Authors: Suketu Mehta
Next follows a meeting of Ajay’s station chiefs, sleek, fat, sly fellows who are lords of their turf. I can see why Ajay refers to them, after they leave, as bandicoots. Then a policeman comes in and tells him they caught a car with counterfeit money in it. Ajay asks him, “How much did they have?”
“Four lakhs.”
“What did they say?”
“They’re not saying anything.”
“Bring them in.”
Ajay tells us to sit in the back of the room, on a small sofa. The door opens, and two men are led in by three plainclothes policemen.
Almost immediately the beating starts. “Tell the Saab who gave you the money!” screams one of the cops.
“I don’t know, sir.”
He is slapped hard across the face. This man is a fat Sindhi bourgeois. The taller, thinner man says he’s his cousin and drove the car. Both speak English, and are well dressed. They are uncomfortably familiar. A little more money, a little more education, and they would be People Like Us. Four and a half lakhs in counterfeit 500-rupee notes are brought out of a bag and put on Ajay’s desk, neat green bundles of untruth. A few more slaps follow. “Who gave you the money?”
“I don’t know, sir. Someone called and asked me to pick up the bag.”
“Some stranger called and asked you to pick up four lakhs?” shouts Ajay. “You think we were born yesterday! Take off their clothes.”
The other policemen remove the men’s belts and hit them viciously with them. Anu is cringing; Vinod is holding her hand.
The fat man volunteers a little information. He had met the man who
arranged the deal through his “keep,” as Ajay refers to her, a beer bar dancer in Mira Road.
“What’s his name?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Bring in the electric wire and the strap,” Ajay commands a constable.
The constable comes back with a thick leather strap, about six inches wide, attached to a wooden handle. One of the cops takes it and brings it savagely down across the fat man’s face. The sound of leather hitting bare human flesh is impossible to describe unless you’ve heard it. The man screams. The cop brings it down again. Meanwhile, the cousin is getting blows in his back with the other policeman’s elbow. Both men are bending, cringing, to avoid the blows, with the strap, the belts, and the policemen’s bare hands, which are landing all over their faces and bodies. The strap across the fat man’s face causes the most pain, and he is bent nearly double trying to ward off the blows. The thin man has a spot of blood on his forehead, or maybe a tikka from the temple; I can’t tell. Vinod is murmuring something over and over to his wife, holding her hands very tightly in his.
“Do you have any children?” Ajay asks the fat man.
“One.”
“How old?”
“Five years.”
“Bring in his wife and children. We’ll beat his children in front of him if he doesn’t talk.”
“No, sir! I’ll tell you everything. I’ve told you everything.”
The three policemen attack the men randomly. The thin man takes it without crying; once the policeman near him, much shorter than him, hits him in the eye with his belt. The thin man barely flinches, as if a fly had landed there. “Tell the Saab what you told me,” the short policeman commands.
“It’s not anything,” the thin man protests.
The cop flies at his face with the belt. “Tell him!”
“Sir, my parents came over from Pakistan in ’forty-seven, when Partition happened.”
The short policeman looks at Ajay eagerly, perhaps hoping to be rewarded for having extracted an important bit of information crucial to
establishing the Sindhi’s double loyalties. Ajay is unimpressed. Several million people in India, including the deputy prime minister, would be traitors by this standard.
“Take them to the room and put the electric wire down there.” Ajay addresses the fat man. “You won’t be able to do your work by your mistress.”
More information comes out: The fat man took 450,000 rupees from a Pakistani agent and gave 325,000 rupees in genuine Indian currency in exchange. As they are being beaten, they address their tormentors as “sir.” Thus we addressed our teachers in school; thus do Vinod’s film crew address him. Not once do they fly out; not once do they scream an obscenity at the people who are slapping them with open palms across their faces. For the first time, I am hearing Ajay curse. “I’ll shove it so hard up your ass that everything will come out of your mouth.” But he is holding himself back. The men are not being electrocuted in their genitals, not yet, not in this room, because there is a woman present.
“Take them both to Sanjay Gandhi National Park and shoot them. Put a revolver next to him and a chopper next to the other one. We’ll say they tried to escape in their car.”
The men are led out by the three policemen and the three of us move to the front of the office. Vinod, who has witnessed such scenes before, is laughing about how affected Anu is. He had kept asking her if she wanted to leave. But she had her eyes wide open and could not tear herself away in spite of her shock. “I’ve never seen anybody being beaten. I can’t wait to go home and hug my child.”
“This is nothing,” says Ajay. “This is Walt Disney.”
“The real beating is still to come,” says Vinod knowledgeably. “They’ll be taken somewhere.”
Ajay smiles. “To the Resort.”
I had an idea of “the real beating” from speaking to Blackeye, the young D-Company hit man, who had been arrested earlier for the murder of a music producer. The policemen stripped him and put him facedown on a small bench in the interrogation room. They tied his hands to the bench. The officer put on gloves. He took a small bottle containing a particular kind of acid; one drop on human skin will eat through it like Drano down a bathroom drain. The gloved hands spread his buttocks. “They put it in
my godown,” Blackeye told me. “They stretched my godown and put the whole bottle in my godown.” More than a year later, every time he shits, a little bit of flesh comes out.
The counterfeiters wouldn’t be shot; they’re small time. And their kids and wives wouldn’t be beaten. Unlike others in the force, Ajay is not a sadist; his bark is much worse than his bite. His technique is to extract the maximum amount of information with the minimum of physical pain. But the dancer in Mira Road, the fat man’s mistress whose name he gave up first, would be brought in that night. They would press her for more names. The mistress is always given up first.
The dancer later leads them to the entire ring. Ajay arrests a total of seven people and recovers $100,000 worth of Indian currency. He finds out that the Dawood gang is involved, under the guidance of the Pakistanis. Their aim is to flood the country with forged notes. The beating of the men revealed the chain of distribution: the fake Indian currency was manufactured outside Islamabad in the Pakistani government printing press, whose plates turned out hundreds of thousands of pictures with the portrait of Mahatma Gandhi, and was sent to Kathmandu, where it was picked up and sent by rail or road all over India. Once in the country, it was exchanged for smaller amounts of genuine currency or mixed with real notes and spent in the bazaar, or thrown on the dancing girls in beer bars. This is a new kind of cross-border aggression: economic sabotage. Bombay, as the financial capital of the country, is particularly vulnerable. There is already a rumor going around that the Reserve Bank of India will stop accepting 500-rupee notes. Some shopkeepers have already stopped accepting them, leading to fights between them and their customers. In Kathmandu the previous year I was told by my hotel that it wouldn’t take 500-rupee Indian notes for this very reason—that so many of them were counterfeit.
“There’s a whole world around us that we know nothing about,” says Anu, walking back to her house from Ajay’s office. “I just want to watch my Hindi films and be safe.” All of a sudden, she’s conscious of some subterranean stream of homicidal violence five minutes down the road from her plant-filled house, some deep river of pain on whose banks she lives.
At the story session for
Mission Kashmir
immediately afterward in
Vinod’s house, Vinod is explaining a scene to Hrithik Roshan, the hero. “And then you’ll have thirty bullets going in your back, and you’ll fall like this.” He falls flat on the ground, a movie director’s idea of death. “Fantastic!” says the star.
A
JAY IS A
B
ANDRA BOY
, a star batsman in his schooldays. He joined the Indian Police Service in 1981, after he graduated from Bombay University with an honors degree in history and political science. He worked in various ranks all around the state and city. Through the years, Ajay got to know the precise details of every racket in the city, big or small. He tells me, for example, that the franchise to make big chalk pictures of Jesus Christ on the footpath, on which passersby throw coins, is sold for 75,000 rupees for six months by the toughs who control that section.
After his work in the blasts investigation, Ajay was promoted to deputy commissioner in the Crime Branch, where for four years he was responsible for tracking terrorist and gang activity in the entire city of Mumbai. Then, in 1996, he made a bad career decision: He raided the house of Jaidev Thackeray. Jaidev is Bal’s son. The old man got on the phone and had Ajay transferred to the State Police for his audacity. There Ajay remained, dealing with tribal crime in the rural areas, until 1998, when the authorities decided that the nuisance of Ajay’s incorruptibility was outweighed by his expertise in fighting the gangwar, and brought him back into the City Police.
Ajay has one abiding hatred: the movie industry. His father was a movie producer who died of powerlessness. At one time his father signed Rajesh Khanna for a movie. After getting the superstar’s dates, he rented a studio for a week and constructed an elaborate set for a song sequence. The actor didn’t show up on Monday, then he didn’t show up the next day. The set was ready; the crew and the producer were waiting. Every day meant a huge expense. Khanna didn’t show up all that week, and by Saturday the entire set had to be demolished, a fantasy that would remain a fantasy. On that Saturday, Ajay’s father had his first stroke.
Sometime later he signed up another actor, Vinod Khanna, and again took a set of dates from him. On the day of shooting, the star was untraceable. He had become a follower of Rajneesh and had disappeared into the guru’s ashram in Pune. The star’s secretaries didn’t know how to get hold
of him. Once again the producer saw his money disappearing before his eyes. He had his second stroke then.
“I was very fond of my father,” Ajay says. “I used to wake up at three-thirty in the morning, and my father wouldn’t be in his bed. I would walk to the garden and see him sitting outside, smoking. When I went up to him and asked what the matter was, he said, ‘I’ve borrowed money at thirty-six percent interest. What will I do?’ He had lost twenty-five lakhs. I hate the film line; it’s a dirty business. I swore that when I grew up I would be a man in a position of power over these people who ruined my father.” So he became a police officer, rather than a lawyer or a doctor or a businessman; rather than a movie producer. “In the uniform there is power.”
In his current position as ACP, Northwest Region, he has suzerainty over Bandra and Juhu, the Beverly Hills of Bombay, where the stars live and work. They make a beeline for Ajay’s office every time they get a menacing phone call from the underworld, including the actors who caused his father to die a slow death. “They came to me to say they were very good friends of my father. I told them what my father told me and how my family felt about them.” They sat in front of him, squirming. “I had half a mind to throw them out. But then there’s the reputation of the department.” So he helps them out, makes the calls that need to be made, and rounds up the extortionists that need to be rounded up, so the stars can sleep easy. But there’s one difference between Ajay and his father. Today, it’s Ajay who gives the stars his dates.
W
HEN
A
JAY AND HIS WIFE
, Ritu, come to our flat for dinner, I offer him a drink, but Ajay is that rarity in Bombay: a cop who doesn’t drink. “I saw so much liquor in my house, growing up. I didn’t like my father drinking. A person loses control when he drinks. I don’t like to drink or smoke. Never.” He repeats the word, I suspect, for himself: “Never.”
He is also a rarity in another way: He doesn’t take bribes. He says he must be the only government official in India who pays his own phone bills for his private line: 2,000 rupees a month. For not taking bribes, and for being from a well-off family, Ajay says he has very little in common with the rest of his colleagues. “Most of the people in the force are jealous. The rest, maybe the seniors, are frightened of me.” As a result, he never socializes with other policemen.
For ten days before Diwali, the senior police officers’ quarters in Worli see a procession of men bearing baskets of expensive fruits and sweetmeats, gifts for the officers. Ritu summarily refuses all such gifts—a bottle of champagne from a movie director, for example. The other officers, especially Ajay’s superiors, are concerned about how Ajay’s honesty reflects on their own acceptance of gifts, so they give him some fatherly advice. “You have to be practical.”
“Have the gangs ever tried to buy you?” I ask Ajay.
“After the blasts I was offered fifty lakhs by my senior officer not to assault someone. He said, ‘Don’t beat this fellow up, he’s very connected. I know of someone who’s ready to give fifty lakhs. I’m not telling you to do anything illegal; I’m telling you not to beat him up.’ I said, ‘Sir, I’ve trained under you. If you weren’t my senior officer I would assault
you.’
My problem is I get very emotional about my honesty.”
Ajay’s monthly salary, as an IPS officer, is just under 20,000 rupees. A skilled secretary in a multinational corporation makes more than that. “That needs to be revised,” I tell him.
“It was revised. Until last year it was seven thousand.”
“Seven thousand a month?”
“I began in 1981 at seven hundred and fifty rupees”—$75 at the time—“a month, as Assistant Commissioner of Police.” Ritu, who comes from a rich family in Delhi, was aghast when she saw the quarters they would live in. There was no furniture. Although Ajay doesn’t drink, he loves meat, the rarer the better. In his parents’ home he ate only meat for his meals. When he began in the police force, he couldn’t afford to buy meat for a year. When he was posted to a district, he made up for what he couldn’t buy in the marketplace by going hunting for boar. On the walls of his quarters now are a tiger’s head and a deer’s head.