Maximum City (40 page)

Shakeel is sometimes referred to as the Sheth, or as Haji saab. He isn’t much to look at, Kamal confirms. He is truly small, five feet tall and thin. Shakeel is also called paun takla by his friends, because he is three-quarters bald from the front. His father worked at the Mazagaon docks as a technician, was laid off, and then found itinerant work as a ship painter. His mother sorted grain for a living. They had five children, and all of
them lived in one small room. Shakeel, the second brother, passed high school and started out repairing televisions. He began selling counterfeit watches. Then he started doing matter, or debt recovery, work and caught Dawood’s eye.

Shakeel first made his name during a customs seizure of a consignment of smuggled gold. He was a junior operative back then. When the customs men from Delhi came for him, Shakeel jumped out the window into a gutter, leaving the gold behind. The agents sealed it and wrote up the quantity. Shakeel waited for them to come out of the building gate downstairs, held a gun to the first customs agent to walk through the door, and took the gold back. Then he slapped the agents and sent them off. The agents and the police sealed off the entire area of Nagpada and demanded only one man: “that shorty.” Through their political connections, the gang got him out. Eventually, he fled to Dubai in 1989.

Shakeel is married and has two daughters, who are with him in Pakistan and hate being there; they curse it. But his entire extended family runs on his money. In Pakistan, Shakeel occupies himself by watching western movies all night on a huge projector screen in his house.

“What kind?” I ask.

“Shootouts.”

Kamal has a good relationship with Shakeel. “He’s a nice person. When he used to talk with me, he talked with respect. ‘Do this, beta.’ Like an elder brother.” He forgives easily, unless you talk to him in anger. He has another name: Insaaf ka Tarazu, the Scales of Justice. Kamal saw why with his own eyes. An old man owed eight lakhs to someone, and the creditor had taken the matter to Shakeel’s court. Kamal was playing carom in Shakeel’s office when the old man was brought in, alone. The old man explained that he was in great need; his daughter had to get married. “And then Shakeel said he was not to pay one paisa; in fact, Shakeel gave the old man two lakhs.”

In the absence of justice from the legal system, the bhais take on the role of judges. They stress that when they step into a dispute, they don’t just take one side and extort the other side for money. If a businessman comes to the bhai to recover money from a debtor, the matter is looked into by the bhai before the debtor is approached to pay. This makes business sense for the underworld. It is much more difficult to get someone to part with money that he doesn’t owe than it is to get him to pay up legitimate
debts. Even the language the bhais use in settling disputes is borrowed from the courts. The sense that justice can be obtained from the underworld is so pervasive that the phenomenon has reached its logical conclusion: In November 1999, a senior judge in Bombay himself approached Shakeel for his assistance in recovering forty lakhs that he was owed in a “chit fund,” an informal savings scheme. A mob lawyer named Shaikh arranged for the judge to speak to Shakeel, according to a transcript of the talk made public by the police:

It is a conversation between two judges, or between a judge and a supplicant. “I already have his matter involving two crores,” the more powerful judge says, after asking his clerk to get his pen and diary. The judicial courtesies are observed: “You are a wise man.” The senior judge reproves the junior one for tolerating lawlessness among the police force. But he reassures the petitioner: “I will clear you.” In this particular incident, the litigation failed. The lawyer, Shaikh, was murdered by his own gang. The police had been taping Shaikh’s calls and had stumbled upon the judge’s conversation with Shakeel. If the lawyer’s phone had not been tapped, the chances would have been better than even that the judge would have recovered his money, minus the usual legal expenses, the contingency fee. As Police Commissioner M. N. Singh said, summarizing the conversation, “A judge has lost faith in the judiciary and approaches a gangster to settle a personal matter.”

K
AMAL SAYS
he has been telling me all about the underworld because I am in the media and he wants this message to be passed on to the government, to the society, to the system, and to the underworld: Everybody is selfish in the underworld; nobody is anybody’s friend. Zameer is not Satish’s friend; he uses him for his own ends. Dawood and Shakeel don’t trust each other. “There is a fight between the two. It is an internal matter.” Shakeel depends on Dawood’s money to stay alive and, in turn, shields his don from Chotta Rajan. But Shakeel is not safe in Karachi, says Kamal. “I think in the near future the ISI people will kill Shakeel.” Pakistani intelligence suspects he might be playing both sides of the fence, supplying information to Indian intelligence. The Indian government, given a choice, would support Shakeel over Dawood; Shakeel, as far as anyone knows, had no role in the bomb blasts. “He is a very communal gangster, a well-wisher of the community,” admits Kamal. “But he won’t do it to an innocent.” It
was Dawood and Tiger Memon, also hiding in Karachi, who were involved with the blasts. “They are guests of Pakistan, so they have to do Pakistan’s bidding.” On this point the police and the mob controller agree: Dawood now lives in Karachi as a guest and prisoner of the ISI. Ajay Lal explains, “Dawood is his own prisoner at the moment. He can’t back out. He requires the ISI there. The moment he comes back here he’ll be killed, by his opponents or his own people.”

Still, Dawood lives in style in his adopted home, collecting houses, cars, passports, and women. He dresses in Armani suits and cruises the seas off Karachi in a speedboat, shooting seagulls. But all his money couldn’t keep his nine-year-old daughter Mariah from dying of meningitis in Karachi in 1997. Dawood was broken by her death and stepped away from active control of his empire, leaving it to his brother Anees and to Shakeel. They have become rivals, and there is bound to be an internal gangwar in the D-Company after its namesake dies.

Kamal later speaks to Shakeel about our trip to Pakistan, and the don advises against it. The atmosphere there isn’t good, he tells Kamal. “A civil war is about to start. The agencies ask about everyone from India.” Instead, he will speak to me on the phone from Dubai, where I am stopping on my way to America. I am equally interested in seeing how Zameer is faring in his new home.

T
HEY ARE WAITING
for me right outside the airport, Zameer and another young man. Zameer smiles when he sees me; he needs a shave and his eyes are bloodshot. It is very early in the morning; they had been waiting since five-thirty. On his mobile, the silent man with Zameer calls their bhai for instructions, and we are told to take a taxi to a hotel.

If Bombay has a twin, it is Dubai. It is the aspirational ideal for most of Bombay, except for the section that yearns for New York or London. We drive through the spanking new city, and I tell Zameer that it looks as if it were built yesterday. This is quite a change from Mira Road. We are driving in a big American car on fast new roads past skyscrapers, and there is not a single human being to be seen. Zameer has been in Dubai for a month. “Do you like it here?” I ask him. He quickly shakes his head no.

The taxi stops at the hotel, and there is some argument between the
young man and the cabbie over 1 dirham. Once we get into the room, this colleague, who I ascertain in the lift is also from Bombay, suddenly bursts out with, “Those Pakistanis are real bastards.”

“Why?” asks Zameer. “Was the taxidriver Pakistani?”

“Yes. Swine.”

A little later, we go out for lunch to an Indian restaurant. Zameer and a college friend of Girish’s, a stocky Keralite who changed his name from Sree to Shoaib after joining the D-Company, tell me about their lives in Dubai. They are subjected to daily humiliations. At the telephone office, they might be waiting in a long line of Indians and Pakistanis, and a man in Arab dress will go straight to the window and his payment will be taken first. The Arabs refer to the Indians and Pakistanis as beggars, or harami, bastards. “If someone comes from Bombay,” says Shoaib, who has been living here for a few years, “we eagerly ask him, ‘What’s happening in Bombay?’”

Zameer tells Shoaib about how wonderful Bombay has become. “Fifty-five flyovers! You’ll be able to get from Andheri to Colaba in speed limit.” He has nostalgic memories of train-hopping from Mira Road to Borivali and Borivali to Andheri and Andheri to Dadar. He remembers the greenery everywhere; in Dubai there are few trees to look at. He misses his family most of all, the fact that ten people would be in tension if he was late, that apnapan, that sense of belonging. Here they have to wash their own clothes, cook their own meals, clean their own toilets. They are living in a city they detest, and survive by creating a facsimile Bombay world, through the television and through constant phone conversations with their troops on the ground in Bombay. “We have no friends among the nationals.” They have, it occurs to me, no friends at all.

L
ATER
, Z
AMEER AND
I
WALK
out into the neon Dubai night. The bars and streets of the sheikhdom are filled with prostitutes: very young Malay girls and very white Russian girls wearing tight shorts and walking with long strides down the empty boulevards. We go into a pub, where I gratefully sip from a pint of Kilkenny beer. “I can’t go back anymore. Downstairs is finished for me,” says Zameer matter-of-factly. Salim, the man he had ordered killed, was working for Chotta Rajan. He had already killed three bomb-blasts suspects and was going to kill Zameer himself; he had
been scoping out Zameer’s place when Zameer’s boys noticed him. Zameer got the order from Shakeel. “Do him.”

He set Satish on the case, who kidnapped him in a car, beat him, and put him on the phone to Zameer to decide his fate. Salim pleaded for his life. “There were waves in his voice,” recalls Zameer, flattening his hand into a chop and making it tremble. He told him he was sorry and he would henceforth work only for the D-Company. Zameer was conducting this conversation while pacing up and down on the street below his apartment, on the other side of the Arabian Sea. Zameer cursed him for having killed the three bomb-blasts suspects and told him he was a traitor.

But there was a technical problem: Chotta Shakeel had given his word to the Bombay Police that not a single bullet would be fired by his gang during the elections. So Satish took a large knife and cut Salim open. “It takes huge guts to be able to do that, when blood is spouting at you,” observes Zameer. He slit him so that his kidneys came out. Half an hour after he died, Satish phoned Zameer again; the work had been done. The body lay for three days, from Monday to Wednesday, on the terrace of a building in Mira Road. But Chotta Rajan, who had ordered Salim to kill Zameer, knew from Monday on that his boy was missing, so he told the police about Zameer and where to find his family. The cops were lying in wait outside his house to encounter him, but Zameer had already fled to Dubai.

Zameer’s family is in tension. He hasn’t spoken to them since he got here; the police might be monitoring their phone lines. They picked up his brother and tortured him till he went mute, and Zameer had to pay them 50,000 rupees through Kamal to get him released. “If they had killed him, I would do anything,” the small man says with emotion. “Throw a bomb, anything.” Another large sum went to release Satish’s brother-in-law, who was also involved in the murder. Shakeel gave him two lakhs total for the job. This is the advantage in not doing work on a contract basis; if he had contracted to do the job for, say, one lakh (which is already a high sum, given the 5,000-rupee payments to the actual shooters), with what face would he be able to ask the bhai for more if the cost of paying off people was higher than originally thought? There is no set price when Shakeel asks him to kill someone. To Zameer according to his need, from Shakeel according to his ability. “The underworld gives, it doesn’t take,” he avers.

He enumerates the munificence of the company. Zameer’s apartment,
which he shares with Shoaib and other people, costs 35,000 dirhams a year. He has a laundry, a TV, a stereo, and the latest-model mobile phone; his phone bill to India averages 70,000 rupees a month. Also, any amount he requests for his family—the cost of a wedding, for example—is immediately sent on by Shakeel. Zameer estimates it costs eighteen lakhs a year for Shakeel to keep Zameer in Dubai. Some of the time that Zameer works—he has two hundred men under him in Bombay—he is planning the hits, the escape routes for the shooters, and how to deal with the police inquiry that will follow. He draws charts, with a pencil, to help him visualize the scene on the ground.