Maximum City

by Suketu Mehta

  He asks me about my education. I tell him I have a master’s degree. “I think I also have a master’s degree,” he says. “Because I am in this line I think very fast. My confidence level has been raised; it is flying. If you have to shoot a man standing in the midst of ten people, you need confidence. If I apply myself to math or science or business I will get very good results because of my confidence. I am at an advanced stage of confidence.” Satish thinks that if he were to go into business in Bombay, he would do well there too. “You know why? Nobody will be able to extort me. In Bombay, to be a capable businessman, you have to be in touch with the underworld.”

  But Satish’s mind has not been at ease for a while now. He has not been able to meditate. He used to be able to meditate for hours at a time. Bombay makes him uneasy. “In Bombay there is something in the air. In Bombay you see death all the time.” Even on the trains. “Have you traveled on the Virar train? Just traveling on it will make you strong. I feel more tension hanging from the Virar train than from a shooting.”

  A few days ago he had been on one of those trains. It was packed in the way only a Bombay train can be, and Satish was crushed against a Gujarati man standing with his wife and children and brother. Satish asked him politely to move a little, give him a little space. The Gujarati got agitated. “Don’t be a wiseass!” he shouted at Satish. His brother grabbed Satish’s neck, and Satish kicked out and hit the man’s son by mistake. He felt bad about hitting the little boy. The Gujarati was showing off in front of his wife and children and brother, cursing the lone Maharashtrian man. He shook his umbrella at Satish, intending to swat him with it. Satish had one hand on his gun. “I asked myself, should I, shouldn’t I?” He appealed to the man’s wife: “Aunty, please make him understand.” The Gujarati raised his umbrella; Satish felt his gun. But what if the man told the crowd that Satish had touched his wife? The crowd could do anything to him. So he let his challenge go and took a backward leap off the train. “But I will meet him again, I’m sure of it.” He is laughing as he mimes the Gujarati waving his umbrella, not knowing how close he was to death. A gangster must not be offended, however inconsequentially. A slight which for normal people would be merely annoying, soon forgotten, is for someone like Satish a huge ego wound. That sense of being slighted can lead to homicide. There is no proportionality to his response. A hit man’s character is defined above all by narcissism, that complex mix of egotism and self-hatred.

  There is something in the Bombay air that agitates him, Satish repeats. “My mind has not been stable for a while. Something is always going on, even in sleep.” When he eats, he feels very hot all over, and thinks, Ma ki chud, I want to kill someone. Satish turns to me. He asks, “Have you ever fired a gun?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have a desire to?”

  I smile.

  “I liked your partner’s answer.” Satish turns to Mickey and tells him what Vikram had said at our last meeting. “A cat was dying in the middle of the road. When I asked him what should be done with the cat, he answered that if he had some instrument he would kill it with his hands. It appeared to me a very straightforward answer.” But I am different. “You are not a gentleman!” Satish says. “You are worse than criminals.”

  “Why?”

  “The more educated you are, the more criminal you are. You become heartless, self-centered. You use the power of your money to give people trouble.”

  “What is a gentleman?” Mickey wonders. “I don’t know.”

  “A gentleman is one who kills his heart’s every desire, who doesn’t have guts,” says Satish. “I used to get only ten rupees a day pocket money to go to college. My father told me that in his day he used to walk to his college. But I stole and went in a rickshaw with my girl. I wasn’t afraid, and so I got laid.”

  Then, holding the gun in his hand, Satish asks me point-blank, “Are you afraid of death?”

  My answer is crucial. My answer must be exactly right.

  He is loading the gun. “What do you think will happen to you after you die?”

  I look up from my computer. I reply that my religion tells me we will all reach moksha and unite with God.

  “It’s not so easy, that you die and immediately get moksha,” Satish notes.

  “I know,” I say. “It takes millions of lifetimes. With all the sins I’ve committed in this life, I’ll probably be reborn an ant.”

  They laugh and the tension breaks. I start breathing again.

  Satish takes off his jeans and goes swimming in his trunks in the hotel pool while I continue talking to Mickey. Mickey badly wants to get out of Bombay, he tells me. He asks me how he can get to Canada or America or Germany. “Will you take me with you? You only need to take me as far as the airport there; then I’ll manage.” He has studied computers at an institute. He has relatives abroad. He should get out of Bombay while he is still alive. Besides, he says, the chances of a new riot in Bombay are high. “This one will be preplanned. It will be very bad.”

  Satish has finished his swim and comes back in his towel and is listening. “Muslims have accumulated a lot of arms. The countries next door have armed them.” He puts on strings of prayer beads around his neck. “What will Hindus bring to the fight, cannons?”

  During the 1993 riots, Satish and his friends had taken advantage of the unrest to loot timber ships and cloth shops. But he had also saved the life of a Muslim friend; given him a Hindu identity and a name, Amar, and hidden him. “We wanted to rob, not kill. My friends were killing women. I didn’t like that.” He blames Thackeray squarely for the riots and says that the Srikrishna Commission Report, which the Sena detests, is a “perfect report.” This is an unusual opinion for a devout Hindu, especially a Maharashtrian, but then Satish is not the usual Hindu. The members of Satish’s group are all intensely religious, but they all belong to different religions; they could be an advertisement for communal harmony. There is Satish himself; there is Mickey, who is Sikh; and Zameer, who is Muslim. “We had Catholics too. But they get diverted too easily by girlfriends; they don’t have much hunger for money.”

  Satish gets on the floor now, puts a pink towel over his head like a scarf or a veil, and begins praying, with the gun at his right on the bed. He recites Sanskrit verses by heart, rapidly and loudly, rocking a little back and forth, holding his hands up heavenward, palms open. The room is filled with the strange sight of this half-naked man praying in an ancient language next to his gun, as I continue talking to his companion and typing on my laptop. He prays for about fifteen minutes. Then he stands up, bows, touches his forehead to the floor, and rises again. When he sits back on the bed the first thing he does is to pick up his gun and touch it to his forehead. “This is God!” he exclaims, in English.

  “What can give life, what can take life, can only be God,” observes Mickey.

  “I think you are a very big criminal,” Satish tells me suddenly. “Have you ever killed anybody?”

  “No.”

  “Ever gotten anybody killed?”

  “No.”

  “The line of his head is very big,” he says to Mickey, indicating my palm. He has read my palm from across the room. The line indicates that I am a very big criminal.

  As it gets dark, they are getting increasingly edgy. They have been using my mobile all afternoon and evening. They have been making calls, and my number has been registered in the memory of the mobiles of their contacts. Another thought makes my blood run cold: They can get the phone numbers of my home and those of all my friends from the mobile’s memory. All they need to do is press the number sign and ‘1’. A number will come up, and the display will ask them: HOME? If they respond to its invitation and press YES, they will be speaking to my wife.

  I shut down my computer and end the session. Mickey puts the gun back under his waistband, and I walk out of that room feeling light, so light.

  In the rickshaw going back, we pass two men by the road. One of them is holding an air rifle, the other a flashli
ght, and both are pointed up at the trees. The first man fires the rifle. A bird falls down, fluttering. It is the same road where we saw the dying cat the last time we were here.

  Once we reach the town, we stroll past the police station. The Sikh is swaggering, running his hand through his hair. He and I and all of us are conscious of the piece under his waistband. We walk across the tracks at Bhayander. With the train looming down on us, Satish asks me, “Do you know a man who can answer my questions? I have a lot of questions. Do you know a man who knows the answers to everything?”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “On philosophy, on the nation. You can’t answer my questions. You only keep listening. Either you don’t have the capacity to answer my questions—I’m speaking frankly—or you don’t want to; you choose not to. I need someone to answer my questions. That’s why I stopped meditation, why I just finish my puja anyhow, very quickly.” We come up to the restaurant, the same one we had eaten at before. “I am very uneasy because of my questions. I don’t get satisfaction from my work. It’s like I’m having sex but not getting the orgasm.”

  In the restaurant I decide to tackle it head on. “Give me one or two of your questions.”

  The hit man smiles and leans forward across the table. “What is God? Does he have a beginning or an end?”

  I tell him what my grandfather told me—that according to the Gita, God is “anant, akhand, anari” and I explain the meaning of the words: unending, inseparable, unborn.

  Once, he tells me, when the police were closing in on his group and they were all under imminent threat of being shot dead in an encounter, “We sat in one room and talked of God constantly. We discussed God like others discuss girls; we talked about whether he has a beginning or an end, how he could come from nothing. Then we gave up, because we decided that research into God would make us unhappy. So we just started reciting the name of God.”

  I point out they had begun with Jnana Yoga, approaching God through knowledge, and moved on to Bhakti Yoga, through devotion. It’s in the Gita.

  Next question: “What is right and what is wrong?”

  I tell him I can’t answer this question for him. Most people are taught about right and wrong by their parents or by their religions. But these rules are funny, I acknowledge; people will tell you that it’s wrong to kill but they’ll say it’s right to kill for your country. So I tell him that since the questions came from inside him, the answers will also come from inside him.

  The questions torment him, he says. They frighten him, they make him uneasy. He asks the next one: “Why do we respect boundaries? Why do we call [the country] Bharat Ma? Why do we sing these patriotic songs?”

  I answer that I don’t know why either. Since I moved to America, I have never believed in boundaries or patriotism. Two Punjabis across the border have much more in common with each other than a Punjabi and an Arunachali. These boundaries are British-made boundaries.

  Then Zameer speaks up. He disagrees with me, politely. He postulates an example. If you have a house, it is necessary to divide your property from your neighbor’s property by means of a boundary, otherwise he will swallow what is yours. Pakistan might swallow Kashmir.

  Satish wants to know when the answers to his questions will come. They are affecting his mind.

  “Have you ever thought of suicide?” I ask.

  “When I’m uneasy, I want to kill someone else, not myself. Maybe I’m not brave enough.” He asks me about a Muslim gangster I had told him about meeting, who said he fought for his faith. “What did you say to him? Did you try to improve him?”

  “Who am I to improve him?”

  He likes this answer very much. “For the first time in two days you’ve spoken frankly.”

  Satish thinks of his vegetarianism as a first step in his own improvement. Then he might give up girls, then he might give up everything. But he wants to know why his desire keeps increasing. First he was content with one—two shots each time he was with a girl. “Now it’s up to five, six, seven. Why is that?”

  I tell him that desire is nature’s way of furthering the species. But he says he wants to eliminate his desires one by one. “We can’t tolerate defeat. We must always have victory. When we go to do our work we cannot lose.”

  “What if you go to kill someone and the opposite party has a gun and kills you? Is that defeat?”

  The Sikh, Mickey, answers this one. “The man who gets killed will not admit to a defeat. But five others will say he lost.”

  I tell them about the Gita again, about its lesson that it’s enough to do your dharma.

  “Truly, the Gita reduces all tension,” says Satish. He feels lighter now that he knows that the answers are within him. He invites me to go on holiday with them to Mahabaleshwar. Then they are on to planning their next operation, in Chembur. There is hurried whispering with Zameer, and then they are both gone, in separate directions.

  Zameer now gives me the real names of the two men. And then comes the greatest surprise: Mickey, says Zameer, is actually a shooter for the Rajan Company, sworn enemy of Satish’s company. When Satish left the Rajan gang, Mickey stayed. He had come there today to warn Satish that one of the bomb-blasts people associated with the D-Company was about to be hit and to give Satish the name so the target could be warned and flee. This he did because they were friends, and also because Mickey felt some compassion for the target; he was just a nobody who had stored some ammunition. Zameer observes, “There is honor even among thieves.” He leans back and lights a cigarette. “Now for the first time today I can relax. I was really afraid about what they were going to do with that bartan. I was going nineteen—twenty, up and down.” Zameer had jumped to get a rickshaw when we left the hotel. He was afraid the shooters would fire the gun on the road if we walked down. They had been raring to go all afternoon and evening; they had asked him if they could fire it in the bathroom. In that hotel room, Zameer says, Satish was holding the bullets up to his nose and smelling them.

  THAT MORNING, before going to meet the shooters the second time, I had written down in my computer the name of God and then backspaced over it, so that his name would be woven invisibly into the screen, would form a foundation or wash for all the accounts of murder and assault that I would be writing that day. I don’t like Satish and I don’t like Mickey. If the police or another gangster shoot them dead—when the police or another gangster shoot them dead—I will feel no regret. I will not feel that the earth is a poorer place for their passing.

  And yet, and yet . . . at the time I am sitting with them, when my eyes are anxiously following the gun as it goes from hand to hand, the clip as the bullets are removed and reloaded, the angle of the gun as it is aimed, and the finger put on the trigger—they are doing it so fast, like three-card-monte artists, might they not make a mistake and have one bullet left when they think they’ve emptied the chamber?—that time in the room when I am with these men who think good and evil, sin and virtue are for the common people, for frogs in the well, is there not an exhilaration in me? Why am I not tired of listening to them? Why do the nine hours pass by effortlessly, as with a new lover?

  The day after my second meeting with Satish, and the day after that, I walk about in the world of the mundane in a daze. I go with Sunita into the city to meet an old friend, to take in a movie, to have dinner. But the rest of the world seems trivial. Their conversations revolve around trivialities: careers, taxes, shopping. Nobody in that Bombay talks about God, or sin and virtue, or death except when it is imminent, looming over a near relative, and then it is dealt with in a quick, frightened fashion, as if to get it out of the way as quickly as possible. But I have been immersed in extended contemplation of those questions with people who have to face them every hour of every day, and it has been exhilarating. The last time I can recall exploring those topics in such depth was with my grandfather, as he lay dying in my uncle’s house in Bombay. But I was not as close to death then as I was in that hotel room.

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nbsp; Now, ordinary conversations bore me. “How much more do you need?” my wife, my friends keep asking me, concerned about my safety. They are asking the question based on the wrong premise. They think I keep meeting the gangsters for material for my book.

  Chotta Shakeel: The Don in Exile

  A few weeks later, Kamal tells me that Zameer has gone to the Gulf. “He has gone to the bhai log.”

  “When will he be back?”

  “He won’t. You have met a future don. You know that shooter you met? He is controlled by Zameer. Zameer reports directly to Shakeel. You will be reading his name in the headlines in a few days.” I think of that small intelligent man. He hadn’t said much during my conversations with Satish, but it was obvious that the shooter was taking orders from him. Now, on Zameer’s orders, Satish had killed a Muslim man named Salim, a former colleague of theirs who had switched to the Chotta Rajan gang. Kamal tells me that because Zameer was with me during my meetings in the hotel, I was safe. Otherwise the shooters are a bit mad. “If you had asked the wrong question they would have shot you and then said sorry. A gun is such a thing that if it is in a eunuch’s hand he will think himself a man.”

  I tell Kamal I still want to go to Pakistan and meet Chotta Shakeel. The modalities of my meeting are worked out: I am to go to Dubai and meet a man named Anwar, Chotta Shakeel’s younger brother, whom the don has always kept out of the gangs—he runs a cargo business. He will take me to Karachi, where I will meet Shakeel, and I can talk to him as much as I like. Kamal knows Shakeel well; he has spent time with him, and he tells me about him.

  Shakeel is sometimes referred to as the Sheth, or as Haji saab. He isn’t much to look at, Kamal confirms. He is truly small, five feet tall and thin. Shakeel is also called paun takla by his friends, because he is three-quarters bald from the front. His father worked at the Mazagaon docks as a technician, was laid off, and then found itinerant work as a ship painter. His mother sorted grain for a living. They had five children, and all of them lived in one small room. Shakeel, the second brother, passed high school and started out repairing televisions. He began selling counterfeit watches. Then he started doing matter, or debt recovery, work and caught Dawood’s eye.