Maximum City
I ask Zameer if it is absolutely safe, my going in there alone. Zameer replies that since he is taking me in, it’s probably okay. “But in this line, things change in five minutes,” he says. “If I get a call from above saying ‘Eliminate Suketu,’ I’ll do it, even if I’m your greatest friend. Because if I don’t do it, I’ll get killed myself.”
As I’m registering in the hotel, Zameer says that only four people will be in the room. What were all those boys coming up for, then? “They’ve come for swimming,” he explains. We wait silently in the room. Through the window we can see trees. The room this time has the same kind of bed, a steel wardrobe, a desk, and a couple of chairs. It is bare, functional, perfect for sex or death. You bring yourself to such a room and decorate it with yourself. The only excess is yourself.
Satish has shaved today and is wearing jeans, and a shirt with broad red and white stripes. With him is a tall well-built young Sikh man named Mickey. I take out my computer and Mickey sits on a chair by the bed. He has on a tight blue T-shirt that shows off his muscles. He wears a neatly trimmed mustache and beard and constantly runs his hands through his short hair, perhaps feeling for the turban he has given up.
Mickey now stands, pulls up his T-shirt, and takes a gun out from under the waistband of his jeans. He hands it over to Satish. Satish holds it, looks at it closely, and turns to me.
He puts the gun in my hand.
I feel its weight and heft and turn it over. It is a 9mm Mauser, gray, with the steel showing where all the marking has been removed. The scratches give the impression that the gun has been well used. It feels very big in my hand. Satish shows me the clip. Mickey points out that it can hold ten bullets, but they generally put in only seven because the spring in the mechanism gets damaged if it’s full. It can empty in ten seconds. Satish takes out the bullets and shows them to me. They are copper bullets with a steel core, and each one bears the markings KF for Kanpur Factory, the government ordnance factory. The gun costs between two and a half and three lakhs on the street, and each bullet sells for between 70 and 180 rupees. They are proud of the gun; they speak of it like a prodigal child. “In a man it will make such a big hole,” says Mickey. He should know. He’d made these holes in six men by the time he was in his early twenties.
Mickey is fond of listening to the Backstreet Boys—and to the sound of a Mauser. “There is something in that sound. My brother’s friend heard me test it, and he said, ‘Look at my arm, the hair is standing on end.’” Mickey urges me to try it. “Even if you fire two or three rounds you will get confidence. Its sound has that quality. The more it fires, the more your confidence will open up.” An AK-47 and more sophisticated weapons don’t have the quality of that voice, he says, like someone comparing classical singers. The Sound is used to convince extortion targets; Mickey plays it like a record for businessmen he visits on the bhai’s errands. “Sometimes he needs to hear the Sound. Sometimes I need to run a bullet through his hands or his legs.” Upon hearing it, the businessman suddenly becomes subordinate to Mickey. In normal circumstances, the hit men, like the Sena boys, are spectacularly powerless in the big city. They make themselves powerful by killing; they imbibe their victims’ power.
“We are anti-alchemists,” says Satish. “Whatever we touch turns to iron.”
Satish is aiming the gun, practicing; taking the clip out and pulling the trigger, putting the clip back in without the bullets and aiming it, taking the clip out again, loading the bullets and waving the gun around the room, pointing it at Zameer and smiling, making a soft sound with his mouth: “Phroo!”—it sounds like a raspberry—as he blows him away.
Mickey was the Sikh friend who had taken Satish to Punjab to kill a police officer. Five of them went from Bombay, got a Maruti car, took the weapons—each of them was given a pistol—and did the work. They were chased. They threw away their guns, climbed on top of a freight train, and then ran into a forest, full of very old rare trees. The police closed in on them, shining flashlights through the forest. The sound of the police came from all directions in the cold fog, and the hit men decided to walk in a group toward one of the police parties. The police stood them in a line in a clearing, and they knew they were going to be shot. Just at that time, another of the squads pursuing them arrived and began quarreling with the first one, saying they wanted to interrogate the captured boys. There was a dispute over which one of the squads would get credit for the catch. The second squad finally took them away, alive. “We used to take God’s name a lot,” says Mickey. “Maybe that’s why we lived.” Satish is raising the gun, aiming it, pulling on the trigger.
The interrogation in Punjab began. The police made cuts into the sides of Satish’s groin, and he shows us how: one diagonal cut, sloping toward the penis, left, and one on the right, in the crevices just below his balls. They then took hot chili powder and rubbed it into the bleeding incisions.
Mickey tells me about the roller. He was stretched out, and a large rolling pin was placed over his body. Two big cops got on it, one on each side, and rolled it over his body with all their weight. It caused Mickey to call out loud to his entire family, including his grandparents. “After you torture a person like that you had better kill him,” suggests Mickey. “Because if you release him, nothing on your earth has the power to scare him anymore.”
They were briefly jailed, but the judge in their case had been fixed and they went back to Bombay. After their exploits in Punjab, the group found themselves being ardently wooed by all the gangs. They started doing freelance work for political parties—their “independent business”—which they define as “taking the air out of opposition parties.” For one general election they were hired by a Congress legislator fighting for a seat against a BJP man who was a rich smuggler and landing agent at the airport. The BJP candidate had police security, but Satish and Mickey managed to get it removed long enough to go into his office, beat up his boys, and go at him with swords. They would have killed him, but he was rescued in time. The BJP man was connected to the home minister; public demonstrations were held, demanding the arrest of his assailants. But Satish and Mickey also knew the minister; they had had a photograph taken with him. Besides, they had no particular enmity toward the BJP. Their last contract was with the BJP and, before that, with the RPI, the Republican Party of India. “We don’t support parties, we support the individual,” Mickey says. They have no interest in politics; they don’t go to party rallies. “The member tells us he has a difficulty with a particular man. We try to make him understand,” explains Satish.
“Some people understand immediately,” adds Mickey. “Others after going home. Others after hearing a firecracker. We make them understand as each can.” But there is one politician whom they sincerely admire. “If we were to choose one man to support for the country,” says Satish, “we would support Atal Bihari Vajpayee. He is a genuine person. If he can bring about a revolution we will support him. He is a bachelor. He has made politics his mistress. There is no scam in which his name figures. All parties respect him.” What impresses them most about Vajpayee is his decision to test the nuclear bomb. “Now the whole world looks at India. There is now a power,” exults Mickey.
“He took the decision to go to war over Kargil,” points out Satish. “No other PM would have been able to do this.” They admire his ability to make powerful decisions, warlike decisions. “Nowadays who remembers Gandhiji?” asks Satish. But he still uses the respectful suffix.
For all their fighting on the side of the terrorists in Punjab, for all Satish’s work on behalf of the Pakistan-based bhai, both of them insist that they are not against the nation. “Patriotism and the gangwar are completely different,” says Satish. In fact, the two of them had been discussing the conflict in Kargil the previous day. They decided that if they got the chance, they would go to Kargil and fight for India. If the bhais actually tell them to do antinational work, they will quit the D-Company, maintains Satish. His greatest wish is to kill those who planned the
bomb blasts. “They did wrong things.” He doesn’t want to kill the blast participants still left on the ground in Bombay—“They were pawns; they just stored the weapons in their homes”—no, not them. “I want to kill Tiger Memon. I want to kill Dawood. I want to kill Chotta Shakeel.” He is talking about the leaders of the D-Company. Satish is sitting here and announcing, in the presence of Zameer and Mickey and myself, that he wants to kill the bhai of his own gang. (Later, Zameer tells me he appreciates the fact that Satish said out loud he wants to kill Shakeel, whom Zameer works for. “He doesn’t have one thing in his heart and another on his tongue.”)
I ask about the structure of their lives, their daily routine.
“We mostly go to sleep late,” answers Satish. “We watch TV till two. We wake up and have breakfast and do our puja by noon. Most of the time is spent on the phone. We go after flesh; mostly, college girls. We wear good clothes, have cars and mobiles. Sixty to seventy percent of the girls get seduced this way. With fifteen percent we speak English well. With the others we give money. That’s it: one hundred percent,” says Satish, totaling up. But the girls also try to make suckers out of them. He points to me. “Gentlemen like you can’t seduce girls like we can. With us, if we give her chocolates once, we want to screw her on the second date.”
Then Mickey says—and I don’t know whether he is being serious or mocking—“We believe in pure Indian principles. First the wedding night, then the children, then the home.” Maybe Mickey’s desire for doing things the Indian way comes from some heartbreak, for he adds, “We believe that a woman will always go to someone better, someone with better clothes. She will leave you for someone better.”
“A mother’s love is pure,” continues Satish, who has known so little of it. “She doesn’t think, ‘This boy failed in school, he is not my son, that one came first in his class, he is my son.’ A wife or a girlfriend’s love can never be that pure.” He has noticed a fact about love that he wants to call to my attention. “The day we do something very bad, we get a lot of love at home. When the police come and tell the people at home that they’re going to bring their son’s corpse home, they hug us then, they say, ‘Son, we love you.’ If I think about that love, I won’t be able to do any crime. I won’t even be able to tell a lie.” So he takes pains to avoid thinking about it.
“Mostly I am not attracted to anything,” Mickey explains. “I think about a person only as long as he is with me. When he goes a little away, I go very far away from him. Like our leader: I don’t think of him at all. I can even kill him. Even girls; I have affairs at the most for four or five days with them. Even my family: When I am away from them I don’t think too much about them.”
Why did their parents give birth to them? Satish wonders. “They must be regretting it.”
When a man touches his killer’s feet and begs for his life, saying, “Please don’t kill me. I have young children,” it is the worst argument he can offer. Thinking the killer will let you off because you have kids assumes that you can locate a hidden source of sympathy in your killer based on something shared, something in common. But very few killers are fathers. Very few of them have had good experiences with their own fathers. So that bond between father and child, which for you and me is the most convincing argument against your death—don’t kill me because it will break that sacred bond—means nothing to them. It is a bond, in fact, that the hit men have consciously been trying to break all their lives. As far as they’re concerned, ridding your children of a father is the greatest favor they can do them.
Suddenly, Satish declares, “There is no meaning in this kind of research that you’re doing. There is no ending to this.” He repeats his advice: “If you did spiritual research instead, you might even find God.”
“Every man has the same story,” says Mickey, in agreement that my research is a waste of time.
“If four criminals die, eight more will be born,” says Satish. “There wasn’t so much crime before. Now there is only one business left: the Bullet business. All this is God’s game; we have to play it. Our existence has absolutely no meaning. Whatever our story is, it is finished.”
“We could die two hours from now,” says Mickey. But he is prepared for it. “We have seen everything there is to be seen.”
AT THIS TIME, Satish and Mickey are hiding out north of Dahisar. I later ask Zameer why they won’t be caught here. He explains it is because of politics among the police stations and zones. If a particular crime has been committed in a particular area, the prestige of that area’s police station is at stake in capturing the perpetrator. The other stations or zones will not cooperate willingly with them; and the original station does not like to ask the others for information on the man they are in search of. It’s the difference between food cooked at home and food asked for from someone else, explains Zameer. The police force is ridden by political factions, and no one follows these political struggles more closely than the folk of the gangwar. They know the names of all of the encounter specialists, and each has a mythology built up around him similar to the kind built up around the top hit men. At the slightest prodding, they can tell you about the exploits of Vijay Salaskar, Pradeep Sharma, Pradeep Sawant. “Sunil Mane is in good form nowadays,” says Mickey, as if speaking about a cricket player. They speak of the police shooters with no less respect than they speak of the star gang shooters.
But the shooters of the Bombay gangs are getting restive. They are getting killed in multiple encounters. The bhais forbid them from hitting back. Satish declares, “We are ready to kill the cops. But the people on top are afraid of enmity with the police, because then the police will wipe out that company.” Instead, the bhais tell the police to kill the shooters when necessary; they inform on their own men. Satish wants to hit back at the police. “If two—four cops were hit, the encounters would stop. Right now everything—politics, the gangwar—is running on the backs of the shooters. The day the shooters feel that the people on top are not supporting them . . .” There is a kind of class consciousness developing among the shooters.
The Company tries to take care of shooters on the run like Satish. They are rotated around a series of safe houses, in good buildings around the city, and they are given mobile phones and, occasionally, cars. “I am at a place right now where I don’t have to shift every night, but the boys with me have to shift every night or every week,” says Satish. He is in a curious position. By now he has been in three companies, and they know he has no permanent allegiances. He is not working for his faith, as the Muslims in the Company profess to, or for the nation, as the Hindus in the Rajan Company claim. He is in it strictly for the gold. At the moment, he needs to raise money for the wedding of a friend’s sister; the friend had been jailed after a botched job. He has no love for Rajan or for Dawood. “There is no loyalty,” he says. “There is no trust.”
I remember what Kamal had told me about the dal badlus, the men who change loyalty from one gang to another. This usually happens after a disagreement with the bhai. It could happen emotionally, “such as when the bhai shoots your brother.” When he sends out feelers to the rival gang that he wants to change parties, the second bhai will tell him, “Give us a gift,” and the dal badlu will shoot a member of the first gang, perhaps the leader, as an offering. But he is always mistrusted by the gang he goes to; he is always the first to be given up to the police. “Such a man is killed after he’s used.”
Satish, all of twenty-five years old, can never leave the gangwar. “Now there is no use in getting out. Now there are opposite people”—the many enemies he has made in the opposition. He remembers that the first man he had murdered, the Muslim blasts’ suspect, had “improved.” He had left the gangwar. “He had a wife, two kids. He got traced.” Satish often thinks about his own death. “I have seen so many deaths. When I am killed I will die quickly, there will be no trouble. I want only this: Of the people who kill me, I want one of them to die by my hand.”
Before he goes out on a job,
Satish blesses himself ceremoniously. “I give myself blessings. I don’t take anybody else’s blessing. For all good and evil, I give myself blessings, because I alone am responsible for everything in this world. I don’t believe in good or evil; I believe in karma.” Then, turning to me, Satish asks, “Do you believe in sin and virtue?”
I say that I do.
“Only weak persons believe in sin and virtue. My father works a lot, suffers in the trains. Now there is me. I don’t work a lot. I sit, I get a phone call, I go and put a bullet in someone and get a lakh of rupees. It is no big thing for me, but my father won’t be able to do that work. So he will give his fear a name: sin. He will call it principles or whatever.”
He tells me a story about his cousin, a civil engineer. He was much loved at home and now earns several thousand rupees a month working for a builder. “I never got that pampering at home. I earn a lot of money. Who is more successful, I can’t say. His progress is slow and steady, mine is all at once, but there is no use.” He envies his cousin, envies him his respectability—the families must be comparing the two of them constantly—but has a measure of contempt for him. “He would never have thought of anything outside of his life.” One day, when they were both children, they had a big fight. The cousin was living next to an automobile factory that made the omnipresent little Fiat cars. Satish and his cousin were talking about cars, as little boys do. Satish was speaking about the fancy cars he had heard about: Toyota, Mercedes. He told his cousin that the Mercedes was the most expensive car in the world. His cousin, seeing the Fiats roll out every day next to his house, insisted that the Fiat was the most expensive car in the world. “I felt like breaking his head,” recalls Satish. “He is, bhenchod, a frog in a well.”