Maximum City (33 page)

Of the seven and a half “open” cases against him—the ones the police have registered—six and a half were done on behalf of the gang, and one was a freelance job. His first murder was in 1991—he stabbed a man fourteen times, but the victim lived. That was the half murder. The next one was a liquor seller, Philips Daruwala, and that was the first proper murder. After that, there were five more that the police know about. “The ones that are not open only I know.” If he is caught, he says, “at least ten to fifteen murders will be charged to my name.” When he kills, he likes to take “a big wicket”—someone whose death will frighten ten others.

His own company is arranged in groups of cells. One person doesn’t know what the other is doing; it’s all organized from Dubai. His weekly expenses are 20,000 rupees: 10,000 goes to his mobile phone bills, 5,000 for
himself—mostly for charas—and the rest is given to his family. When he is in need of a big sum, he will take on a supari, a contract killing, which will bring in two lakhs: half in advance, half on performance. If the man to be killed is a non-Muslim, he will kill him right away. But if he is Muslim, Mohsin will find out if the matter is correct, if the man is in the wrong; if not, he will walk away from the contract, giving up the second half of the money.

“I’m doing this for Islam,” Mohsin explains. “During the riots, it was a matter of our izzat”—honor. If there had been no Hindu—Muslim issue, there would be no gangwar. After the blasts, he points out, Chotta Rajan had said that anyone who escaped the law wouldn’t escape him. “I am not a literate man. If I had a brain I wouldn’t be doing all these things. In jail they did readings of the Koran, which is where I learnt everything.” He is not afraid of death, because if he dies he will become close to Allah; he will become a shaheed. “I had dreams, but now they’re broken. I’ve left everything up to Allah Malik. Everyone has to die. I have gone to kill so many people and they’ve lived, maybe I’ll live too.”

The party of English girls behind us suddenly bursts out into “Happy Birthday to You!”

After the meeting in the café we walk about a bit through the streets of Madanpura. There is plenty of light from all the shops, but it is a tinny kind of light, like the music coming out of the radios. Outside the Bihari slums, a class of Muslim kids on the footpath, all loudly and enthusiastically reciting their multiplication tables, is being led by a young teacher marking time with a stick. Mohsin has now relaxed a bit and tells me he is to get married on the sixteenth of this month. At first the girl’s parents were reluctant, but since everybody in the neighborhood seems to be enlisting in the gangwar, they’ve given their consent, saying, “If it’s in the girl’s fate to marry him, she will do so.”

We agree to meet again, for a longer period, someplace more private.

A
FTER LUNCHTIME
a few days later, seven of us walk into the lobby of a small hotel in Byculla. Ishaq, Shahbuddin, Girish, and I get into the elevator, along with Mohsin, Anees, and another young man, even thinner than Mohsin, who seems to be his apprentice. In the beginning, I am faintly irritated by Ishaq and Shahbuddin’s presence; I think they have come there for
the food and drink I order up to the room I have rented for the day. Then I understand. They are standing guarantee for me, as well as making sure I won’t get shot dead.

The hotel is owned by a retired Pathan gangster who used to be Dawood Ibrahim’s mentor, they tell me. Every street in this part of central Bombay is mythic for the underworld. In the modern air-conditioned room, Mohsin takes off his shoes and sits comfortably on the bed. He is dressed in a lightweight shirt and black jeans. The others arrange themselves on the sofa and around Mohsin on the bed. Girish shouldn’t be here; he’s supposed to be meeting with a sales prospect in Andheri. But this is more important than business. It is why Girish will always be a bad businessman. He finds his own city too fascinating.

I take a chair opposite Mohsin and start up my laptop. I am careful to refer to these guys in the formal “aap” rather than the familiar “tu,” which everybody in Bombay uses. It confirms my outsider status and also gives them a certain measure of respect from a man of the other Bombay.

Trust is very important, says Mohsin, looking at me. “The Muslim boys are trustworthy, but they are also the greatest traitors. When you come into this line, you have to have trust. I have come here”—he means this hotel room—“on trust. I have come here because of my friend,” and he indicates Ishaq. “Otherwise, if I were to see anybody else with a computer, I’d take it and tell him to fuck off.”

I tell him that I am also here on trust, that I realize he can take my computer at any time. I have to let him have that at the very beginning, acknowledge that in this room at this time in the city of Bombay, it is he who has the power, and I, the nonresident Indian from Malabar Hill, am inferior to him in the order of things. He does not need to exercise his power, but he does need it to be recognized, to be put into words.

Mohsin started out working with a smuggler in Andheri, gold biscuits mostly, when he was a teenager—he is twenty-eight now. When his pockets started getting pleasantly filled, he began visiting the beer bars. When the government liberalized gold imports, the biscuit business crashed, and Mohsin went to Baroda and robbed a bank. He was arrested. “They put big photos of us in the paper,” he says with pride. He got out on 15,000 rupees’ bail, but the money from the robbery was confiscated. In jail, a friend had given him a phone number. “He said, talk to Shakeel Bhai.” And thus, five
years ago, Mohsin came into the D-Company. Now he still does a little gold business, but mostly he’s into extortion and ransom. The Company is a sort of tax collector. “All in the film industry give money to Shakeel. The Company takes money from all: builder, director, financier. If the call comes from Dubai, it doesn’t matter who you put in between—a minister or whoever—but you have to pay.”

Mohsin explains the benefits of being in the Company very simply: “If someone shoots me, at least one lakh will come to my home. If I am hit by a taxi, nothing will come to my home.” A friend of his, Afzal, was killed by the police. When his sister was married six months later, Shakeel sent three lakhs to her. When Mohsin came out of jail, his mother had died and his brother was to get married. The bhai sent him 50,000 rupees for the wedding and told him, “If you want more, call.”

“I only have to open my mouth to get money,” Mohsin says with confidence. “If I want a car for a while it is arranged.” Because the gangwar is a paying proposition, there is a glut of shooters in Bombay; the Biharis have come in and are driving down the rates. “They’ve fucked our mothers. Now everyone wants to join the Company.”

Anees, unlike the others, has a notion of the economic injustice of the way the gangs are organized. “In Dubai the sheths get crores for work they pay one lakh to the boy here to do.”

Mohsin has three enemies: Chotta Rajan’s men, the police, and the informants. If the gangwar men can kidnap an informer, they torture him before killing him. Otherwise they shoot him where they find him. Nowadays the police are giving informants powerful guns to protect themselves. Mohsin had been “given the work of”—told to kill—Husain Vastara, an informant in the bomb blasts and close to Ajay Lal, my policeman friend. Vastara was extremely cautious and rarely ventured out of his lair in Pydhonie. Some of the newer police commandos are only now starting to wear bulletproof vests as they go into the gangwar, says Mohsin. Husain Vastara was a gangster who wore a bulletproof vest.

Mohsin is a seasoned shooter, and he has developed a maxim for his work: “You should know a man’s hobbies if you want to kill him.” A man can stop work, but he cannot stop pursuing his hobbies. Vastara had a great love of cricket; he went out to watch a match. His bodyguards were drinking tea as Mohsin drove up on his motorcycle. “I went up and shot at him.
My equipment locked. He had a look of great fear. His face had the look of death.” Mohsin turned around and sped off on his motorcycle; he had not been recognized. The bad gun had saved Vastara’s life for the moment.

Mohsin’s immediate boss is Mohammed Ali, a Hindu who converted to Islam so as to improve his career prospects in the D-Company. “He runs Bombay for Chotta Shakeel.” The next day Mohsin and Mohammed Ali, who is related to Vastara, went to Vastara’s office and sat down to chat. Vastara brought out a gun. “He was moving his pistol around, aiming first at one of us, then the other.” His arm swept in a wide arc, like a pendulum, stopping in front of one face, pausing, then moving back to the other face. The two were frightened. After they left the office, they called Vastara from a pay phone. Vastara said to Mohsin, “I know you two came to shoot me.” Mohsin hung up the phone and said to Mohammed Ali, “Let’s run.”

They hid out in a social club in Grant Road, the Dana Club, and played cards. The phone rang; it was for them. When they picked up the instrument they heard Vastara’s voice. “It’s not good to play cards so much,” Vastara told them. Now they were really scared. How did he know where they were? They phoned Shakeel and asked him what to do. “Who else knew where you were?” the bhai asked. Stanley knew. Stanley was the lead shooter of their cell. Shakeel called Stanley and asked him how Vastara could have known that Moshin and Mohammed Ali were playing cards in the club. There was something off about the way Stanley answered the bhai’s questions; it was not right. So Shakeel called Mohsin back and said, “Shoot him.” They went looking for Stanley and found him, standing on the road.

“First shot I hit him,
dhadam!
He held up his hand to stop the bullet when the gun came up. The first shot was on his heart—the second on the other side—the third in the neck—the fourth in the stomach. Mohammed Ali held up his head by the hair and emptied his gun into his head. Then we walked away. All the people had run away while we were shooting. This was in Narialwadi, five minutes from here. We walked to Rani Bagh and took the bus to Wadala. Then we came back at night and had a good dinner in Bhendi Bazaar. We ate quail. Then we played carom. We forgot we had done any work.”

This was two years ago. Mohammed Ali got caught for the murder, but not Mohsin. When Mohsin read about Ali’s arrest in the paper, he knew that he too would be caught before long. Mohammed Ali gave up Mohsin’s
name. “I have no enmity toward him; he was beaten.” And Vastara? “He’s still there. But when the Company wants some work to be done, it will be done, if not today, then tomorrow.” And sure enough, a few months later, Vastara was shot dead by another D-Company hit man as he was coming out of his mistress’s building. Shakeel had found out another of his hobbies.

Mohsin explains his work technique. “Most of the time we shoot for the head, the head shot. Then there is no tension about whether he’ll live or die.” Except once, when he shot a man near Bombay Central. “I put the gun to his head and fired. The bullet glanced off his forehead and he lived. Now what can I do? My job is to shoot and kill. I try to kill. What can I do if the bullet slips?” He likes to take his time. “If I can kill him at leisure I will do so. If I have to kill and run, then only the Man Upstairs knows whether he’ll live or die.”

Mohsin uses a .38, with anywhere between seven and nine rounds. For those who can’t afford the imported guns, there is the katta, the country-made gun, used to shoot deer. “The hole it makes in the front is very small, but in the back it is huge. The bullet spins as it enters the flesh. After you fire two or three bullets from it, you have to let it cool down. If you fire it more than that, your hand blows off.” When Mohsin doesn’t or can’t use a gun, he uses a razor or a chopper. For the half murder in 1991, Mohsin used a khanjar, a short dagger. I ask him if he needs strength to use a knife to stab through muscle and bone. “Have you ever cut a watermelon?” Mohsin asks of me. “It’s the same. A man’s flesh is so delicate.”

The second man on the bike, the assistant in a shooting, is called “number-kari.” Chotta Shakeel pioneered the use of motorbikes to execute gangwar hits; now all the companies use them. “We stop the bike and do it. The motor is racing. The man shoots and gets on. A third man is always standing by, silent. If he is needed he will come; otherwise, the public doesn’t know about him. If he is needed, he starts shooting and the public thinks we are everywhere.” Unlike hit men in more advanced countries, Mohsin never has to worry about disposal of the bodies. He just leaves them where they fall and zooms away on the bike.

W
HEN HE WENT TO
kill Philips Daruwala, Mohsin had typhoid. When you have a fever, he notes, your mind operates on another level, and then
to have to go out and kill someone can be a special experience. It was Ramadan, and he had to do the work alone. Daruwala was a man of some style, wearing safari suits and black sunglasses, and he had a Doberman who was constantly with him. During the riots he had given money and arms to the Hindus. The order came down to do the work on him. Even though Mohsin was sick, he had to do it, the work was very important. When Mohsin rose from his sickbed and went to Daruwala’s liquor shop, he found uniformed policemen sitting with him. Mohsin went away and came back in the evening. There were still men around Daruwala, but they were in plainclothes. Mohsin didn’t know that they were also policemen from the Crime Branch, come to collect their bribes as they did every Saturday. He followed Daruwala as he left the dog and his visitors to take a leak inside a country liquor bar next door. As he was pissing, Mohsin came up behind him in the bathroom and raised his hand with the gun. It would have been an easy shot, but Mohsin was suddenly struck with a scruple: A man, he thought, should not be shot while he was pissing. He would wait for him to finish.

Daruwala zipped up and turned around and saw the gun staring him in the face. “His face was death.” But Mohsin’s weapon locked. “I was also frightened. I should have shot him in the back the first time.” He reloaded, fired again, and shot him in the head. Daruwala stumbled out onto the road and fell. “Then I loaded again—
dhadam, dhadam
—fired twice, and left.”