Authors: Suketu Mehta
Zameer suggests we go to another pub for variety. We walk out into the humid street again and see pictures of girls for a ladies’ bar in a hotel. We go inside and stop at the gents. I go to a urinal while he goes into a lavatory booth, as straight men do when only two of them are in a public toilet. But Zameer opens the door of his cubicle immediately and steps out. “Cockroach.” I see it, the white cockroach that has scared the budding don pissless.
Upstairs in the hotel are two rooms, both with music playing. “Pakistani,” says the doorman for one, trying to invite us into a room with a Pakistani ghazal singer. “Indian,” says the man in front of the other, which has the dancers. Both are trying to entice us. “Come, come!” Without hesitation, Zameer walks into the Indian room, and I follow him. It is a sad excuse for a ladies’ bar. The fat girls, imported from Bombay, sit on chairs onstage wearing pantsuits. There is a fog machine. Old songs are playing, the kind that NRIs are fond of: “Eena Meena Deega” and “Bole re Papeehara.” It is almost empty. “In Dubai everyone knows I work for Shakeel Bhai. It is open. In Bombay there will be one or two Crime Branch people in every bar. If I were sitting like this in Bombay I would have four or five bodyguards standing behind me.” Here, in this strange country, Zameer is anonymous, sad, and safe.
This is the true meaning of exile: some insurmountable force that keeps you from going back. Zameer will be shot dead on his way home from the airport if he goes back, either by the police or by the Rajan Company. So he sits at home in the evenings in a country he hates, watching endless Sony TV and Zee TV. He dreams of taking the train at Mira Road and praises the fifty-five flyovers of Bombay to his friends, in between phone calls in which he orders the destruction of the city he longs for.
After three months he can go to Karachi, which he hates even more than Dubai—in Dubai, at least, he says, the people are disciplined—or to Bangkok. Zameer is a special category of refugee: not a political refugee, not an economic refugee, but a criminal refugee.
S
HOAIB KEEPS CALLING
P
AKISTAN
from my hotel room, trying to get Shakeel on the phone. The boys refer to him with respect as “Chotte Saab.” He is a namaazi, they say; he prays five times a day and never drinks, smokes, womanizes, or curses. My friend the crime reporter Naeem Husain had once argued with Chotta Shakeel. “How can you say you kill for Islam? When you shoot another Muslim, is that Islamic?”
“The prophet is dead and Allah is in heaven,” Shakeel had replied. “We have to do what we can on earth.”
I speak to Anwar, Shakeel’s brother, once. “I hope you are experiencing no trouble in Dubai? There is nothing to worry about,” he reassures me, without my asking.
At first it appears that Shakeel has gone to visit Dawood, whose mother has just died in Bombay—of natural causes. There is some tension among the fraternity in Karachi as a result, and Shoaib is uncertain about whether I’ll be able to get my interview. I have bought 300 dirhams’ worth of prepaid phone cards from a supermarket and fed them into Shoaib’s mobile. We call again. Finally, I hear Shoaib’s voice change. “Ji, bhai. Ji, bhai,” he says into the phone. His face tenses up and he stands rooted to one spot in the room. The phone is handed to me, and Chotta Shakeel comes on the line.
The don brings my attention to the fact that he never gives interviews, he has no need of fame, and he is doing this only because I, a man from America, have traveled so far to talk to him. He repeats this contention several times throughout our conversation. He speaks in chaste Urdu; obviously, his years in Dubai and Pakistan have changed his Bambaiyya Hindi. Throughout, he is very respectful, relaxed, confident. He never hesitates; it is a voice used to giving orders. There is not the merest hint of anger in the don’s voice, just suggestions he expects to be obeyed—“You are not to write of this”—when we discuss matters that could cause him real trouble. To difficult questions, his answers are roundabout, like those of a politician.
I ask the don whether he misses Bombay.
“There is no other city like it in the whole world. I miss my people, my land; that air, that sky; those known faces, those relatives.” I sense he is straining to convey, in Urdu, his great longing in some poetic form. “It is like a dish which, once tasted, is never forgotten. I miss my whole family, but apart from that I was born there. A man never forgets where he was born. A man never forgets his childhood, his lanes, his neighborhood. A man loves this very much. To go to picnics during school . . . to see films . . . to go out with friends . . . My story is this,” he says, in the manner of an actor explaining himself in a movie scene. “I read up to SSC”—eleventh standard—“and I wanted to read more. My intention was to join the military or be an officer. You know how, in school, people write on the topic ‘What I Want to Be’? I had a vision of becoming a military officer, and I wrote a composition on it. I wanted to die for my country. The feeling a man has for his country—some people think about it, some people do it. I had a desire to do it, but the circumstances and conditions took such a turn that I am a lieutenant in the D-Company.” He knows who to blame for his inability to serve his country. “The police people have a hand in my life being spoiled. Then I got involved in this line and the result is in front of you.”
I ask him how he controls such a huge operation from so far away. I do not say “from Karachi”; his boys have already said it to me a dozen times today.
“Don’t write the name of this country,” he commands. “The planning and the activities are known to the boys on down, and they do the work according to their way. There is a communications link.” Shakeel spends a lot of time on the phone. He expresses amazement at the Internet. “You press a button and the whole of the news is in front of you!” The don spends a couple of hours every day on the Internet, scanning the Bombay newspapers: checking the financial pages, seeing who has made a killing in the market. “The biggest source of information worldwide is the electronic media. The second is political magazines, which people like you put out.” Then there is his intelligence network. “I have many contacts downstairs, who tell me what is going on all over India. The news that you don’t get I get before you.” The don is also a bibliophile; he is particularly partial to spy novels. He has liked reading since he was a boy. “I can read a novel in half or three-fourths of an hour.”
I ask him why he is at war with Chotta Rajan. Is it, as Rajan says, because of the blasts?
“Listen closely,” the don commands. “In all Bombay it is known that Chotta Rajan has not split apart because of the bomb blasts. One year before the blasts, from 1991 to ’92, he got a fault in his heart and became a traitor. Three boys of his—Diwakar Chudi, Amar, Sanjay Raggad, his boys—we killed all three for being traitors to the company. The fourth was Chotta Rajan. Twelve to fifteen years Dawood raised him like a little boy. Instead of killing him, he forgave him. He had raised him like a child, and Rajan touched his feet and wept a lot, so he forgave him. He didn’t do anything for the Company. After the bomb blasts, six months later, he left Dubai. He had to tell people why he broke away, so he told people it was because of the bomb blasts. He knew what the reality of the blasts was and who did it.”
“So who did it?” I ask.
“You are not to talk about it now,” the don suggests.
It is not true, Shakeel claims, that the people of the Muslim community go into the D-Company, and the people of the Hindu community go to Chotta Rajan or Gawli. “Many Hindu boys are with us,” he says, putting the ratio as high as fifty—fifty. For Hindu festivals, the Hindu members of his company are given money. “Our motto,” he declares, “is insaaniyat”—humanity.
I ask him his opinion of the police. It is not vituperative, as I have found among the shooters. “Particular officers are tied to particular gangs, but not the whole department. Some officers are good, even today. All the IPS officers—those are neutral and do good work.” He allows that the police have to do their work, even if it involves killing his men. “Encounters should happen to those who pose a danger to the public, who harass the public.” But they should have ethics. “They should also want that an innocent not die at their hands, because he is also someone’s child, someone’s breadwinner.” The police have been killing innocents of late. “In some departments there are people who do things according to religion. They’ve been killing Muslim boys for the last four months, saying this boy belongs to the D-Company. Seventy-five percent of those boys aren’t mine, and I don’t know them.” This is a fair estimate, according to what I’ve seen in Bombay. “The police bring them in and kill them, saying this man is of the D-Company, or with Chotta Shakeel.” Then he adds, “Which is one and
the same thing.” The afterthought is significant. People have been questioning this assumption. But he is saying it confidently. Shakeel is not going to break with the D-Company, he is going to inherit it.
Since he is residing in enemy country, I ask him what he feels about the recent war in Kashmir.
“Suketubhai, war is a very bad thing these days. Because people’s lives are lost, the economy gets ruined. The whole nation goes back a hundred years. Who benefited after the war? So many weapons and missiles are being made, millions of dollars. These same monies, if they are spent on the poor, then every country, not just Hindustan, would be very happy.” He avers that, contrary to his reputation, he loves India and wants to die for it. “There is no doubt about this. The country in which a man is born, a man does not become a traitor to that land. A man can only give his life for his country. That is a very big medal for him. That is a very big respect. When a man wants to join the military, he doesn’t want to go there to play cricket or exercise; he wants to martyr himself.”
The mastermind of the largest criminal syndicate in the subcontinent now comes out with a line from JFK. “My intention is, What can I do for my country? Not, What has the country done for me?” Then he adds, “Think about that.”
He is in favor of power being transferred to the younger generation, “who have a plan for the future.” The politicians of today, he says, “have become so old that their only future is death, whether in a year or two or five.” He speaks of them with special venom, enumerating the assorted scams and scandals they are involved in: a leather scam, a fodder scam. There is a difference between criminals and politicians, whom he compares using the standard Bombay metaphor of the movies. “The difference is that all the criminals do their work on the screen, which people can see. Politicians work behind the screen, which the public can’t see. It is the same, whether you work from behind or in front of the screen. Politicians are bigger criminals than us. We fight among ourselves, but these people are ruining the whole world.” It is clear which party he favors in Bombay. “Today the Shiv Sena have ruined Maharashtra. Good government has been done in the Congress rule.”
I ask him if he is satisfied with the way his own life has turned out.
“A human being is incomplete. All his life, something or the other is after him. Whether a man does good work or bad, he is never satisfied with
himself. What I wanted to do—become a military officer, that dream I had—was crushed from the beginning. Now what dream should I see, what wish should I have for the future?” he asks me. He reverts back to the language of Bollywood. “The way life goes, the
THE END
, only Allah knows.”
Does he have any regrets?
“A man who does bad things can never think them good. I think that something went wrong, or I did something wrong.”
I ask him how, as a man who professes to be a good Muslim, he reconciles being religious with being a murderer.
“Enmity and religion have nothing to do with each other. Both of them have their place in life. Some steps are taken for the sake of the religion. Not just mine; you do it too.” The gangwar will never end. “Enemies die, but not the enmity. An enemy dies, and another is born.” Then he defends himself: “My record is that I have never done anything to any innocent man. I don’t kill anyone for extortion.” He claims, further: “I don’t ask for extortion money. I have so many businesses that I have no need.” Since the whole work of extortion is done over the phone, he points out, there are many people who extort in his name. Recently, two Marwaris had been killed under his name. When the police need to close their files, they attribute all kinds of murders to him, which he has had nothing to do with. “It is not a good thing that murders happen for extortion,” the don opines.
Still, he seems to have a heavy sense of his involvement in “wrong work.” “What is wrong is wrong. A sin is a sin.” The punishment would come after death. But “a man should be given the chance to improve. If even what he hasn’t done is stuck on him, then a man can’t return. His life becomes”—and he uses the English phrase—“one-way traffic.”
My card runs out and the line is cut. After a minute Shoaib’s phone rings and first an assistant gets on, then Shakeel. I can hear a blast of car horns in the background; perhaps he is in traffic, or the noise is coming in through an open window. He explains again that he doesn’t have that much time. “But I thought, since you came from America . . .” He is reminding me again of the courtesy he is doing me. “Our true faces should come in front of the public. People have spoilt our faces.” But this is true in every field: “People who love you and people who hate you.” At the end, he asks me, “Now you tell me, what did you think of me?” It is a strange question. Is he anxious about my opinion, anxious to be liked, or is he trying to suss
out what I will be writing about him, so it can be stopped in time? As I am talking to their boss, the boys are leaning over my computer, watching what I am typing. I have to tread carefully.
“You speak like a poet,” I reply, knowing my countrymen.
The don is pleased by this response. He offers me a gift. “Any kind of work that you need from me, at any time, you call me. Leave your phone numbers with these people or contact me through them.” It is an immense favor, offered to me by someone who has absolute power to grant it. I guess it is his way of keeping journalists happy. The government might give a house; companies would provide a junket; the mob boss throws in a death to my enemies. He is offering me something from the Company store. I thank him and tell him I have no such need at the present moment.