Maximum City

by Suketu Mehta

  According to the laws, cattle are supposed to be slaughtered only in the Deonar abattoir. A truckful of policemen looks on as the bulls are slaughtered in front of their eyes. The cattle that I see are all bullocks, though the doctor says that, since the cow is cheaper and more delicate, they prefer that meat, and some are smuggled in against the laws and slaughtered here. “It is against the feelings of the other community,” he says. “If they find out, in one hour there would be a riot.”

  There is none of the usual western avoidance of the fact of death behind the dressed-up food on the plate; the animal is brought in live, and you see the before and after. You see exactly which part of the animal’s insides a cut of meat comes from. You see the beast struggle to stay upright as it’s brought down; you see its eyes open wide as the men sit on its body; you see the desperate gasping and trembling of the body after the blood has left it. Before this, I have seen killing only on the Discovery Channel. But now here it is: in full view, in the open street, in the broad day. When I see my first cow slaughtered I feel sick inside; I want to go and stop it. I have been a vegetarian for some eleven years now. But I cannot tear myself away. I climb over a handcart, to get a better view. I look at my blue denim shirt as the man hacks at the bull’s carcass with an ax. A bright red droplet of blood has landed on the blue and stands there, solid. I am afraid to touch it. After a while it turns black, and then it is harmless, just another black speck.

  The freshly killed meat is supposed to taste better than the flesh killed in distant countries, many months or years ago. Hunters must get this charge, but it is nothing like this; the rifle confers the privilege of distance. This is the most direct form of hunting, where you plunge the knife straight into the neck of the struggling animal and rip its body apart with your own hands. The men are all eager, happy to participate in the killing and the carving up. The laborers in Ishaq’s factory are in a good mood. This is the beginning of a three-day holiday, a holiday in the city, for there isn’t enough time to go back to the village. All day long, there is just the killing and the feasting. All the poor will be fed, and fed well, on fresh meat; three-fourths will be distributed to them. The bullock meat is tough, and most of it is made into seekh kababs and mincemeat. The goat meat is more tender. The chickens in their cages in the market are safe for the next few days.

  It is hot, baking hot, and the meat lies in the open streets. After the carcasses are cut, they are left on the street or in the gutters where they have fallen. Then they are dragged over the surface of the road on their way to people’s homes or to the Gulf countries, where a lot of the meat is exported. I don’t see a freezer anywhere. By midmorning, a lot of this will be in people’s stomachs, the one animal going into the other. In the workshop, I see a man wring out a long tube from a goat’s inside; a shower of hard black droplets of dung falls out into a bucket. Then he chops up the edible parts of the goat and throws them into the same bucket, where they mix again with the dung.

  There will be feasting for three continuous days. “In the evening of the third day,” says the doctor, “we go out to a hotel and eat vegetarian food.”

  Inside his factory, Ishaq shows off his pet goat. He is feeding the goat mutton. He laughs. “It will eat anything.” Its diet over the last year included tea and cigarettes. He has developed feelings for the goat. On the day after tomorrow he will slaughter it.

  I see children leading baby goats—kids—through the lanes, petting them, feeding them lettuce leaves. A worker in Ishaq’s factory, dressed in white just before he steps into the washing pit to kill a goat whose horns have been painted green, says these animals are lucky, because they are being killed for religion—“they are happy”—whereas all the others are killed just for food. That’s why they aren’t making any sounds, he says. He goes into the pit and hacks at the goat’s throat, and the blood pours out on his white clothes, making him red all over.

  In his village, the doctor says, he has killed goats dear to him. “It is best to sacrifice a goat that you have raised from infancy, that you have developed love for.” At the moment of sacrifice, he says, the religious sentiment overpowers the reluctance to kill the one you love. “Not what they do here: buy the animal the day before, that they don’t even know, so the only sacrifice is of your money. All this blood you see today—Allah doesn’t like that.” They are eating mutton right now, Shahbuddin and Ishaq, dipping chunks of pav into the meat. It is liver. Some people prize the liver, others the heart, others the thick soup that is made of cattle hooves, which is supposed to give strength to the eater; the doctor prefers the muscle of a cow’s udder.

  Shahbuddin says, “If animals could speak a human language, then very few would be cut.” He is trying to defend the practice. He believes he has a soft heart, he says, and so these things affect him. But his religion believes that every single thing on earth was created by Allah for the enjoyment of man, and so if animals weren’t meant to be slaughtered and eaten, what are they here for? “If someone can prove to me that animals aren’t created for the use of human beings, I’ll give it up.” He asks me: Some people believe it’s okay to kill a chicken but not a goat. Why is that? I answer that it’s because the goat has a greater capacity for pain. But to an ant, responds Shahbuddin, its pain is as great and its life has the same value as that of an elephant. “But you may ask me why I won’t eat meat that’s not halal. You may say that the meat is the same; what’s the difference if one has a prayer said over it?” He is willing to admit doubt into his belief system. At any rate, he is thinking about the slaughter going on outside, and ever so gently he is addressing my unasked questions.

  Mohsin: The D-Company

  Ishaq and Shahbuddin—whose clinic is just down the road from Ishaq’s shop—are originally from Azamgarh, in Uttar Pradesh, which is famous for its criminals, such as the D-Company lieutenant Abu Salem, who was born there. I am talking to them about an article on Azamgarh that appeared recently in the paper. It mentioned its reputation as the money-laundering capital of India. “We ourselves did it!” chorus Shahbuddin and Ishaq. Shahbuddin’s grandfather was a big hawala operator. Money would be given to him in rupees; he would phone Saudi Arabia and, through a code, instruct the operator there to disburse a sum of rials to the receiving party. “In any crime anywhere in the world, if investigated thoroughly, the name of Azamgarh will come in somewhere,” declares the doctor. In Azamgarh, says Ishaq, the panwallahs do a side trade in guns. You can buy an AK-47, smuggled from Nepal, from a pan stand for 65,000 rupees. “Why do people keep AK-47s?” I ask him.

  “Just. As a hobby,” he explains.

  Madanpura, too, is famous for its gangs. “They’ve distributed the business,” notes Dr. Shahbuddin. “Someone is in property, someone in killing, someone in kidnapping.” The kids around here will murder for 5,000 rupees. They do it out of poverty, but they take the money and flaunt it in the beer bars, throwing it at the girls. After the murder there’s no life left for them. They are hunted by the police. They might even be hunted by the very people who have commissioned the murder.

  “Any man who is doing these inhuman things is deceiving himself,” Asad bin Saif of the peace group had told me about the Hindus of the Sena who had killed during the riots. It was interesting how he had put it: “deceiving himself” rather than “deceiving God” or “deceiving humanity.” There is a gulf between the human heart and murder, and I was intent on seeing the bridges men build for themselves over that gulf. I had met the rioters and the encounter specialists, and I now sought out the professional murderers of the gangwar, men who deceive themselves every day of their lives.

  ONE AFTERNOON, I sit down in a dhaba, a cheap eatery, in Madanpura and order Pepsis for myself, Ishaq, and Anees, a fair-complexioned, enthusiastic young man who grew up with Ishaq. Anees tells me about the war in the underworld that has so far, in 1998, officially claimed two hundred lives. He is “company touch”—not officially in the D-Company but associated with them, available for small works. He
has a friend who is a shooter in the Dawood gang, a professional murderer. I ask Anees if I might meet him. He agrees but says it will have to be in a public place, which he will not tell me about beforehand.

  A couple of days later I am met in Ishaq’s shop and walked into the Venus Café, below the Maratha Mandir cinema hall. It is a modern, brightly lit place, open to the street, filled with couples waiting for their movie to start. With Anees this time is a small thin man with a mustache, whose name is given to me as Mohsin. Anees leans forward. “He’s done two murders.”

  “Seven and a half!” Mohsin immediately says, offended. “Seven and a half!”

  “Seven and a half.” Anees corrects himself.

  We order coffee and juice. There is a party of young English girls at a booth behind us, travelers from the station next door. They may be waiting for a night train out of Bombay. They are not molested in this café, or even commented upon. This is not Delhi. Behind us Ishaq and another boy sit on the single bench, facing our backs, like the coachmen on the back of a carriage.

  Mohsin is another of Ishaq’s childhood friends. Ishaq has seen him after a decade, and later tells me, “We used to mock him when he was a kid.” He could be anybody, the lift man, the peon in my uncle’s office, any one of the people walking on the sidewalk as I pass in my car. But he has a murderer’s eyes, dark, glinting. He meets my eyes, and if I lower them to look at my notebook to write something he touches my hand lightly with his. I have to look him in the eyes.

  Of the seven and a half “open” cases against him—the ones the police have registered—six and a half were done on behalf of the gang, and one was a freelance job. His first murder was in 1991—he stabbed a man fourteen times, but the victim lived. That was the half murder. The next one was a liquor seller, Philips Daruwala, and that was the first proper murder. After that, there were five more that the police know about. “The ones that are not open only I know.” If he is caught, he says, “at least ten to fifteen murders will be charged to my name.” When he kills, he likes to take “a big wicket”—someone whose death will frighten ten others.

  His own company is arranged in groups of cells. One person doesn’t know what the other is doing; it’s all organized from Dubai. His weekly expenses are 20,000 rupees: 10,000 goes to his mobile phone bills, 5,000 for himself—mostly for charas—and the rest is given to his family. When he is in need of a big sum, he will take on a supari, a contract killing, which will bring in two lakhs: half in advance, half on performance. If the man to be killed is a non-Muslim, he will kill him right away. But if he is Muslim, Mohsin will find out if the matter is correct, if the man is in the wrong; if not, he will walk away from the contract, giving up the second half of the money.

  “I’m doing this for Islam,” Mohsin explains. “During the riots, it was a matter of our izzat”—honor. If there had been no Hindu—Muslim issue, there would be no gangwar. After the blasts, he points out, Chotta Rajan had said that anyone who escaped the law wouldn’t escape him. “I am not a literate man. If I had a brain I wouldn’t be doing all these things. In jail they did readings of the Koran, which is where I learnt everything.” He is not afraid of death, because if he dies he will become close to Allah; he will become a shaheed. “I had dreams, but now they’re broken. I’ve left everything up to Allah Malik. Everyone has to die. I have gone to kill so many people and they’ve lived, maybe I’ll live too.”

  The party of English girls behind us suddenly bursts out into “Happy Birthday to You!”

  After the meeting in the café we walk about a bit through the streets of Madanpura. There is plenty of light from all the shops, but it is a tinny kind of light, like the music coming out of the radios. Outside the Bihari slums, a class of Muslim kids on the footpath, all loudly and enthusiastically reciting their multiplication tables, is being led by a young teacher marking time with a stick. Mohsin has now relaxed a bit and tells me he is to get married on the sixteenth of this month. At first the girl’s parents were reluctant, but since everybody in the neighborhood seems to be enlisting in the gangwar, they’ve given their consent, saying, “If it’s in the girl’s fate to marry him, she will do so.”

  We agree to meet again, for a longer period, someplace more private.

  AFTER LUNCHTIME a few days later, seven of us walk into the lobby of a small hotel in Byculla. Ishaq, Shahbuddin, Girish, and I get into the elevator, along with Mohsin, Anees, and another young man, even thinner than Mohsin, who seems to be his apprentice. In the beginning, I am faintly irritated by Ishaq and Shahbuddin’s presence; I think they have come there for the food and drink I order up to the room I have rented for the day. Then I understand. They are standing guarantee for me, as well as making sure I won’t get shot dead.

  The hotel is owned by a retired Pathan gangster who used to be Dawood Ibrahim’s mentor, they tell me. Every street in this part of central Bombay is mythic for the underworld. In the modern air-conditioned room, Mohsin takes off his shoes and sits comfortably on the bed. He is dressed in a lightweight shirt and black jeans. The others arrange themselves on the sofa and around Mohsin on the bed. Girish shouldn’t be here; he’s supposed to be meeting with a sales prospect in Andheri. But this is more important than business. It is why Girish will always be a bad businessman. He finds his own city too fascinating.

  I take a chair opposite Mohsin and start up my laptop. I am careful to refer to these guys in the formal “aap” rather than the familiar “tu,” which everybody in Bombay uses. It confirms my outsider status and also gives them a certain measure of respect from a man of the other Bombay.

  Trust is very important, says Mohsin, looking at me. “The Muslim boys are trustworthy, but they are also the greatest traitors. When you come into this line, you have to have trust. I have come here”—he means this hotel room—“on trust. I have come here because of my friend,” and he indicates Ishaq. “Otherwise, if I were to see anybody else with a computer, I’d take it and tell him to fuck off.”

  I tell him that I am also here on trust, that I realize he can take my computer at any time. I have to let him have that at the very beginning, acknowledge that in this room at this time in the city of Bombay, it is he who has the power, and I, the nonresident Indian from Malabar Hill, am inferior to him in the order of things. He does not need to exercise his power, but he does need it to be recognized, to be put into words.

  Mohsin started out working with a smuggler in Andheri, gold biscuits mostly, when he was a teenager—he is twenty-eight now. When his pockets started getting pleasantly filled, he began visiting the beer bars. When the government liberalized gold imports, the biscuit business crashed, and Mohsin went to Baroda and robbed a bank. He was arrested. “They put big photos of us in the paper,” he says with pride. He got out on 15,000 rupees’ bail, but the money from the robbery was confiscated. In jail, a friend had given him a phone number. “He said, talk to Shakeel Bhai.” And thus, five years ago, Mohsin came into the D-Company. Now he still does a little gold business, but mostly he’s into extortion and ransom. The Company is a sort of tax collector. “All in the film industry give money to Shakeel. The Company takes money from all: builder, director, financier. If the call comes from Dubai, it doesn’t matter who you put in between—a minister or whoever—but you have to pay.”

  Mohsin explains the benefits of being in the Company very simply: “If someone shoots me, at least one lakh will come to my home. If I am hit by a taxi, nothing will come to my home.” A friend of his, Afzal, was killed by the police. When his sister was married six months later, Shakeel sent three lakhs to her. When Mohsin came out of jail, his mother had died and his brother was to get married. The bhai sent him 50,000 rupees for the wedding and told him, “If you want more, call.”

  “I only have to open my mouth to get money,” Mohsin says with confidence. “If I want a car for a while it is arranged.” Because the gangwar is a paying proposition, there is a glut of shooters in Bombay; the Biharis have come in and are driving down the r
ates. “They’ve fucked our mothers. Now everyone wants to join the Company.”

  Anees, unlike the others, has a notion of the economic injustice of the way the gangs are organized. “In Dubai the sheths get crores for work they pay one lakh to the boy here to do.”

  Mohsin has three enemies: Chotta Rajan’s men, the police, and the informants. If the gangwar men can kidnap an informer, they torture him before killing him. Otherwise they shoot him where they find him. Nowadays the police are giving informants powerful guns to protect themselves. Mohsin had been “given the work of”—told to kill—Husain Vastara, an informant in the bomb blasts and close to Ajay Lal, my policeman friend. Vastara was extremely cautious and rarely ventured out of his lair in Pydhonie. Some of the newer police commandos are only now starting to wear bulletproof vests as they go into the gangwar, says Mohsin. Husain Vastara was a gangster who wore a bulletproof vest.

  Mohsin is a seasoned shooter, and he has developed a maxim for his work: “You should know a man’s hobbies if you want to kill him.” A man can stop work, but he cannot stop pursuing his hobbies. Vastara had a great love of cricket; he went out to watch a match. His bodyguards were drinking tea as Mohsin drove up on his motorcycle. “I went up and shot at him. My equipment locked. He had a look of great fear. His face had the look of death.” Mohsin turned around and sped off on his motorcycle; he had not been recognized. The bad gun had saved Vastara’s life for the moment.

  Mohsin’s immediate boss is Mohammed Ali, a Hindu who converted to Islam so as to improve his career prospects in the D-Company. “He runs Bombay for Chotta Shakeel.” The next day Mohsin and Mohammed Ali, who is related to Vastara, went to Vastara’s office and sat down to chat. Vastara brought out a gun. “He was moving his pistol around, aiming first at one of us, then the other.” His arm swept in a wide arc, like a pendulum, stopping in front of one face, pausing, then moving back to the other face. The two were frightened. After they left the office, they called Vastara from a pay phone. Vastara said to Mohsin, “I know you two came to shoot me.” Mohsin hung up the phone and said to Mohammed Ali, “Let’s run.”