Mumbai Noir

by Altaf Tyrewala

  “You are being modest, Mr. Gomes.” She had a pleasant resonance in her voice.

  “No, I am not. I am being realistic.”

  As the evening progressed, I discovered she was a selfmade Mumbai woman—independent, smart, empathetic, and full of life. Another collectors’ item for Irani. After we were suitably oiled on the expensive cactus juice—she had a good appetite for the stuff—she pulled the old, hoary question on me: “Tell me, Mr. Gomes: if you were not a private detective what would you be?”

  “An undertaker,” I said. “The business is steady.”

  Two weeks later I was drinking my second cup of tea at Kayani’s, glancing at the headlines in the morning newspaper— full of scams in politics, sports, agriculture, defense, industry, finance, entertainment, you name it. The same old pasteurized story—with monotous, clockwork regularity. How much more of this brazen looting can the people take? I wondered. Compared to these plunderers, Genghis Khan was a rookie just learning the ropes. There was little point being a “crimebuster” in these loaded, free-for-all times. As Konduskar had implied at our meeting in Nagpada, what was the sense of putting the small fry behind bars?

  As I was punishing my brains with these weighty questions, a minor news item in the inside pages caught my attention. The headline read: Dreaded Criminal Escapes from Judicial Custody.

  Salim Chingari had done it again. His MO was the soul of simplicity. While being taken for a court appearance in a police van he had faked a very convincing fainting fit—frothing from the mouth and all. The two flustered cops drove him to a nearby hospital for emergency treatment. Chingari made his escape from the hospital brandishing a surgeon’s scalpel. The two cops were suspended, pending an internal inquiry. You know what that means.

  So here I was, back to square one. Easy come, easy go, I ruminated. It made my day.

  That afternoon I packed my meager possessions from my flophouse and decided to go where I belonged.

  My old landlady was very understanding. Waiving the half-month’s rent, she said: “Bring me some Goan sausages if you decide to come back, Shorty.”

  “I will, Mrs. D’Costa,” I said. Though there wasn’t much chance of that.

  I took the night Volvo to Goa and slept like a baby. The vodka-and-lime mixture helped.

  When I landed at Panaji, I felt alive and ready to start all over again.

  THE BODY IN THE GALI

  BY SMITA HARISH JAIN

  Kamathipura

  Radhana’s hamam was as disgusting a place as I had expected. Located at a petrol station in Panvel, near one end of the Mumbai–Pune Expressway, it was a haven for lonely truckers and sexually transmitted diseases.

  Subhash Mehta was found in a gali behind the eunuch bathhouse, lying in a large puddle of his own blood, which was still trickling from his groin when my men got there. His genitals had been hacked off, leaving him with only a two-inch penis stub and parts of his scrotal sac.

  By the time my havaldar and I drove to the hamam, the gali was cordoned off with police tape. On the outside of the barrier, a handful of reporters who had found their way to the remote location jockeyed for camera position. On the inside, a group of garishly made-up women, residents of the hamam, pleaded with a constable to let them return to their guru, insisting they hadn’t seen a thing; khaki-clad officers took measurements and collected samples from the body and the area surrounding it, recording each item in a notebook and placing the samples into small plastic bags for analysis.

  I worked my way through the activity, toward the narrow space where Subhash lay—spread-eagled on his back, naked.

  “Bloody hell, yaar. Who would do this?”

  The senior constable, one of the small minority of Indian Christians living in Mumbai, crossed himself and mumbled a short prayer. Other constables walked near the body to take a closer look at what had become of their colleague, a rising star in the Mumbai police crime branch. Some uttered a short blessing; most checked themselves below their belts.

  A group of constables remained on the periphery, craning their necks to see over the shoulders of those surrounding the body, but keeping their distance. There is an even divide in Mumbai between those who believe in the power of the eunuchs and those who don’t. Hijras were believed to be honored ascetics, conveyers of holy power, custodians of procreation; and what is more important than that? Not a surprising sentiment in the second most populous country in the world.

  “Eh, come here!” I shouted. I was as disgusted by the hijra culture as those constables, but a member of my branch had died, and someone was going to pay. The gali snapped to attention, and the senior constable scrambled to meet me.

  “Sir, we have secured the area. There is one witness; we are talking with him now.”

  I turned in the direction he indicated. Two constables stood with a slight man wearing an ’80s-style safari suit and a terrified stare. One constable jotted notes on a small pad, as the other tried to coax more information from the textbook salesman. A.J. Reddy had stopped for petrol in the middle of the night, on his way home to Pune.

  “There is one woman only—older, wearing a sari. She tells the men what to do,” the witness said.

  “How many men?” one constable asked.

  “It was dark. I’m not sure.” He closed his eyes, as if to envision the scene. “Must be five or six.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “One man, he has a knife. The lady says, Make the subinspector pay. Then she leaves. I run, before they come after me. I hear a man scream. So loud, it is.” He stopped to catch his breath. “I run faster to my car, but the women … the people from the hamam come outside to the gali. They see me and scream that I do this. But I don’t do this!” His voice broke, and he looked at the constables, frightened.

  I left them to finish the interview and turned back to the senior constable. “Where are the others?” I asked.

  “Some we have questioned and released. The rest are inside.”

  I motioned my havaldar to follow me, and we made our way to the hamam.

  The cement walls and corrugated roof of the crumbling structure smelled of urine, sweat, and desperation. A sign on the outside advertised a menu of offerings: Tea—Rs. 6; Cold Water—Rs. 8; Toilet—Rs. 2. At the bottom of the list was a painted picture of a condom with no price next to it—safety, with room for negotiation.

  My havaldar inspected the grounds while I looked around the inside. I stood as close to the door as I could, opting for the smell of gasoline over what was waiting for me in there: pink walls sporting pictures of the available hijra prostitutes, seductive smiles on their faces. I wondered about the type of men who came here.

  “Inspector?”

  I turned to find the head prostitute, the one called Rani, standing in the doorway of the room she shared with three others. I moved inside, pulling my feet under me with each step.

  The space was divided into four makeshift cubbies—on one side, shelves stacked with personal belongings; on the other, a small mirror and makeup table. In the back, a woman finished dressing; near her, another made her bed. Sex workers covering up their night’s work.

  Rani saw my lips curl and came to her sisters’ defense.

  “It wasn’t always like this. We hijras used to be respected. People welcomed us to bless their sons and their marriage unions. Then the nakli ones came, the fake ones. Men who can make children, but who want to enjoy our success. So they dress like us and act like us and come to all the marriage and birth functions, until we are left with no other way to make money, but this.” She raised both hands in a wide stretch that indicated the whole room.

  I looked around the austere space, filled with only what was necessary for the eunuchs to ply their trade: beds, makeup stands, and a rack of beaded and glittery clothing straight from a roadside shop in Bandra. My stomach lurched.

  “How did Subhash Mehta come to be in your gali?” I asked, ending her diatribe and returning us to the reason I was there.

&
nbsp; The others in the room stopped what they were doing and focused on Rani. Her lips quivered, and she bit them to keep them steady. She lowered her eyes before answering. “He came often, he took care of his business, then he left.”

  “Are you saying Subhash Mehta was a …” I stumbled over the word, “customer?” An image of Subhash lying in the gali, turned into a eunuch, flashed in my mind.

  Rani turned her head, but not before I saw her exchange a quick glance with the other two hijra prostitutes in the room. All three remained quiet.

  Before I could stop myself, I raised my hand and brought it down hard against Rani’s cheek. She collapsed to the floor.

  “Haramzadi! Bitch! Tell the truth!”

  The other two took a step in her direction, but stopped when I raised my hand.

  I dropped to the floor, ready to strike Rani again. She crossed her arms in front of her face and buried her head under them. I recoiled at the sight of what I had done. It was common practice amongst my colleagues to take advantage of the uniform, but I had always avoided such confrontations. Subhash’s brutal murder changed things. I stood and moved away from her.

  After several moments, she looked out from under her arms. “Inspector, we are not the ones you should be investigating.” She spoke softly. “It is the fake ones who are responsible. We are like this from birth.” She pointed to the area between her legs. “My brother and I used to pull on it, to try and make it bigger; but this is how God wants it.” She swiped at a tear that rolled down her cheek.

  Once the God card was played, there was no room to disagree.

  The practice of prostitution in hijra bathhouses was known to my higher-ups, and they turned the other cheek— some of them, rumor had it, in the bathhouses themselves. But Subhash … it didn’t make any sense.

  I had enough to file a first information report, but the real story of what had happened to Subhash in the gali last night remained hidden.

  Two weeks before his murder, I had scheduled Subhash to work with me, to cover the state elections. Bahujan Samaj Party activists were expected to confront Shiv Sena–BJP members, in an effort to disrupt what was being predicted as a landslide victory for the latter’s candidates. The issue on everyone’s mind was safety. The increase in the migrant population of the city was having far-reaching impacts on infrastructure, crime, and even health care. Without proper representation at the state level, funds could easily go to other parts of Maharashtra and away from Mumbai. Every available member of the Mumbai police force was deployed for crowd control. Subhash and I were assigned to the Shiv Sena rally at the Parsi Gymkhana grounds.

  “What took you so long?” I asked Subhash when he finally arrived at the Azad Maidan police station in Colaba, forty-five minutes late. Despite the nearly twenty-year difference in age, ours had been an easy collegiality.

  “Late night,” he said with a grin.

  Despite my irritation at having to wait, I had to smile at his boyish gloating. On many occasions, Subhash had filled our ears with stories of Bollywood starlets he’d met at some big director’s house party, or socialite girls whose fathers had been only too happy to see their precious daughters with a member of Mumbai’s finest. The class division, otherwise rampant in the city, didn’t seem to touch Subhash.

  It was ten o’clock in the morning, so traffic was still light as we drove to Parsi Gymkhana. Some businesses were opening their doors; many others remained dark. We drove three kilometers north on Marine Drive, looking at hotels and residential buildings on our right and the smog-coated view of the Arabian Sea on our left.

  The exteriors of most buildings were covered with black and dirt—the city’s beauty hidden under decades of slow decay. Scooters zigzagged between cars; their drivers kept helmets within reach, in case they spotted a policeman. Beggar children came to the car: “Saab, I want to eat. I’m hungry. Mahashay.” High-rises, some of the more prominent of the city, sported clotheslines threaded across their balconies, the day’s wash fluttering in the breeze coming from the Arabian Sea. Untethered men hammered eighteen stories up, building even more structures in an already filled skyline. Pigeons squatted on rooftops and fed along the shore.

  Everywhere signs and billboards told you what to do: Stay in Your Lanes; No Honking Unless Necessary; Stick No Bills; Don’t Answer the Call of Death: Cell Phone or Hell Phone? Most people ignored the street signs. Even the red-light timers on many traffic stops, to tell cars when to turn off their engines— an effort to keep down petrol costs, pollution, and the road rage created while waiting for the light to turn green—did little to calm the constantly frayed nerves of Mumbai drivers. Here, tradition and modernity, fertility and asceticism, excess and poverty lived within the same city limits.

  Two cricket stadiums and a hockey stadium later, we turned right onto the grounds of Parsi Gymkhana, an openair lawn and clubhouse commonly used for public functions, press conferences, and weddings. Cylinders filled with liquid propane gas clustered in a corner outside a collection of sheds set up as temporary kitchens, where food for the day’s events would be prepared.

  I parked in the makeshift lot at one end of the large field where the rally was to take place. The lawn was packed with Bollywood elite, media, and state officials. The average Mumbaikar was barely represented, reflecting the city’s low voter turnout of the past decade and a half.

  Despite pleas from Mumbai’s glitterati, most of the city’s residents shunned local politics. State officials tried to claim that school exam schedules, high temperatures, and the busy April–May wedding season were to blame for the poor showing at the polling stations. The reality for many Mumbaikars, however, was that their lack of interest was a function of apathy and indifference—a belief that their vote wouldn’t result in the change they wanted, so why bother?

  Those who did show up at the Gymkhana came with an agenda. Protestors carried signs accusing the Shiv Sena–BJP alliance of everything from defamation to violent attacks. Sena backers showed their support by screaming obscenities at the opposing group. Police constables watched the proceedings closely, lathi charge sticks at the ready.

  At the front of the rally, local Shiv Sena leader Mukesh Sinha worked the crowd into a frenzy. The majority party leader had already discussed the potential loss of infrastructure support funds if BJP candidates weren’t sent to the state assembly, and he had moved on to health care.

  “When we consider the alarming rate at which AIDS is spreading in the city,” he said, “we can easily identify the culprit—the growing hijra community of prostitutes and sex workers. We must make an example of them and those who keep them in business.”

  The onlookers applauded their assent. This hard-right sentiment was exactly what this crowd had gathered to hear, the same conservative pandering that had brought the Hindu nationalist party to its current position of power.

  “We can set an example for the other cities of India, and even of the world.” The crowd erupted again and added cheers to its applause. The leader of the largest local presence of the Shiv Sena–BJP alliance was as militant and ambitious as they came. With the elections looming, the dissolution of the hijra gharanas in Mumbai had become a hot-button issue, and many politicians saw it as just the feather in their cap needed to win seats in the state assembly. What lengths would he go to to win? I wondered.

  * * *

  Radhana’s hamam, like so many in the city, was under the jurisdiction of one guru, Rekha Devi. As head of the most powerful gharana in Mumbai, she would have the answers I needed.

  The drive to Kamathipura took us to the only place in the city more seedy than the truck stop. The galis of Kamathipura, Mumbai’s oldest red-light district, boasted every manner of sexual gratification imaginable, from conventional prostitutes to eunuchs to the area’s crowning glory, child virgins.

  The late-morning April air was thick with heat and pollution. My havaldar and I traveled in noisy air-conditioning along Mahatma Gandhi Marg until we picked up Kalbadevi Road near Metro
Cinema in Dhobi Talao. Just past the cinema, the usual mixture of people waited outside the redpainted plaster façade of Delhi Darbar, home of the best biryani in Mumbai.

  Along the way, we passed more mandirs than we could count, making the godlessness of our destination a mirthless joke. All around us we saw traders hawking their wares in shops lining the streets—watches, steel cutlery, books, readymade clothes, designer saris, bicycles. Two lanes, one in each direction, became three or four, as cars made their own passing lanes. Buses, trucks, cars, and auto-rickshaws shared the road with cows, goats, stray dogs, and even an ox cart; dogs crossed the street with the same nonchalance as pedestrians, a casual look over their shoulder to acknowledge the honking horns but not to obey them. During peak hours, Kalbadevi Road could rival the daily traffic of Peddar Road.

  Our descent was a gradual one. We passed the Cotton Exchange building, Paydhuni Jain Temple, and parked in Iqbal Chowk, from where we walked—through Bhindi Bazaar, Null Bazaar, Chor Bazaar—until we reached Kamathipura. The changing images along our route peeled back the city’s secret: a cosmopolitan veil hiding layers of desperate reality.

  Most of the hijra prostitutes worked out of Gali No. 1, on the south side of Kamathipura; but Rekha Devi made her home in Peela House, site of the notorious hijra cages of Kamathipura.

  Once in the gali, we were accosted by the compounded smell of garbage, urine, and feces. Open drains, naalis filled with excrement, lined both sides, the air thick with the suffocating odor. Ramshackle structures stacked two high offered glimpses of the activity inside: cots with thin mattresses and no sheets; cloth curtains separating one-meter by two-meter spaces, with room enough for two people in a horizontal position; bare walls revealing nothing about the sex workers who rented space by the customer.

  Nearby, a group of women wearing loud Maharashtrian saris—jeweled greens and fuchsias and sapphires—their nails painted in gaudy colors, thick coats of lipstick, kaajal, and powder covering their faces, tried to cajole money from passersby.