved my child. My poor confused child. You loved my child and you are asking, without words you are asking, I see in your eyes in the dark that you’re asking. How much did my children know.
As for your beloved, in everything I have told so far he is free of all guilt. He was not born, or a little boy. As for the others, they grew up in a certain social stratum, the stratum of big city big business, and they knew what it took. Without greasing the palms, nothing got done. They knew about my Don Corleone, yes. But he was a well-liked guy. For them all this was normal as it was for everyone else. They liked the movie world also. The movie stars at our home. The ease of being with A-list women. As if they also had stepped up onto the silver screen. This was pleasurable and if the dons were there too, so what, it was a known thing. Nobody cared. In the time of Sultan Ameer nobody judged. But when Alankar took over, th
en I shielded them from my involvement. The less they knew the better for everyone. This was a different type of individual and I kept my family away. My business was my business, I accept there are criticisms to be made, I neither justify nor defend my choices and actions, I only state. Your boy was seven years old in 1993 and twenty-two in 2008 when we came to New York. I must say that of all three of them he was always the most self-absorbed. His war was within himself, I see it clearly now. His cannons trained on himself from then until. Until. So to keep things from him was simple. The things I needed to keep from him, I don’t think he knew. Also the oldest boy, my damaged boy, Harpo they called him, it could be a cruel town, yes; for him too the great question of his life lay in his head, a question with no answer. Him also I absolve. There remains the question of Apu. Apu who was Groucho then. Apu, to be frank: I think he knew. He knew but he didn’t want to know and so, the drink the drugs, to deafen himself and blind himself and make himself unconscious. I never spoke to him about the dark side. He didn’t ask. “If my father was a dentist,” he said to me once, “would I care how many fillings or root canals he did today, on whom? So, I think of you like that. You’re the dentist when you go to work but at home you are the father. That is what your family needs from you. Not fillings but fatherly love.”