Authors: Suketu Mehta
The next morning Ajay went back to the site and checked for himself, accompanied by the police officer who had fired. Ajay then found the bullet, embedded in the door of a doctor’s dispensary that had been behind the beast. “He had missed.”
I look up from my notes. “How close was the officer to the elephant?”
“He had fired from ten feet away.”
Even if a suspect is arrested and his weapon found, the whole support structure Ajay has to rely on to secure a conviction, everything from the forensics laboratories to information technology to the public prosecutors, is substandard. “It’s very easy for people abroad to talk about human rights. In New York or the UK, a confession made before a police officer is admissible. Here it is not. We are given the worst lawyers, the ones who are not good at private practice. The gangs have the best.” In the age of the market economy, globalization, and multinationals, “the police is a nonprofit institution. Why should they put money into it?”
So the police take shortcuts to solving crimes. Maharashtra had the highest number of custodial deaths in the whole country in 1997: 200, a
500 percent increase from the previous year’s total of 30. Two hundred people tortured to death in police custody! The record outstrips that of many military dictatorships around the world. According to a police report of the causes of 155 custodial deaths in Maharashtra in the 1980s, only 15 were due to “police action.” The rest had causes ranging from “fell from bed” to “fell on others.”
Most people in this part of the world, rich or poor, give the police station a wide berth. A friend tells me his accountant has stolen forty-five lakhs and run off to the south, where he is hiding. My friend files a complaint with the police, who arrest the accountant’s sister. She is not involved in the crime, but they keep her in custody for twenty days, hoping it will put pressure on her brother to surrender. When my friend goes to the station, the police officer in charge tells her she’s in the lockup and invites him to “Do what you want with her.” My friend fears for her safety and sends a man from his office to sit at the station day and night, guarding her from the officers of the law.
My uncle castigates me for having sent Sunita to pick up some forms from Special Branch, the agency responsible for registering foreigners. “You can’t send ladies to the police station.” And sure enough, she is harassed. She hears the inspectors making lewd comments about her in Marathi. The officer in charge tells my wife he can send her and my children to court if he so wishes. I should just have dropped Ajay’s name; the forms would have been delivered to my door. But it was still early in our return home; we still labored under the propriety that we had learnt in the West. This changed as we got used to the Country of the No.
I get a taste of Ajay’s power when my sister and her fiancé fly in from San Francisco. I am sitting in his office and I tell him I have to leave to fetch them. Ajay makes a call to the inspector in charge of the airport. I go to the airport police station. “Lal Saab’s guest. Arrange the courtesy for him,” the desk inspector orders. A plainclothes officer escorts me into the restricted area of the airport, all the way to the escalator coming down from the arrival gate, where I greet my astonished sister. I take them to the front of the immigration line—oh, the joy of skipping that endless line!—and go right through customs. The assistant commissioner of customs shakes my hand and asks feebly, “Anything to declare?” “Nothing,” I say, leading my sister and her fiancé past the helpless men in white. They don’t have anything that is liable for duty, but there is power in knowing that we could
have brought in computers, munitions, liquor, and heroin if we had wanted to. So often, coming into this airport, I have felt completely helpless. Now I have police swarming around me; I walk past closed doors, past men with guns. The normal rules don’t apply to me.
I could get used to this.
B
Y NINE O’CLOCK
these days, when the air-raid siren goes off, it is already steaming. All those who can have fled. Only those who have had a bad year—the failed students, the failed businessmen—are left behind to suffer summer in the city, to take the trains, to walk the melting streets. Each year it gets hotter. The sun rises late but makes up for it with its vigor. All winter long it has gathered strength; now it is loaded for bear.
I get to Ajay’s office one evening at seven. He is running a fever and has switched off the AC; the office smells of stale sweat. It is infested with mosquitoes, which feast on my blood. Ajay has recently arrested several members of a gang who worked at a shoe factory in Dharavi, earning between 800 and 1,500 rupees a month for their work there. It’s a miserable life for the millions of young men who work in the factories of the city. They labor in dark, hot rooms, where they can never stand up straight, for fear of getting nicked by the whirling blades of ceiling fans jury-rigged from the tin ceilings. They are mostly from Bihar or Uttar Pradesh, and they work fourteen hours a day, every day, in silence, hands moving in automatic gestures. If there is an urgent order, they’ll work all day and all night. Most employers here pay their employees by the piece: Making a wallet, for example, earns them between 14 and 25 rupees. They start working as young as eight and can’t work past twenty, because their hands are no longer quick, their eyes not so bright. “They have no friends’ circle, no nothing. In their life, they have no program for the future,” one of the workshop owners had explained to me. Their transcendence is the last show at Maratha Mandir on Sunday evening or a trip to the crowded beach at Juhu to marvel at the freedom of the sea. In the afternoon, the factory workers eat straight from a pot, sitting on their haunches. When they finish working, they lie down on the same patch of ground on which they’ve been sitting for fourteen hours, in rooms where they might be able to see a little bit of sky and a luxury high-rise on the not-too-distant horizon.
Ajay tells me how these men can be drawn into a gang. A person from
their village who is already in the gang would take them to the beer bars; there, the newcomers would see their village man throw money at the dancing girls. They would see that the girls came over to him, touched him, went out with him for the night. “To the guy from the village, the beer-bar girls are like Madhuri Dixit,” notes Ajay. They would think, This man came to Bombay just six months before me, how is he living so well? He is wearing good clothes, moving around in a car. So they would be drawn in, given the gun already cocked, told to go up to the target and pull the trigger and run; that’s all there is to it. A shooter’s average age is anything between eighteen and twenty-six (“Anything above that, you’re organizing it,” says Ajay). That is, if he lives that long. The shooters don’t look anything like their movie counterparts. “A shooter’s appearance has to be absolutely nondescript. That will afford him the ability to melt into the crowd. Ultimately it just takes a little pressure of the finger to pull the trigger, not physical strength. Ultimately it takes the ability not to feel remorse when they shoot a man and see blood.”
The first interrogation of the evening begins. Two plainclothes police officers and a plainclothes constable come in, bringing a veiled figure. The officers tell Ajay that the suspect is a shooter in the gang that killed a mob lawyer. When the veil is removed, it discloses a puny man, scarcely five feet tall, so scrawny you wouldn’t look at him twice in the street. As the towel is removed, he brings his palms together in a hesitant namaste.
Ajay presses him for details. “When did you get the order for the work?”
“Eleven . . . before eleven. It was before eleven, early in the morning, that bhai called me to do the work.”
“Do the bhais ever wake up before eleven?” Ajay demands angrily, catching the lie. “Bhais never wake up before eleven!”
After the suspect and the plainclothes policemen leave, Ajay tells me he’s almost sure the man didn’t do it. He’s being paid to take the fall for someone else the gang wants to protect. “But I suspect that officer is mixed up in it”—indicating the chair to my left, where the big policeman was sitting.
I am astonished. Ajay is referring to a police officer nominally under his own command.
“He’s a mole.” Ajay might have to interrogate him himself, if he doesn’t get the information by the next morning.
The new political structure doesn’t want Ajay in Bandra. He doesn’t expect to last in his office past September. Ajay’s boss, the police commissioner, is about to be replaced, and he does not know whether the new man is someone he can trust. When he does not know whether his chiefs themselves are beholden to the gangs, he has to operate in secrecy from his superiors. If he lets them know who he’s going after, and if the suspect happens to be from the gang that the superior is allied with, the gang will be tipped off. So Ajay has to hide what he’s doing, both from the bandicoots in charge of the stations and from the politically savvy men above him.
For the last couple of years, and especially since his posting to Bandra, Ajay has been unable to sleep at night. He tosses and turns, thinking of his various operations, anticipating the gangsters’ next move. “When I get up in the morning, I think I don’t want to go to the office. I think I would like to get sick. I’m burning out.” On the rare Sunday that he doesn’t go to his office, he starts getting panicky by evening, thinking he’s losing control of his region.
The previous morning, his wife said to him, “Your son needs you.” Ajay points to the newspapers on his desk. In one of them is the news that Rahul has scored a winning goal for his school hockey team, which he captains. His son hasn’t read the report. Ajay won’t get home in time to congratulate his son, so he calls Ritu to do so. “When I leave early in the morning he’s sleeping, and when I get back late at night he’s sleeping. I haven’t seen my son at all.”
An unmarked Maruti Omni pulls up outside the station, and some men are led out with their heads covered. A detective comes into Ajay’s office escorting Akbar, a thirty-one-year-old rickshaw wallah from Andhra, a shooter who is suspected of killing several members of the D-Company. Akbar has studied up to the third standard at the Jogeshwari municipal school. He is wearing a dirty white shirt with a green alligator on it. He seems a bit slow; he holds his head and scratches it when attempting to dig up a name. “What was his name . . .?”—slowly moving his fingers through his hair—“What was his name . . .?” But he is avoiding nothing. Without being prompted, he comes out with the fact that he fired the bullets. He used to own a rickshaw, which he sold to raise money for his sister’s wedding. Then he drove a rented one. The policemen slap him around a little, but it’s really not necessary. He talks readily about his works. First
was a man at a motor training school. His accomplice had fired two rounds at him, and he had fired once.
“How did you learn to fire a gun?” asks Ajay.
“He gave me the gun and told me to press a button. The bullets were already filled.” Akbar’s main concern seems to be to protect his brother, who figured marginally in the job, having picked up some of the gang’s money on his way home from the station.
“I’ll drag your whole family in,” promises Ajay. “How much money did you get?”
“I got fifteen hundred rupees to shoot the bullet.” Then there was the work of a D-Company member whom he had shot two bullets into at a traffic light, as the victim frantically attempted to hide in the back of his jeep. “I got a net of thirty-five hundred rupees.” For three murders, total.
“What did you do with the money?”
“I gave it to my family, to my wife and kids. I have two kids, one six years and the other six months.”
“So you’ve destroyed your kids’ lives!” Then Ajay puts to him a question I had been asking a lot in Bombay: “Don’t you feel anything about taking a life?”
Akbar replies, “After the bullet fires I just don’t know where it goes. I hit him from very close.” He shows how, stretching out his arm; he had hit him at arm’s length. “If I had to shoot from afar I couldn’t do it.”
The detective turns to Ajay. “This is a demon. He should be finished off.”
After the man is led out, Ajay tells me his gang is behind the biggest shootouts of the past couple of weeks. They work for the Rajan gang and have, unluckily for them, been caught with five guns that ballistics confirmed were used in the shootouts. “Fifteen hundred rupees,” Ajay repeats. That’s what Akbar was paid to pump two rounds into a living human being. And now he will spend at least ten years of his unfortunate life paying for it behind bars, for the sake of $35 to give to his wife and children.
“What’s the lowest price for a life you’ve seen in Bombay?” I ask Ajay.
He thinks for a while. Then he tells me about the ragpicker.
In 1995, several pieces of a body were found in the municipal dump in Deonar. An informant tipped Ajay off on the murderer: He was a sixteen-year-old boy, a ragpicker, who lived in a shack on the dump. The boy was
brought in for interrogation and confessed. He had been approached by a boarder staying with a couple. The husband of the couple was working the night shift in the Mazagaon docks and had taken in the boarder. It is unwise for married men to work the night shift, and the inevitable happened: love bloomed between the boarder and the wife. The husband was the thorn. He suspected his wife and beat her. One day the wife cooked drugged food for the husband; he ate it and fell asleep. The boarder and the ragpicker then smashed in his head with a rock and transported the body to the Deonar dump. There, the ragpicker spent two hours cutting the body into many pieces, and distributing them around the dump. The wife filed a missing person complaint.
Ajay asked the boy how much money he’d been paid for all that work: killing the husband, transporting his body, sawing away at it, walking around with the bloody head and torso and limbs looking for strategic spots to dump them.
“Fifty,” said the boy.
“Fifty thousand?”
“No. Fifty rupees.”
It was the month of May. In June the rains would come. The ragpicker needed 50 rupees to buy a gunnysack to put on the roof of his shack so his home wouldn’t get flooded in the rain. So he killed a man for a sum of money that would not buy a cup of coffee at a good hotel in the city.