Authors: S. Hussain Zaidi
‘
Theek hain saab gaadi roko, mera ghar aagaya… sochkar bolta hoon
[Ok, sir stop the car as my house has come. I’ll think about this and get back to you],’ said Dawood. Likha was taken aback at the casual way in which the boy was addressing a senior police officer. The jeep halted at the intersection of the JJ Hospital. Dawood waved at Likha and crossed the road, heading home.
14
Beginning of the Bloodshed
I
qbal Natiq had an inherent dislike of the Pathans and their reprobate ways. For Dawood, Natiq was an embodiment of courage, one who lived correctly amongst the Pathans like Amirzada, Alamzeb, Ayub Lala, and Saeed Batla, who had a wayward way of life. He even defied them and consistently exposed their misdeeds. But Natiq failed to draw a line between bravery and recklessness. At last, his fight to unmask the truth took him too far.
Now, Dawood was Natiq’s main source for most of his stories. Dawood’s boys used to collect street level intelligence and paan shop gossip and pass it onto Natiq, who made headlines of these meaty tales. Most of the time, the stories were unverified plants but Natiq trusted Dawood enough to take the risk. He was never sued though he faced some subtle threats and hostility from the Pathans who held
baithaks
in the BIT compound.
With the police and the press on his side, Dawood was no more an underdog. Riding on the crest of invincibility, Dawood thought of testing waters for himself. He knew that until he toppled Baashu Dada from power, Baashu had been known as a kingmaker. Whichever party he supported won hands down and whomever he deserted could never win. Maulana Bukhari’s case was a classic example of Baashu’s clout and power. And Dawood wanted to see if he could wield clout and power like Baashu did.Thus Dawood proposed the idea to Natiq of contesting the Lok Sabha elections.
Political aspirations should never be based on presumptions. True, he was a fantastic journalist and a known name in the circles, and this could make him a favourite for the common man. Natiq, however, made the mistake of assuming these under the delusion that he could win the election. He filed his nominations as an independent candidate for the sixth Lok Sabha elections in 1977.
Dawood thought that through his boys he would give Natiq the necessary support and ensure that he managed to win. This was a useful litmus test for the wannabe don.
Inevitably, however, Natiq lost the elections badly and could manage only 800 votes. Rajada Ratansingh Gokuldas of Bhartiya Lok Dal won comfortably.
Unfazed with Natiq’s loss, Dawood became certain he was still far from his desired peak of power. He now had to work harder to get there sooner. Natiq was a first timer; it was but natural that he might not perform so well, he convinced his candidate. The next time, the victory would be his, an explanation Natiq readily bought.But Natiq’s cup of woes had begun to brim. For the Pathans had decided he was a party pooper, following his actions after their gruesome killing of a man and the rape of his newlywed wife at Chawla Guest House, Ibrahim Rahimtullah Road.
It so happened that the Pathans used to hide their smuggled goods in the vicinity of the guesthouse. Ayub Lala and Saeed spotted the couple who were staying at the guesthouse on one of their errands. One night, they barged into their room and gangraped the woman for no other reason but sheer lust, and then killed her husband to leave no witnesses.
People were not willing to disclose the names of the killers, but Natiq went ahead and reported the whole story, disclosing everything. The cops managed to crack the case and arrested Ayub Lala and Batla as well as their aides, including Saeed.
After spending months in jail, the criminals got bail and returned to their base at Carrom Club in the BIT compound. They were plotting to eliminate Natiq but somehow were not able to summon enough audacity to kill him. After all, they had just got bail.
Nonetheless, they began making threats to Natiq. They tried to ransack his small editorial office. Natiq lodged a complaint at the Dongri Police Station, saying that the Carrom Club had become a den for several anti-social activities and the cops subsequently raided the club and shut it down—a major victory for Natiq and the last straw for the Pathans.
On the fateful night of 17 August 1977 around 3:30 am, after Natiq had gone to sleep, he was woken by a persistent knocking at his door. A sleepy Natiq opened the door and found Saeed standing on the door.
‘Bhai has called you,’ Saeed said. ‘Bhai’ here referred to Amirzada.
‘What the hell! Have you seen the time? I cannot come now. I will meet him tomorrow,’ Natiq replied.
‘No, he wants to see you now,’ Saeed insisted.
‘Are you crazy? My wife is alone at home, I cannot leave her like that and go,’ Natiq tried to reason with him.
‘Iqbal bhai, Bhai is in a very angry mood. If you meet him now you will be able to ward off the trouble lightly. If you provoke him by defiance, it may prove very costly to you,’ Saeed said, indicating by the menace in his tone that they were willing to drag him out from his house to the Bhai’s den if need be.
A reluctant Natiq realised there was no point in arguing with them anymore. He might as well just go talk to the Bhai, to simplify the issue.
Natiq’s 22-year-old wife Zaheda was new to the city. She was worried and a vague premonition gripped her heart; she wanted to dissuade her husband from going out at that hour. But Natiq was sure that they would not go as far as to actually kill him, and somehow consoled her, and left with Saeed and Ayub. They crossed the road and sat in the car, which was parked outside the petrol pump just outside the BIT compound.
No sooner did Natiq enter the car than he was greeted with a volley of expletives. Taken aback, Natiq tried to get out of the car immediately, but by then the car had begun gaining speed. Ayub and Saeed also slapped him hard. The attack came totally unexpected to Natiq, and he could not bear the humiliation as tears welled up in his eyes.
Despite Natiq’s protests, the car kept running and halted only at the Kadar building at Grant Road, which housed the office of Amirzada. Natiq was subjected to further humiliation and violence in this office.
‘
Dawood ke kutte, bahut hoshiyari karta hain
[Dawood’s dog, you think you’re being very smart]!’
A thin and wiry Natiq was reduced to a punching bag; blows and kicks were showered on him brutally. Then Saeed, who had been waiting to exact revenge for all the hardship he had encountered in prison following Natiq’s articles, brought out a chopper and inflicted several serious injuries. Natiq began to bleed profusely and lost consciousness. The goons again bundled him into the car and took him all the way to Mahim, where the half dead Natiq was dumped at an isolated spot near the Mahim creek.
Lying in a heap of faeces, urine, and other filth near the massive gutter of Mahim, Natiq regained consciousness to the brightness of a shining afternoon sun. He had no clue how many hours he had been lying in that state. But he was aware that he had lost a lot of blood; life was slowly draining out of him. No strength left, he felt his limbs had turned to lead.But Natiq knew that if he was to remain alive, he would have to make a grand effort. Since he could not stand, he began to crawl on his hands and his knees and somehow got to the road, where two men and a traffic cop spotted him, fortunately.
They immediately put him in a cab and rushed him to the JJ Hospital, where his family was informed. Dawood too was given news of the assault, and came running to meet his friend. A weak Natiq gave a statement to the police officers in the Dongri Police Station, and other revealing details to his friend Dawood. Likha himself had come to talk to Natiq, and he stood by as the man spoke.
Dawood blamed himself for Natiq’s plight, in a sense, and he was to feel even worse. Despite the best efforts of the doctors, Natiq did not survive; after two days of an excruciating battle in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), he succumbed to his injuries. Dawood, Sabir, and their boys were furious at the Pathans’ beastly behaviour and felt beaten by them. Natiq had, after all, been a bulwark against the Pathans.
Dawood had not known bereavement earlier. This was the first such instance where someone who was so dear to him—a dear friend and almost a brother—had been so brutally killed. He vowed to take revenge in such a way that the Pathans would never dream of ending up on his wrong side. Revenge was the only way to salvage pride. Standing on the freshly made, flower-laden grave of Iqbal Natiq, Dawood swore revenge,.‘Iqbal Bhai
, main kasam khaata hoon, jis tarah unlogon ne tumko maara hain, us hi tarah main bhi unko maaroonga
[I promise to avenge your death in the same torturous manner they killed you].’ Officer Likha, standing next to Dawood, kept a hand on the 22-year-old avenger’s shoulder and assured him all support.
The chroniclers of the Bombay mafia debated for decades whether it was the killing of reporter Iqbal Natiq that was the great watershed. For until then, the 22-year-old Dawood had never tried his hand at killing or bloodshed. Natiq’s murder opened a bloodletting spree in Bombay.
15
The Executioner
I
t was 1977. Death loomed like a dark mist that seemed to engulf Dawood’s every sense, tinged with a sense of deception. Dawood’s only promise of deliverance from the vagaries of fury and the hollowness he felt inside was vengeance. Every single Pathan in Bombay was abhorrent to him.
It had been only around a year since Baashu Dada had been repressed and isolated from the kingdom of the Bombay mafia, discredited, but this accolade felt inadequate in the face of the void left by Iqbal’s death. Khalid Pehelwan, who had earlier been Baashu’s right-hand man, now approached Dawood to place before him his brutal, instinctive and biased form of expression of solidarity towards a man he had grown to respect after Baashu Dada’s decline.
Khalid was an austere, self-made man, inclined towards incisive precision in all he did. He had been Baashu’s right-hand man for a long while and his status as a serious player in the mafia was formidable. After Baashu’s ousting, his admiration for the way Dawood had fortified his status within Bombay had grown tremendously. Khalid had far-reaching influence and assessing the power that Dawood himself had come into, he deemed it honourable to collaborate with Dawood. He offered him his services.
Khalid and his posse had already earned a name for themselves. His notoriety was catapulted to greater heights when a heist he had masterminded and taken part in, targeting a diamond merchant in Grant Road, resulted in the arrest of most of his men, while Khalid himself walked away unscathed. After all, he was the mastermind, who had to be, by default, elusive, unlike the smaller fry.
Dawood’s notion of Khalid’s personal courage and a primitive sense of authority gave him an idea of how he could help him discredit his opposition. He brought Khalid on board. In turn, Khalid decided to become the symbol of Dawood’s fight against the Pathans. He knew that at this point Dawood had nothing on his mind but to wipe out the Pathans’ empire in Dongri. The ending of this vendetta had almost become Dawood’s right as well as a necessity, to quell anyone who sought to oppose him.
Two men had had a bigger hand in the business of Iqbal’s murder, Saeed Baatla and Ayub Lala, and Dawood had no intention of sparing these two Pathans. Khalid, in his bid to prove his loyalty and detonate the drama that was to unfurl, promised Dawood that he would personally ensure the two were punished. Thus the campaign of extermination had begun.
By this time, word had gotten around all over Bombay that Dawood was on the lookout for Ayub and Baatla. Knowing they were on Dawood’s hitlist, and definitely with a bounty on their heads, the two men went underground. Their every move was discretely handled; a maze of secrets played out as they maintained a difficult safety. But theirs was not an impenetrable group, and it was not long before Khalid caught on.
An informant told him that Ayub Lala was visiting a bar at Girgaum Chowpatty. He wasted no time in heading out straight for the bar with his men in tow. Now, while Khalid was a sturdy, well-built wrestler, Ayub Lala was a well-built man himself. But Khalid was a man driven by the motives of a grand revenge that he had to enact to prove his loyalty, while Ayub was already weakened. He had already displayed his cowardice when he chose to escape Dawood.
Transfixed by Khalid’s sudden entrance, Ayub knew that the sinister gleam in Khalid’s eyes held nothing but sadistic intentions for him. Ayub and his men struggled to put up a stiff resistance, but the sheer strength of Khalid and his men seemed to overpower even the considerable might of his men. Mercilessly, they beat up Ayub and his group of gangsters.
Khalid dragged Ayub all the way to Dongri market. Not satisfied with the moans of Ayub after his beating, Khalid took his knife out and slowly but surely started to slice into Ayub’s ankles, leaving him at the mercy of his arms to drag himself forward in a hopeless, desperate bid to get away from the inhuman torture he was being subjected to.
As the veins of his ankles trickled blood onto the road he lay on, Khalid gently grabbed Ayub’s hand and slowly cut into his wrists, the veins spurting blood across his own face. Ayub’s hoarse cry for help went unheard and the stream of blood grew into a pool of futility. Profusely bleeding and unable to move, Ayub Lala succumbed to his wounds on the street.
News of this inhuman killing sent shock waves across the city, reverberating into the depths of the Bombay mafia. Dawood was mighty pleased. The killing had effected evidence of his status. But with moral perversion comes venomous prejudices. In any case, the political might of Dawood’s mafiadom had come into its own.