Dongri to Dubai (21 page)

After meeting with several Dalit group leaders, one of the senior leaders and intellectuals, Jogendra Kawade, gave his support to Mastan’s brainchild. Thus came into existence Dalit-Muslim Suraksha Mahasangh (DMSM), in 1985. Despite good coverage in the print media, the party failed to make its presence felt, however; even in the face of Mastan’s best efforts to fund and promote the party, it could never rise to become a force to reckon with.

All the smuggling cases against Mastan had now been disposed of. He now devoted his time between politics and real estate. Karim Lala followed suit and decided to reform himself as well, focusing on his hotel business and disassociating himself from any kind of criminal activity. Baashu Dada had in the meanwhile migrated to Hyderabad and vowed never to return to Bombay.

The only one who was still active, still nursing his ambitions to become numero uno in the Bombay mafia, was Dawood Ibrahim.

23

Death of a Brother, Birth of a Gang War

P
opular Hindi film songs rent the air as girls, dressed in their gaudiest finery, hung about the long verandahs of Congress House in south Bombay. The address was a misnomer. Once upon a time, stalwarts of the Indian National Congress who spearheaded the freedom movement in India had set up base at Congress House. But those were nobler days. By the seventies, it had become a whorehouse where nautch girls, called
mujrewallis
in the local lingo, entertained clients àla
Pakeezah
. Some of the nautch girls were good singers and nimble with their feet, but over the years, the place had disintegrated into a proper prostitution joint where men came up to pick up the finest piece of flesh they could find. Unlike their counterparts in Kamathipura and Falkland Road, sex workers from Congress House catered to a richer clientele. So while the place looked tawdry, it did not wear the desolation and desperation of Kamathipura. It had the unkempt look of a whorehouse but the girls were classier and prettier, and wore fragrant
mogra
, but the scent of sin could not be masked.

The girls lived in tiny, water-tight compartments with equally small dreams. They had no siblings and family; their fellow workers, pimps, customers, and the madams who stood guard over them doubled up as this. Most of them lived and died in the same place. Some of them had managed to put their children in boarding schools, where they were being educated unaware of their mothers’ dark secrets.

In this vast cauldron of sex and sin, lived Nanda and Chitra, two women in their late twenties. Both were friends and had been forced into prostitution at a tender age. They had lost their parents in infancy and their relatives had dumped them at Congress House for a few hundred rupees. They were raped in the initial years, before finally coming to terms with their destiny and getting some small measure of control over it.

Now, a prostitute will give pleasure to over twenty to twenty-five men in a span of twenty-four hours but she will always cherish sex with one particular man. Sex with the chosen one is never be treated as a chore, for she chooses her beau as the man’s interest in her is not confined to her body or face. For Chitra, Sabir was one such customer.

Sabir was only in his second year of marriage when Chitra happened to him. Chitra was no head turner, but she was charming and good looking, and most importantly, she lavished attention on the curly-haired Sabir. He was a poet at heart, showering her with Urdu ghazals
and
shayari
(poetry)
which actually made her blush.

Sabir had married for love, and his wife Shahnaaz was quite a good looking woman. Although she was seeing a Pathan before marriage and was known as
Lala ki Lali
, Sabir wooed her and eventually convinced her to marry him. Dawood had never liked the idea of his brother marrying someone else’s girlfriend but he loved his brother and had given in to Sabir’s wishes. Within the first year of their marriage, Shahnaaz bore Sabir a son, Shiraz, and then Shahnaaz conceived again. It was then that Sabir was drawn towards Chitra, who made time for him and returned romance back to his life. Not that he stopped loving or caring for Shahnaaz, but she was heavily pregnant and sex with her ballooning person did not appeal to him.

With his new paramour, he went to watch movies, where Chitra did things to him that never even happened in the movies. They ate bhelpuri at Chowpatty, dined in expensive restaurants, and drove around in their car on the streets of Bombay.

Chitra enjoyed Sabir’s company and the luxury that money could buy. He was a divinely prescribed antidote for her otherwise bitter life; life in Congress House was depressing and Sabir’s presence made her forget it for a while. Her meetings with Sabir barely lasted for a couple of hours, as he had his family and business and he was always in a rush. But whenever he dropped her off at Congress House, she was left feeling overwhelmed. She could not help but confide in her friend Nanda about her passionate encounters with him. For example, she said, one day Sabir had bought a cone of ice cream from the Chowpatty seaface and dumped the whole thing on her face before licking off the cream in full view of the public, even as Chitra shrieked in horror and delight.

Nanda envied Chitra though she never told her as much. Nanda wanted a man like Sabir; there were no fairytale endings in their lives, but a lover could help alleviate the pain of the life she lived. As Chitra kept filling Nanda with stories of her blossoming love life, Nanda lapsed into depression. And then one fine day, a tall, handsome Pathan walked into her life.

Amirzada befriended Nanda with a purpose. But Nanda, in her hunger for a real lover, failed to see through his designs. Amirzada had learnt of Sabir’s interest in Chitra and knew that she was the key to Sabir. When he learnt that Chitra was completely smitten with Sabir, he latched on to her friend Nanda. Amirzada’s entrance into Nanda’s life filled a long pending void in her life, as he wooed her in just the manner she imagined Sabir had romanced Chitra. The red light area lives up to its image; nothing lies hidden here for long. In no time, Sabir learnt about Nanda’s relationship with Amirzada. But even though Amirzada was a former foe, he thought the past was well behind them.

In the meanwhile, Amirzada began to keep tabs on Sabir’s movements through Nanda. One evening, he called Nanda and told her he wanted to spend a night with her. Nanda was elated, but then she thought of her best friend Chitra. Lately, Chitra had been quiet; Nanda had not seen Sabir visiting her for a long time. Mindful of Chitra’s pensiveness, Nanda asked Amirzada if she could bring Chitra along. When Chitra overheard Nanda’s conversation, she immediately interjected, saying she would not be able to make it as Sabir was visiting her at night and they had planned to go out. Unwittingly, Nanda relayed the information to Amirzada. The Pathan did something Nanda did not figure out until the next day; he told her he could not make it and slammed the phone down. Nanda was left holding the phone, surprised and disappointed.

As there are restrictions on timings at Congress House, clients and visitors cannot stay in after 12:30 am. So, whenever Sabir was late visiting Chitra, he took her out on a long ride. This particular night, on 12 February 1981, at around 1 am, the two left in his white Premier Padmini Fiat.

That night, he had just returned from Shahnaaz’s periodic medical checkup—she was in her seventh month—when he had got a call from Chitra, who told him that she was missing him. Sabir left immediately, telling Shahnaaz he would be back in the morning. For Shahnaaz this was now routine. Sabir kept disappearing, night after night, on flimsy pretexts. They fought bitterly over his absence, but Sabir failed to pay heed and stormed out, every time, just as he had this night.

As Sabir’s car exited Kamathipura and took a sharp left on Tardeo to emerge on Haji Ali shrine’s intersection, he checked the rearview mirror out of habit. There, he saw a flower-bedecked Ambassador following them closely. A newly-married couple, he thought and smiled. It was past midnight, and Chitra, sitting beside him in the car, was in a mischievous mood, putting him, in turn, in the mood for love.

Suddenly, Sabir’s attention was drawn to the fuel meter. He cursed under his breath and looked around for a petrol pump to refuel his vehicle. After several failed turns, he remembered that there was a gas station at Prabhadevi a few kilometres away. He just hoped his car would pull through the four to five kilometre distance.

Suddenly, he noticed that the wedding party was still following his car. Were they going to the suburbs? What were they doing while he kept zipping in and out of smaller roads looking for gas?

The flower-bedecked car was, in fact, his cortege. There was no bride or groom in it, only agents of death who were stalking him. They were actually following a well-laid plan, hatched the same evening. The car had Mamoor Khan at the wheel, Amirzada, Alamzeb, Manohar Surve alias Manya Surve, and others. They were carrying assault guns, rifles, pistols, swords, and choppers. Surve used to devour James Hadley Chase paperbacks, and he was the one who outlined the plan to finish off Sabir that night. The trick of decorating the car with flowers and giving it a celebratory look, even, was Surve’s. The pursuers knew they would have to intercept Sabir at some point after tailing him for a while, and the flowers would allow them access to him without his getting suspicious.

Sabir spotted the Servo Care petrol pump at Prabhadevi and drove his car in. As he rammed on the brakes, his heart went wild, thumping away with alarm and fear as he saw the white Ambassador screeching to a halt behind his car. He asked Chitra to get off, at once, and groped for his gun. But Sabir was seconds too late.

Five armed men jumped out of the white Ambassador and surrounded Sabir’s car. Slowly one of them opened the car’s passenger’s door and extricated Chitra, who was quaking with fear, her face ashen. Sabir’s limbs were frozen, his throat dry; even as blood rushed into his brains, everything seemed to blur.

Guns began to spew fire then, shattering the windscreen and piercing Sabir’s body. The gangster’s screams of pain and agony lasted only a few seconds, so powerful was the assault. Years later the gas station attendants and the neighbourhood would recall in horror the cold-blooded killing and the endless screams of a woman. No one could keep a count of the number of bullets fired on Sabir that night, but the autopsy recorded a total of nine bullets extracted from his body, and nineteen from various cavities in the car seats, carpet and metallic frame of the vehicle.

As Sabir slumped, his forehead on the steering wheel, one of the killers whipped out a rampuri knife and slit his wrist. By then Sabir was beyond any pain or sensation, however. Blood simply gushed out of his wounds like a river in spate. Even his expensive white leather shoes were soaked and softened.

The slaying of Sabir went down in the Bombay police annals as one of the most violent and brutal mafia killings the city had ever witnessed. One of its witnesses drew a parallel with the mythological Abhimanyu in the battle of Mahabharat, surrounded in stealth and killed without being allowed a proper defence.

The victorious band of killers got into their Ambassador and headed back towards town immediately afterwards. Within 15 minutes they had reached JJ Square and veered onto Pakmodia Street. It was pitch dark and the denizens of Dawood’s fiefdom lay fast asleep when their car halted outside the imposing wrought iron gate of Musafirkhana. The five gunmen, ready to finish off the Dawood group’s upper echelon, got out of the car muttering
‘Aaj iska kissa bhi tamam kar dete hain
[let’s finish him off today itself]
.’

The high of shooting Sabir had led them to feel invincible. They began to mindlessly fire at the iron gate, without targeting any particular person or place. The silence of the night was shattered with the hail of bullets. Suddenly, the assailants realised they had emptied their gun, and hastily began to reload. But someone from inside Musafirkhana sprung a surprise on them; a volley of bullets was fired from within the gates. The killers ducked for cover, looking at each other in surprise. They had never expected retaliatory fire at this hour of the night.

The gunman was Khalid Pehelwan, who was firing from the first floor from behind a pillar. Khalid had been awake since the time Sabir had left. The moment he saw the Ambassador coming to a screeching halt, he had grabbed a gun.

The Khans were a bit rattled at this rallying. They decided to leave as they had already won a major victory that night; this assault was only a bonus. By then, Dawood and his men had taken their positions and were ready to launch their onslaught. When they saw the Ambassador backing off, they started firing, bullets hitting the boot and the bonnet and breaking its glass windows. Speeding off, the Pathans somehow managed a safe passage.

The gunfire had woken Musafirkhana and the gang members were now assembled outside the gate. Dawood noticed that one key man was missing—his brother Sabir. Dawood’s first fear was that he had taken a hit from one of the bullets. But Khalid, who was the hero of the night, told him that Sabir had left a while ago to visit Chitra. A strange foreboding took over Dawood. Where was his brother? Sabir lay, of course, lifeless in a pool of his own blood.

Henceforth, the Dawood-Sabir gang was officially rechristened the Dawood gang. The death of Sabir changed two things: Dawood Ibrahim and Bombay’s mafia. Neither would ever be the same again. Bombay’s mafia opened a new chapter of blood and gore; revenge and broad daylight killings; fresh recruits and new gangs; big money and drugs. Dawood not only turned vengeful but intensely motivated and driven, propelling him out of the small league in the Bombay pool and pushing him into the big sea of crime.