Dongri to Dubai - Six Decades of the Mumbai Mafia

by S. Hussain Zaidi

  Her clothes had been ripped apart with no glory in admiring her in her nudity. Pouncing on her naked body like a ferocious beast, Samad began biting her all over. Then Shilpa spat on him as they both stood there consumed by unabated passion by the act. She slowly licked her own saliva off his body, sending him into a delirium of ecstasy, as he did the same to her—spitting and devouring his own spit off her naked body as if that would bring her to the pinnacle of her orgasm.

  Samad had sex with several Muslim girls but he found all of them to be coy and inhibited in bed. And while Samad liked Shilpa’s boldness, she enjoyed his aggression. The couple seemed tailor-made for each other. Shilpa was a revelation, often stunning him with her natural flair to please him.

  Oblivious to their outraged neighbours, their moans and screams echoed beyond the closed doors. They had no qualms, as they bared themselves for a no holds barred sex session. From the showers to the kitchen table where vessels and utensils were flung with as much fury as the abuses and the dirty expletives that Samad would hurl at Shilpa as he shoved her and himself into her in all their warped glory.

  Finally Samad would carry her lithe body, still wrapped around him, and fling her onto the carpet in the drawing room where he would satiate himself with animal-like passion.

  It was 4 October 1984. Bombay’s streets were full of vibrant crowds, dancing and singing on the occasion of Dussehra, the day when Hindus celebrated the success of Ram over Ravan—and the victory of truth over evil.

  People thronged the streets at Vallabhbhai Patel Road, and mindless of their surroundings, everyone was dancing in a mad frenzy. When Samad looked down from the seven-storied Sikka Nagar building, he could not help but reflect on the series of unexpected events that had unfurled that week.

  There will be very few Pathans like him. Abdul Samad Abdul Rahim Khan was known for his irrepressible ruthlessness, insatiable lust, and brutality. So much so that even his own ilk—the Pathans—did not want to remain associated with him. Bombay’s largest Urdu daily Inquilab had read a clear-cut proclamation from his uncle, Karim Khan alias Karim Lala: ‘I have nothing to do with Samad Khan. Anyone dealing with him may do so at their own risk, I will not vouch for him in any manner. I refuse to take responsibility for any reference made to me during any transactions.’

  Samad was enraged. With his primitive notion of honour, he felt betrayed. The old world loyalty of the Pathans meant nothing to him now. His uncle, who had always been a hero to him, had become a malevolent presence. Being a Pathan, his uncle could have kept the differences, if any, to himself, he thought. He had been publicly humiliated and this only corroborated the rift within the ranks of the Pathans.

  What Samad did not know was that Lala had his reasons for this drastic action. Every time Samad committed a crime, Lala would be hauled to the police station, Crime Branch corridors, and subsequently to the courts and put through a lot of trouble in terms of interrogation and detention, which he was growing tired of. Samad’s actions had disturbing implications and the only way to deal with it was to declare that he had nothing to do with him.

  But, stoking his magnum ego, Samad Khan thought about how everything he had done so far, and believed that he had done it all on his own. He fancied himself as a lion. He had no need for his uncle’s clutch to do anything. He remembered, proudly, the time he was given a supari to kill a businessman called Jain in July, the same year.

  Samad had entered the hotel, his burly frame not quite blending with the more polished people loitering inside the lobby. Approaching the reception, he asked in a bellowing tone, ‘Jain kaun se kamre mein hai [which room is Jain in]?’

  It is every hotel’s policy against divulging room numbers of guests to anyone. The receptionist was about to refuse but something about this brawny man in his aggressive demeanour made him cringe in fear that he might be assaulted if he did not relent. ‘1921,’ he found himself saying in heavily accented English, hoping that the Pathan might not follow. But room number 1921 had already registered in Samad’s head as he quietly slipped out of the hotel lobby and waited for night to fall.

  At night, he went to the hotel, did not even throw a glance anywhere and headed straight to the nineteenth floor with two other men. He knocked on the room 1921; a bespectacled man of very small frame opened the door. ‘Tera naam Jain hai [is your name Jain]?’ asked Samad. Perhaps no one in his life would have referred to him in such a disrespectful manner.

  The man behind the door was stunned and confused but it soon turned into fear, as he looked closer at the three men in front of him. The next moment Jain was knocked into the room with the blow of a fist on his face. The men brutally kicked and punched him on the face and all over his body as he lay on the floor squirming in pain. Then suddenly the blows stopped and he was dragged on to his feet. He was quickly stripped of all his clothes as he saw Samad light up a candle.

  The men held up his hands as Samad drew the candle and whiffed it around Jain’s face. He then dropped the hot wax onto a bewildered Jain’s scrotum and all over his penis. As Jain screamed in extreme pain and anguish, Samad’s face had eerily drawn into a wide grin.

  Ironically, big hotel rooms are engineered in such a manner that no sound should escape the room premises. And even if they did, the hotel staff remained discreet under the presumption that the guest must be having a good time with his companion.

  After a while of torture, Samad grew tired and quietly took a rope and strangled Jain. He let go of the rope and walked out, the grin never leaving his face. It had taken him about five blood curdling hours to complete the entire process.

  But Samad, being the unscrupulous Pathan that he was, was not known for being meticulous about the finer details of the contract and executing them. He later realised the next day that the person he had killed was S.K. Jain, a tax macro executive, and not Ranvir Jain, on whom the supari had been issued. He was moved to remorse, not at the mistaken identity, but because he had not fulfilled his job.

  Not one to let go, Samad set out to Hotel Sea Rock again the next day, and this time around, got the real target and killed him. With his exhilarating sense of machismo, Samad Khan had completed his campaign of extermination.

  Samad Khan single-handedly ruled the roost during his sentence between 1983 and 1984 in Arthur Road Jail, despite Dawood’s men having had complete control over the jail previously. The jail was teeming with gangsters from various gangs, most of whom were Dawood’s men. Despite this, Samad was calling the shots. He would threaten witnesses there and people would come to him for help; he had even managed to get the jail officials under his control. Samad had a colour television and a video cassette player installed in his cell. No other gangster had that kind of clout in the jail.

  Apart from holding darbars, he was also demanding and extorting money during his incarceration. His dictatorial manner and evident power made people think that if he could unleash such extortion from within the confines of his jail cell, they would not want to deal with him at any point. Out of fear they would just shell out the money, and he played on this psychosis for a long time.

  He fondly remembered the time when he, Kalia Anthony and Abdul Kunju decided to take care of two witnesses who had testified against him in the murder case of passport agent Raja Singh Thakur. Fully aware that the case in the session’s court was entirely built on their testimony he wanted to silence them. They were Ghulam Hussain and Naseer Hussain, inherent reliable witnesses in the case. His logic bore him that if these two men turned hostile he would be able to change the ruling in his favour. And once their testimonies were changed, he could easily get bail in the case.

  In that darbar, where Anthony, Kunju, and his other hang-arounds were sitting, he called on the two witnesses. The first thing he did was strip them of their clothes. Then he called a barber and he asked him to shave off the hair on their heads, their moustaches, beard, and eyebrows. Once their ent
ire face was shaven off, he warned them that the next time the blade would not be shaving any hair but instead running along their throats and slitting their jugulars if they did not take heed of his warnings. He conveyed to them that if they did not do what he told them to, he would have them tortured and killed inside the jail without a single jail authority or anyone else coming to their rescue.

  Albeit by intimidation, when the case came to the courts, Samad made bail and walked out of the jail. Still absorbed in his self-mortified thoughts, he thought about the time right after the Jain killings when he had proved his loyalty and love for his uncle when he surrendered to the police.

  Once Ranvir Jain’s killing was out in the open, the police were desperate to implicate Samad in the murder but he was absconding. So the cops picked up his uncle, Karim Lala from his flat near Novelty Cinema and detained him. They assured him that they would let him go only if Samad surrendered, well aware of Samad’s loyalty and ties to his uncle.

  The police knew that Lala was the only one who could get to Samad, so they even threatened that Karim Lala would be implicated in the case if they did not get Samad. This infuriated Lala and he conveyed a message to his friend Haji Mastan that Samad had better surrender to the police. Through various channels, Haji Mastan managed to convey the urgent message. He exhorted Samad to surrender for the sake of his old uncle and even conveyed that his bail would be arranged, that he would be out in no time.

  Samad knew the only solution was to surrender, so he gave himself in, for love of his uncle. Arrested in July, he remained in prison for only two months. In September, he was released once again from Arthur Road Jail. And as always, the moment he got out, he wasted no time in throwing his weight around, creating havoc, and threatening people.

  It was at this point that Lala was advised by Haji Mastan to break off all ties with Samad, if he wanted the cops off his back. So, seething with rage and self-indulged mania, Samad decided it was time he branched out on his own. He would do things on his own and be a ganglord himself. He did not need his uncle’s help or his patronage.

  As he brooded, a thought struck him. He considered clearing any bad feelings with Dawood, following his domination of his gang members while in prison, and his ties to the Pathans, so he had at least one less front to watch his back on. Samad arranged a meeting with Dawood and extended his hands tranquilly, proclaiming his friendship and loyalty and diffusing any enmity between them. He affiliated his loyalty to Dawood, proclaiming that whatever had happened between Alamzeb and Amirzada and the other Pathans had nothing to do with him and that he was not involved in the killing of Sabir. Hence Dawood should have no reason to hold any grudges against him.

  Dawood, although taken aback and cautious, admired the man’s courage and openness and respected the zeal and honesty with which Samad had approached him. Samad had won over Dawood when he had extended his hands. A certain level of friendship had been attained, even if temporarily. Knowing this, Samad went home a relieved man.

  However, the very next day, when he was sitting in a bar, an informant told him that Dawood’s younger brother Noora had been spreading malicious gossip about him. Apparently Noora had been abusing Samad and proclaiming that had he not been Lala’s nephew, he would have been done away with a long time ago.

  Fresh from the hurt of his uncle disowning him, and manically puffed up with his sense of his own might, Samad smarted at the insult. Samad’s animal-like mentality had been openly challenged and his notoriety questioned. Being a Pathan, and anyway known for his brash, brutal ways, Samad could not fathom the thought that someone could actually question his independence and self-integrity. He immediately sought Noora out and attacked him that very day, following the day of his truce with Dawood. He single-handedly beat him up, leaving Noora severely injured. Samad smiled at how, in full view of Dawood’s acolytes, he had beaten Noora black and blue and no one had come to his rescue. Had he not made friends with Dawood he would have killed Noora after putting him through Jain-like torture, Samad grinned with pleasure.

  Surprisingly, Dawood did not retaliate immediately, which Samad took to mean that he had understood that Samad had been justified in his actions.

  So on 4 October 1984, as Samad left his apartment, he took a long puff on his cigarette, and realised his cigarette had already reached its end. He threw it off the balcony. He looked at people walking past in high spirits. Gazing into Shilpa’s eyes before he departed, for some strange reason, his longing seemed to draw him to her in an almost repulsive way that was not sexual, but suggested his desire to stay. He wrenched his strong arms off Shilpa’s finely manicured fingers, and left. As he pushed the button for elevator, a vague sense of foreboding engulfed him.

  The elevator touched the ground and jerked him back out of his thoughts, a couple of minutes later. As he walked out of the elevator, he felt the presence of death. Samad Khan stood transfixed: Dawood and his brother Ali Antulay, Chhota Rajan, and Abdul Hamid stood before him, stonily silent. They all had guns cocked in their hands, and none of them seemed to be in the mood to talk.

  Samad opened his mouth to say something but their guns began to spew bullets indiscriminately. As the firing died out and the dust settled, it was revealed that Samad’s bodyguard and the housewife who happened to be in the lift with them had sustained multiple injuries. Samad’s own body had nineteen bullets in it. He died on the spot.

  Dawood spat on Samad’s face, the bile rising in his mouth. What Samad had not realised was that his assault on Noora had infuriated Dawood. How could Samad attack his own brother when just the day before Dawood had been kind enough to put his grudges behind him and shaken the hands of one of his arch enemies?

  Dawood surmised that the truce was actually Samad’s unscrupulous cunning and that he would turn around and betray his trust. Dawood could not see beyond vengeance and payback for Samad’s actions, and was paranoid that this pledge of friendship was just another excuse to disarm him.Dawood had always nurtured the desire to personally kill a Pathan but he could not lay hands on them thus far. Sabir’s murder kept playing in his head. The day he visited Noora in the hospital, Dawood was consumed by a mindless rage. He had made his decision to kill Samad Khan and put an end to a very violent chapter in the Pathan gang; one where true repentance is comparatively rare.

  Dawood’s killing of Samad Khan was the last straw for the Bombay police. There were already a number of charges against him, and with the Samad killing, the police came after him in full force. In 1986, Dawood left Bombay for the last time.

  34

  Dawood’s Better Half

  While Dawood kept himself occupied with gang-building, he had totally shut the door on love after Sujata’s humiliation. He spent much of his time reducing his rivals to pulp and forming a close coterie of trusted members.

  One day as he sat in his favourite seat at the Gulshan-e-Iran restaurant near Manish Market, his mind drifted back to that crushing moment when Sujata chose her family over him. The thought ‘how dare the bitch’ reverberated in his mind. Unaware of the heartbreak, his acquaintance Mumtaz Khan—referred to by friends as ‘Kaana’ in a derogatory way because he was blind in one eye—walked over to Dawood’s table.

  Mumtaz owned a perfume shop in Manish Market and he went to speak to Dawood about some dirty work he wanted done. Manish Market’s shop number 12 needed to be ripped apart and emptied out; in other words, Mumtaz, for his own reasons, wanted to get even with the owner of the shop. ‘I know you can do it, Dawood,’ he said.

  Bubbling over with fury at the moment, Dawood was in the perfect state of mind for a task like this and promptly agreed. Upon arriving at Manish Market, his rage converted into a sort of fuel for violence and he began to tear the shop apart. Seeing him in such an angry mood, people lost the courage to confront him; they let him go about his job. Having thrown every little thing out of the store, Dawood pulled down the shutter with one a
rm.

  Mumtaz was extremely pleased that his task had been undertaken and completed with such clinical precision, and following the shakedown of shop number 12 in Manish Market, Dawood became a regular visitor at Mumtaz’s home. Over time, Mumtaz found himself very satisfied with Dawood’s efficiency and hard work. So, he invited him over to his residence for a feast. As is the unwritten law in most countries across the world, business is never discussed at the dining table. Accordingly, Dawood and Mumtaz were having a lighter discussion over dinner, when it happened.

  Dawood had never imagined he would meet someone quite as attractive as Sujata again. He never thought he would encounter someone who would fascinate him like she did. And yet, here he was unable to put a single morsel of food into his mouth, transfixed by the vision of beauty in front of him.

  His hands and mouth betrayed him and refused to obey his brain. As soon as she walked out of the room, Dawood immediately inundated Mumtaz with questions. Was she, Dawood wondered, Mumtaz’s daughter? As it turned out, the girl, Mehjabeen, was Mumtaz’s sister-in-law and the daughter of Yusuf Kashmiri, a small-time businessman. Dawood was blown away by her beauty and soon began to date her. Mehjabeen, on her part, had heard tales of Dawood’s bravery from her brother-in-law, and fell for him.

  Soon, Dawood would pick up Mehjabeen regularly from her home and take her for a spin on his motorcycle. They would regularly make trips to the beach, where they would share a plate of bhel puri and a few tender moments in the sand among other couples. Sometimes, they would sit at Marine Drive and laugh as they were soaked with the ocean spray. They would then seek shelter in a nearby restaurant and sit there for hours over chai and biscuits, talking to each other like excited teenagers.

  There were days when Dawood would take longer to finish his ‘business’ before meeting Mehjabeen for their daily outing. On those days, she would gaze wistfully out of the window and imagine him riding down the road on his motorcycle, fading away just before she could touch him. Until finally, that same vision of Dawood coming down the road was no figment of her imagination but a reality.