Authors: Suketu Mehta
As we are talking, Sanjay’s mobile phone rings and he lies to someone,
probably a director trying to find out why he isn’t on the set. “I’m in Alibag,” he says. He makes another call, speaks in a low tender voice to someone else.
He was always extremely protective of the women in the family, Dayanita told me. When she would stay at the Dutts’ house in Bombay, on the nights she was out late in the city she would come home to find Sanjay waiting up, no matter what hour of the night it was. He would look at his watch, look at her, and then go off to his room without saying a word.
He took this concept of protection to extreme lengths. “I love guns,” the star declares. During the riots, he became possessed by the idea that his family was in danger. He had been fearing for their lives: that the Hindus were out to get the Dutts during the riots because of his Muslim mother and his father’s public stance against the Sena. So, according to Ajay Lal, he called Anees, the brother of Dawood Ibrahim, and Abu Salem and asked them to send down some “guitars,” AK-56s. Ajay told me what they extracted from Sanjay in return for the guitars. “The guys who did the blasts brought a Maruti laden with AK-56s and grenades in a special hidden cavity from Pakistan to Bombay. They needed a place to open the cavity—they couldn’t just do it on the roadside—so the natural place was Sanju’s garage. Sanju, like a lot of other people, had a fascination with the underworld.” The cop did not think well of the star.
Sanjay was at the peak of his career in 1993, when the blasts occurred. His film
Khalnayak
(Villain) was that year’s highest-grossing film. He played an assassin hired by the underworld.
AN AMAZING PORTRAIT OF A SENSITIVE VILLAIN
, the posters announced. He was shooting in Mauritius when Ajay detected the blasts case and started arresting the conspirators. The guns were taken from Sanjay’s house by his friends and destroyed in a foundry. In the foundry, the police found a spring and a rod belonging to one of the rifles, on the basis of which he was arrested.
Sanjay blames his troubles on Sharad Pawar, the powerful leader of the Nationalist Congress Party, one of whose main rivals is Sanjay’s extraordinarily popular father, Sunil Dutt. I tell him about my meeting with a Muslim government clerk in Jogeshwari, who, when I asked him what party he votes for, had said, “Whatever party Sunil Dutt is in.”
Pawar had told his father that he could get Sanjay released in fifteen days if he turned approver in the case. “If I had turned approver that
would mean admitting that I was part of the conspiracy. How would that look? How would it reflect on my family?”
His father told him to come back from Mauritius. Pawar had assured Sunil Dutt that his son would be picked up for half an hour and then released. But when Sanjay came down the escalator from the arrival gate, he saw two hundred commandos waiting for him with drawn guns. Among them was Ajay Lal, who whisked Sanjay away and interrogated him. Then he was put in the Arthur Road jail. In the middle of his first night there, men came into his cell. They were prisoners, and they belonged to the Ashwin Naik gang. The men took Sanjay to their leader, an engineer, educated in London, who had to come back home to join his brother the gang lord. (Vinod’s gangster film
Parinda
was based on the relationship of these brothers.) The don asked him how he was faring. Sanjay said he missed his father. So the don got out his cell phone and gave it to Sanjay. His father was astonished to receive a call from his jailed son at 11 p.m.
Shortly after he was put in prison, his father came to visit him. “Now I can do nothing for you,” he admitted to his only son, and went away. “I cried and cried,” Sanjay recalls. He could not be released on bail; the government wouldn’t grant it. The first judge, Patel, had become fixated on getting Sanjay. According to Sanjay, the trouble began when his lawyer asked the judge to recuse himself. The judge rejected the petition and turned on Sanjay with new hatred.
In the jail he was removed from the general population. “They said they had information that I would be killed. For my safety they put me in solitary confinement, which was a fucking joke.” For three months he hardly saw daylight. It was an eight-by-eight-foot room with a toilet in it, in which the star had to bathe, shit, and brush his teeth. His family sent food to him from home, but it was eaten by other convicts before it got to him, and he had to eat the barely edible jail food. The solitude could drive a man out of his mind.
Sanjay made friends with the natural world. Through the tiny air vent, four sparrows would come into his cell every evening, and Sanjay would put his massive hand out with crumbs in it. He was starved for touch, and they would let him touch them, so he would caress the little birds. He made friends with the ants, too, that came out of the sewage pipe. “Amazing things, these ants. There is some kind of language between them. If one is
going the wrong way, another ant will tell him.” He would lie flat on the floor and watch them for hours on end, as they struggled with their crumbs of food, carrying them over the sewer line. “If the crumbs were too big for them, I would hold the crumb and lift it over the sewer line. It was like a helicopter ride for them.” There were no clocks, of course, in the cell, but Sanjay knew the time because of a rat, an enormous bandicoot. “I named him General Saab because in the night he used to enter the cell exactly at twelve, and at one o’clock he used to leave. He was like a general, walking around the barracks.”
But the attractions of the vermin paled. He hadn’t seen his family in three months. One day he went berserk and banged his head against the bars till it bled. His head required ten stitches. Frightened, the jail authorities removed him and put him in another cell with twenty-one hard-core terrorists from Punjab, who looked after him very well. “They were highly emotional, lovable Sardars.” They cooked for him. They took stones, made a hearth, took the jail food, and transformed it into something else altogether, tastier, more nutritious.
Gunmen of all the gangs mixed freely in the jail. Sanjay met a lot of shooters, studied how the recruiting was done, starting from the children’s barracks, where the sharp boys were picked up, their bail arranged, their families taken care of. After he was released, he shared this knowledge with directors of gangster movies, who made films based on the characters he’d met. And his own ability to play gangsters was unsurpassed in the industry. Jail was good for his acting skills. “People say I’ve matured and there’s a lot of pain in my eyes.”
But none of the real shooters looks remotely like Sanjay. I remark to him that the shooters I’ve met tend to be small and skinny and he nods. He has noted the same thing. “Their eyes are absolutely cold.” He has noticed another quality of the gangsters and terrorists. “People who are connected with crime are very godfearing. They used to pray a lot, they used to hate the fucking government.” Once he became involved with crime, he followed suit. In jail, he prayed for four hours a day.
What was the worst thing about jail? I ask him.
“It was, Why have you done this to me? Why have you put me in jail? I saw shooters who have killed thirty people come and go in front of me. I started thinking, I’ll fucking kill people when I get out. I was two hundred
pounds of muscle weight when I went into jail. In three months, I lost seventy-five pounds.” And he was threatened with torture. “They showed me the third degree to break me.”
So Sanjay Dutt is an angry man. “They talk about this country being the biggest democracy. It’s a fucking piece of shit,” says the man who will play a patriotic Muslim cop saving India in our movie. The star has a historical analysis of what’s wrong. “When the British left India, they left behind the law and they left behind all that shit. Ambedkar changed the constitution of the country, but he didn’t change the law. For the British, all those freedom fighters—Tilak, et cetera—were terrorists. When the constitution and the law don’t match, you’re talking about deep shit out here.”
On the wall of Sanjay’s study is a caricature of him, lifting weights and smoking a cigarette at the same time. The cartoonist is Raj Thackeray, the Saheb’s nephew. The only politician about whom he is careful not to say a negative word is Bal Thackeray, leader of the political party that started the riots that made him so fearful he asked for guns to protect his family from them. Because Bal Thackeray is the same man who, having demonstrated to all Bombay that he could put the Muslims in their place, also demonstrated his power, his magnanimity, and his love of the film industry by ordering his government to furnish bail for Sanjay Dutt, son of the Muslim Nargis Dutt.
Mahesh Bhatt is clear about what he feels for Sanjay: “He’s a criminal. He has the heart of a criminal.” It hasn’t stopped Mahesh from having just released a movie starring Sanjay. In 2000, Sanjay is on his third comeback in films, with
Vastav
and
Mission Kashmir.
Sanjay’s encounters with the underworld convinced him that they were superior to people in the film world. “They are honest about what they do. They don’t hide what they do. Film line is a piece of crap, bhenchod. Here it is how to fuck each other. If he’s coming up, send people to the movie theater to boo him, write bad things about him in the press.” His hatred for the family business is almost a physical object on the table between us.
I ask him what he would like to do if he were free of the case. He responds that he wants to make $3 million and then move to New York and live off the interest. He maintains a small apartment opposite Macy’s in Manhattan. He wants to open a steakhouse, and he knows all the famous ones: Peter Luger’s in Williamsburg, Morton’s of Chicago, Sparks’ on 43rd
Street. In any case, he wants to get out of Bombay. “I used to love this place. It’s fucking too dangerous now.” His daughter by his first wife goes to public school in Bayside. He is happy for her. “Education is fun for them. I don’t see that here. Here you’re studying some shit: When did Aurangzeb invade India? Who the fuck cares?”
He asks me to stay for lunch. For Sanjay it consists solely of sautéed spinach, which he eats without rice or bread, in big spoonfuls. I am surprised, after all his talk about steakhouses. He explains that his high-protein diet caused kidney problems, so he now has to eat a mostly vegetarian diet. Sanjay’s personal trainer has just had a heart attack from the overuse of anabolic steroids and had to retreat, back to Venice Beach. Sanjay eats seven small meals a day, of stuff liked the boiled spinach.
A
FEW DAYS LATER
, on a Monday, I go to the TADA court again with Sanjay. This time there is to be an actual hearing of the blasts case. We pick up a man named Hanif Kadawala, not too far from my office.
“Are you also one of the accused?” I ask him.
“We are all innocent,” declares Sanjay.
Hanif, a small-time film producer and restaurateur, is one of the people alleged to have given Sanjay an AK-56 rifle after the riots. I did not know it then, but I was sitting with a man in the last months of his life. In February 2001, he was shot dead by the Rajan gang very near where we picked him up. Chotta Rajan had decided to take upon himself the determination of Hanif’s guilt or innocence. By that year, the gang lord or the police had killed 7 of the 136 accused in the case.
Sanjay spends the car ride juggling shooting schedules. He touches his eyes and lips and prays on sight of each temple en route.
I spend most of the morning trying in vain to get into the TADA court. While I wait, a succession of people come and go through the police post outside the jail: lawyers; the accused out on bail, come for their weekly registration; a mother and her two young children, a boy and a girl dressed in their Friday best, come to see the father inside; a stunningly beautiful young woman in a black burka, come to give comfort to her man in jail.
Finally, in the afternoon, I get an audience with Judge Kode, because, he explains, “It is my duty to help a young man.” He then embarks on a soliloquy about, among other things, my dharma as a writer, the nature of
the city of Bombay, and the role of the judiciary. All the while he talks, he chews pan; there is a largish lump inside his left cheek, like the tumor it foreshadows. The judge tells me I must give a good impression of my country to the foreigners. “They think we are primitives.” He wants me to show them that India has the greatest judicial system in the world. He has personally recorded 8,000 pages of evidence, the total number of pages runs to 13,000. “I have not even taken a single day’s leave. Not one day casual leave, not one day—by the grace of God—sick leave.” Kode has twenty-three men guarding him. He met Ajay and asked for fifteen more.
Judge Kode’s court commences. Sanjay tells me, “It’s like a family.” And sure enough, the police and the court officers are chatting familiarly with the accused, asking after their families. Once we are inside the courtroom, Sanjay directs me to the front. “You sit here.” He smiles, turning to the rear. “We are the accused.”
The judge enters and the roll call is read, 124 names in all. “Hanif Kadawala!” and he stands up. “Salim Durrani! Yakub Memon!” I look back and there is a ragged army of hardened toughs sitting on rows of wooden benches, along with about five women sitting to the side. “Sanjay Dutt!” and the movie star half stands, and then sits back down, just one of the bomb-blasts suspects.
The judge takes his place. Behind him are wood-paneled walls without the usual picture of the Father of the Nation. Various administrative matters are dealt with, various petitions put forward by the lawyers. They want their clients to be exempted from court appearances because they are being hunted and killed by the Chotta Rajan gang. Nobody is using the mikes provided. I am seated right up front, one row behind the lawyers and directly in front of the judge, but I can’t make out what’s being said. The accused behind me cannot hear a single word. There is a constant murmur among them as they discuss the World Cup and their various careers in crime. An officer of the court periodically gestures toward them: “Shhhh! Shhhhhh!” And the hubbub quiets for a moment, then rises up again to its former volume. The fans overhead beat the air coming in through the open windows, through which I can see a palm tree and blue skies. It is overall a pleasant, restful atmosphere, and the man next to me, carrying a cell phone in defiance of the strict orders posted in the court, nods off. When he wakes up, he slyly reads a newspaper. I look at the clock on the wall, willing it to move faster, thinking of my lunch and of women, exactly as I did in school
during a slow period. The fans, the constant murmur of the backbenchers, the drone of the lawyers and the judge: collectively they bring back those dead afternoons in class. The court is adjourning for summer vacation for two weeks. For the TADA boys, it is the last day of school and there is a holiday mood. With this difference: When it comes time to graduate, a decade hence, the ones who don’t do well will be hanged.