India (13 page)

Mr Ghate said immediately that he would send the children to the hospital in his car. He hurried out to attend to that, and Charu and I were left alone in the room.

Charu told me some more about the communal life of people in Bombay. He said that the love of the communal life stemmed from the life in the joint or extended family: that was a full life, of a constant crowd, and shifting, passionate relationships between the various groups or sections of an extended family. Charu said his own wife, who was doing an M.Sc. degree in child development, couldn’t read if she was alone; she preferred to read when there was someone talking near by. Even now, his wife liked staying with her family in their old flat, for the company, the warmth, the constant reassurance of human voices.

Since Mrs Ghate had pulled it, the curtain in the kitchen doorway had remained pulled back. I could see that there was a puja box in the kitchen, something quite basic, nothing like Mr Raote’s recessed wall-shrine. Mr Ghate had said that he was not a religious man; the puja box in the kitchen must have been for his wife’s sake.

When he came back to us, Mr Ghate looked troubled. He had got the children to the hospital. But he was now worried about his wife. She fell easily into depressions. She knew the affected family, and the accident to the two children was already having a bad effect on her.

Still, the incident showed how important it was for the Sena to have a representative in a place like the chawl. The Sena was known for its social work, and people felt they could approach him.

I asked whether the communal life of the chawl and of other packed areas made political organization easier.

The chawl is like a bigger family. The area is an even bigger family.’

And other groups could be organized easily as well?

He didn’t answer.

He was a stern, dark man. His concern for his wife, which he talked about so openly, was like the one soft thing in him. He had
got married in 1970. He was twenty-one then, and his wife was eighteen. The love story he had to tell was in some ways like Mr Raote’s in far-off Dadar. The girl who became his wife lived in another chawl. He began to go to that chawl to give lessons to a friend who was weak in mathematics. He had got to know the girl’s family; he had begun to give lessons to the girl as well; an attachment had developed.

The girl’s father was a teacher. (Mr Ghate’s millworker father had never owned a book.) He didn’t like it when Mr Ghate dropped out of his engineering college. At that time, too, the Shiv Sena had a bad and violent reputation. The girl’s family thought Mr Ghate was an idler. It was this family opposition to Mr Ghate that first threw his wife into a depression.

Mr Ghate said, ‘She’s extremely sensitive.’

One day they were sitting together, Mr Ghate and the girl, in a hotel. A
ho-tal
, a simple restaurant. The girl’s sisters and her brother saw them. Mr Ghate felt that it would be difficult after this for the girl to go back to her family room. So he took her to an uncle’s place in an apartment block. The next day they got married. That hadn’t been his intention at all when he took the girl to his uncle’s. But he saw that it was the only thing he could do; the decision to get married was entirely his own. The marriage was done with Vedic rites, simpler than the traditional Hindu marriage rites.

So his marriage had been a love marriage. Had other members of his family followed his example?

He said a sister had made a love marriage a year or so before.

‘It’s happening more and more, you think?’

‘Yes.’ But then, in spite of the romantic story of his own marriage, he became stern. He was clearly unhappy about his sister’s marriage. ‘Love marriages don’t last, unless there is an understanding of minds. A marriage doesn’t survive if it’s based on physical attraction.’

‘Was there opposition to your sister’s love marriage?’

His reply was ambiguous. ‘There was no opposition. She got married purely out of physical attraction.’

‘What was the man’s job?’

‘Ayurvedic doctor.’
Ayurveda
, traditional Hindu medicine.

‘Well off?’

‘Fairly well off, but not independent. That’s why I wanted my
sister to get a job. They’re staying at Sion. Just recently I got her a job.’

Sion was Papu’s suburb. Was Sion a euphemism for Dharavi?

I asked, ‘Staying in quarters in Sion?’

‘They’re staying in a proper block. But I don’t really know. I have nothing to do with my sister now. I’ve got her a job, and that’s all I want to know about her.’

‘But why?’

‘The boy is not on his feet.’

‘How much is she getting in her job? The job you got her.’

‘About 900 rupees.’

‘You don’t want to go and see how she’s getting on?’

‘No, no. I’ve given her a job. They have a child. But no. My sister is not on the same wavelength, and I don’t like that. Her way of life is very cheap. She has cheap expectations. To her, I am not too educated. But I believe that my way of thinking is superior to my sister’s. Her thinking is: “You must have your own block. You must have a lot of money.” But she doesn’t have the capacity.’

The translation was Charu’s, and I wasn’t sure what Mr Ghate meant. He had said earlier that he valued people only for their mind, and perhaps he was saying now that his sister’s material ambitions outran her education and made her absurd.

‘And she doesn’t adjust to people,’ Mr Ghate said. ‘My wife is adjustable. But my sister can’t adjust with my wife.’ Perhaps the trouble lay there.

‘Is your sister a good-looking girl? Handsome?’

‘Not totally.’
He spoke the words in English. With the affirmative Indian side-to-side swing of the head, he added, in English again,
‘Fair.’
Then he restated his position. ‘I don’t value much the blood relation. My relatives never helped me. Only my friends helped me. Now that I’ve got a name and position, a lot of my relatives come to me. But I don’t give them too much attention.’

‘Why do you say that your sister’s ambition is cheap?’

He didn’t reply.

I put it directly to Charu: ‘Shouldn’t he, as a Sena man, be encouraging people like himself to have ambition?’

They talked, Charu and Mr Ghate, and Charu gave Mr Ghate’s reply. ‘What is important is for a person to know whether he is really suited to have that ambition. People come to me all the time
to ask for help. But I don’t think they deserve help by rights. They should be worthy.’

I asked him about the tiger poster on his wall. He said a friend had given it. He spoke the English words,
‘You observe a lot – by watching.’
He spoke the words in an awkward, fractured way, but he seemed to load them with a special, even mysterious, meaning. I asked about the Shivaji coronation or durbar in the other picture. What year was that? He didn’t know the year.

His sister had tried to break away. He hadn’t forgiven her, for that and for the love marriage which, in his own life, he considered part of his strength and character. He was a hard man, made by the chawl life from which he could now never separate himself. Perhaps, with the Sena pride that was his anchor, he felt – with everything else – that old ideas of honour and correctness had been violated by his sister.

Perhaps the sister was going to be all right; perhaps she would be able to stand alone, without the supports of family and clan and caste. But this was also no doubt how, in Bombay, people fell through the cracks into the abyss, and some – the lucky ones – were cast up again in places like Dharavi, not far from where, with the ambition that in her brother’s eye was so absurd, inviting trouble, the girl now had an apartment ‘in a proper block’, almost certainly something in one of those characterless ‘quarters’ that had thrown Papu into a gloom a few days before.

It was said by people one met, and by columnists in the newspapers, that Indian society was being ‘criminalized’. What was meant was that, with all the frustrations of India, political parties and business people were using gangsters to get their work done or to speed things up: to deter political defections, to encourage political donations; to enforce payment of a debt, to compel adherence to an unwritten ‘black-money’ contract.

Crime now paid very well. The gangs fought like politicians for territory, and the gang wars of Bombay were in the news. The newspapers and magazines were running articles about the wars that were like accounts of the opaque political disputes in many of the states of the Indian Union. They were opaque for the reason that the politics were opaque: there were no principles or party line, there were only personalities. People only had enemies or
allies, and the relationships of both gangsters and politicians were constantly shifting. The killings in the crowded Bombay streets were, like the politics, about power and leadership. And, as the dust cleared, the newspapers and magazines began, competitively, to feature profiles of the don emerging as the king of the Bombay underworld.

This don was like a politician in another way: he was so written about, so interviewed (though he was based outside India, in the Gulf, in Dubai), that all the articles about him were like one another. Like many people in the public eye, the don had become his newspaper profiles; he had nothing new to say.

I thought it would be better for me to meet someone lower down, not of don status, someone not so interviewed, someone who had not formalized his experience to such a degree, and might still have something to say. I didn’t really believe that such a meeting could be arranged – I was a visitor, passing through, with nothing to offer – but the gangsters of Bombay loved their publicity, and were especially interested in people who wrote in English. They wanted to be known abroad as well.

My contact was Ajit. Late one afternoon we took a taxi out to Dadar; it was a drive I was getting to know well. After we left the taxi, we walked a little way, through the relaxed late-afternoon crowd, to a pan-shop next to a cinema. We waited there for a while, among the cinema dawdlers, until someone greeted us; and then someone else came. We followed this second man. We turned into various rich-looking residential streets, and finally entered a tree-shaded house by a side door, losing what remained of the daylight when we went in.

It was a new apartment house. The ground-floor apartment we went into was well furnished in an Indian bourgeois, furniture-shop way. And it was strange, there, among those feminine furnishings, and in a very dim electric ceiling light, in an atmosphere still of Indian decorousness (shoes taken off at the entrance and left inside the front door), to be looking at Indian faces expressing Indian welcome and civility, and to hear in Indian-English voices, relishing the moment of theatre, that I was among gangsters.

There were about six or seven men in the small sitting room. They were young men, in their late twenties, and all of them, except for the leader, the man who now began to do the talking,
had faces one would have expected to see on university teachers or men working in banks. Many of the men were standing when we came in, and they remained standing.

The leader was sitting alone on a fat, over-stuffed sofa. Like a prince showing favour, he asked me to sit beside him. He was dark, with a well-formed mouth with a full and curved lower lip, and with prominent eyes with well-defined eyelids – the kind of features that were stressed by the artists of some Rajput courts.

And I didn’t know what to talk to him about. I had expected to meet one man alone; I hadn’t expected a roomful. I was further put out by the sudden loss of daylight and its replacement by a dim ceiling bulb that made me stare hard and was like a physical irritant.

I had been hoping, in whatever talk I had had, to take things slowly, to approach the subject of crime and the gangs with some circumspection, and to light on my material on the way. But it became clear, from what the leader said, that he wanted to start
in medias res
. He wanted to talk right away about the gang wars that were going on, and to stake a claim for his gang and his group. But I knew very little about the Bombay gangs. I didn’t know about the personalities and rivalries and famous battles; and I couldn’t take advantage of the openings the leader was giving me.

He seemed at last to understand my difficulty. He must have been disappointed, but he didn’t show it. He began, instead, to help me with the beginner’s story he must have thought I was writing. He said he knew he was going to die sooner or later from a policeman’s bullet. I felt he wanted that to be quoted. And then, as though letting a novice reporter into the sensational material he thought such a reporter needed, he told me what his group did by way of crime.

They did a certain amount of protection; in that line they ‘worked with’ stall-keepers. They did the numbers game. They had recently broken new ground: they had done a kidnapping for a political party, snatching and holding a student leader of another party at the time of the students’ union election. A profitable and growing business for them was encouraging people to give up controlled tenancies, releasing land or a building for redevelopment. They also did a certain amount of ‘biscuit’ work – stealing melted-down gold ‘biscuits’, which was one way in which people liked to keep their black money. What was nice about that was that
when someone lost his biscuits he couldn’t complain to the authorities. The biscuit business was a nice business; all you needed was information, and you could get good information from the police. At one time, when they were younger, and money wasn’t as plentiful as it now was in Bombay, they used to do black-market theatre tickets. A neat little business, really: you bought up all the seats for a popular film, and had touts sell them at a premium. But that was in the old days; it wasn’t worth their while now. The one thing they didn’t do was contract killing; they couldn’t kill a man they had nothing against.

His manner was confidential. He leaned close to me on the over-stuffed sofa and talked without raising his voice. He was like a businessman outlining his services, giving a prospectus. He didn’t move or gesture a great deal; his tone was even; the energy and unreliability were all in his eyes.