Maximum City (25 page)

As in sports and entertainment, the gangs hire scouts. The scouts are everywhere, finding out who is successful in the city and the precise measure of their success and reporting back to the gangs. A substantial portion of the eventual payment is sent back to the scouts. The gangs, like Ajay, live on information. They are hungry, ravenous, for information, constantly sniffing for it in the newspapers, in pan shops, in executive suites, in politicians’ chambers, on the Internet.

The gangs flourish because they form a parallel justice system in a country with the world’s largest backlog of court cases. Indicative of this judicial paralysis is the fact that, as of 2003, a decade after the Bombay blasts, the trial of the plotters is still dragging on. “The criminal justice system has totally collapsed,” says Ajay. “This is the reason why the underworld thrives. A dispute over a flat, which takes twenty years in court, is taken care of in a week or a month by the underworld. You work out the economics.”

Politicians will come and go, the city will boom and bust, but the gangwar will never end. The culture of the gangwar is intrinsic to the culture of the city. Madanpura, Nagpada, Agripada, Byculla, Dongri, Bhendi Bazaar, Dagdi Chawl: The heart of Bombay is the heart of the gangwar.

I
AM HAVING DINNER
with a friend of my uncle, a Polish jeweler from America. The jeweler has been coming to Bombay for twenty-five years. On every trip he’s seen the city improving. But four years ago, the curve started dropping. It is more polluted, he says. There is a dust storm that evening and he can’t breathe. And then there is the steadily increasing violence. He has been reading in the papers about the gang shootouts, which have even made the
New York Times;
his wife in Connecticut wants him to come back at once. The world has discovered that Bombay has a gangster problem.

“Would you feel safe walking down this road? Could I walk here?” the
jeweler asks, as we are driving from the Taj to the Oberoi (there should be a special air-conditioned causeway or ropeway connecting the two hotels, the traffic between them is so intensive and exclusive). It is around eleven, and there isn’t anybody on the poorly lit sidewalk.

“Yes, I would,” says my uncle.

Bombay is still a city where I can travel about pretty much anywhere at all hours of the day or night. Muggings are virtually unknown. Women aren’t molested like they are in Delhi. A Parsi woman at a society party tells me about an incident when she was traveling on the highway with her family. Their car broke down in front of a slum colony, and she and her husband got out. People came up out of the slum. She got scared; she was wearing a miniskirt. They came closer and told her to get back inside. She felt the car moving; the slum dwellers were trying unsuccessfully to push it into starting. Meanwhile, friends in the car ahead had come back. The slum dwellers told them to leave the car there overnight. She was sure the car would be stripped by the next day, but they had no choice. When they came back, the car was untouched; the slum colony had deputed a couple of people to watch over it, all night long.

Bombay’s menace is not street crime. It’s bigger and more organized than that.

My uncle shows me the invitations that he’s been getting from his fellow diamond merchants for the December wedding season. They are the usual lavish cards, each costing 50 or 100 rupees, each one a small chap-book decorated with little Ganeshas, wrapped in silk, containing individual cards for the different modules that make up such a wedding: Hasta-Milap (the religious ceremony), Dandiya-Raas (the dance), Bollywood Nite, Gala Dinner. He opens one. The main venue is written on a patch of paper that has been pasted over the main card, like an afterthought. It is at a small hall I haven’t heard of. My uncle peels back the patch: Underneath is the original venue, the Racecourse. The wedding has been moved so as not to attract attention from the gangs. Another wedding, in the family of a movie financier, features an elaborate card but again a humble venue: the lawn of the financier’s own apartment building. At a previous wedding in the family, a roster of Bollywood stars came to dance like performing monkeys; this one will be a small family affair. A wedding caterer of my uncle’s acquaintance was asked by the gangs for his client list for the coming season. “I had no choice. I had to hand over the list,” the caterer said. How
does the underworld get information on who has money? It is through all the intermediaries: the contractors, the domestics, the interior designers.

The
Bombay Times
features a story on marriages being toned down because of the possibility of extortion. The byline is Staff Reporter. At the end of the story, a line states,
All names changed on request.
Anonymity has now become a survival tactic.

The stories build, carried aloft from person to person on the collective fear of rich people in a poor country. A family has dinner at a five-star restaurant and is presented with the bill. It is in five figures, and they protest. The waiter tells them the bill includes payment for the dinner of the six men sitting over there in the corner. They have a choice: They can either foot this bill or say good-bye to the new Ford car they drove to the hotel in.

Another of my cousin’s friends is approached for money. “You have bought a new flat and sold the old one for eight lakhs. Give us one.”

My cousin advises his friend, “For peace of mind you should just give them the lakh.”

“They don’t want one lakh,” the friend says, “they want one crore.” (One crore is a hundred lakhs.) When the caller from Karachi calls again to demand the money, the friend’s father asks for the extortionist’s fax number. He then faxes the caller his income-tax returns for the past four years, which demonstrate that he is making no money at all. It is like applying for financial aid at an American college. Poverty is a virtue.

The city’s great and good are panicked. They struggle to imagine just how abysmally low the value of human life has sunk. The gossip columnist Shobha De puts it into the proper perspective. “Today, a supari [contract] killing costs anything between an entirely affordable five to ten thousand rupees, from a high of five to ten lakhs a few years ago,” she explains to readers of her column. “Unemployed youths are ready to kill for the price of a Gossard brassiere. Isn’t that something? A statistic worth thinking about.” So the rich are forced into humiliating changes of lifestyle. Another Shobha De column narrates the plight of a young lady in South Bombay.

The gangsters have the same effect on Bombay society that the Bolsheviks had on the Russian nobility. What all the protest marches by the left couldn’t do, a few phone calls from the bhais have managed: They have forced the Bombay rich to stop flaunting their wealth.

In business, so entrenched has extortion become that the Bombay High Court recently ruled that extortion payments are tax deductible as a legitimate business expense. Extortion is a form of tax. Since there is a parallel justice system, there have to be parallel taxes. It used to be that there was only one gang—Dawood’s. But now that there are multiple gangs operating, as soon as the businessman pays one, all the others line up for their payments, so he finds himself paying four or five gangs at once. He might even be paying freelance extortionists, people who pose no real threat. The implicit or explicit tradeoff in the protection racket—you give me money, I give you protection from myself and others—no longer applies. The gangs are powerless to afford protection against the others. It is less a protection racket now and more like a simple mugging: You give me your money or I’ll kill you.

“Extortion and kidnapping are the crimes of the future.” says Ajay, because the net investment is 1 rupee, the price of a phone call. He recently arrested two MBA students who were extorting the professor who had been teaching them about entrepreneurship. “I said, You fellows are crazy. They said, We have more brains than the others.” Kidnapping, too, thrives on fear. One Dawood-affiliated gangster has a sideline in kidnapping. He takes his victims to a room in the suburbs, blindfolds them, and throws live snakes at them.

I
N
1999, Ajay has a new posting, as Additional Commissioner of Police, Northwest Region, which puts him in an area that covers half of Bombay, from Bandra to Dahisar, but is the site of three-quarters of its crime. He is now chief of thirty-one out of the seventy-two police stations in Mumbai and has ten thousand men working for him. In this appointment, he has
superseded six officers with seniority over him, because of a dramatic increase in extortion-related crimes in the city. “They expect me to come in with a magic wand and solve the problems,” Ajay says. The newspapers advertise him as a knight on a white charger; they speak of his work in the bomb-blasts investigation and tout him as the one man who can fix Bombay’s current crime problem. I am interested to see if he will succeed. On a pleasant evening, I suggest to Vinod, the movie director, that we go for a walk and meet Ajay in his office down the road. Anu, his wife and a film journalist, says she wants to come too.

Ajay’s new office has a nice view of the sea. As we come in, a police inspector and his informant enter and brief Ajay about a recent shootout. “Who were on the team that is playing the game of the blasts suspects?” asks Ajay.

They say that in the shootout, “the fielding had been in place for four days.” Team, fielding, playing the game: They might be talking about a cricket match. And, actually, the thrill of belonging to a gang is not unlike the thrill of playing on a team. The captain has to be the smartest, he has to be the brain. He has to arrange the fielding, the batting order; he has to rest some players and test the newcomers.

The inspector and the informant tell him they will be able to produce the key player in not less than six days. Ajay urges them to do it sooner and tells the informant that he’ll take care of the cases against him. All evening long, informants come to him and huddle over his desk, in low urgent voices, as he nods and takes notes in his ledger; all evening long, he barks and growls, threatening mutilation, castration, death, and the execution of loved ones, in his ceaseless quest for information. All evening long, he listens to the multiple whisperings of the heated city, developing contacts, developing sources.

Ajay defines the essence of how to conduct an interrogation: “You have a little information, and you must let him think you have more.” The suspect will also try to string Ajay along, revealing a little at a time, until he can get to the safety of the courts. Ajay squeezes; then he squeezes a little more. “First comes the sugar-cane juice, then the lemon juice,” he explains, turning a crank in the air. But it’s not a simple matter of physical force. “Everyone cannot just be beaten black and blue. Knowledge is power.” He might start the session with the briefest of hints that he knows everything but is waiting for the suspect to confess voluntarily. “Some
times on this they start. Sometimes they take your measure: How much do you really know?” So the interrogation is a game, in which the players are constantly trying to read each other’s minds. And not all the power is with the policeman holding the stick, the electric wire.

Ajay’s mobile rings. Khan, one of his top informants, is waiting to speak to him. The door opens, and a very thin man in his twenties comes in and huddles over the desk with Ajay.

After he leaves, Ajay tells us that Khan is a burglar and a ladies’ man. His trade name is Chikna. He is sleeping with the wives of four or five top gangsters. “I’m jealous of him,” says Ajay. But Khan’s days are numbered. Ajay found this out when Khan was first brought in on burglary charges. Ajay’s men beat him up, not stopping until Khan began vomiting blood all over the floor. At this point the burglar informed his tormentors that he had full-blown AIDS, and they reported this to Ajay. “The first thing I told my men to do was to clean up all the blood and pour Dettol over the floor.” Then he talked to the burglar and found out that he could be turned into an informant.

Why would he do that? I asked. Was it for money?

Ajay shakes his head. “Proximity to me.” He comes into the commissioner’s office whenever he wants, moves around in his car. “It makes him feel powerful.” Ajay is good to his informant. “In the last six months of his life I’ll make him feel like a king.” He has given Khan a mobile phone and Ajay’s personal mobile number, on which the burglar can call the ACP day and night. What about his burglaries, I ask Ajay. Is he still continuing them?

“I’ve allowed him one or two.” But he’s locked him up for two others that involved gunplay, once for six months and once for eight. This also made the gangs feel sure that Khan wasn’t a police informant.

Tonight he has come with some interesting information. One of the gangsters whose wives he has been sleeping with will come to visit the wife tonight, at her home. Ajay picks up the phone and asks, “What happened to that auto-rickshaw we confiscated? Is it still in working order?” The plan is to have Khan pose as an auto-rickshaw driver and park in front of the wife’s house. Ajay’s men will be around in plainclothes, as hawkers or passersby. When the gangster arrives to visit his wife, Khan will identify him to the cops. If he doesn’t arrive tonight, the burglar knows he’ll go to church on Sunday, and Ajay’s men will be waiting outside the church.

“What will you do with the gangster?” I ask Ajay.

He looks at me, at Vinod, at Anu, and then back at me, and there is a slight smile playing about his mouth. “Do I have an option?”

Anu asks if Khan could have transmitted AIDS to the gangster through his wife.

Vinod is excited about this as a plot point for a movie: a police agent who kills off gangsters by sleeping with their wives and infecting them with HIV. Ajay shoots this down immediately. “The gestation period is too long: six years. They can do lots of damage in six years.”