I ask him how he controls such a huge operation from so far away. I do not say “from Karachi”; his boys have already said it to me a dozen times today.
“Don’t write the name of this country,” he commands. “The planning and the activities are known to the boys on down, and they do the work according to their way. There is a communications link.” Shakeel spends a lot of time on the phone. He expresses amazement at the Internet. “You press a button and the whole of the news is in front of you!” The don spends a couple of hours every day on the Internet, scanning the Bombay newspapers: checking the financial pages, seeing who has made a killing in the market. “The biggest source of information worldwide is the electronic media. The second is political magazines, which people like you put out.” Then there is his intelligence network. “I have many contacts downstairs, who tell me what is going on all over India. The news that you don’t get I get before you.” The don is also a bibliophile; he is particularly partial to spy novels. He has liked reading since he was a boy. “I can read a novel in half or three-fourths of an hour.”
I ask him why he is at war with Chotta Rajan. Is it, as Rajan says, because of the blasts?
“Listen closely,” the don commands. “In all Bombay it is known that Chotta Rajan has not split apart because of the bomb blasts. One year before the blasts, from 1991 to ’92, he got a fault in his heart and became a traitor. Three boys of his—Diwakar Chudi, Amar, Sanjay Raggad, his boys—we killed all three for being traitors to the company. The fourth was Chotta Rajan. Twelve to fifteen years Dawood raised him like a little boy. Instead of killing him, he forgave him. He had raised him like a child, and Rajan touched his feet and wept a lot, so he forgave him. He didn’t do anything for the Company. After the bomb blasts, six months later, he left Dubai. He had to tell people why he broke away, so he told people it was because of the bomb blasts. He knew what the reality of the blasts was and who did it.”
“So who did it?” I ask.
“You are not to talk about it now,” the don suggests.
It is not true, Shakeel claims, that the people of the Muslim community go into the D-Company, and the people of the Hindu community go to Chotta Rajan or Gawli. “Many Hindu boys are with us,” he says, putting the ratio as high as fifty—fifty. For Hindu festivals, the Hindu members of his company are given money. “Our motto,” he declares, “is insaaniyat”—humanity.
I ask him his opinion of the police. It is not vituperative, as I have found among the shooters. “Particular officers are tied to particular gangs, but not the whole department. Some officers are good, even today. All the IPS officers—those are neutral and do good work.” He allows that the police have to do their work, even if it involves killing his men. “Encounters should happen to those who pose a danger to the public, who harass the public.” But they should have ethics. “They should also want that an innocent not die at their hands, because he is also someone’s child, someone’s breadwinner.” The police have been killing innocents of late. “In some departments there are people who do things according to religion. They’ve been killing Muslim boys for the last four months, saying this boy belongs to the D-Company. Seventy-five percent of those boys aren’t mine, and I don’t know them.” This is a fair estimate, according to what I’ve seen in Bombay. “The police bring them in and kill them, saying this man is of the D-Company, or with Chotta Shakeel.” Then he adds, “Which is one and the same thing.” The afterthought is significant. People have been questioning this assumption. But he is saying it confidently. Shakeel is not going to break with the D-Company, he is going to inherit it.
Since he is residing in enemy country, I ask him what he feels about the recent war in Kashmir.
“Suketubhai, war is a very bad thing these days. Because people’s lives are lost, the economy gets ruined. The whole nation goes back a hundred years. Who benefited after the war? So many weapons and missiles are being made, millions of dollars. These same monies, if they are spent on the poor, then every country, not just Hindustan, would be very happy.” He avers that, contrary to his reputation, he loves India and wants to die for it. “There is no doubt about this. The country in which a man is born, a man does not become a traitor to that land. A man can only give his life for his country. That is a very big medal for him. That is a very big respect. When a man wants to join the military, he doesn’t want to go there to play cricket or exercise; he wants to martyr himself.”
The mastermind of the largest criminal syndicate in the subcontinent now comes out with a line from JFK. “My intention is, What can I do for my country? Not, What has the country done for me?” Then he adds, “Think about that.”
He is in favor of power being transferred to the younger generation, “who have a plan for the future.” The politicians of today, he says, “have become so old that their only future is death, whether in a year or two or five.” He speaks of them with special venom, enumerating the assorted scams and scandals they are involved in: a leather scam, a fodder scam. There is a difference between criminals and politicians, whom he compares using the standard Bombay metaphor of the movies. “The difference is that all the criminals do their work on the screen, which people can see. Politicians work behind the screen, which the public can’t see. It is the same, whether you work from behind or in front of the screen. Politicians are bigger criminals than us. We fight among ourselves, but these people are ruining the whole world.” It is clear which party he favors in Bombay. “Today the Shiv Sena have ruined Maharashtra. Good government has been done in the Congress rule.”
I ask him if he is satisfied with the way his own life has turned out.
“A human being is incomplete. All his life, something or the other is after him. Whether a man does good work or bad, he is never satisfied with himself. What I wanted to do—become a military officer, that dream I had—was crushed from the beginning. Now what dream should I see, what wish should I have for the future?” he asks me. He reverts back to the language of Bollywood. “The way life goes, the THE END, only Allah knows.”
Does he have any regrets?
“A man who does bad things can never think them good. I think that something went wrong, or I did something wrong.”
I ask him how, as a man who professes to be a good Muslim, he reconciles being religious with being a murderer.
“Enmity and religion have nothing to do with each other. Both of them have their place in life. Some steps are taken for the sake of the religion. Not just mine; you do it too.” The gangwar will never end. “Enemies die, but not the enmity. An enemy dies, and another is born.” Then he defends himself: “My record is that I have never done anything to any innocent man. I don’t kill anyone for extortion.” He claims, further: “I don’t ask for extortion money. I have so many businesses that I have no need.” Since the whole work of extortion is done over the phone, he points out, there are many people who extort in his name. Recently, two Marwaris had been killed under his name. When the police need to close their files, they attribute all kinds of murders to him, which he has had nothing to do with. “It is not a good thing that murders happen for extortion,” the don opines.
Still, he seems to have a heavy sense of his involvement in “wrong work.” “What is wrong is wrong. A sin is a sin.” The punishment would come after death. But “a man should be given the chance to improve. If even what he hasn’t done is stuck on him, then a man can’t return. His life becomes”—and he uses the English phrase—“one-way traffic.”
My card runs out and the line is cut. After a minute Shoaib’s phone rings and first an assistant gets on, then Shakeel. I can hear a blast of car horns in the background; perhaps he is in traffic, or the noise is coming in through an open window. He explains again that he doesn’t have that much time. “But I thought, since you came from America . . .” He is reminding me again of the courtesy he is doing me. “Our true faces should come in front of the public. People have spoilt our faces.” But this is true in every field: “People wh
o love you and people who hate you.” At the end, he asks me, “Now you tell me, what did you think of me?” It is a strange question. Is he anxious about my opinion, anxious to be liked, or is he trying to suss out what I will be writing about him, so it can be stopped in time? As I am talking to their boss, the boys are leaning over my computer, watching what I am typing. I have to tread carefully.
“You speak like a poet,” I reply, knowing my countrymen.
The don is pleased by this response. He offers me a gift. “Any kind of work that you need from me, at any time, you call me. Leave your phone numbers with these people or contact me through them.” It is an immense favor, offered to me by someone who has absolute power to grant it. I guess it is his way of keeping journalists happy. The government might give a house; companies would provide a junket; the mob boss throws in a death to my enemies. He is offering me something from the Company store. I thank him and tell him I have no such need at the present moment.
“Very few people understand me,” he says, at the end of our conversation. He says it with some pride.
I say good-bye to Zameer in the lobby of the hotel. And then Zameer repeats Shakeel’s offer: “Any trouble you have in Bombay. One work free. Bhai said so.”
My childhood was filled not so much with violence as the constant fear of violence. I longed for a defender against the bullies in my school, in my building. Now at last I have my protectors: Ajay Lal, Kamal, Shakeel himself. They will lay waste to my enemies. The tough guys, the Lords of the Last Bench in my school, have grown up and they are my friends. I now walk around the world with a different status, a different sense of security. The don has offered me one free hit.
Later, when I repeat this story to close friends in Bombay, in New York, a wistful look comes into their eyes, and they start making lists of the people they would eliminate if they were granted such a favor. They are only half joking, and I am genuinely shocked by some of the names they give me—ex-lovers, colleagues. The women are more interested in using such a gift than the men. If men dream about killing someone, they want to do it themselves, squeezing the trigger, plunging the knife. Women need it done for them. Most of the names they have in mind are those of people they once loved greatly and now hate with equal passion. Each one of us, I am beginning to discover, has a circle of people close to us whose deaths we fantasize about.
I hold on to my favor like a rabbit’s foot in my pocket; it makes me feel secure, walking around Bombay, and I am calmer with people who threaten me, more tolerant. I know what I can do if I am really provoked. That knowledge makes me magnanimous, forgiving of slights. I become a better human being because I know I can get the person of my choice murdered.
IN APRIL 2000, two shakha pramukhs are shot dead by Shakeel’s men. Sunil and Amol are out on the streets, shutting down all of Jogeshwari, taking rickshaws off the road, ordering shops to pull down their shutters. The State Reserve Police is called out. The Sena goes on the warpath in the assembly. They demand the resignation of the Congress government over the issue of “breakdown of law and order in the state.” The government goes all out to find the killers of the Sena pramukhs. Ajay Lal tells me why one of the shakha pramukhs was killed. “He was banging a Muslim girl,” the cop says, with the glee of someone who is privy to information that is unprintable in the newspapers. “And Shakeel didn’t like the kafirs messing with their girls. He said, ‘Do him.’”
Girish is getting more and more frightened. He phones me one Sunday night. “You know the Sena work? It was done by our friend.” Kamal had showed him two sketches of the killers, put out by the police in the newspapers. Any citizens who recognize these two men have been asked to contact the police. Girish recognized them as Satish and Mickey.
I call Kamal. He tells me that Zameer had sent out the order for the work, and Satish and Mickey had executed it. “They have become superstars.” The D-Company is now extracting its revenge for the forty or fifty members of the gang that were killed by the previous Sena government. Under the aegis of the more friendly Congress government, they are going after the shakha pramukhs; and the police officers, who had been kicked around by the pramukhs, are not unsympathetic to Shakeel’s boys.
Once again, I am in possession of dangerous information. I know the two assassins that the entire police force is looking for; even Ajay has misidentified the man who did the work of the shakha pramukhs as Nilesh Kokam, who was subsequently shot dead. The police, hunting high and low for Satish, had killed a number of people who had nothing to do with the shooting; in one twenty-four-hour period, four men are killed in three separate encounters. But I know their real names, what they like to eat, how they love, what their precise relationship is with God. I know who controls them in faraway countries. And I know exactly who, when tortured, will give up their hiding places.
At this point, I quit my researches into the underworld. But the gangwar will never end. Because, at its core, it is not the gangsters against the police or one gang against another. It is a young man with a Mauser against history, personal and political; it is revolution, one murder at a time.
PART II * PLEASURE
Vadapav Eaters’ City
DARIYA MAHAL IS HISTORY. Would that it were rubble.
It was a necessary mistake. I didn’t say good-bye to Dariya Mahal. I felt no need to be in that flat one second longer than I had to. I had forgotten, at my peril, how much I am affected by the physical space I live in. A couple of months after I find the office in Elco Arcade, I also find, through a broker, a flat to call home in Bandra. I have no personal history in Bandra; it was as remote for me when I was growing up as Patagonia. It used to be considered a suburb, populated by Catholics. The only Catholics I knew were my teachers at school, and my knowledge of their lifestyle was gleaned from the Hindi movies, where the Christian women always wore short skirts and the men always drank excessively. I liked them for this reason. As I got older, I felt more comfortable among them than the Gujaratis I grew up with, where if you went to someone’s house for dinner you got very good vegetarian food but no liquor to build up an appetite with.
The new flat is the home of a famous actress who starred in some of the best films of the parallel cinema in the eighties, before her untimely death. Now her sister is renting it out. The contract negotiation couldn’t be more different from the one for the Dariya Mahal flat, which was basically done over a handshake with the diamond merchant. The contract for the Bandra flat is the longest and most detailed contract I have ever signed. We begin with a premise, strongly reinforced by the broker, of mutual suspicion and distrust. Among the items enumerated by the owner, so that we cannot steal them when we leave: curtain rods, the number and type of ceiling light fittings, and a toilet paper holder. We go over every line, every word, like arms negotiators scrutinizing a ballistic missiles treaty. At the end, the owner does not shake my hand or wish me well in her home. All this for a third-floor walkup an hour distant from the city center. The Rent Act has made Bombay a city without trust.
But it’s a much nicer flat, worth all the hassle in getting it. The wood furniture is as spare and elegant as that of the Dariya Mahal flat was not. This flat, too, has a view of the sea. In front of me, an ugly pink building, but beyond it, to the left, my sea. I can have the windows open and junk won’t fly in. Above, the vast sky. A clean house in which the light is perfect for a portrait sitting. All afternoon the light changes, soothes. And then it rains and there is the lovely monsoon light. Living in Dariya Mahal, I forgot that Bombay, too, has light that is worthy of notice. Monday afternoon, and I see no people as I look out the window. It’s India, and I don’t see any people! Luxurious vista for the eyes to roam about, settling at leisure on the palm trees, the rolled-back sea at low tide, the towels hanging still from the laundry lines. But there! A servant comes to the window opposite and takes up the laundry. Well, one person is okay. For contrast.
Outside the children’s bedroom is an almond tree, which surprises us of a morning with
a bright red leaf among the broad green leaves; it has changed color overnight, as if painted by a practical joker.
IN BOMBAY, after the first year, our lifestyle is much like it was in the East Village. We begin making friends again, adding to our wealth. By now we have accumulated a fine collection of generous people on three continents; not so much loved ones as liked ones. Friends, separate or common to me and Sunita, drop in from out of town—Bhopal, New York, New Delhi, London—along with my sisters and cousins, and without planning it we have a party. Our friends don’t mind if we wait to begin cooking until they arrive, and they don’t mind chopping onions and ginger for the meal. As some of us cook in the kitchen, others sprawl around the living-room floor and balance my sons on their stomachs or construct Meccano cars with them. We offer them beer and wine, and sometimes something stronger, and food carefully cooked and casually served. Some smoke dope by the window. There might be music, and my kids dance to it. You can wander from cluster to cluster of people and join in whatever conversation is happening—about the toxic corridor in Gujarat that the friend from Green peace is fighting; or about photography, and Dayanita’s exhibition; or whether or not the friend from Bhopal should get married to his latest girlfriend. Or you can not talk at all and put a towel on and off your head, causing Akash to go off into peals of laughter. There are people who don’t like each other, people who have good reason to hate each other because they were once in love, but they are here together now by accident and have to make the best of it. After the fourth drink they find out that their differences are nonexistent. They will be rediscovered with the hangover tomorrow morning, but for now there is only the boozy fellowship. Presently, at an advanced hour, after everybody is suitably drunk, dinner will be put on the table, often in the pots in which it is cooked, and it will be hot as hell in order to get through to our taste buds, deadened by the alcohol. My sons stay awake till everyone leaves, at one in the morning, two in the morning, or till they drop. This feels familiar. This is what we like to do of an evening, wherever we are.