Mumbai Noir (2 page)

The provincialism dictating who one’s neighbors may or may not be doesn’t, thankfully, extend to Mumbai’s commercial life. When it comes to making money, the city has been by and large blind to caste, class, or creed, exalting productivity and wealth-generation above all else. History has shown that in its unabashed pursuit of profit, Mumbai can also be deaf to considerations of ethics and morality.

Through the early half of the nineteenth century, a large number of local Parsi, Marwari, Gujarati Bania, and Konkani Muslim businessmen were involved in the opium trade, shipping Indian-grown opium out of Bombay to China, in direct competition with the British East India Company, which exported the product out of Calcutta. While millions of Chinese sunk into the despondency of addiction, Bombay’s capitalist classes grew staggeringly rich. The success of the opium trade, followed by the cotton boom in the 1860s, sparked the ascension of Bombay from a barely profitable port town to a roaring trade center. Much of the city’s infrastructural development, including its lasting social and educational institutions, was paid for with the dirty money of these local businessmen. It is a historical ethical conflict that the city has never quite faced up to.

Over the centuries, crime has remained at the service of commerce in a city that was cravenly capitalist long before the rest of the nation followed suit. If a demand exists— even for something as wishful as the “elixir of youth”—you can bet some enterprising chap in Mumbai will move heaven and earth to fulfill it. Even if it means having to strip human corpses of their testes, as the elixir-peddling hakim does quite profitably in Kalpish Ratna’s time-warping tale. In Sonia Faleiro’s unsettling glimpse into the city’s transgender subculture, death isn’t even a prerequisite: the dai earns her keep by relieving sentient (and willing) men of their jewels.

Paisa pheyko, tamasha dekho. Throw the cash, watch the dance. These words from an erstwhile Hindi film song have become the de facto motto of Mumbai. Cash can get things moving in a rusty bureaucracy. Cash can help you get away with murder. Sometimes a little cash can help you save big money.

In Mumbai’s dance bars, whole wads of cash must be thrown to get the women moving. Outlawed in 2005, these dens of misogyny and exploitation still manage to scrape through under the euphemistic moniker of “orchestra bars,” where the concept remains unchanged: tantalizingly dressed women dance or sing in front of a lusty male audience. No self-respecting tome on Mumbai would be complete without a riff on this seedy city institution. Avtar Singh’s story fulfills
Mumbai Noir
’s dance-bar quota. To his credit, Singh infuses genuine romance into an overly romanticized setting.

Like its dance bars, Mumbai too has been heaped with exaggerated depictions in recent decades. The city’s chroniclers—its novelists, essayists, poets, journalists, and filmmakers—often seem overawed by the idea of Mumbai, rendering its quotidian realities in brushstrokes of grandiose narratives. What inoculates the stories in this collection from the hyperbole of “maximum city”—that much-abused term coined by the astute Suketu Mehta to describe Mumbai—are the restraints set by the noir genre, which stipulates, among other things, an unflinching gaze at the underbelly, without recourse to sentimentality or forced denouements. (But not without the courtesy of a glossary of Indianisms, to be found at the back of the book.) When viewed from a plane (or hotair balloon), any metropolis might strike one as jaw-dropping. For a majority of Mumbai’s residents, however, the city’s overcrowded public transportation and decaying infrastructure fail to provide even the minimum of relief.

Unending traffic. Sparse greenery. Corrupt governance. Mumbai always seems on the verge of a massive breakdown. What keeps the city somewhat peaceful and functioning is the very thing that makes it overwhelming: the population density, which is one of the highest in the world. Mumbai’s ever-present multitudes serve as eyes on the streets, pitching in during moments of crises, and at other times inhibiting acts of random violence. This has helped the city earn its reputation of being one of India’s safest urban centers.

While Mumbai’s civil society is remarkably accommodating to all varieties of lifestyles and individual preferences, perhaps the biggest threat to the city’s famed cosmopolitanism comes from its twin banes: Mumbai’s ultranationalist groups and its increasingly sectarian police force.

Bombay was officially renamed Mumbai in 1995 when an alliance of these ultranationalist groups controlled the state government. The renaming was meant as a symbolic undoing of the country’s colonial past. Ironically, other legacies of the British colonial rule were left untouched, such as Mumbai’s suburban rail system, its water and sewage infrastructure, as well as its enduring colonial-era architectural landmarks.

In December 1992 and January 1993, during the Hindu-Muslim riots that swept through Mumbai following the demolition of the Babri Masjid, the city’s police force, possibly for the first time in its history of serving the city, abandoned neutrality and sided with the Hindus, turning what would have been a routine communal skirmish into a catastrophic minipogrom. For the citizens of the city, and for its minorities in particular, the communalization of the police was the start of Mumbai’s darkest chapter. Devashish Makhija provides a heartrending depiction of cynical police officers let loose on Mumbai’s religious minorities. In this story, the international war on terror is echoed in Mumbai, turning every Muslim man into a suspect following a bomb blast. Riaz Mulla takes a converse approach, delineating how an ordinary businessman can turn into a bomb-planting extremist. Mulla looks unflinchingly at how events may have unfolded leading to Mumbai’s first terrorist attack.

In March 1993, in a misguided attempt to settle the score after the Babri Masjid riots, Mumbai’s Muslim-dominated underworld unleashed a series of thirteen bomb blasts throughout the city. The mastermind of these blasts, Dawood Ibrahim, was a Mumbai-born gangster operating out of the Middle East. Two hundred and fifty people lost their lives in the explosions and hundreds more were injured. (Those interested in understanding the often mundane genesis of headline-making terror attacks may look up Anurag Kashyap’s award-winning film
Black Friday,
based on S. Hussain Zaidi’s book
Black Friday: The True Story of the Bombay Bomb Blasts
.)

Since 1993, there have been no further communal riots in the city. Instead, in a kind of outsourcing of violence, Mumbai has been targeted by international terrorists no less than seven times. Each attack jars the city out of its intense commercedriven routines. But life resumes normalcy within hours, once the corpses and debris have been cleared out and the injured deposited in hospitals. Social commentators accuse Mumbai of a savage sort of indifference. Absolutely nothing seems to affect the city. Or maybe that’s a wrong way of looking at things. Maybe Mumbai isn’t just one city, but an organic conglomerate of innumerable subcities, each thrumming to its own vibe. A tragedy in one part of Mumbai barely registers elsewhere. People fall off moving trains, bombs erupt in busy bazaars, lives are made and broken in the city’s daily flux, and things go on as usual.

Altaf Tyrewala
Mumbai, India
December 2011

PART I

B
OMB-AY

JUSTICE

BY
R
IAZ
M
ULLA
Mahim Durgah

T
he court will now pronounce its verdict,” the judge remarked plainly, as if he was going to read out the evening news.

Asghar Khan stood up in the witness box with the anticipation of a man in that twilight zone of hope when the decision has been made but not yet announced.

“The defendant has been accused of planting a bomb in the crowded Zaveri Bazaar area which killed three people and injured many.”

Asghar Khan wondered whether it was necessary to revisit the circumstances; does a doctor open the incision to check if the surgery has healed?

“The court has been convinced that there was no motive behind this dastardly act but to kill innocent people and create terror.”

The night came alive for Asghar and even today it seemed as unreal as it had seven years ago. He had watched terrorized from his hideout on the terrace as the distant sounds grew louder and the street was suddenly filled with a multitude of swords, tridents, and flames. The group first torched his scooter and in the light of the fire he could see them—known faces made grotesque by the flames. He had bought the scooter secondhand for twelve thousand rupees, the first vehicle of his life. As the tires and seat went up in flames, the mob broke open the shutter of his small travel agency office, Haafiz Tours and Travels. An enterprising insurance agent had once told him to get everything insured; but how does one insure against the betrayal of friends? They unplugged the phone and flung it to the ground and started to ransack his cupboards, throwing everything they could lay their hands on into a huge pile in the middle—passports and airline tickets and application papers—and he realized they were not just going to burn his office but also the small business he had successfully managed to set up. None of his clients at his budding Haj and Umrah travel agency would be able to perform pilgrimage that year; some, like his parents, probably never.

“The court finds Asghar guilty of willful murder and damage to public property.”

The passports, due to their glazed cardboard, were the last to catch fire and burned the longest. That night he wasn’t worried about the scooter or his business; one doesn’t worry about the future when the present itself is under threat. He was worried for his life and Salma’s and their first child still in her womb. She had tried to scream when they poured kerosene on the scooter. She had saved passionately for it and like every woman she was not good at taking losses. He had clasped her mouth firmly and tiny droplets of blood appeared on his palms where she bit him. She had probably realized that the present is of little significance if there is no future to look forward to.

“The court understands that Asghar suffered losses to his business and property in the riots preceding this incident.”

How does one understand something one has never experienced? Even he had not understood when they first came asking for money to fight for the homeless Palestinians. After that night, when he had lost everything, they became his new friends, the only people to lend him money to buy food and treat his wife. He had asked for tickets to go back to his village in far away Uttar Pradesh, where his brothers set up grocery tents in open markets, moving to a different village each day—Dariyapur on Mondays and Thursdays, Rahimgunj on Tuesdays and Fridays, Bidwai on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and their own village on Sundays. He had tired of setting up and closing down a business each day in a new place and had come to Mumbai in search of stability. What he had never thought of was what happens when the thing that brought this stability is suddenly taken away. It was not as easy as setting up a new tent in a new village the next day and he felt a sudden longing to return to that varying yet familiar routine. His new friends, though, refused him that getaway; he had business to settle in the city before he could leave.

“But if every aggrieved person starts to take the law in his hands there would be anarchy. It is the duty of the state to provide justice.”

What did the state mean by justice? Having to prove that the property which was burned belonged to him when all the relevant papers were destroyed along with the property? This was necessary to prevent fraudsters from taking advantage of the state’s grant, the presiding officer had said, but Asghar couldn’t decide which was a greater denial of justice: the state being cheated by a few opportunists, or the rightful being denied what was due to them. He had refrained from following the path of retribution his new sympathizers were advocating. Though he had lost all means of livelihood, the future still bode a small ray of hope: his unborn child.

“The court would like to take a strong stance in this case so that this particular judgment acts as a deterrent to all such acts in the future.”

It was the birth of his son that marked the end of the future for Asghar. He was born blind and Asghar was convinced it was due to the trauma of that night. He would hold his baby, looking intently at that innocent face, knowing the child would never see him, never see anything. He decided to put a black ribbon on his own eyes for a day to feel what it meant for his son, but he couldn’t keep it on for more than an hour. Salma felt it would not be as bad for their son because he had never known what sight was, but Asghar couldn’t decide which was a greater loss: of having found something and lost it, or never knowing what one had lost. Six months later when their son began crawling, Asghar and Salma realized the enormity of raising a blind child. There was little Asghar could do for his son, and that helplessness was far greater than his helplessness that night when they had burned down his office. There was no morning here, no returning to normalcy. He was a fool to believe that it was all over. Sometimes when he watched his son he could see them standing outside his door laughing, mocking his naïveté.

Justice cannot be the sole purview of a few, his new friends had told him, and now he realized they were right. Who would give justice to his son? He would have to do it himself. He met them the next day and they told him the plan. All he had to do was park a scooter in the Zaveri Bazaar area during the busy morning hours. It was ironic, he felt, that a scooter was going to be the vehicle to get back at them.

“In order to provide justice to the innocent families who lost their beloved ones in this tragic incident, and to deter young people from taking the law in their hands, the court wishes to pronounce the strictest punishment in this case. Under section 302 of the Indian Penal Code, the court pronounces capital punishment for Asghar Khan; to be hanged until death.”