Mumbai Noir

by Altaf Tyrewala

  Early afternoon, and again I can’t fall asleep. I look at the weathered HMT on my wrist. Just late enough to miss Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge. No other tax-free movies around. I stay in bed.

  I no longer visit theaters to watch films. But back in the day, we all did. Abbu frowned upon them, but we loved them. When Bachchan started playing us, we laughed at first. Dressed like that, in those cars, preening like a woman. But soon, the bhais found themselves fascinated with this portrayal. This was how they could—should—appear. And so was born a new generation of “Dons” who tried to live up to the image that those two Muslim writers created. Dressed in suits, wearing dark glasses, driving around white Mercedes with glamorous women on their arms. Glamorous stars in their coterie. Crystal glasses in their hands. Gold-filtered cigarettes in their fingers. From Families, they turned into what that crazy film director called Companies.

  And they were no longer Pathan.

  Pathans did not need titles or inheritance to be convinced of their own indisputable royalty. Royalty was inherent in their solemnity, their larger-than-life ideals, their need for utter peace with their own conscience in a life lived outside the law. They blessed. They dispensed justice. They sent men without honor to their graves. They took their honor to theirs.

  The new bhais were converts from different communities. Konkani and Gujarati Muslims, whose lives had not been lived for generations with the lofty ideals of the mountain peaks, but on the shores of the ever-changing, ever-diabolic ocean. Survival demanded lightness of weight, and flexibility of plan. The ocean demanded emptiness contained in wooden hearts—golden hearts would drown. It’s how the underworld turned treacherous. You could be killed simply because it was advantageous for someone. And dying, you wouldn’t know with any certainty why.

  Now, I go to the theater, not to the film.

  Cinema halls were cheap, air-conditioned places to sleep away three and a half hours of an unbearable life. So, of course, the new city went to work on them. Now they’re small, claustrophobic, cost five times as much for two hours’ worth. And filled with The Kids.

  The Kids. The frightened lifeblood of this moribund little island where everyone has learnt to be afraid. Aged fourteen to forty, some older; dressed in identical T-shirts and jeans and sneakers. A generation of vapid boy-men and hysterical girls, to whom friendship and love and connection with the universe at large is through increasingly smaller electronic screens. Their thumb muscles now the most athletic part of their bodies. Their need to be loud a defiant shout against the absolute pointlessness of their lives.

  Every film, every horrible TV show, every magazine, and every restaurant desperately trying to reach out to the supposed psychology of this soul-sterile species. The twigs that keep aflame the sad fires of an impotent hell.

  In my time, boys were men by fourteen. Else they died boys. They shoved and pushed and postured and carved a little place of the area for themselves—the adda—where they were the kings. But the changes were already visible when the gangs migrated.

  As the new bhais moved away from Islam, they moved closer to Musalmans. Dongri, Mahim, Agripada. Muslim bastions where the bhais, surrounded by mosques and Believers, felt cocooned from the Judgement of Allah. Quickly, their fluid moral code started flowing through the streets. The less honorable the bond, the more loquacious the vows of friendship by the young men over games of carom. All night, they nibbled bhuna-gosht and discussed exaggerated deeds of bravado, their daily reiterated fearlessness, the dire but perpetually pending consequences for those who had incurred their wrath.

  The Companies had a certain regard for the those who had served the Pathans. When your own brother could no longer be trusted, we who could be were a luxury. Old-timers in the gang were like vintage cars. A status symbol. A suggestion of class. Not terribly practical, but still a reminder of better days. There was great demand for our services. I was still young. Yet they started calling me Chachu. In a world that was now being filled with sobriquets like Kasaai, Tamancha, Cutting, and even a Halkat, mine conferred upon me a benign veteran status, one that elicited unlikely nods from the Bosses. I stopped driving cars and began receiving and accounting for the hafta from the street operatives.

  Hafta. The weekly cost of life. Paid voluntarily to the old Pathans for protection from cheap thugs, local goons, evil landlords, even the police. Now demanded by force for protection from the demander. Each one offering their own bit of protection, depending on how much harm they could arbitrarily inflict. The goons. The cops. The new packs of street mongrels that did nothing except not hurting people. For money.

  On the terrace, Lala shook his head slowly on that Sunday evening I visited him. Trying to understand. Failing. “Protection from themselves? Really? And people pay? Lahaul-villa …”

  His words would have been even stronger had he learned I had fallen in love with a girl from the Night Bird dance bar.

  Afreen. Afreen. Afreen. My soul sang the song long before Nusrat did.

  Having started to make some money, I had nowhere really to spend it. In the new localities, no one asked us for money. They laughed and coughed awkwardly if we offered to pay, looking around invitingly for others to join the joke. The more money we made, the less we were expected to pay for anything. Just like the movie stars of today.

  Without the fear of Abbu’s censure, I gave in to the darker lights of my soul. Nights were when we came alive. Met. Spoke business. Ate. Even drank—an unthinkable a few years ago. Came to dance bars, like thrilled teenagers whose parents had finally stopped asking where they were going. And what wonderful places they were. What a testimony to a woman’s power.

  Not a flash of skin. Not the hint of touch. You squandered your fortune for one more glance. Or, at least, a glance more than the adjoining table received. Entire sagas of rivalry, jealousy, love, hatred, betrayal, and vengeance played out wordlessly every evening, against the backdrop of the most popular film music. Every night, you went back for your fix of life lived in looks.

  There were just two rules. Don’t touch. Don’t fall in love. The first got you in trouble with the house. The other could—would—destroy you. I broke the second rule. And spent many months and most of my savings trying to break the first.

  Six months and many thousands of rupees later, I started to receive mock-exasperated smiles. Preferential attention was no longer in proportion to the currency notes I flung. The odd pleasantry at a table—a certain sign of a man of consequence. The odd drink replenished at her nod, without my asking—a sign of virtual royalty.

  A year later she deigned to meet me outside the bar. It was much, much more expensive. The drama became far more intense. I no longer needed an opponent to feel the gamut of emotions from desire, hurt, hope, betrayal, self-loathing, and rage. There was no longer the cool solace of stepping out the doors, no adrak chai the next afternoon to wipe the heart clean and start afresh the next night. It was now a drama that stayed in my heart, in my head, growing and simmering and festering. It was life itself.

  She only condescended to let me buy her gifts. The odd lunch. A walk by the ocean was a privilege. A movie rare. When it became clear that she would never, ever fall in love with me, I mustered up all my courage and asked her how much it would cost for her to sleep with me. She laughed. She laughed without malice, without mockery. She laughed caught genuinely unawares. Then she stopped and looked at me with the most hatefully kind eyes.

  “How much do you make?”

  She made more.

  I went home. Stayed there.

  Everyone had heard about my sad, silly, broken heart. The no-exit clause of the Underworld Charter was overlooked for sad old Chachu, who could no longer do the math of life. I was out.

  I cried. For many days, many months. I cried alone at home for my Afreen who would never be mine. I never saw her again till she died. But my heart died with her.

  When the vote-lusting politicians who could afford private dance parties pulled yet another plug from the
city’s life support, the Night Bird became the Sunshine Air-Conditioned Family Restaurant.

  No families ever went there. It was a haunt for sorry old loners to listen to old film songs sung live. Songs of love lost, love broken, love shattered, love killed. We sat moist-eyed, mourning affairs that never were and marriages that were. I sat there, knowing what no one else knew. We were all singing a dirge to a dying city.

  And to my Afreen, who was buried with the city’s spirit in the December of ’92. The chaleesma was spent indoors, in fear, in January ’93. And we finally stopped mourning her a hundred days later in March ’93.

  The bhais became terrorists. The underworld fled overseas.

  I fled to Colaba, one of the last places where the city that never slept tried to stay awake. It was drowsy already. The denizens seemed wired and wide-eyed, as if prised open with caffeine and determination. Somnambulant swagger became the body language at dusk.

  Citizens started encroaching the territory. They came to enjoy the grunge, impress giggling bimbos with it, feel cool amongst its charcoal grills and roasting meats. They had learned the joys of the nightlife in a city that could barely keep from snoring.

  To dispel the beckoning slumber, the city learned to party. Hard. Through the ’90s, Citizens joined the nocturnal celebration that was Bombay. Discotheques, those mysterious places where exotic people went for erotic escapades, suddenly sprouted everywhere. You no longer caught your breath in the brief period it took for long, slender legs to emerge from expensive cars and walk into those fascinating dark spaces as fluorescent thumps leaked out momentarily when the doors opened. The doors were thrown open to all.

  I stood outside one such door and kept watch; occasionally the peace. There are no bouncers better than ones with dead hearts. Unafraid of pain, unafraid to hurt, unafraid of the consequences, I observed the city grow stupid and weary with youth, watched the mating dance lose grace and imagination, saw The Kids destroy The Juice.

  Juice. That thing that once flowed through the narrow, street-lit veins of the city, keeping her alive, sexy, alluring, dangerous, juicy, safe. The Juice began to dry up. No one knows how or why. No one knows who turned the generator off, or which fucking moron channeled the same energy to a giant cloning machine that churns out the coffee-shop chumps. If I had a bomb, I’d strap it to my chest and walk into that machine. Or at least a Coffee Day.

  When, in November 1995, we were told that there was no longer a Bombay, we never fought. We never refused in outrage to turn off the lights. We just went to bed as told.

  But I couldn’t sleep. It was just too dark.

  Somewhere, lost in my sleepless dreams, is a Bombay that many have never seen and many more have forgotten. She was like a beautiful mistress whom you could ill-afford, but she was worth frittering your job, marriage, and life away for. I catch a glimpse sometimes; at least I think I do—in a nod that carries a forgotten respect, in a brief look from a window before it shuts, in a rumor of The Juice still flowing on some nights, in some haunts. But never anything that I could reclaim, never enough to take me home.

  I still roam the city looking for The City. I still walk the nights searching for The Night. Searching for my Afreen. Searching for anything that gives a man a reason to live.

  Or at least a chance to die.

  PART II

  DANGEROUS LIAISONS

  NAGPADA BLUES

  BY AHMED BUNGLOWALA

  Nagpada

  The muezzin’s call reverberated in the air, exhorting the faithful to the evening prayer, as I was entering the bustling Nagpada police station on a tricky assignment. I wanted some information for a client. She was understandably shy of publicity, considering the nature of her business. I don’t sit in judgment about what people do for a living. My client operates in a gray area of the watered-down underworld—once, not so long ago, headquartered in Nagpada. Now it has gone global.

  Inspector Konduskar’s welcome was just short of Antarctica. We exchanged some banal pleasantries and I got down to business.

  “Can you tell me where I can find Salim Chingari, for old times’ sake?” I put it to him.

  His dour expression didn’t change. He looked at me squarely with his bulging eyes and intoned in a typical, languid coplike manner: “You have some nerve, Gomes, walking into this police station enquiring about Chingari. We’re not an Ask-Me service for washed-out private detectives nursing delusions of being crime busters.”

  I had expected this reaction from him. It was an act he had to put on for my benefit. I hardly needed to refresh his memory of the time, about six months earlier, when I had put a couple of leads his way in the sensational and brutal massacre of three eunuchs in Kamathipura—the notorious red-light district adjoining Nagpada.

  Konduskar got a promotion for “cracking” the case in an “expeditious” manner. I got nothing. Now it was my turn for a little payoff. You see, what the cops didn’t know was that the hacking to death of the eunuchs was a mere red herring to camouflage a much bigger crime—which included, among other things, one of the biggest land grabs this side of the equator. You must have read about it in the papers. It was in the news for almost a month before some fading actor made waves with the dramatic announcement that he was ready to bid “the long goodbye” to Bollywood to take up the cause of improving living conditions in the slums of Dharavi. What his publicist called the three S’s of social transformation— schooling, sanitation, and sympathy. Of course, there hasn’t been much progress to report, except that many residents of Dharavi were spotted wearing a “free” T-shirt with a picture of the star, juxtaposed with an uplifting message: I will be there. He was there, once, for a photo-op with a local politico in tow. The pictures splashed in the papers showed the two talking to a small girl with a bewildered expression on her face. It was pathetic.

  My interest in Salim Chingari was hardly academic. I wanted to make his acquaintance for a number of reasons— the most important being that he could put me in the right direction for the case I was on for my publicity-shy client, Hawa Bai.

  It took the tough Nagpada cop a long time to make up his mind. He finally muttered, “Let’s go and eat some kebabs at Sarvi.”

  We walked across the street from the police station and settled down at a corner marble-top table with typical fake Irani chairs—the real ones are collectors’ items with the Page 3 denizens of Mumbai.

  The waiters knew I was with a distinguished personage and the service was extra prompt and courteous. A few morsels of the well-marinated kebabs—for which Sarvi is justifiably famous—mellowed the big cop’s mood a little and he asked me tentatively: “Why are you interested in Chingari? And don’t play games with me, Gomes.”

  “He can connect me with someone I’m looking for. And I don’t play games with cops, especially the ones attached to Nagpada,” I said. “Too rough on the nervous system.”

  Konduskar allowed himself a half-smile—something strictly rationed in the Indian police force. Something to do with a morbid fear of appearing people friendly, I guess.

  He didn’t say anything and ate another mouthful. He could almost be the brand ambassador for Sarvi kebabs!

  I could tell he had a lot on his mind besides the whereabouts of one of Nagpada’s most infamous residents— frontman, bagman, lookout, district collector. A man of many parts.

  “It’s strictly off the record.” I put some real persuasion in my voice. “And I have no retirement benefits. I need this job.” I wanted to add a bit of emotional appeal.

  He chewed on another kebab and on what I had just pitched to him.

  “Okay. This is the last time and then we are quits. I believe he’s in a safe house somewhere, which belongs to a financier who lives in Pali Hill. You get Chingari and I will book him. I don’t have the time or resources right now with all this bloody bandobast duty almost daily. Anyway, the commissioner wants bigger fish.” Konduskar was outsourcing his small problems. In a way it was good for me.

  “Name an
d street number?” I ventured.

  “Try the local police station. You might get lucky,” he said dismissively. It was clear that was all he was willing to tell me for old times’ sake and the kebabs. Or probably that was all he knew.

  “Thanks,” I said, picking up the expense-deductable bill.

  Before figuring out how to work this Pali Hill lead I decided to drop in at Sameer’s for a drink. The old thirst was acting up. Sameer runs a tough watering hole in Nagpada but I am a welcome “outsider” at his place. About two years ago I saved him a lot of grief by warning him about an impending excise raid on his place. When the raid did happen, Sameer had transformed his place—overnight—into a funeral parlor. Pure artistry!

  A couple of days later it was back to business as usual— the drinking business.

  Sameer’s place ought to be be a tourist attraction. It’s colorful, to say the least. His clients drink hard and talk loud. And they don’t carry business cards. The walls are adorned with posters of flashy cars which are a passion with Sameer— though he can’t drive any of them. In the old days he used to serve only battery juice in his joint, but globalization has caught up with him.

  Sameer came over to my table with a half of Rasputin vodka and put it on the table.

  “This is on the house, Shorty. How’s the detective business?”

  “If it gets any worse I’ll have to ask you for a bartender’s job.”

  “Anytime,” he said. “What brings you to Nagpada all the way from Dhobi Talao?”

  “An old flame who’s feeling sentimental about our tryst in Khandala,” I lied.

  “Okay. See you around.” He ambled away, shuffling his prosthetic foot. He’d lost his right leg in a bitter intergang war in Nagpada, about twenty years ago.

  Over my second drink I got into stock-taking mode.

  Things were not going too well for me in Mumbai—where there’s no dearth of crooks, crime, and sleaze. Business was slow and I was getting all the bottom-of-the-barrel jobs. Like this one from Hawa Bai to trace her favorite trick—Jasmine— who had disappeared mysteriously after spending a night with Chingari, a week ago. The cops were not too keen on finding another lost soul in Mumbai’s flourishing flesh trade. Hawa Bai had promised to be generous with the money. It helps with paying the bills, you know. The influential madam obviously had a soft corner for the girl. I could understand why. The picture she had shown me—handing me some “expense” money—was of a twenty-something girl, full of hope and idealism. Part of the reason I was on this job was to relive how it had felt to be young and idealistic. I feel like this about once every ten years.