Authors: Suketu Mehta
There was one woman Satish was very serious about, a doctor who came from a family of doctors from Delhi. They had met in college; he double-dated her along with his Sikh friend, who was also seeing a doctor. “It was expensive. They were of a high status, and you needed good money. We would go to the Taj and sit, to the Leela and sit.” He was with her for almost two years. “I was satisfied mentally, sexually, everything.” She tried to reform him. Satish was a science student in college. “She wanted me to be in her line. She wanted me to be a pathologist.” But they broke up before their second anniversary. His mind started playing “psycho-tricks” on him. “I started thinking she had affairs with other people in her group, other doctors. I used to curse her, beat her. She would say, Beat me, but don’t curse me with such bad words.” But she was very serious about him and very ambitious about her career. Satish saw the end coming. “I felt I was going very deep into this. I felt that if I were caught, she and her family would be dishonored, so I broke it off.”
Later, he tried to get back with her, but she avoided him. “A few days ago I went to kill someone early in the morning. I didn’t find him. I was waiting outside a hotel in Dahisar when she came there to visit a relative. She saw me, but she didn’t say anything. After that I called her many times. My friends would beat me, but still I kept calling.”
After the Rajan Company, Satish and his group did some work for the
Manchekar Company. The Manchekar Company specialized in the powder business—drugs—and they also preyed on doctors in Kalyan and Dombivali. The Manchekar Company was a poor one; it was known as the gang of the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, but it always paid its shooters on time. Satish smuggled guns for them. When he wants to get guns, he will travel to Nepal or to UP. He tells me about a trip to UP: “There I murdered.” The countryside is in a constant state of caste warfare, and the young people have no other profession but politics. A person’s honor is in his rifle. Homemade bombs are available for 11/2 rupees. “The people who make them have rotted their insides from handling them.” He was visiting a local member of parliament, who was supplying them with ammunition. Satish had a proposal for the MP: If he did some work for Satish’s group in Bombay, Satish and his boys would do work for them in UP. One morning as Satish was shitting in a field behind the village he heard gunshots. There was a fight between the Thakurs and the Brahmins. Satish went with sixty armed men into the village of the Brahmins. The whole village fled. One person was killed and many hurt. “We felt we were an army, we had so many weapons.”
Satish had a decent record in the Rajan Company. He has two murders on his official record, four or five attempts, and a few other murders that are not on his record. Satish has now been in the D-Company—or “Mucchad Company,” as he refers to Dawood and his mustache—for only a couple of months. During this time he has already carried out two assignments. He switched because of the money he is given in this company and because of the good quality of the ammunition they provide. “A shooter has two weaknesses: girls and guns. When the bullet fires, there is a great happiness and everything opens up. When a man dies I feel even greater happiness.”
I ask Satish if the people he kills beg for their lives. “Some of them do, so you should kill them immediately and not wait for them to talk.”
A
S WE FINISH
for the day and walk out of the hotel, Satish says, “I like such places.” It is quiet in the evening, and the air is cool. “It is like the village, and my mind is at ease. But after a few days of this I start getting restless.” As we are waiting for a Garuda, Satish asks, “What’s that in the middle of the road?” It is some distance off, an animal slinking along the
road. At first I think it might be a mongoose creeping along, but then Satish observes, “It’s a cat that got hit by that car.” A white Maruti has just sped by. The cat is not crying at all. It attempts to pick itself up and crawl to the side of the road. It is a curious form of locomotion; it gets up with half of its body, then falls and slithers frantically about, like some elongated worm, this way and that.
“Now what would you do with that cat?” Satish asks us. “You can do one of two things: You can put it in the middle of the road so that its pain is shortened, or you can pick it up and put it on the side. What would you do?”
“If I had an instrument to kill it, I’d do so,” says Vikram, the novelist.
The cat crawls to the side; then it crawls back toward the middle. “The cat thought the same thing,” notes Satish. “Could you kill a cat?”
“I don’t know. I’ve gone hunting a couple of times,” Vikram replies.
“That thrashing about of the cat is what the children of the middle class of Bombay are doing. We”—he means the shooters—“give them mukti.” Liberate them. The Garuda pulls ahead, leaving the cat still slithering about, waiting to be delivered by the next car or bus.
Presently, Satish launches into a soliloquy on God. “God is like smelling money that you’ve earned. There is no smell, really, but you have felt him. We are all part of God’s game.” Even God has a game: In the underworld sense, to “play someone’s game” is to kill them. The biggest game is God’s. Satish tells me I am researching the wrong subject. I should be doing spiritual research, like our ancients, the jnanis. “They knew everything. They never talked, they just laughed.”
I ask him if he has done a lot of spiritual research. “I don’t do research. I go within myself. Everything is in me. You want to know when I reach the deepest meditation? It’s when I’m in the toilet. It’s a very creative time for me. I plan everything, all my work, in the toilet.”
We drive past a police checkpoint. The cops are checking cars for couples looking to neck on the deserted beaches. They wave me and the gangsters on. When we get to the Surahi restaurant, there is a party of drunk cops there too, all the way in the back. They are arguing. One of them wants another to have one more peg. A third lets out a huge belch. One of them takes off his shirt and stands up. As they leave, I see him with a new shirt, the label still sticking out over the back. “They must have collected
today,” says Satish, clearly disgusted. The gangsters refer to the police as gande log, “dirty folk.”
A
FEW DAYS LATER
, Zameer arranges a second meeting with Satish, on a Friday. Of the first meeting, he says, “That was just the trailer.” For the main feature, Zameer will be bringing Satish and another hit man to meet me. Vikram can’t make it; he is being interviewed on a television program in Delhi. So I go alone, the second time, to meet the gangsters.
When Zameer comes to pick me up in a rickshaw, I try to make conversation. But he isn’t talking. He is tense about something, and I am conscious of being alone. On the road up to the hotel we start seeing his boys: two, four, eight of them. There is an army coming up to the hotel. Why? Zameer isn’t offering to give any of them a ride. I ask him if he has ever gone abroad. He hasn’t so far, but in a week he is going to Dubai. Why? I know that, after a big hit, the shooters are generally sent out of the country for a spell. Who is Zameer going to kill now?
I ask Zameer if it is absolutely safe, my going in there alone. Zameer replies that since he is taking me in, it’s probably okay. “But in this line, things change in five minutes,” he says. “If I get a call from above saying ‘Eliminate Suketu,’ I’ll do it, even if I’m your greatest friend. Because if I don’t do it, I’ll get killed myself.”
As I’m registering in the hotel, Zameer says that only four people will be in the room. What were all those boys coming up for, then? “They’ve come for swimming,” he explains. We wait silently in the room. Through the window we can see trees. The room this time has the same kind of bed, a steel wardrobe, a desk, and a couple of chairs. It is bare, functional, perfect for sex or death. You bring yourself to such a room and decorate it with yourself. The only excess is yourself.
Satish has shaved today and is wearing jeans, and a shirt with broad red and white stripes. With him is a tall well-built young Sikh man named Mickey. I take out my computer and Mickey sits on a chair by the bed. He has on a tight blue T-shirt that shows off his muscles. He wears a neatly trimmed mustache and beard and constantly runs his hands through his short hair, perhaps feeling for the turban he has given up.
Mickey now stands, pulls up his T-shirt, and takes a gun out from
under the waistband of his jeans. He hands it over to Satish. Satish holds it, looks at it closely, and turns to me.
He puts the gun in my hand.
I feel its weight and heft and turn it over. It is a 9mm Mauser, gray, with the steel showing where all the marking has been removed. The scratches give the impression that the gun has been well used. It feels very big in my hand. Satish shows me the clip. Mickey points out that it can hold ten bullets, but they generally put in only seven because the spring in the mechanism gets damaged if it’s full. It can empty in ten seconds. Satish takes out the bullets and shows them to me. They are copper bullets with a steel core, and each one bears the markings KF for Kanpur Factory, the government ordnance factory. The gun costs between two and a half and three lakhs on the street, and each bullet sells for between 70 and 180 rupees. They are proud of the gun; they speak of it like a prodigal child. “In a man it will make such a big hole,” says Mickey. He should know. He’d made these holes in six men by the time he was in his early twenties.
Mickey is fond of listening to the Backstreet Boys—and to the sound of a Mauser. “There is something in that sound. My brother’s friend heard me test it, and he said, ‘Look at my arm, the hair is standing on end.’” Mickey urges me to try it. “Even if you fire two or three rounds you will get confidence. Its sound has that quality. The more it fires, the more your confidence will open up.” An AK-47 and more sophisticated weapons don’t have the quality of that voice, he says, like someone comparing classical singers. The Sound is used to convince extortion targets; Mickey plays it like a record for businessmen he visits on the bhai’s errands. “Sometimes he needs to hear the Sound. Sometimes I need to run a bullet through his hands or his legs.” Upon hearing it, the businessman suddenly becomes subordinate to Mickey. In normal circumstances, the hit men, like the Sena boys, are spectacularly powerless in the big city. They make themselves powerful by killing; they imbibe their victims’ power.
“We are anti-alchemists,” says Satish. “Whatever we touch turns to iron.”
Satish is aiming the gun, practicing; taking the clip out and pulling the trigger, putting the clip back in without the bullets and aiming it, taking the clip out again, loading the bullets and waving the gun around the room, pointing it at Zameer and smiling, making a soft sound with his mouth:
“Phroo!”
—it sounds like a raspberry—as he blows him away.
Mickey was the Sikh friend who had taken Satish to Punjab to kill a police officer. Five of them went from Bombay, got a Maruti car, took the weapons—each of them was given a pistol—and did the work. They were chased. They threw away their guns, climbed on top of a freight train, and then ran into a forest, full of very old rare trees. The police closed in on them, shining flashlights through the forest. The sound of the police came from all directions in the cold fog, and the hit men decided to walk in a group toward one of the police parties. The police stood them in a line in a clearing, and they knew they were going to be shot. Just at that time, another of the squads pursuing them arrived and began quarreling with the first one, saying they wanted to interrogate the captured boys. There was a dispute over which one of the squads would get credit for the catch. The second squad finally took them away, alive. “We used to take God’s name a lot,” says Mickey. “Maybe that’s why we lived.” Satish is raising the gun, aiming it, pulling on the trigger.
The interrogation in Punjab began. The police made cuts into the sides of Satish’s groin, and he shows us how: one diagonal cut, sloping toward the penis, left, and one on the right, in the crevices just below his balls. They then took hot chili powder and rubbed it into the bleeding incisions.
Mickey tells me about the roller. He was stretched out, and a large rolling pin was placed over his body. Two big cops got on it, one on each side, and rolled it over his body with all their weight. It caused Mickey to call out loud to his entire family, including his grandparents. “After you torture a person like that you had better kill him,” suggests Mickey. “Because if you release him, nothing on your earth has the power to scare him anymore.”
They were briefly jailed, but the judge in their case had been fixed and they went back to Bombay. After their exploits in Punjab, the group found themselves being ardently wooed by all the gangs. They started doing freelance work for political parties—their “independent business”—which they define as “taking the air out of opposition parties.” For one general election they were hired by a Congress legislator fighting for a seat against a BJP man who was a rich smuggler and landing agent at the airport. The BJP candidate had police security, but Satish and Mickey managed to get it removed long enough to go into his office, beat up his boys, and go at him with swords. They would have killed him, but he was rescued in time. The BJP man was connected to the home minister; public demonstrations were
held, demanding the arrest of his assailants. But Satish and Mickey also knew the minister; they had had a photograph taken with him. Besides, they had no particular enmity toward the BJP. Their last contract was with the BJP and, before that, with the RPI, the Republican Party of India. “We don’t support parties, we support the individual,” Mickey says. They have no interest in politics; they don’t go to party rallies. “The member tells us he has a difficulty with a particular man. We try to make him understand,” explains Satish.
“Some people understand immediately,” adds Mickey. “Others after going home. Others after hearing a firecracker. We make them understand as each can.” But there is one politician whom they sincerely admire. “If we were to choose one man to support for the country,” says Satish, “we would support Atal Bihari Vajpayee. He is a genuine person. If he can bring about a revolution we will support him. He is a bachelor. He has made politics his mistress. There is no scam in which his name figures. All parties respect him.” What impresses them most about Vajpayee is his decision to test the nuclear bomb. “Now the whole world looks at India. There is now a power,” exults Mickey.