Papamani got married to Devendra and began living with her in-laws at a slum in suburban Mumbai near Mankhurd station. After shifting from one shanty to another, the couple finally bought a small room near the Hanuman Temple at the Sion-Koliwada slum in Antop Hill.
In the years that followed, she had four daughters and one son with Devendra: Jayanti, Lalita, Jayshree, Jayalaxmi and Venkatesh.
However, life had another setback in store for Papamani.
Her husband, an alcoholic, spent most of his money getting drunk in the evenings. During one of his drunken stints, he met with an accident that left him paralysed for life. With five children to raise and a disabled, unemployed husband at home, Papamani was forced to hunt for a new source of income.
It was during these troubled times that she was approached by her neighbour and friend, Savitri, a prominent drug peddler in the Sion-Koliwada slum. Savitri sold pudis (packets) of heroin. Since the drug-peddling business was highly profitable, Papamani immediately decided to give it a shot. Savitri also lured Jyoti Adiramalingam from Reay Road, to work for her. Under Savitri’s tutelage, Papamani and Jyoti were given the responsibility of dividing large quantities of heroin into smaller pudis and then distributing them to interested parties.
In no time, the troika of women—Savitri, Papamani and Jyoti—had begun to control the pudi-selling business in Sion-Koliwada. However, with profits running into lakhs, it was only a matter of time before Papamani outsmarted her own mentor, with her shrewd, business acumen.
In 1991, Papamani decided to split from Savitri and began running the business independently with the help of a loyal group of peddlers. Papamani’s business strategy was simple. She would buy five kilogrammes of heroin at anywhere between one to three lakh rupees and would then convert ten grams of heroin into forty pudis. She then sold each pudi at twenty-five rupees, making a profit of around three lakh rupees per month, i.e. about the salary of a CEO of a company in Mumbai. Sometimes, she would also peddle large quantities of heroin for regular customers. The police tried to arrest her on several occasions but she always managed to escape conviction, for want of evidence.
In the months that followed, the coterie of people working for her tripled, and this illiterate slum-dweller soon went on to launch a full-fledged empire with her own financial managers, peddlers and advisors, literally converting the Sion-Koliwada slum into a drug den.
Papamani also engaged several hundreds of unemployed men and women in the drug-peddling business, providing a source of income to the many deprived families of Sion-Koliwada. She had begun to make so much money, she was forced to stock liquid cash in several hutments across the slum. With crores of rupees always at her disposal, her involvement in charity work also began to increase. She was considered the poor man’s bank, as she would loan people money to run their households. It is said that Papamani kept thirty to forty lakh rupees in cash tucked inside her sari and fearlessly walked the narrow alleys of her slum area, distributing money to poor Tamilians in return for their services.
Her charity work did not deter her from multiplying her own finances. And so, even while she continued to live in her small shanty, she began investing money in lucrative businesses. Her first destination for investment was Bangalore. Despite having made her money in Mumbai, Papamani still had a soft spot for the city in which she had spent her childhood. It was here that she allegedly started a three-star hotel. She also bought herself a house and four shops in Trichy, in the Salem district. Papamani gave all these shops on rent and employed someone to collect the rent from the tenants.
Soon, because of her role in transforming the poverty-stricken Sion-Koliwada slum into a place of wealth, the locals christened her Mahalaxmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth. Papamani was now Mahalaxmi Papamani Chinapayya Devendra.
Then, in 1993, the Mumbai police’s Anti-Narcotics Cell (ANC) arrested her once again. This time, the ANC was confident about throwing her in jail for a very long time. Papamani knew she was in trouble, and in an urgent bid to secure release, she roped in narco-specialist Ayaz Khan. She knew that if there was any lawyer who could get her out of prison, it was Ayaz. Her faith was not misplaced: Ayaz successfully managed to spot loopholes in the ANC’s case, and Papamani was released on bail.
Papamani’s popularity and support within Sion-Koliwada was apparent also from the way the slum-dwellers took personal interest in shielding her. For instance, escape routes were charted within the slum. The Sion-Koliwada slum is built on the slope of a hill and the shanties are attached to each other. The path leading to these shanties is also narrow and maze-like. To help her escape, the slumdwellers created several routes, hideouts and underground passageways within the connected hutments. These routes eventually led outside the slum. Every time the police came to arrest Papamani, people in the slum would be warned and she would be sent out through one of these routes.
Matters became more complicated when Papamani came up with a novel idea to escape arrests. Several times, the police would be confronted with an impenetrable wall of eunuchs, who formed a human barricade for the entire stretch of the slum. These eunuchs were much stronger and abusive than the locals, and the cops usually avoided any confrontation with them.
An officer with the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB), who was personally involved in Papamani’s arrest in 2004, narrated how Papamani’s army of eunuchs accosted them when the cops nabbed her. They surrounded the officer’s jeep in which Papamani had been herded and stopped it from moving ahead, demanding that Papamani be freed. After much difficulty and a lathi-charge by the Antop Hill police, the officer managed to escape from the slum with Papamani in the car.
Papamani soon separated from her husband Devendra, leaving him to fend for himself. Reluctant to get any of her children involved in her line of work, she sent four of them to study at the elite JR Cambridge boarding school in Salem. Her children though, were not interested in studies, and after they failed repeatedly in school, Papamani finally had to bring all of them back to Mumbai, four years later. She got three of her daughters married in Mumbai; one married the son of Papamani’s mentor, Savitri.
At around the same time, her twenty-year-old daughter Jayshree, who was a Class 9 dropout, started having an affair with a local ruffian, Vijay Gupta. Their relationship caused Papamani a lot of embarrassment, partly because the boy was from a different caste and partly because he was a local goon, and she was thought of highly by the locals.
In her confessional statement to the NCB, Papamani admitted that, since she was preoccupied with the heroin business and occasionally absconding to evade arrests, she could not pay attention to Jayshree. Papamani finally filed a case of molestation against Gupta and sent her daughter to a distant relative’s place. But all her attempts to shelter Jayshree went in vain, as the girl continued her affair. Assuming that her daughter was already ‘spoilt’, Papamani decided to make Jayshree her successor. Jayshree was initially roped in to sell pudis and then gradually made to deliver bigger consignments to Papamani’s clients.
On the afternoon of 19 July 2004, the NCB caught Jayshree with four kilos of heroin. Papamani was eventually arrested around ten days later.
Investigations revealed that Papamani had connections with NCB’s most prized catch, Ghasiram Solanki, who was one of the leading drug traffickers in India. However, Papamani maintained that she did not know him personally.
She said that, while she was on the run, she had stayed in the house of a friend Laxmi Karpai, who bought heroin in large quantities from a woman known as Hamida aka Aapa. Hamida, she said, used to arrange for the heroin from Solanki.
The NCB had been looking for evidence and witnesses against Papamani. To their luck, Papamani’s husband Devendra, who all this while had been holding a grudge against her for what he saw as her abandoning him, decided to stand witness against her.
During his testimony, Devendra revealed information about some of Papamani’s prime properties in Salem and Mumbai, which she had bought with the in
come she earned from the sale of heroin. ‘My wife is in the heroin business and I am not on good terms with her,’ Devendra said. Jayshree, who was also upset with her mother’s attempts to keep her away from her lover and force her into the drug trade, also decided to stand witness against her.
Papamani was finally convicted and put behind bars in 2004. It was ironic that the two people for whom Papamani earned turned against her. While she had so many followers, none of them were in her family.
Knowing perhaps, that Papamani’s influence would extend beyond the jail she was in, not one of the residents of Sion-Koliwada had stood witness against her. Her husband had, and he paid for it with his life.
In 2007, Devendra was murdered under mysterious circumstances. For the record, he was killed by a group of drug addicts and thrown onto the railway tracks. But neighbours believe that his fate was sealed the day he decided to act against his wife.
Papamani was released two years after her arrest. These two years of confinement marked the worst phase in her life. Her fortunes took a nosedive as all her benami properties were seized by the NCB and the Mumbai police. After Devendra’s death, Papamani’s heir-apparent Jayshree eloped with another local ruffian. From being a crorepati, Papamani was now scraping loose change.
Chapter 4
ENCOUNTER WITH
THE EMPRESS
T
he grey Tata Safari halted at one corner of Antop Hill’s busy market area. I got down and started walking towards the junction. The street was dotted with shanties, small vegetable and fruit stalls, tea and secondhand furniture shops. The market was bustling with people and everyone, right from the vendors to the locals, seemed to be conversing in Tamil. It is the local language in the area, and though I was in central Mumbai, I could well have been in some small town in Tamil Nadu.
This is the Sion-Koliwada slum, infamous for its illicit hooch distillery owned by Vardharajan in the ‘80s, and later, notorious for being a drug den under Mahalaxmi Papamani. While most of the residents of the slum may have found other sources of income today, there are several whose lives suffered irreversible damage as a result of these little industries. The slum is built on a hill that leads to a Hindu temple. These hutments reminded me of the ones I had seen at Sonapur Lane in Reay Road when I met Jyoti Adiramlingam. I was told that Papamani still lived here.
Since she was known to all, I assumed that it would be easy to locate her. I was wrong. Most of the people in the area refused to acknowledge her existence, let alone speak about her goddess-like aura.
After receiving vague replies, suspicious glares and misleading directions from several people, I decided to approach a woman who, I’d noticed, had been spying on me while I moved around asking for Mahalaxmi’s whereabouts.
‘What do you know about Papamani?’ she growled.
‘She is the Amma out here,’ I said, choosing my words carefully.
‘What if I told you I am Papamani?’ she asked mockingly.
I had seen Papamani in the photographs that I had procured from the NCB dossiers and the woman in front of me looked nothing like her.
‘No, you aren’t,’ I said politely.
She immediately broke into a sardonic smile. ‘She sits at that junction,’ she said, pointing to the junction ahead.
I expressed my thanks to her with an awkward smile and began walking. I must have gone a little beyond the junction, when I became conscious of a woman who had been sitting all alone near a wooden cart.
‘Are you looking for me?’ she called out, in heavily accented Hindi,
I turned around, and was stunned.
She was Papa (God help me) Mani. Papamani. Mahalaxmi Papamani. My jaw dropped on seeing her.
The woman whom I had only known by reputation or police and NCB dossiers, was actually right in front of me, sitting calmly, fanning herself with the pallu of her black saree. I thought I would never be able to trace her but it almost seemed like she had been anticipating my arrival.
I was surprised that she did not have her gang of eunuchs or coterie around.
‘Why did you want to meet me?’ she asked, as I came closer.
‘I am a social worker,’ I lied, just as I had to Jyoti.
‘I am self-sufficient. I don’t need your help.’
‘We can find you work,’ I persisted.
‘Me? I already have a lot of work,’ she interrupted, pointing to the wooden cart in front of her. ‘Look here, this is my livelihood. I make enough from this.’
I looked at the cart and saw that there was a heap of onions and potatoes on it,
‘I sell vegetables. Do you want some?’ she asked sarcastically.
For a brief moment, I did not know how to react, but I was desperate to continue the conversation. ‘Yes, two kilos each,’ I replied hurriedly.
Papamani was taken aback; she hadn’t expected me to actually buy the vegetables. She quickly recovered though, and as she began placing the vegetables on a weighing scale, I asked, ‘Since when have you been doing this?’
‘Two years,’ she replied.
‘What about the police cases against you then?’
‘Police cases?’
‘For selling drugs ...’
‘The police is envious of me. My dhanda helped sustain thousands of families in Sion-Koliwada. The hungry were fed with my money while the poor got their children educated. I was doing good work for society.’ ‘Then why did you open this vegetable stall?’ ‘My husband is dead; my daughter ran away. I did not see a reason to make so much money anymore,’ she said, as she put the vegetables in a black plastic bag. ‘Forty-five rupees.’ I promptly paid her.
As she counted the money, I was reminded of the stories of Papamani distributing lakhs of rupees to people. The four crisp ten rupee notes and the five rupee coin that I handed to her were nowhere near the kind of money she had handled in the past. Satisfied after counting the money, she nodded at someone on the opposite end of the road. It was then that I noticed the people around us, watching us talk. I ignored them and tried to get her to speak again.
‘I can still help you if you want me to.’
‘Give me fifty thousand rupees,’ she demanded out of nowhere.
‘For?’
1 need it for an operation. It can save my life.’
‘I don’t have that kind of money now.’
‘Get it, and then we can continue talking.’
Her proposition shocked me; it sounded like extortion to me. But the situation became even more uncomfortable when I noticed that a group of five to six menacing-looking Tamil women had begun encircling the stall. Sensing something was amiss, I decided to make a move. I quickly took the two polythene bags and walked away quietly.
‘Keep buying from here,’ Papamani said with a smile.
I nodded, although I wasn’t sure whether she meant the potatoes and onions or the pudis, the business, which like Jyoti, she claimed to have stopped long ago. I walked away and, when I felt there was enough distance between me and the women, I turned around to look at Papamani for one last time.
She was not sitting near the junction anymore. As for the vegetable stall, I saw a young boy stuff the vegetables into a jute bag and leave. In a few minutes, the place had been cleared. I got into the Safari, still in a quandary about the pieces of this Papamani jigsaw puzzle. Something was just not right. But I was glad that I had walked away unharmed from the place.
A few days after the incident, I got a call from an informant, who claimed to have helped the NCB arrest Papamani.
‘I heard you met Papamani,’ he said.
‘How did you know?’ I asked, astonished.
‘It’s a much talked-about setup at Sion-Koliwada,’ he replied with nonchalance.
‘What setup? What do you mean?’ I asked incredulously.
‘All that you saw was staged to trick you. It was a farce for your benefit.’
The revelation stunned me, but at least now the puzzle was complete. The whole decoy was int
ended to throw me off track. The reality of Papamani was far from what I had seen of her at the vegetable market.
Chapter 1
THE FLIGHT FROM LISBON
T
he police convoy cut across the runway, its blaring sirens not raising even one eyebrow amidst the din at Lisbon airport. The gun-toting guards accompanying the convoy gave the impression of it being a mobile fortress. The cars screeched to a halt and officers of the Policia Judicia stepped out, escorting a thirty-six-year-old man, dressed in a black T-shirt and track pants. He had a stooping gait and seemed to be smiling nervously. The Portuguese police spoke to him before he was taken over to the eagerly waiting contingent of Indian officials.
For a moment, deputy superintendent of police, Special Task Force, CBI Devendra Pardesi, couldn’t believe his eyes. He had handled tough cases and tougher criminals, but this one seemed a bit unreal. The man the Portuguese police was handing over just didn’t fit the bill of one of Mumbai’s most dreaded gangsters—someone who had masterminded some of the most gruesome murders in the annals of Mumbai crime history.
Pardesi had barely collected his thoughts when the occupant of the second car stepped out. Just as in the movies, a policeman held the door open as a woman’s legs emerged from the vehicle and daintily settled on the tarmac, toes first and then the heels as she climbed gracefully out of the car. Her fair skin appeared pale and almost translucent in the afternoon heat. Tall and slim, she had very delicate features that were strained at the moment as she clutched a Bible like it was a lifesaver. Her long, thin legs and narrow waisdine were emphasised in the figure-hugging T-shirt and jeans that she wore.