Immortals (11 page)

Chapter 15

The Background Check

Mumbai, India

13 May, 2012

Inspectors Tukaram Mastan and Arjun Rane were sitting in the office of Superintendent of Police Ajith Swaminathan.

Ajith was thirty-nine and had spent the last nine years in Mumbai. He knew, by now, how the city played and had seen all the sides of its dice. Right now, the shit of Rashique
Bhai’s
death was threatening to upset many political apple carts and Ajith had been given the task of getting to the bottom of the mystery of Rashique’s death.

The state home minister had called up the Commissioner of Police and had made it clear that he would not have other gangs gobbling up Rashique’s business. The minister wanted a clean succession in Rashique’s gang and wanted status quo in the underworld.

The Commissioner had started parleys with the representatives of the various gangs and most of them had come round, to accept Munna as the successor of Rashique’s business under the guidance of
Baba
. He had spoken to
Baba
and he had agreed, contingent on being allowed to avenge
Bhai’s
murder. The details were still murky for the police as no one had made it alive out of the carnage, save for some slinky whore of a starlet, who had been there pimping herself to Rashique. The Commissioner could not risk the gang going for the revenge themselves as they did not have a fucking clue and these motherfuckers would create fucking mayhem if they were allowed to do shit like that on their own. Therefore, he had convinced
Baba
that the police would do their bidding and go after the gang’s revenge. The deal was sweet to Hazari
Baba
too, as it would establish once and for all that the
Bhai’s
gang still cut favour with the establishment even after
Bhai’s
death, at the same time achieving
Bhai’s
revenge. He could still take steps on his own, his promise to police notwithstanding.

The Commissioner had called Ajith for a meeting that evening at the Racecourse Club, of which the Commissioner was a lifetime member. He had told him what he wanted, over a cup of tea. He knew Ajith to be a reasonably honest cop who had a sane head on his shoulders and was capable of doing a quiet and efficient job.

Ajith had asked him just a couple of questions.

‘Who is it that is losing so much sleep over Rashique’s death, and why?’

The Commissioner could not suppress his smile at the question. The answer could help Ajith secure a future for himself in the cutthroat politics of this city.

‘Well, walk with me.’ The Commissioner got up and Ajith followed him.

He stopped in front of a large map of the state of Maharashtra in the garden and pointed to it.

‘Where is Mehkar on this map?’

Ajith had not heard of the name before and his face had a blank look for an answer.

The Commissioner pointed his finger to a tiny, italicised name between Mumbai and Nagpur.

‘It is a cluster of twenty villages in the middle of the Sahyadri hills right on a straight line between Mumbai and Nagpur.’

Ajith still had a blank look about him.

‘How’s your geometry, Ajith?’

‘Good, Sir. Mathematics was always my strong point in school.’

‘Good. I assume then that you know the importance of straight lines. You know, it takes at least ten hours for a road journey between Mumbai and Nagpur because the road is not a straight line,’ the Commissioner smiled as he signalled Ajith to walk back to the table.

‘And just so that you know, I know that a road will be there within ten years. You may ask me why.’

Ajith was nodding his head by now. He was beginning to grasp the import of the sinuous path this discussion had taken.

The Commissioner continued:

‘The Home Minister and seven other ministers of the government own a total of seven thousand acres of land in and around Mehkar. And I am doubly sure that there should be a road there as I also know that another five thousand acres of land belong to the top six opposition leaders of the state.’

Ajith laughed.

He cocked his head and almost asked the Commissioner, how many acres of land did
he
own in Mehkar, but thought better of it at the last moment.

The Commissioner laughed aloud as he sensed the question that Ajith had almost asked.

After the laughter died down, the Commissioner went on:

‘As the ministers could not acquire land on their own, they took help and that is where Rashique
Bhai
came in, facilitating purchases and holdings for the ministers.’

Ajith had dinner at the club before returning home. He then headed straight to his computer, Googled Mehkar, and drew up his plans right away. The day had been very fruitful. He had acquired both knowledge and opportunity and these were the biggest assets to build upon.

Ajith smirked a bit when Inspector Arjun asked him the same question that he had asked the Commissioner.

He shrugged his shoulders and said, chuckling:

‘I don’t know much, but the Commissioner said it had something to do with keeping things in a straight line.’

Arjun nodded earnestly.

The details of
Bhai’s
murders were at best sketchy. Ten armed guards defended
Bhai
and yet all of them had been systematically butchered before
Bhai
was shot as he sat on his toilet seat. The only survivor was a petty actress who was found, semi-conscious and semi-clad, in
Bhai’s
bedroom.

She remembered hearing a flurry of gunshots before a young boy barged into the room, looked her in the eye, spared her life, and shot
Bhai
in the bathroom. The boy and
Bhai
had conversed before he had killed
Bhai
, but she had not caught any of the words.

‘Young boy, my foot!’ thought Ajith.

She was presently recovering from shock in a hospital and would soon be going through volumes of stock photographs with the Mumbai police to try to identify the ‘young boy’.

The ‘young boy’ was identified the following day.

There was a photo captured, based on a video grab from a shooting at Malhad a year ago. Based on the video evidence, police had arrested three suspected gang-shooters but they were let off due to lack of any corroborative evidence after the court ruled the video evidence as inadmissible as it was too sketchy and grainy. However, the photographs had gone on the police record and the two-bit actress could identify the killer.

The actress had been reluctant initially, but had become very co-operative after the police had threatened her with a case of prostitution and had threatened to expose her activities to the public. She had turned helpful and had readily agreed to identify the culprit and help the police.

Ajith suspected that she had also received instructions to be helpful from both the gang as well as from the higher-ups in political circles. An ambitious pretty young thing could have tremendous reach in the ‘Mumbai muddle’.

The muddle was a milder word to describe the shit there. Yesterday’s mafia members were today’s politicians, and they never stopped being either thereafter. They had a finger in every deal in the city and practically owned or had a stake in everything that churned out money. They were real estate barons, irrigation contractors, hoteliers, developers… the list was endless. You name it and they were there. Their unceasing enterprise for self-aggrandisement was amazing. If only these incredibly smart people actually did what they were supposed to be doing, it would have made his job much easier. Alas, that was not to be and he had to keep on at his duty. His duty was to guard this pot of shit and prevent it from boiling over and scorching the common denizens of the city. Well, not scorch them too much, anyway.

Coming back to the pretty young thing – she was an emerging star in Bollywood without any movie-family connections, and it took a lot of ‘socialising’ amongst the biggies to secure a foothold in the industry. An actress who was intent on making it big would have to know intimately some big guys from the big production houses, some from the political scene, and definitely some from the underworld. That was the troika that ran the Mumbai filmdom and Ajith would not be surprised at the knowledge and intelligence that these industrious females could gather.

The killer identified by the actress turned out to be one Jai, a shooter in the Rashique gang. There was no last name and this Jai had been associated with the Rashique gang for the last couple of years. The bastard was only seventeen years of age and had become a dreaded gangland shooter. There were reports of several shootings attributed to his name: two builders, a film-music record producer, an MLA, and a municipal councillor amongst them. There was no proof to indict him and he would definitely have been on an ‘encounter’ list, had it not been for the patronage of the ruling party for the Rashique gang.

The preliminary investigation on the scene confirmed that the owner of a betel shop opposite the farmhouse had seen Jai, that he had checked in at a rundown hotel close to the farmhouse with a girl the previous night, and that both had slipped out without paying for the room. The hotel owner was furious at having been given the slip, and had co-operated with the police by readily identifying Jai and by providing the police with a sketch of the girl.

The forensics from the farmhouse showed something peculiar. The details seem to tell an incredible tale – there seemed to be a single shooter who came in with a gun, shot a man at the gate, a guard inside, grabbed the guard’s semi-automatic and went on a killing rampage, slaughtering nine guards and Rashique
Bhai
in the process.

Incredible!

‘Incredibly intriguing, bordering on fucking impossible!’ thought Ajith.

Ajith had asked for a full dossier on Jai, the shooter.

***

Inspectors Tukaram and Arjun took a couple of days before returning a detailed dossier on Jai. There were police records of possible involvement in various crimes, which were preceded by the juvenile home records where Jai had been incarcerated following an unproven charge of murder, and silverfish
-
eaten records from an orphanage, where the murder had taken place, preceded these.

The oldest account of Jai’s recorded life emerged from the records at the orphanage. Jai’s life started from the depths of a dustbin on the corner of the crossing of St Basweshwar Marg and St Kakkaya Marg in Dharavi.

On a wet, rainy day, a newborn, barely alive, male baby was found and rescued from the dustbin by Anwar Salim, a butcher who lived nearby. Anwar had a small family, consisting of his mother and his wife of five years. He and his wife had been trying desperately to have a child but had been unsuccessful until then. The constant nagging of Anwar’s mother only made life worse for him. He had already made numerous perfunctory rounds of scores of doctors, godmen, and miracle workers, but to no avail. The doctors had not found anything wrong with either of them and yet they had not had a baby even five whole years after marriage.

Anwar took the baby boy as a signal from Allah and took him home where, after some reservation and some consternation, he was accepted as a Godsend – manna from heaven.

There was only the matter of a narrow, beaded saffron thread around his neck. Although it meant that the boy could be a Hindu, Anwar chose to ignore the thread. The boy was purified, christened Yousuf and was then duly circumcised.

Yousuf struggled through a sickly childhood and was soon joined by a beautiful sister, Yasmeen, born to Anwar’s wife a couple of years later. Yousuf and Yasmeen had a happy childhood filled with the love of their doting parents and the meagre means of his butcher father feeding five mouths.

Things could have gone on like that forever and Yousuf could have had a normal life butchering animals for meat, but things panned out a little differently for him.

Yousuf’s father had a beef with another butcher in the area and things slowly reached a head on a wet, humid Friday. On that fateful day, after the evening prayers were over, Yousuf and Yasmeen went away with their aunt to spend the weekend at her house. A bloodbath ensued in their house and Anwar Salim, his wife, and his mother were hacked down in the dead of the night.

The murderers were caught by the police after three days and thrown into jail. Close relatives and neighbours recovered the bodies from the mortuary after autopsy and arranged for their burial. Everyone sympathised with the two lovely kids but felt that they would be too much of a burden on their already strained resources. The aunt wanted to have them but her husband shook his head. So they very humanely decided that they be given up to an orphanage.

The formalities were completed and Yousuf and Yasmeen were given up to an orphanage run by an NGO in Kalyan, Mumbai. The NGO, Bharat Kalyan, was based in Mumbai and had offices all over the country. They dealt with old-age homes, widows’ homes, orphanages, and hospices for the terminally sick. They had made headlines for their work during the deadly tsunami down south. One of their patrons being related to a media house did help their cause and helped to keep them in constant media glare. The NGO business is a tightrope walk of finances and sometimes even big NGOs are stretched thin over finances. The orphanage in Kalyan had a similar problem.