Maximum City

by Suketu Mehta

  A few years ago, Ajay received a call from an official in Delhi. South Africa needed police officers from third-world countries to retrain its police services, and Ajay had been nominated for a two-year posting in Johannesburg. Johannesburg “is the drug capital of the world,” says Ajay. He thought about it that night and made up his mind to go. In the morning he consulted two former police commissioners who thought highly of him. Both advised against it. Ajay is on the hit list of the underworld gangs. “They have set you up to be killed there,” the men said. Ajay passed on the opportunity, but thinking back on it now, he says it was “a tactical mistake.”

  Ritu read history at Oxford. She had applied to study at Cambridge, and they offered her a lectureship with a sizable stipend attached to it. She turned it down to marry Ajay. But she hasn’t been able to pursue her career. She wants to go to America, where she will be able to study again. Every time they pass by the airport road, Ajay’s ten-year-old son asks, “Pappa, can we take that road?” He knows that abroad is the only place his father can truly relax. As soon as the plane leaves the ground in Bombay, all the stress disappears. “It’s like an on/off switch,” Ajay says.

  “He never takes his kids to the zoo,” complains Mrs. Lal.

  “Every day I am in a zoo,” responds Mr. Lal.

  In every conversation with me Ritu has brought up the fact that she gave up her career immediately after getting married. She insists it was the right decision, to raise two children, to be a good wife to Ajay. And by dint of being Ajay’s wife, she has to endure pressures that would drive another woman to break down. “After the bomb blasts I would get calls in the middle of the night: ‘We know you have a son who goes to Cathedral.’” The callers would demand that Ajay back off. The sons, Rahul and Ravin, are under twenty-four-hour armed guard. After the blasts, there was one day when gangsters were waiting with grenades to throw at the car taking Rahul to school, as it passed under the Marine Drive flyover, a road where it has to slow down. At the last minute Ajay found out about the plot, and the car took a different route.

  When their sons go to school, armed policemen stand outside their class. Rahul, the older son, doesn’t like the constables always being with him. “It curtails his freedom,” notes Ajay. “He can’t go down to play like the other kids.” Once, when Rahul was in the second standard, Ritu picked up the phone, and the caller told her he’d put a bomb in her son’s classroom. She called Ajay, frantic, but could not get through to him. Two minutes later, the security officer assigned to her son called up to confirm the threat, saying the school was being evacuated. Ritu rushed downstairs, jumped into the car, and drove to the school in a panic, running all the red lights, her heart in her mouth, as she imagined what was happening to her son. She found him safe and sound outside the school and brought him home. This happened several times. Ajay says the bomb squad was regularly dispatched to his son’s school.

  All this explains the anger I see in him during his interrogations. “If the family is tense and frightened, automatically I get tense.” Aside from Shrikant Bapat, the commissioner at the time of the riots and the one named in the Srikrishna Commission Report for allowing the rioters a free hand, Ajay is the only officer of the Mumbai Police who has been provided such extraordinary security, because his family lives under an extraordinary threat. But Ajay can carry on because he has a good woman by his side. “Ritu’s accepted it amazingly well,” he tells me later. “She’s been very strong. She’s never told me, Don’t do this. Never.” So now he wants to go abroad, for two or three years, to escape the attentions of the gangs and let his guard down a bit. “Out of sight, out of mind, hopefully.”

  As Ajay and Ritu leave the flat and walk downstairs, I look out of the kitchen window. A white Ambassador with a police light on it pulls up, Ajay and Ritu get in, other men run about, some get into the Ambassador with him. Behind them, a jeep pulls out, full of policemen with long guns, and the convoy leaves in the quiet night. The cars had pulled up to the entrance before my guests reached the ground floor; there must have been guards outside my door, or in the lobby, waiting all evening for my dinner party to finish. We had never been so secure—or so unsafe.

  THE BOMBAY POLICE was established by the British. The most famous police chief of British times, the one who modernized the force, was Charles Forjett, an Anglo-Indian. He set the tradition of policing the city with an iron hand, and also of being hated for what he did at the behest of its citizens. He considered that his foremost duty was “to crush evil in the bud.” Ajay could be his reincarnation; when I ask him what drives him, he responds simply, “The fight against evil.”

  During the 1857 mutiny, Commissioner Forjett traveled incognito around the city, arresting on the spot anyone whom he overheard praising the actions of the mutineers. He erected a gibbet in the compound of the Police Office, summoned the chief citizens whom he knew to be disaffected, and pointed to the gibbet. Two of the mutineers were chained to cannons on the Maidan, the public was invited to watch, and the cannons were fired. The Maidan was filled with an odor of burnt flesh.

  Bombay’s businessmen gave Forjett a sum of £1,300 in 1859 and, after he retired to England in 1864, another £1,500, “in token of their strong gratitude for one whose almost despotic powers and zealous energy had so quelled the explosive forces of native society that they seem to have become permanently subdued.” But the Empire was not so generous; he was a half-breed. According to a later British history of the force, “Forjett is said to have regarded himself as slighted by Government in not having received from them any decoration. It certainly seems curious that so admirable a public servant should not have been rewarded with a Knighthood or admitted to one of the orders of chivalry.” Forjett’s pension was paid in rupees. After the decline in the exchange rate, he asked for it to be paid in pounds; his request was not honored. He died in England at the age of eighty, in a house in Buckinghamshire, which in his bitterness he named not after any of the British governors he had served but after Sir Cowasji Jehangir, a Parsi notable from Bombay. A native.

  A century and a half after Forjett professionalized the force, the Mumbai Police is still fairly considered the best in India, with the best detectives. Ajay remembers taking a team of New York City policemen around the Dharavi slums. “They were amazed.” He points to the city’s massive population, the difficulties of tracking a constant stream of migrants and their crimes. “In every case you are waving a magic wand and detecting them. I don’t see any city in the world which has got such a wide range of crimes as ours.” Ajay wonders what fabulous facilities the American police might enjoy. “If it’s like the movies, they have a gym, a shower room.”

  Ajay once had an argument with the editor of the Bombay Times, who was comparing the Bombay Police unfavorably with Scotland Yard. Ajay responded that statistics would show that almost all the cases given to the Bombay cops were solved. How come there were so many cases? the editor asked. It’s because there are so many complaints. In Ajay’s current posting, he spends the day dealing with sixty to seventy visitors, members of the public asking for his help with everything from extortion calls to a woman wanting Ajay to bring her runaway husband back to her. “Eighty percent of the people who come to me say, ‘Get him out of my flat,’ or, ‘That fellow’s trying to get me out of my flat,’” Ajay tells me. “And if I help the man get someone out of his flat, the one I get out will say, ‘The police have been paid off.’” The fallout from the Rent Act takes up most of Ajay’s time. What really stands between him and his kids’ right to time with their father and his wife’s right to time with her husband is the Rent Act, not the gangwar.

  The root of the problem is that there are simply not enough policemen for this exploding city. In 1951, four years after independence and a halcyon time for Bombay, there were 4.3 policemen per thousand people. By 1998, when I moved back, this ratio had been halved; there were now only 2.6 per thousand. As a result, points out Ajay, the force is grossly overworked. “Practically ev
erybody here from the commissioner on down works fourteen to fifteen hours a day. A constable has a twelve-hour shift, eight to eight. But he may go home at ten or eleven. There’s no overtime.” A constable takes home a salary of 4,000 rupees a month, less than what I am paying my driver. Police housing can accommodate only about 60 percent of the force; 40 percent live in slums. More than ten thousand police constables are waiting for government quarters, which they only qualify for after ten years of service. “So the constable goes to the slumlord, and he tells him, ‘You are charging others twenty-five thousand for a hut; you give it to me for twenty thousand and take the money in phased payment, installments.’ Do you expect such a guy to take action against slumlords? He will say, ‘What has the department done for me?’” And it’s not as if sustained devotion to duty can bring a constable hope of giving his children a better life. Under the rules of the Bombay Police, a constable can rise no higher than the rank of an assistant inspector of police. It is no wonder that the father of Dawood Ibrahim was a constable in the employ of the Bombay Police. His example notwithstanding, the strength of Muslims in the force, which is under 5 percent, needs to be increased, says Ajay.

  The weapons and the laboratories available to the Bombay Police are antiquated. The Dawood gang gets its weapons from the bazaars on the Pakistan—Afghanistan border: AK-47s, hand grenades. Some of the automatic rifles are even equipped with silencers. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, sections of the Bombay Police are still armed with .303 rifles used in World War II. “After the army got modernized,” Ajay explains, “their old weapons were handed over to the police. There was a shortage of revolvers and pistols.” When Ajay got off duty as a junior police officer, he had to hand his weapon to the officer relieving him. So if a constable is faced with a professional hit man firing his Mauser, he has to stop, unstrap his mighty musket from his shoulder, load the bullet, raise it to his shoulder, line up the target through the sight mounted on the barrel, and wing him. By this time the hit man will be in Dubai.

  And it’s not as if the police are adequately trained, even when they are properly equipped, as Ajay explains with a story. One day in the late eighties, when he was posted to the northeast region of Bombay, he got a call from one of the officers under his command that an elephant had gone berserk. He asked the officer to get a veterinarian. A little while later, the officer called again: The elephant was running amok, uprooting things. Ajay went to the scene of the beast’s rampages. By the time he got there, the vet had arrived and had tranquilized the elephant, who was now being transferred onto a truck with the aid of a crane. As he was showing Ajay around, the police officer added sheepishly, “Sir, I had to fire a round.” Ajay informed the veterinarian and asked him to check the elephant for a bullet. That night, the vet called Ajay: He couldn’t find the bullet. Ajay told the vet to check again. “I said, an elephant’s skin is very thick, search with a fine-tooth comb, and you’ll find the bullet.” Very late that night the vet called back; there was no bullet in the elephant’s hide.

  The next morning Ajay went back to the site and checked for himself, accompanied by the police officer who had fired. Ajay then found the bullet, embedded in the door of a doctor’s dispensary that had been behind the beast. “He had missed.”

  I look up from my notes. “How close was the officer to the elephant?”

  “He had fired from ten feet away.”

  Even if a suspect is arrested and his weapon found, the whole support structure Ajay has to rely on to secure a conviction, everything from the forensics laboratories to information technology to the public prosecutors, is substandard. “It’s very easy for people abroad to talk about human rights. In New York or the UK, a confession made before a police officer is admissible. Here it is not. We are given the worst lawyers, the ones who are not good at private practice. The gangs have the best.” In the age of the market economy, globalization, and multinationals, “the police is a nonprofit institution. Why should they put money into it?”

  So the police take shortcuts to solving crimes. Maharashtra had the highest number of custodial deaths in the whole country in 1997: 200, a 500 percent increase from the previous year’s total of 30. Two hundred people tortured to death in police custody! The record outstrips that of many military dictatorships around the world. According to a police report of the causes of 155 custodial deaths in Maharashtra in the 1980s, only 15 were due to “police action.” The rest had causes ranging from “fell from bed” to “fell on others.”

  Most people in this part of the world, rich or poor, give the police station a wide berth. A friend tells me his accountant has stolen forty-five lakhs and run off to the south, where he is hiding. My friend files a complaint with the police, who arrest the accountant’s sister. She is not involved in the crime, but they keep her in custody for twenty days, hoping it will put pressure on her brother to surrender. When my friend goes to the station, the police officer in charge tells her she’s in the lockup and invites him to “Do what you want with her.” My friend fears for her safety and sends a man from his office to sit at the station day and night, guarding her from the officers of the law.

  My uncle castigates me for having sent Sunita to pick up some forms from Special Branch, the agency responsible for registering foreigners. “You can’t send ladies to the police station.” And sure enough, she is harassed. She hears the inspectors making lewd comments about her in Marathi. The officer in charge tells my wife he can send her and my children to court if he so wishes. I should just have dropped Ajay’s name; the forms would have been delivered to my door. But it was still early in our return home; we still labored under the propriety that we had learnt in the West. This changed as we got used to the Country of the No.

  I get a taste of Ajay’s power when my sister and her fiancé fly in from San Francisco. I am sitting in his office and I tell him I have to leave to fetch them. Ajay makes a call to the inspector in charge of the airport. I go to the airport police station. “Lal Saab’s guest. Arrange the courtesy for him,” the desk inspector orders. A plainclothes officer escorts me into the restricted area of the airport, all the way to the escalator coming down from the arrival gate, where I greet my astonished sister. I take them to the front of the immigration line—oh, the joy of skipping that endless line!—and go right through customs. The assistant commissioner of customs shakes my hand and asks feebly, “Anything to declare?” “Nothing,” I say, leading my sister and her fiancé past the helpless men in white. They don’t have anything that is liable for duty, but there is power in knowing that we could have brought in computers, munitions, liquor, and heroin if we had wanted to. So often, coming into this airport, I have felt completely helpless. Now I have police swarming around me; I walk past closed doors, past men with guns. The normal rules don’t apply to me.

  I could get used to this.

  BY NINE O’CLOCK these days, when the air-raid siren goes off, it is already steaming. All those who can have fled. Only those who have had a bad year—the failed students, the failed businessmen—are left behind to suffer summer in the city, to take the trains, to walk the melting streets. Each year it gets hotter. The sun rises late but makes up for it with its vigor. All winter long it has gathered strength; now it is loaded for bear.

  I get to Ajay’s office one evening at seven. He is running a fever and has switched off the AC; the office smells of stale sweat. It is infested with mosquitoes, which feast on my blood. Ajay has recently arrested several members of a gang who worked at a shoe factory in Dharavi, earning between 800 and 1,500 rupees a month for their work there. It’s a miserable life for the millions of young men who work in the factories of the city. They labor in dark, hot rooms, where they can never stand up straight, for fear of getting nicked by the whirling blades of ceiling fans jury-rigged from the tin ceilings. They are mostly from Bihar or Uttar Pradesh, and they work fourteen hours a day, every day, in silence, hands moving in automatic gestures. If there is an urgent order, they’ll wor
k all day and all night. Most employers here pay their employees by the piece: Making a wallet, for example, earns them between 14 and 25 rupees. They start working as young as eight and can’t work past twenty, because their hands are no longer quick, their eyes not so bright. “They have no friends’ circle, no nothing. In their life, they have no program for the future,” one of the workshop owners had explained to me. Their transcendence is the last show at Maratha Mandir on Sunday evening or a trip to the crowded beach at Juhu to marvel at the freedom of the sea. In the afternoon, the factory workers eat straight from a pot, sitting on their haunches. When they finish working, they lie down on the same patch of ground on which they’ve been sitting for fourteen hours, in rooms where they might be able to see a little bit of sky and a luxury high-rise on the not-too-distant horizon.

  Ajay tells me how these men can be drawn into a gang. A person from their village who is already in the gang would take them to the beer bars; there, the newcomers would see their village man throw money at the dancing girls. They would see that the girls came over to him, touched him, went out with him for the night. “To the guy from the village, the beer-bar girls are like Madhuri Dixit,” notes Ajay. They would think, This man came to Bombay just six months before me, how is he living so well? He is wearing good clothes, moving around in a car. So they would be drawn in, given the gun already cocked, told to go up to the target and pull the trigger and run; that’s all there is to it. A shooter’s average age is anything between eighteen and twenty-six (“Anything above that, you’re organizing it,” says Ajay). That is, if he lives that long. The shooters don’t look anything like their movie counterparts. “A shooter’s appearance has to be absolutely nondescript. That will afford him the ability to melt into the crowd. Ultimately it just takes a little pressure of the finger to pull the trigger, not physical strength. Ultimately it takes the ability not to feel remorse when they shoot a man and see blood.”