Authors: Suketu Mehta
Daruwala’s men ran after Mohsin; he fired once at them, and they fled. But then the Crime Branch cops got into their car and went after him. As he was being chased, Mohsin raised his hand with the gun in their direction. The driver swerved and turned, and Mohsin jumped into a passing taxi. When he got home, his fever was raging. “I put my blanket on and went to sleep.”
Mohsin was not arrested for Daruwala’s murder, but he has been for others. If the cops find Mohsin, they’ll ring up Shakeel and ask how much he’s willing to pay to get his shooter released. If the negotiations fail, the police will torture him. He tells me what has been done to him. The police handcuffed his hands behind his legs, inserted a stick in between his knees, and balanced the stick on the backs of two chairs, so he was hanging in the air like a pig on a poke. Then they lined up on either side of him and took their shots at him as he swung back and forth. His eyelids were propped
open all night with matchsticks. Then there was a portable generator; clamps were attached to his fingers, earlobes, and genitals, a wheel was turned, emitting sparks, and his skinny body trembled and jumped as the twelve-volt electric shocks coursed through it. “Doing that causes an effect on the mind,” Anees explains.
Once, in the station, the cops tied one end of a pair of handcuffs to Mohsin’s foot and hung him upside down from the ceiling. This was supposed to be only a temporary measure. But there was a procession outside, protesting something or other, and the cops had to go deal with it. “I hung like that for four hours. My entire leg was swollen. I forgot I had a foot.”
He holds up his hand, spreading out his palm, showing us the effect of the police’s attentions to it. “Not one finger is straight.” Dr. Shahbuddin looks at it with professional interest.
The police will have a good amount to drink while they’re beating their prisoners. When someone is being beaten, everyone in the police station clusters around. “It’s like when a goat is being killed, how people come around to see.” In the interrogations, the police try to scare the captives. One trick they use with simple men is to bring out a lemon and a knife. Then they tell the suspect, We will cut a lemon on your head and it will affect your brain, and you will tell us everything. This works with the superstitious; as they see the cop approach their skull with the lemon and begin to cut it over them, the juice spurting out over their exposed head, they might babble out everything. But not Mohsin. “I said, Then why beat me? Just cut the lemon.” Then they really got angry. He cursed them. He had already appeared in court, so he couldn’t be killed in an encounter, he informed his tormentors. This is one of the rules governing encounters, recognized and followed by cops and criminals alike. If a judge is aware that a man is alive and in police custody, he stays alive.
Mohsin has three men left in his group within the larger gang. The other five have been shot dead by the police in encounters. According to Mohsin, it had been ordered by the state government that whoever has two cases against him should be shot in an encounter. By this standard, Mohsin is five and a half cases overdue. The weapon the cops leave by the side of the encounter victim is an indication of his status. With a junior person in the gangwar, they’ll leave a “sixer.” For a person of more importance, they’ll leave a Mauser. For the big guys, the real bhais, it’ll be a submachine gun, an AK-47 or AK-56.
Two waiters come into the room bearing trays of sandwiches. We stop talking till they leave.
Mohsin is now a year out of jail, where he spent three very comfortable years. “I was stoned throughout.” There were separate quarters for the gangwar boys. He enjoyed charas and Phensydril, a potent cough syrup. The Company sent him 7,000 rupees a month for his expenses in jail, and a further 10,000 to his family. The jail had all the facilities for the Company men, including TV and a carom board, around which the stoned gangsters whiled away their time. Twice a day, their tiffin came from the Company. They could get girls, booze; all it took was to pay the “customs”—bribe the guards. Those who have nobody in Bombay to give them money for their expenses in jail resort to another means of income: “They sell their behinds.”
In jail, the people who had been in the business of girls and brown sugar—heroin—are beaten up and money extorted from them. The brown sugar is sold out of sacks behind V.T. Station by the Africans between four and five in the morning. The police are afraid of the brown-sugar people. They throw their own shit at the cops; they cut themselves with blades before a court appearance and tell the judge the police did it. In 1993, there was a riot in Nashik jail, where Mohsin was lodged at the time. Indians are fed first in the jail, then the foreigners. An African threw hot dal on a guard’s face, and there was a riot. The jail guards hit the black men with their iron-tipped bamboo sticks, to no effect. Then one African swung at a guard, and the guard was immediately knocked out. The riot was out of control; the guards had lost power. So they opened the gate of the gangsters from Bombay and let them loose in the African cells. The Bombay wallahs rushed in with homemade knives and started slashing the Africans left and right. “The matter was finished. Two Negroes were killed. No records were kept of the crime. In jail there is wild justice.”
Mohsin is about to get married. After his wedding, he might do some “good work,” as opposed to the kind he’s doing now: “Some factory, something. I can live under another name somewhere else.” And he can always flee the country. After a big work, a valuable shooter will go from Bombay to Dubai and thence to Karachi. They have connections with the police at the Bombay airport.
At this point, Girish decides to try his hand at reforming the hit man. “You are getting married. Now at least stop.”
Mohsin is not swayed by his plea. “I have to earn my expenses for the wedding.” His fiancée has said the same thing to him: Leave all this. And Mohsin put forward a challenge to her: “If you have the power, make me leave all this.” It is a love marriage; the girl is his cousin. After the wedding he has to go to Surat to avenge an assault on one of his men, Yasin. He was in the middle of drinking a sip of water, and his enemies had come at him with a sword; “his head opened up, all his teeth came into his hands.” He was left for dead, and now Mohsin has to go to Surat. It is a matter of personal honor, not a Company matter. “My izzat is there.”
“He will not improve,” predicts Anees, in front of Mohsin.
I hear water running in the bathroom behind me. The doctor is taking a shower. He had been sitting quietly on the sofa, through all the talk of torture and murder, staring with purpose at the bathroom. I remember what he once told me about water in Madanpura, explaining why he doesn’t like living in Bombay. “Every morning I have to decide; if I bathe, there won’t be enough water left to drink in the evening.” When confronted with a bathroom that has running water, and hot water at that, he has decided to make the most of it. He takes his time in the shower and comes out glowing.
Mohsin and Anees speak of the criminal associations of their community with pride, the pride of an oppressed minority that fights back and dares to venture in the illicit “outline” trades. “The outline people are mostly Mussulmans, because today the most money trouble is felt by young Muslims. Mussulmans are in beer bars, gangwar. . . . Mussulmans are not less in anything.” Anees points out that for the whole month of Ramadan, the beer bars are closed or half empty—during that month, they won’t even swallow their spit—and then “on Eid, the beer bars are houseful with Mussulmans.”
These criminal associations do not go unnoticed by the Bombay Police, of whom only 5 percent are Muslim. “Very bad curses they say to us,” Anees tells me. “They call us traitors to the nation, betrayers.” But they were born here. If there is trouble, asks Mohsin, where are they going to run? He is ready to fight for the country. He sees his work in the underworld as “not a matter of the nation but a matter of the qaum,” of the universal nation of Islam. The riots, and the political party that instigated them, are always on Mohsin’s mind. He refers to Thackeray as “the main wicket.” The D-Company is watching the goings-on around the Babri
Masjid very closely. If there is more trouble over the mosque it won’t be like last time; this time they are prepared and will respond instantly. Many people in far places will die. The gangs have stockpiled equipment. “We have a rocket launcher, but we haven’t used it.” Stinger missiles from the Afghan war have been distributed over the subcontinent, held in reserve for the next big riot.
The group discusses the previous night, when the police had called a few of the Madanpura boys to the meeting of the Ekta Committee, designed to prevent Hindu—Muslim riots. There was a lafda, a strike; the boys had noticed a lot of police running around but they didn’t go. The tension is building every day. Mohsin speaks with fear of the times ahead. “What we can’t imagine will happen.” The next affair, Mohsin says, will happen all over the world, a global war of Islam against its enemies. They have numbers and geography on their side. “Muslims are everywhere. Hindus are only in India,” he points out. They are on the right side of history.
One of the Muslim men agrees, telling me, “If you really want to see the mujahideen, you have to go to Palestine. There, even nine-year-old boys carry AK-47s.” He recites the international rosary of the jihad: Palestine, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Bosnia. I have heard this before, in a mosque in Brooklyn, in the imam’s sermon: the careful perusal of every Islamic struggle worldwide, the bugles of distant battles, a sense of a global wrong. These are the street skirmishes in the larger worldwide war, a war that has been going on for centuries, beginning in an obscure hot place among people convinced that there was a good and there was an evil, and evil had to be fought and good defended. The lives of the young Muslims in the gangwar are given meaning by this fight, not to convert the kafirs—the infidels—but to protect their own honor. It is a sentiment that has been transmitted, nearly intact, across enemy lines to Sunil and the Sena boys, who think of themselves as all that stands between the Islamic hordes and us. “All you Marwaris, Gujaratis, you people living in Malabar Hill, if it weren’t for us you would have been finished off long ago.” Both sides see what is happening in Bombay today as only the latest in a long series of historic battles. Bombay is where worlds collide; it is their Tours, their Kosovo, their Panipat. Here the line will be drawn, in this Hindu nation ringed by Islamic countries.
The TV is on in the hotel room and is showing a gangster movie,
Parinda.
The movie was directed by Vidhu Vinod Chopra, whom I had not yet met. A man is being killed in a hair oil factory. “This shot is very good,” says Mohsin. They all watch the screen with interest. “Look how his blood mixes with the oil.” The police are interrogating the murderer. “Where did that man go?” they ask. Answers the killer, “He is in the Worli gutter.” Ever since this movie, “He is in the Worli gutter” has become underworld slang for “He has been killed.”
My technique for getting the gangwar boys to tell me their stories is simple: I am going to put their lives in the movies. This is no lie on my part; I am in touch with directors who want me to work with them on films about the underworld. It is up to me to get the stories. Can an outlaw life be made legitimate if turned into art, into myth?
The boys tell me that, for authenticity in my picture, my characters must use the proper bhai language. There is one word for work, sex, and death in the Bombay underworld: kaam. “Uska kaam kiya” can mean “I killed him,” “I fucked her,” or “I worked for him.”
Over time, the necessity of hiding their activities from the police has led the underworld to develop an entire numerology of slang. Each number from 1 to 40 has an equivalent in bhai language. For example, a girl or “item” is, in this argot, chabbis (26). Her boyfriend is her chhava. A girl is also paaya, paneri, or chawal: rice, which can be of different qualities, as in “This is basmati chawal.” She dances in “school”—a beer bar. Nalli jhatakna refers to the male orgasm. Screwing is atkana.
A gun, not surprisingly, is known by many names: samaan (equipment), bartan (vessel), mithai (sweet), baja (musical instrument), dhatu (metal), chappal (sandal), sixer, chakri. Very often, it is called a ghoda (horse); it is as dear and crucial to a shooter as a horse to a medieval warrior. A submachine gun or, as Mohsin refers to it, a “gun machine,” is also called a guitar, spray, or jhadu, for its sweeping disposal of targets. A small gun is called, endearingly, amma; the bullets, her offspring, bacche. A bullet is also called tablet, capsule, or dana (grain). A hand grenade is a potato, stone, or pomegranate. A sword is lambi—the tall one.
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.