Authors: Suketu Mehta
The bhai of the company he was in then, Chotta Rajan, had sent two “mithais”—sweetmeats, guns—for Satish and a Sikh friend of his. At first they would just play with the guns, threatening people with them but not using them. One day Satish’s girl took him to a temple and tied the sacred red thread around his right wrist. As she was doing this, she told him, “Do no evil.” The next day, the instructions came from the bhai: They were to kill a Muslim man involved in the bomb blasts. The target was in his thirties and had left the gangs behind; he was now devout and went regularly to the mosque.
When Satish went to kill the bomb-blasts man, “I saw fire and fear in his eyes.” As he brought up his right hand, he remembered the thread on it and his girl’s words. So “I fired with my left hand, but it was hard, and it missed. It hit his leg. He ran. I felt a little pity. He didn’t have a big role in it. If I had five minutes with him he might have touched my feet. I could not kill him; I became double-minded. He ran inside his home, and I didn’t fire on him for fear of hitting his children.” Then, enchanted by the sound
of the firing, Satish continued shooting into the air, walking some distance and firing, the public running all around him.
The calls from above got more insistent. The blasts suspect had to be killed. So the setting was arranged again. Four people, including Satish, waited for him at a bus station in a congested area. They all had sophisticated weapons: a 9mm, a Mauser, a .38 bore, and a semiautomatic. They set up their coordinates on their cell phones. At the bus station, one of the group sat next to the target. The others looked around for exit routes. They had their equipment hidden in plastic shopping bags. When everything was in place, “We signaled our friend next to him. He did a brain shot. We did the confirmation firing on him. Everybody ran; the public also got hurt. I stood for about a minute, looking at all the blood. The flesh was falling from his brain. The blood was boiling, like when you see water boiling on the gas.”
It was his first murder. “Thus the work started.”
We speak in Hindi and also in English. Satish is an intelligent man, and he has a way of focusing on you completely when he speaks; he meets your eyes and puts forward his point of view forcefully and articulately, without expecting you to agree or sympathize with him. He had studied for a chemistry degree up to the second year of college; one more and he would have had a BSc.
When Satish was seven years old, in 1981, in the third standard, he saw his mother burning alive in front of him. I ask how this affected him.
“The next day I was eating chocolates.”
The police said his father, an income-tax officer, had killed his mother. His father maintained that it was a suicide. He was suspended from his job at the income tax department, jailed, tried, and sentenced to life. Years later, he was acquitted on appeal by the high court.
Meanwhile, Satish went to an English-language school in Andheri. He was a good student, in the top ten in his class. But “the situation was not good at home.” He found friends in school, tough guys. He started getting into trouble; he once urinated on the blackboard and was suspended. “The people at home found out what we were up to and told us with emotion to stop.” When he talks, Satish often uses the first-person plural to refer to himself, not so much like royalty as like someone who seeks anonymity or evades responsibility by being part of a group.
The need for money to take out girls became pressing. Satish and his
friends snatched chains, stole cars, beat people up and took their money. Sometimes there was a problem; sometimes
they
would get beaten up in a fight. “We wouldn’t have been if we had a revolver. We went to the movies and thought we should have a ghoda.” A friend from Uttar Pradesh had been involved in a fight; Satish and his mates stabbed his opponents. But the opposite side was in touch with the gangs, and so the friend from UP bought a country-made revolver. This was Satish’s first ghoda. “We kept watching ourselves in the mirror. We felt very good. We roamed around with it.” And a wish grew steadily in him: “We wanted to fire the gun.” Satish marks his life not by the people he meets but by the particular gun he used at the time. For each stage of his adult life, he remembers the gun in his waistband like other men remember the woman they were with.
Satish went on to college but sold guns and bombs for use in the 1993 riots. One of Satish’s group was arrested by Salaskar, the encounter specialist I had met, and they found eighteen imported pistols with the group. The police came looking for Satish at his father’s house. Not finding him there, they put a gun to his father’s head and asked for his son’s whereabouts. His father pleaded for his son’s life, and gave money to the inspector, asking him not to kill the boy.
Satish was held by the police for an inquiry, to see if he was involved with the bomb blasts. In front of him, they beat his accomplice, putting the wire on him. That night, Satish was informed, he would be beaten too. He stayed in his cell, greatly afraid of the beating to come. Then he remembered that a Muslim friend had given him a powerful mantra. When the officer came to beat him, Satish pretended to be asleep and chanted the mantra furiously to himself. The officer stood over him, looked at the sleeping boy, and then walked away. “To this day I believe in the mantra,” says Satish.
The police didn’t find a link between Satish and the bomb blasts, so they let him go. As he walked up to his building, late at night, he saw the lights on in his family’s flat. When he opened the door, he saw his father, brother, and sister, sitting up. “I had no mother, of course.” For the first time in his life, he saw his father crying. “He said, ‘I thought you would study, be a doctor.’” Stricken with guilt, Satish went to his ancestral village in Maharashtra. His grandfather was extremely strict with him and made him work in the fields. He pushed the plow with his shoulders and didn’t have enough to eat. When he was sick his grandfather begrudged him
medicine. Meanwhile, his brother, who had been put into a hostel, sent a letter to Satish saying he was very sick and needed to see him. But when Satish asked a cousin for money to go to the hostel to see his sick brother, the cousin refused. “I felt very bad,” recalls Satish. “When I did bad work, I had lots of money; now that I was doing honest work, I had no money.” He ran away to Bombay.
In Bombay he found a job with a flight services company, where there was a lot of smuggling. With his first paycheck, Satish bought his father a watch. “Even today I feel his happiness,” he remembers. There was a dispute in his job, and he next joined a courier firm owned by another cousin. He had to transport parcels into Bombay on the trains. Just before the octroi, or excise tax, station, at the Bombay border, he had to throw the load out of the running train, follow it with his body, and then smuggle the load past the tax collector. One day he made a mistake; he asked a man next to him to push out the load and it fell under the train. The parcel, consisting of imported saris and machinery, was ruined, and his cousin refused to pay him for delivering it. Satish left that job too.
After this, an old friend contacted Satish. The friend had been in jail, where he had come into contact with the gangs. Along with the friend, Satish enlisted in the Rajan Company. That’s when Chotta Rajan gave him the job to kill the man involved in the bomb blasts. After that first murder, there were others. Rajan had a dispute with a movie producer over a picture he had financed. The producer thought he was untouchable; he was protected by thirty or forty boys at all times. He was sitting in his office one day, surrounded by his guards, when Satish set fire to his bungalow nearby. The boys ran to the bungalow to put the fire out, and Satish went into the office. The producer was on the phone, sitting amid some visitors. “We cursed him and put a bullet in his chest. The rest didn’t even speak. We came out and fled in a car.”
All this was in the early nineties, during the troubles in Punjab. A Sikh friend who was with the terrorists was asked by them to bring in some good shooters from Bombay. A policeman was to be hit. Satish went with four others, shot the policeman, and got caught. He was in the Patiala jail for four months. It was a huge jail, filled with terrorists. Many of them were highly intelligent; one had a PhD, and Satish’s cellmate was an assistant collector’s son. He was supposed to be in solitary confinement, but “we had two thousand rupees and we were connected.” There were three other men
in the next cell. Through the walls, they played antakshari, the game of Hindi film songs, where each person starts a song beginning with the syllable that the last one has ended on. The jail resounded with the full-throated voices of terrorists singing love songs.
One of Satish’s tasks was to clean the gallows. The gallows consisted of a platform, over which there was the rope, and an underground room below, where the body on the rope dropped. Satish had to clean the top platform, where flocks of parrots flew over the gallows and speckled it with their shit. But the real cleaning job was in the underground room. According to Satish, people watching the platform could not imagine the sufferings of the hanged when they dropped underground. The room was spattered with feces and tongues. As the condemned hung writhing from the rope, they shit their pants and bit down on their tongues.
After they got out of jail, Satish and his companions were on good terms with the Punjab policemen; one of them had even helped Satish obtain his release, because Satish was the son of a senior government official, however disgraced. They became, in a way, friends. Now, when the Punjab police come to Bombay, they are met at the station in a car by Satish and his boys and taken to 007, a brothel in Kamathipura. Satish knows the menu by heart. “For one hundred fifty rupees you can get a good-looking girl, one that could be a college-going girl. For one hour it costs three hundred, and for the whole night, seven hundred fifty.” By taking them to the brothel, Satish is only returning a favor. He tells me a story about the Punjabi policemen’s hospitality.
One day, in Punjab, Satish was invited to one of his policeman friends’ homes. There was a lavish dinner with the man’s family. “He knew I liked to fuck.” So after dinner he told Satish to get on the back seat of his Bullet motorcycle, and they roared off into the countryside. They stopped outside a house, and the policeman knocked on the door. A man opened it and the officer put a gun to his head. Behind the man stood his wife. “He told me to take the wife into the next room and fuck her.” So Satish did: “I quickly took my shot.” Then the police officer had his turn, with Satish sitting at the edge of the bed, watching. “He fucked her very hard, and watching him, I was on standby again, and I got on her again. She was crying, ‘No, no!’” But the police officer told her to cooperate. “He said, ‘This is our guest.’” The husband and their young daughter were in the next room. “The husband had a gun held to his head by some constables. In
Punjab the police can do what they want.” I ask Satish if he’d raped the daughter as well. He hadn’t. She was only eighteen, and, he said, “I felt bad about doing her.”
Satish tries to rationalize it. “The woman must be having an affair with someone, and they thought, If she can do it with someone else, why not with us?”
As I am listening to this, I have to pause. With an effort, I keep what I am feeling to myself. I ask Satish if he feels fear when he is shooting.
The sound of the bullet banishes fear, he replies. “After the first bullet comes out, everything becomes clear. Then the fun comes.” Different shooters have different ways of dealing with their work. Afterward, some drink. Some get stoned. Some celebrate in the ladies’ bars. After Satish murders somebody, he eats a huge strictly vegetarian meal. He is a teetotaler and a nonsmoker, and he doesn’t do drugs. He goes straight home, has a bath—“I always have a bath”—does a puja to Hanuman, and sits down to eat a nonviolent repast. He won’t even eat eggs. It began when he left jail; the experience had roused a great anger in him. “I felt then that I should kill every day.” He had been a confirmed meat-eater, even eating meat for breakfast. Then one day he gave it up, all at once. “Now that I’m a vegetarian my mind stays calm, I don’t get angry, and I can give attention to my work.”
After the post-murder meal, he sleeps soundly and for a long time. “Some people feel other things,” he allows. He has a shooter friend who had been having a problem with the aftereffects of the murders he’d done. “When he killed a man, that man’s soul came and sat on his chest.” The soul would try to extract his heart from his body. The shooter couldn’t sleep at night. Then a magician advised him on how to trick the soul. “He told him to turn on his side when he sleeps, so the soul can’t grab his heart.” So now the shooter sleeps on his side, and if he sees the soul coming into the room he curls up into a fetal position to protect his heart.
Some of the shooters have become psychos. Satish knows one who is the only child of a doctor and was himself a medical student. Whenever he had a problem at home, he would run away and do something psychotic. He was always high. He had one eccentricity: After he killed someone, he would take out the brain and, with a sword, make a mince out of it. Satish chops up the air very fine with his hand, demonstrating.
“What is he doing now?” I ask.
“He has resumed his medical studies.”
Shooters, maintains Satish, are very sensitive and take things easily to heart. This causes him difficulties in romance. “When I love a girl, I don’t know how to express it. When I love a girl I love her a lot and she starts avoiding me. If she even talks to another boy I will kill him. Then I think I should kill the girl too. I haven’t killed one yet, but I feel one will die by my hand.” Maybe he developed this attitude through watching movies, he speculates.
On the other hand, the girls that the shooters go out with know they are in the gangs and know the risks. Some of them are with the shooters for the food and drink, others for sympathy. “The dancers and whores understand us more. They love us more. They understand the situation. Here, it is kill or be killed. They are also like that. They don’t have the power of guns; they are searching for a shoulder.” If the shooters are broke or wanted by the police, they can always find a place to hide out in the homes of the dancers. “It feels like home. They love us. The time passes by.”