Now to the clues about the murder. The people of the footpath had been clear about Achhu’s irregularity. Ulhas had come up with a possibility of the victim switching between multitudes of footpaths across Mumbai but Dr.Desai’s analysis about the mousebite was on the money. I doubt a person who spent hours with a computer could be a footpath dweller. He also had a mobile phone which would certainly be rarity for a guy living on the streets. There were no unique identification marks on the body. No tattoos, no wounds & no marks barring his neck. Those too were self inflicted. One clue was the fact that he talked like a South Indian. The name Achhu could also give me a lead. But where is the motive? Another possibility had scratched me sometime on my journey from Dadar to CST. If he was good at computers & had to go to the footpaths randomly then he his line of work was either sporadic or not strictly legal. Even with irregular spikes in workload, he was more likely to have an accommodation. But he didn’t, at least for a few days every three months or so. And he was poisoned. That can happen quickly on the dark side of business. The motive in that case could easier to identify. So a word with the old faithful was required. Tomorrow could be equally eventful.
Then there was Pulkit. Was it a chance meeting? I hope so. It felt like one. There was no way he could be so interested in me to set up a meeting like that. And I think he would do that kind of thing if he could get something out of me. I have nothing to offer him. My record as a public servant is good & he cannot have anything on me unless he invents it. Besides, he is known to go after the fat fish. People who can afford him, I don’t have anything worth mentioning apart from the money that my uncle gave me. That too is seating in a tax saving mutual fund. Hell, many of the kids of my seniors spend that kind of amount on their annual college fees here or abroad. But I need to find out more about Pulkit.
And finally the lady at the morgue. Dr.Desai seemed to know her and that old fox sure felt the difference in my blood pressure while she was around. If she was there on official business, I need to check around the morgue for her. Not many women have that kind of effect on me. That is another case for the cop in me. Find her if you can. You have till your transfer.
I am whistled out of my day revision ritual by the cooker. I don’t move though. I let it whistle once more. I am never sure about my rice being properly cooked so I always give it another whistle. Better to eat it softer than usual than having to chew hard.
I finish the improvised khichadi in minutes. Helped with a few slices of raw mango pickle, it finds its way to my howling stomach. I leave the cooker in the sink after filling it up with water. My maid is going to have field day tomorrow. I crawl into my bed to be devoured by instant sleep.
3
Khabari
My mornings are well laid out. I get up by 5am & go for a jog. It is the only time of the day when you can focus on the city & not the people. The morning air is usually cooler than any time of the day. And the best part is that I get to jog past my college. Sydneyham is just 100 meters from the sea. So I approach it from the CST railway station today. The 2 kilometers before this have warmed me up & I have settled into a nice rhythm. I run past the building of the college. It has given me some of the best times in my life. In many ways it has shaped me. So seeing it first thing in the morning is a pleasure.
I emerge right next to the sea soon. A cool breeze blows across the embankments erected across the Necklace road that has come to be identified as the visual of Mumbai. I continue towards the Gateway of India. Soon after the Air India building, my legs pump slowly as if in daily homage. I am running by the Oberoi Trident. I can see joggers on either side of the road. But it is the memory of the attacks of 2008 that hangs on me. I was at a training session in New Delhi then. By the time all of the Mumbai cops like me rushed back to the city under siege, it was over. I have made it a point not to remember the number of victims of those three days. I don’t want to quantify what we lost that day merely in number of lives. The city that represents the best & probably the worst of India definitely lost its balance then. It has regained most of it but that is mainly due to business & not by choice. Even the Trident is open for business now. Otherwise, the hoardings & steel frames erected at its entrance used to serve a reminder of the city’s scars. We have still not punished the one terrorist that we caught alive. I don’t expect the government to do that soon. I have met that man many times and whenever I am in a dilemma about my job I just need to visit Arthur road jail. I have no doubts after such a meeting. I can’t bring myself to go further to the Taj today. So I take a quick left after the Trident to emerge at the Regal talkies. From there it is straight patch of around 500 meters to the Flora Fountain.
Ten minutes later I am back to my flat. After the run, I do a set of 50 abdominal crunches & 50 Suryanamaskar. I am not into weights & the Suryanamaskar are a childhood habit. The habit has been galvanized after I heard a Bollywood fitness trainer recommending them for a chiseled chin. I take a quick shower to get ready for work. Ulhas is picking me up from the Flora Fountain again. He lives in Borivali but is coming over to pick me up. We are to go back to Mira Road later in the day so it would have been better for me to take a train & meet him up at Dadar. But we have another meeting at the Elphistone road. Ulhas does not feel his day has started unless he drives for 30 kilometers & after I told him who I was planning to meet, he insisted on picking me up.
The repertoire of a Mumbai cop is incomplete unless he has “khabaris”. Informers. They are priceless in this city where there are multiple societies. There is the elite which project the high life. Rich men & women who have earned their crores & like to be seen in public going about their life. Some of them are not so inclined but are tailed by general people, criminals & the government to make sure that their privacy is ruined once in a while no matter what they do.
Then there is the middle class, the common man who works at least 8 hours a day, uses the public transport, pays his bills & gives the city an orderly look. Both these types are well documented for cops. I can get basic information on any man belonging to these classes through the usual government channels. House registration, vehicle registration, employment details, property details, service bills, driving license, PAN cards, the list is long. All or any of these can break open the investigation about a person.
But there are two more societies in this city’s fabric that can render this list useless. The poor who live in Mumbai’s slums are one. As their residences are not registered with the government in most cases, pinpointing them is hard & even futile. Water bills, electricity bills cannot be enough as the connections may have been obtained illegally. Though the slums support a large chunk of Mumbai’s industrial workers, there is no reliable employment record. If the person in question is relatively new to Mumbai, matters get worse. These men form groups to stay together but it is not always the case. If he is without family, personal contacts are bound to be minimal. So tracking such a person could turn into the proverbial needle in the haystack.
The last category is that of the criminals. They are very professional. Unlike the government officials, they are prompt with opportunities, innovative at customer care, street smart in operations, alert on threat perception & ruthless in threat elimination. Most of them understand that a low profile is one of the best protections in this city. The politically ambitious denounce it but the businesslike clinch onto it. After a sustained run in the Mumbai crime world, known better as the Underworld, we cops get to know them. There are many avenues for a criminal mind in this city of opportunity. There is thieving, drug trafficking, drugs pedalling, extortion, land grabbing, prostitution rings, and contract killing; the list is ever growing. These services are well sought too.
In a city housing over 25 million, the human nature is on the showcase in all its crowning glory & its lowest nadir. Whosoever runs along these lines consistently catches the attention of the law even if he fails or succeeds. The failures in law are easier to track than those who are really good at beating it. Unlike the fai
led criminals, they accept evolving as a way of life. They improve their methods, their cunning & their reach. Cops need to prepare for these skillful operators over time & these sharp minds use the same time to strengthen their defenses against the law. With enough money & resources, they find every loophole in the law & every law enforcement official who can be exploited. They usually know more about cops than the other way around. Most of them are paranoid about leaking any information about themselves & their businesses because such a leak can break the dams of their defense when a real Mumbai cop decides to slug it out. Modern surveillance tools used by the cops are matched with better protection mechanisms by the criminals. But as sure as humans breathe, information, particularly the kind that is suppressed is bound to flow away. As an old wiseass had put it to me, “A secret & the smell of a fart always end out in the open.”
So cops work hard to get such information. We strike deals, threaten, exchange favors to have this vital weapon that could turn an investigation about a person. These small details are not always accessible. The khabaris are one of the most important sources in this regard. It takes time, patience & almost perennial contextual thrashing of the information revealed by them to rely on them. But once you have a reliable one, he or she can get you results that are “Chhaparphad”. Motherlode. Khabaris are particularly handy when the person in question is new to the Mumbai underworld. He may just have relocated here or could be a newbie who has made his first big hit. Cops have almost nothing on these types & the khabaris can get us a quick heads up. I have heard that some of the best cops have a Khabari network of more than 20 people.
A good Khabari is cunning, calculated, loyal & intelligent. At the basic level, he has to be as good as a criminal. There is a rumor that holds my attention. In 2008, a Khabari had warned a well placed cop about the terrorist attack on Mumbai but the cop thought it to be outlandish. That is possible. Rational people can defend themselves against the audacity of an idea. Anyway, such men are hard to find and most of them need to be groomed. I have been grooming one for my own since the past two years. He has yielded some useful stuff during that time. He is getting better at this so I hope this time he delivers a notch higher. Because Achhu does not have any previous police record. Early today, Ulhas checked that out at the office terminal. No record by that name in the database. He has put up a request for photograph comparison in the system but it takes longer as the search compares the photograph not only with criminals but missing persons. As the machines go to work, we might as well use human intelligence.
***
Ulhas is on time as I reach Flora Fountain. I climb into a different vehicle today. It is a Hyundai Santro Xing. This is Ulhas’s personal car. We are going to meet a person who does not officially exist & it is important that his identity stays that way. Going to him in a police vehicle is out of question. Besides, the Xing means I get to listen to entertaining music & not the usual static punctuated messages by agencies responsible for law & order.
The radio is powered by a Sony Xplode audio system. It showers the car with the silken voice of Mohit Chauhan singing “Naadan Parindey” from Rockstar. I shut out the noise of the world to immerse myself into the rhythmic pool of A.R.Rehman & the heart rending lyrics of Irshad Kamil. Ulhas fills me up about the search & I tell him about my meeting with Dr.Desai. When I tell him about the encounter with Pulkit, he shakes his head as if shivering.
“I wouldn’t have let him seat on my table even if it was just for a drink.” He is clear about that.
“Anything else at the office?” I choose to close that topic.
“The usual. That chutiya was asking about the progress of the case.” Chutiya is the slang for vaginal. And for a lot of us in the office it is the official title for Pritam. I fake ignorance to Ulhas though.
“Came in as I was about to leave. Asked me for the hundredth time where I got this car & what would it cost him for a similar car. Wanted to know if we had any leads. How does he think I will share it with him even if I had one?” Typical Pritam. Ulhas pauses suddenly for a moment.
“He was asking about you too.” I look back at Ulhas as he maneuvers the Xing. This can’t be good.
“He wanted to know if you are vacating your flat.” Ulhas knows my obsession with the flat & is puzzled. But the clarity of the underlying message is hard to miss. Pritam knows I am in the transfer pool. Ulhas does not & I am still not ready to break it to him. Pritam has been posted in Mumbai for his entire career. That is against the law. But he has pounced on loopholes, certainly bribed his way out of the transfer pool many times & might even have used his connections within the department to stall a transfer. I have even heard that he offers the same service to others who are ready to pay for avoiding the transfers or for getting a favorable one. This is sounding like a sales pitch. Ulhas too smells something fishy as he looks at me, as if waiting for me to enlighten him but I choose to look ahead.
Ulhas has dressed up for the occasion. Like me, he is wearing a jeans but it still has a formal look due its vertical pockets. He has put on a collared white T shirt with multi colored lines running across his chest. I am wearing a polo neck orange T shirt & loose fitting cargo jeans with four pockets. Where I get down from the car, everybody seems to wear similar yuppie clothing. To blend in one of the most popular electronics markets of Mumbai, such outfits are a must.
The electronics market at Elphistone road is spread across 200 meters. It is a set of over 20 buildings distributed evenly on either side of the road. Every building is two storied on an average but some are as high as five. Most of these buildings are very old with fraying colors & cracks in the walls. The shops that are the beehive of activity look small even by Mumbai’s standards. Most of the shops have entrances that are not larger than 5 feet. Some of the shops are broader in entrance with frontages showcasing electronic goods & computer hardware products. But it is the smaller shops that draw the crowds. Gray-market is the keyword.
Just as the gray color, the products & services sold here are a mixed bag. They are latest & the best products manufactured by leading brands in the world. The catch is that they are not meant to be retailed in India. Most of them come from Europe & the Gulf. Though globalization has put the Indian market as a priority for every leading industry, electronics giants prefer launching technologically savvy products in the developed nations first. But the Indian consumer has a section which does not want to wait until the latest gadget launches officially here. Most of them can’t travel to the developed nations just for getting the gadget but can pay top buck for it in India. That’s where the gray market finds a footing. It gets them the latest fancy gadgets in India & at a price that is cheaper even than the officially launched products. These are smuggled into India from around the world. The gray markets are also the largest vendors of Chinese products which are cheaper even than their Indian counterparts. So the gray market can cater to the high end, the middle end & the low end section of the electronics consumers with success.
The hottest gadget today is undoubtedly the mobile phone. It is a need, a status symbol for the young & tech savvy that won’t wait for the Samsungs & Apples to launch it later. So they get it off the gray market. Even cheaper are the Chinese phones that offer a feature set that is so large that at times it covers for the rough look of the product. The ones with a shoestring budget don’t look beyond them. The amazing thing about the gray market is the quality control.
Yes, I said quality control. It is highly visible in well known gray markets like this one. The phones that are sold here work. Like the genuine article, they rarely get an operational problem. If a phone does get a problem, it is repaired quickly, many a times without a charge. Apart from that, these shopkeepers look out at each other. That is, if one of the shops is selling faulty goods, it is brought in line by others. There have even been cases where shops have been forced to shut operations because of this. Word of mouth sustains the place & it is protected like a religion. We cops don’t get to bust these gu
ys often. That is because the shopkeepers have blended their ventures. They sell authentic goods too. They have a screening mechanism for customers & stick to it. So they are legally selling products that are meant to be retailed in India but are into other products too. The services offered are also along the same lines. Just like an electronics store, repairing services can be availed here, which is legal. But there are other services those can be availed by the inquisitive customer.
Unlocking mobile phone/ tablet hardware or rooting as it is called is offered almost at every shop. For unauthorized Android & Apple devices, it has become a must have feature. iPhones have a more eloquent term for this, jailbreaking. Doing this renders any product warranty void & many companies block software updates to such a phone. But the gray market has found a way to bypass this. Using the same programming techniques used to develop the software for the phone, they can jailbreak your hardware & ensure that it updates to the latest software features too. Sleek. Again, this is not a publicized service but is most sought after. The logic of small entrances & deep shops seems right.
I am looking for the Jam-Jam mobile phone store. I have been there 4 times during the last couple of years & it was in different buildings on 3 occasions. The person I want to meet is Jamil “Jammi” Kaskar. He is a tall, skinny boy just over his teens. I met him for the first time at the Beharampada police station. He had been held for a shoplifting charge. The Havaldar who had caught him was pressing hard for a complaint as he had let Jamil off previously. Jamil’s parents were pleading as it could have resulted in juvenile home time for him. The fact that they got a local political leader from their community to come down to the police station had pissed off the Havaldar. You don’t want to deal with a Mumbai cop in that mood. He had Jamil sit alone on a bench just next to the cells.
Mousebite Page 5
