by Suketu Mehta
One euphemism for a killing is “outdoor shooting,” as in a movie. The sheth tells his boys, “Wet his head” or “Total him.” For a hit in which the body should disappear: “Uska potla kar de” or “Parcel kar de,” as in “Parcel him out of this world.” Another version of the same order is “Kamti kar do”—minus him, or lessen him. The term supari became associated with contract killing from the tradition of giving pan and supari at festive occasions such as weddings. Before the shooter is sent out on a mission, he is often given a bit of betel nut for good luck.
To have sex with a girl—bajaana—is to play with her. It could also be thokna (hitting) or gaadi chalana (driving a car). Sex and death are never far apart; a gun can also be called a gaadi. Shot lena could mean firing a gun or fucking. Girls, as well as drugs, generically, are maal—cargo—and charas is kala sona—black gold. The police are thola; a police van, a dabba.
Many of the terms are borrowed from cricket, as I have seen in Ajay’s interrogation sessions: The lookouts are called fielding; they watch for the police while the shooters “play the game” of the victim or “take a wicket.” The gang lords love cricket; they spend a lot of time watching it and bring cricketers over to the countries where they are hiding. They love the game so much that they absolutely must know who will win before it is played; they regularly bribe players to throw the matches. And they make large sums betting against them.
Information is tichki, or a light flick of the fingers, as in, “I’m going to do so-and-so’s work. Give me a tichki on him.” Money is number, as in “What number came up for you?” Money can also be message, as in “Your message has come for ten”—10,000 rupees have arrived for you. The underworld speaks of money in modest, reductive ways; one lakh is often referred to as one rupya. To raise money by stealing is to “fund.”
When a shooter goes overseas, whether it is to Dubai, Malaysia, or Toronto, he goes upar—up—to the gaon—the village. Once you leave Bombay, the rest of the world is a village.
Downstairs, the middle-class Bohra Muslims of Byculla are coming and going; a wedding is in progress. We leave the hotel and get into my car. As we are driving through the central city, Anees points out a beer bar, the Gold Mine. “Two murders happened in it. It’s owned by a Shetty. He had two bodyguards. The Company asked him for money, and he didn’t pay it. One day he walked into his bar and found the head of his bodyguard on a table.”
I drop them off in Kamathipura and they wander off into Fifth Lane. “Now we’ll just smoke charas,” says Mohsin, who gave up alcohol five years ago, but has been a charasi since the age of fifteen. “There is no difficulty, only profit. The high cools down my mind. I have a hot mind.” The hashish will make them hungry and horny; they’ll eat sweets and go to the whores after smoking it, so they are able to stay hard longer. “You see how our life is. We wake up at one p.m., sleep at any time.” They are happy about the lack of structure in their lives; always under the looming shadow of death, their freedom. They spend their days and, more important, their nights wandering, free-floating through the charms of the city, from the kabab joints and carom clubs of Madanpura to the charas dens and brothels of Kamathipura, where their anger can be stripped off. At any point in the day or night, there are these boys clustered around central Bombay, ever on the lookout for profitable strife. They watch the streets the way stockbrokers watch their computer screens, or grain merchants watch the onset of the monsoon, looking for the slightest change in the market, the slightest sign of excitement.
After the meeting in the hotel I go to a dinner party in Worli. There are about seven or eight couples in the apartment. It is a long high-ceilinged room with abstract art on the walls—all deformed dark faces—and a few carefully selected pieces of antique furniture. I could be in Soho. The owner has come back to Bombay after a decade in California; most of the other guests have also done spells in America: at the Wharton School or at Harvard. There is a sizable contingent from the Doon School in the Himalayas. The talk in the room is of babies, of the terrible state of the economy, old school stories. We drink the host’s French wine and listen to Eartha Kitt and Annie Lennox on his sleek stereo. A woman comes in, pale white and with blond hair. From a distance, I think she is American. Then I hear her accent: pure Bombay. She has done something to her hair, she has done something to her skin, and she has been able to afford to keep it out of the sun.
I make the mistake of telling one person about my day and soon the room is abuzz; everyone wants to hear about my afternoon with the hit men. The people at this party are as fascinated by my account of Madanpura as, a couple of nights ago, Ishaq and Girish and Shahbuddin were fascinated by my account of a party of industrialists at the Library Bar: “What are they like? How do they talk? How do they dress?” I am angry with myself for shooting my mouth off, at my own need to talk with someone about the stories I have been hearing all day. I have not yet developed a stomach for them; I cannot keep them within myself and write them out the next morning. As it turns out, there is some benefit to sharing the stories with this odd group. Slowly, from the investment bankers, the industrialists, their own stories start coming out. No one will admit to being directly targeted or to giving in to the gangs’ demands, but they refer to a relative or a friend of a friend who has paid up. Mohsin and his company are not so far away from this room; when I look out the window at the quiet Worli road, I notice clusters of men desultorily standing about, perhaps watching the people moving about through this brightly lit room. They can see us better than we can see them.
The man who gives me a ride home, an investment banker, asks me where in Bombay he can buy a gun. He says he once fired a gun on his brother-in-law’s farm. “It was the greatest high of my life.”
A FEW MONTHS LATER, Anees fills me in on what happened to Mohsin. He didn’t get married; a couple of days after our meeting, the Crime Branch arrested him, stuffed his ears with cotton, blindfolded him, and took him away to an unknown place for three days. They beat him and asked two things of him: that he become an informer and that he kill men the police consider their enemies. “He would rather die than become an informer,” Anees says. So the police phoned Shakeel, who paid three lakhs for his life. They released him, and he fled north. From Surat, Mohsin sent Anees a newspaper article about a murder with his photo in it. “Congratulate me,” he said to Anees on the phone. True to his vow, he had murdered the man who had tried to kill his friend Yasin. He had closed the “open” work he had told me about.
Satish: The Dal Badlu
I am in the hot airless outer office of Phone-in Services, to get a meeting with the don Chotta Shakeel. Yet another of Girish’s vast circle of college friends, Kamal, has the power to get me such an appointment. Kamal is the paymaster for the shooters; when they need money, or if they’re killed or in jail and their families need money, he’s the one who takes care of them. Several of the top figures on the most wanted list call him “bhai.” Kamal has a slightly vulpine face and takes care to dress well and speak English well. He has a college degree and a natural entrepreneurial talent and he runs a series of white businesses for the Dawood company. He was directly involved in the underworld, known and feared, until three years ago. The Madanpura boys—Anees, Mohsin—used to fetch tea and cold drinks for him. “If I entered the room, they would not have the right to sit down in my presence. They would keep standing.”
Phone-in Services is a suburban shopping service and the most above-board of Kamal’s enterprises.
With Phone-in Services, the harried commuter returning home to Mira Road after a long train journey just has to make one phone call and his dinner will be brought to his table from the restaurant of his choice, his television will be picked up from the repair shop so he can watch his favorite program that night, and his office clothes for the next morning will be delivered freshly laundered to his doorstep.
On its letterhead, Phone-in Services lists a Hindu at the top. He owns only 15 percent of the company, but the real owner, Kamal, formerly know
n as Shahid, cannot be named. Girish’s friend inhabits a succession of names as others do business offices, to be discarded when the costs associated with the name become too heavy, when the name has built up too much bad will. Kamal is inside his office now with a couple he is advising, in his capacity as bhai. A girl has run away from Aurangabad to be with her lover, and the parents want to get her back. Kamal is mediating. Presently, he emerges and goes to the STD shop around the corner to make a call to Chotta Shakeel on my behalf.
The don asks, “Do you know him? Is he a friend of yours?”
“He isn’t a friend, but he’s the good friend of a good friend.”
“Find out about him. I need to talk to him first.”
BACK IN HIS OFFICE, Kamal proposes that I write the real story of the gangwar in a movie script, unlike any other movie made before: “No fairy tales.” He will give me all the help I need in the research. I can go to Dubai and spend fifteen days watching the operational command structure of the gang. I can see how much they miss Bombay. They are miserable there; there is no life outside work for them. In their free time, they go to the Pizza Hut and drink juice or go shopping for Hindi movies to watch. All the time, they keep wondering what their families are doing at home, what a brother might be doing on a particular festival. When Kamal spent a couple of weeks in Dubai with Chotta Shakeel, he noticed that the tape of the song “I Love My India” had been worn out from playing.
I should do this script, says Kamal, because then the government will know the real situation of the gangwar and will have better strategies to fight the gangs. It will be a service to the country, says the gang comptroller. If the government wants to stop extortion, it should allow smuggling to be profitable again. “It should put restrictions again on gold, imported watches, electronic items. You can never finish the underworld.” The gangs will sometimes fight each other just to keep their names in the papers, he says. Otherwise, ordinary people will not fear them. “It’s like stocking their shop with goods. Fear is what they stock their shop with.”
Before going out for a hit, some shooters tie a piece of thread from Ajmer Sharif on each other’s wrists, like a rakhi, says Kamal. “All the underworld people are godfearing. They are constantly conscious that they are sinning, and so they have to respect God for their survival.” God is the biggest bhai. Kamal’s office has verses from the Koran all over the walls, on the desk. He does namaaz five times a day. Like many of the gangwar people, Kamal ties one or more green bands—called a taveez—around his arm and a few around his chest. When Girish visits Kamal’s office there is a constant religious discussion going on, between Kamal, his staff, and his visitors. The business at hand is put aside to discuss the Upanishads and the Koran, comparing and contrasting Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity without demeaning any of them, exalting all. It is getting a bit too much for Girish.
There is a new air conditioner in Kamal’s office but also a lot of mosquitoes. Girish tries to kill one and claps his hands in the air. He examines his palms; they are clean. “You have no scope in the underworld,” remarks Kamal. “You can’t even kill a mosquito.”
Girish has been sick from the bad air of Bombay. In the evenings he can’t breathe. He has been trying a variety of traditional doctors: ayurvedics, homeopaths, hakims, and most recently, on Kamal’s recommendation, a woman in Mira Road who sees djinns. People come and ask their djinn, through the woman: My parents in America, how is their health? And the djinn answers, cheaper and more reliable than a telephone call. Kamal regularly visits the medium to get news of his D-Company associates in Dubai. In these days when the police have every gangster’s phone tapped, the djinn network, operating securely in the otherworld, is invaluable to the underworld.
One of the men sitting in Kamal’s office is named Zameer. He is in his mid-twenties, under five feet tall and very thin, with a small mustache. He commutes seven hours a day for Kamal, overseeing one of his construction projects in Daman. Zameer tells me that the stewards, dancers, and owners of the beer bars are the main information networks for the gangs. Also, barbers. Zameer seems to know a lot about the underworld.
The phone call with Shakeel I have been waiting for doesn’t happen immediately, but Kamal does me a greater favor: He sends me a top shooter of his company, a man who is “absconding from Bandra to Borivali,” the territory throughout which the police are after him, where he is in maximum danger. He can meet me south of Bandra or north of Borivali. Kamal has told the hit man that I am writing a movie script about the underworld.
WE MEET THEM at the long-distance bus stand in Bhayander, on the municipal limits of Bombay, on a July afternoon. I am with my friend Vikram, who is writing a novel about the underworld and who has asked to come along. We go inside a small café by the bus stand and find Zameer, eating his lunch of methi parathas. He indicates another man constantly on the phone at the booth outside. “That’s him.”
When Zameer has finished eating, we go outside to meet the occupant of the phone booth. He is a stocky man in his mid-twenties, wearing a checked shirt and jeans, a sacred thread on his wrist, and a ring. He is good-looking, with intelligent eyes and a slight beard—stubble, actually. He is introduced to me with one name and later, as I am trusted more, with another name; still later, in Dubai, I am told a third name. I am going to give him a name that is none of these: Satish.
We take a Garuda, a sort of elongated rickshaw that seats eight people in the back on two opposing benches and three or four in the front, depending on the driver’s tolerance, and head for a hotel. There is light traffic on the road. But Satish wants the Garuda to go faster. He sees an obstruction ahead, a vehicle or a person or an animal. I can’t see it from where I am sitting but I hear him tell the driver, “Blow him away from the road, no fear.”
We get down at a billboard that says MAXWELL RESORT. It advertises a swimming pool, and there are pictures, mysteriously, of a helicopter and a kangaroo. From the road we walk up about a mile to the hotel. The road is along the ridge of a hill; on our left are old bungalows with Catholic names on the doorposts and a few shrines to Jesus. On our right we can see the white sea, past paddy fields ripe green in the rains. The whole landscape is softened by the monsoon mist, and we don’t mind the mile-long uphill walk.
As we enter the hotel, one mystery is solved: sheltered in a summer-house past the entrance are a toy helicopter and a kangaroo, with slots for money at the side; they are children’s rides. When they are fed with money they move in various ways. We go inside the hotel and bargain with the owner. As I am negotiating the rate, a couple of employees of the hotel come up to the owner.
“The police are here. They say they have a warrant for you.”
The owner, a small man with a large mustache, nods slowly. “The police are here? Tell them their father’s sitting here.” The police never come inside.
We go up to the room, which costs me 500 rupees. It is completely functional, with a bed and a few plastic chairs. I open my backpack and take out my computer, and Satish tells me about his first murder.
The bhai of the company he was in then, Chotta Rajan, had sent two “mithais”—sweetmeats, guns—for Satish and a Sikh friend of his. At first they would just play with the guns, threatening people with them but not using them. One day Satish’s girl took him to a temple and tied the sacred red thread around his right wrist. As she was doing this, she told him, “Do no evil.” The next day, the instructions came from the bhai: They were to kill a Muslim man involved in the bomb blasts. The target was in his thirties and had left the gangs behind; he was now devout and went regularly to the mosque.
When Satish went to kill the bomb-blasts man, “I saw fire and fear in his eyes.” As he brought up his right hand, he remembered the thread on it and his girl’s words. So “I fired with my left hand, but it was hard, and it missed. It hit his leg. He ran. I felt a little pity. He didn’t have a big role in it. If I had five minutes with him he might have touched my feet. I could not kill him; I became doub
le-minded. He ran inside his home, and I didn’t fire on him for fear of hitting his children.” Then, enchanted by the sound of the firing, Satish continued shooting into the air, walking some distance and firing, the public running all around him.
The calls from above got more insistent. The blasts suspect had to be killed. So the setting was arranged again. Four people, including Satish, waited for him at a bus station in a congested area. They all had sophisticated weapons: a 9mm, a Mauser, a .38 bore, and a semiautomatic. They set up their coordinates on their cell phones. At the bus station, one of the group sat next to the target. The others looked around for exit routes. They had their equipment hidden in plastic shopping bags. When everything was in place, “We signaled our friend next to him. He did a brain shot. We did the confirmation firing on him. Everybody ran; the public also got hurt. I stood for about a minute, looking at all the blood. The flesh was falling from his brain. The blood was boiling, like when you see water boiling on the gas.”
It was his first murder. “Thus the work started.”
We speak in Hindi and also in English. Satish is an intelligent man, and he has a way of focusing on you completely when he speaks; he meets your eyes and puts forward his point of view forcefully and articulately, without expecting you to agree or sympathize with him. He had studied for a chemistry degree up to the second year of college; one more and he would have had a BSc.
When Satish was seven years old, in 1981, in the third standard, he saw his mother burning alive in front of him. I ask how this affected him.
“The next day I was eating chocolates.”
The police said his father, an income-tax officer, had killed his mother. His father maintained that it was a suicide. He was suspended from his job at the income tax department, jailed, tried, and sentenced to life. Years later, he was acquitted on appeal by the high court.
