The fourth man at our table, sitting next to Sanjay, as always, was Salman, his best friend. Salman Mustaan was born in the same year as Sanjay, and had grown up with him in the bustling, crowded suburb of Bandra. He’d been a precocious child, I’d been told, who’d surprised his impoverished parents by topping every subject in every class at his junior school. His success was the more remarkable for the fact that, from the day of his fifth birthday, the boy had worked twenty hours a week with his father, plucking chickens and sweeping out at the local poultry yard.
I knew his history well, piecing it together from stories and confidences he’d shared when we’d worked out together at Abdullah’s gym. When Salman had announced that he had to leave school to work longer hours in support of his family, a teacher who knew Abdel Khader Khan asked the don to intercede on his behalf. Salman became one of Khaderbhai’s scholarship children—like my adviser, in the slum clinic, Doctor Hamid—and it was decided that he should be groomed toward a career as a lawyer. Khader enrolled Salman in a Catholic college run by Jesuit priests, and every day the boy from the slum dressed in a clean, white uniform and took his place among the sons of the rich elite. It was a good education—Salman’s spoken English was eloquent, and his general knowledge roved through history and geography to literature, science, and art. But there was a wildness in the boy and a restless hunger for excitement that even the strong arms and the hard canes of the Jesuits couldn’t tame.
While Salman struggled with the Jesuits, Sanjay had found a job in Khaderbhai’s gang. He worked as a runner, carrying messages and contraband between mafia offices throughout the city. In the first weeks of that service, Sanjay was stabbed during a fight with men from a rival gang who’d tried to rob him. The boy fought back and evaded his attackers, delivering his contraband parcel to Khader’s collection centre, but his wound was serious and he took two months to recover from it. Salman, his lifelong friend, blamed himself for not being with Sanjay, and he left school immediately. He begged the Khan for permission to join his friend and work with him as a runner. Khader agreed, and from that day the boys worked together at every crime in the council’s catalogue.
They were just sixteen then, at the beginning. They both turned thirty in the weeks before our meeting in the Mocambo. The wild boys had become hard men who lavished gifts on their families, and lived with a certain gaudy, aggressive cool. Although they’d supported their sisters into prestigious marriages, both men were unmarried, in a country where that was unpatriotic at the least, and sacrilegious at worst. They’d refused to marry, Salman told me, because of a shared belief or presentiment that they would die violently and they would die young. The prospect didn’t frighten or worry them. They saw it as a reasonable tradeoff: excitement and power and wealth enough to provide for their families, balanced against short lives that rushed into the dead-end of a knife or a gun. And when Nazeer’s group won the gangster war against Ghani’s group, the two friends found themselves on the new council; young mafia dons in their own right.
‘I think Ghani did try to warn Khaderbhai what was in his heart,’ Salman said thoughtfully, his voice clear and his English rounded to the nearest decibel point. ‘He talked about that hero curse thing for a good year or so before he decided to create Sapna.’
‘Fuck him, yaar,’ Sanjay snarled. ‘Who the fuck was he to be giving Khaderbhai warnings? Who the fuck was he to get us all in the shit with Patil, so he had to have his guys cut up old Madjid? And then, after everything, he went and sold everybody out to the fuckin’ Pakistani cops, yaar. Fuck him. If I could dig the madachudh up and kill him again, I’d do it today. I’d do it every day. It would be my fuckin’ hobby, like.’
‘Who was the real Sapna?’ I asked. ‘Who actually did the killings for Abdul? I remember Khader told me once, after Abdullah was killed, that he found the real Sapna. He said he killed him. Who was he? And why did he kill him, if he was working for him in the first place?’
The two younger men turned to face Nazeer. Sanjay asked him a few questions in Urdu. It was an act of respect toward the older man: they knew the facts as well as Nazeer did, but they deferred to his recollection of them and included him in the discussion. I understood most of Nazeer’s reply, but I waited for Sanjay to translate.
‘His name was Jeetendra. Jeetudada, they called him. He was a gun and machete guy from Delhi-side. Ghani brought him down here, with four other guys. He actually kept them in five-star hotels, like, the whole fuckin’ time—two years, man! Bahinchudh! Complaining about Khader spending money on the mujaheddin and the war and all, and meanwhile he was keeping these psycho fuckers in five-star hotels for two fuckin years!’
‘Jeetudada got drunk when Abdullah was killed,’ Salman added. ‘It really got to him, you know, that everyone was saying Sapna was dead. He’d been doing the Sapna thing for nearly two years, and it had started to twist his brain. He started to believe his own—or Ghani’s—bullshit.’
‘Stupid fuckin’ name, yaar,’ Sanjay cut in. ‘It’s a girl’s name, Sapna. It’s a fuckin’ girl’s name. It’s like me calling myself fuckin’ Lucy, or some such. What kind of a bad fucker calls himself a girl’s name, yaar?’
‘The kind who kills eleven people,’ Salman answered, ‘and almost gets away with it. Anyway, he got completely drunk the night Abdullah was killed and everybody was saying that Sapna was dead. And he started shooting his mouth off, telling anyone who would listen that he was the real Sapna. They were in a bar in the President Hotel. Then he starts shouting that he was ready to tell it all—who was behind the Sapna killings, you know, and who planned it all and paid for it all.’
‘Fuckin’ gandu,’ Sanjay growled, using the slang word for arsehole. ‘I never met one of these psycho types who wasn’t a fuckin’ squealer, yaar.’
‘Lucky for us, there were mostly foreigners in the place that night, so they didn’t know what he was talking about. One of our guys was there, in the bar, and he told Jeetu to shut the fuck up. Jeetudada said he wasn’t afraid of Abdel Khader Khan because he had plans for Khader, as well. He said Khader was going to end up in pieces, just like Madjid. Then he starts waving a gun around. Our guy called Khader right away. And the Khan, he went and did that one himself. He went with Nazeer and Khaled, and Farid, and Ahmed Zadeh, and young Andrew Ferreira, and some others.’
‘I missed that one, fuck it!’ Sanjay cursed. ‘I wanted to fix that maakachudh from the first day, and especially after Madjid. But I was on a job, in Goa. Anyway, Khader fixed them up.’
‘They found them near the car park of the President Hotel. Jeetudada and his guys put up a fight. There was a big shoot-out. Two of our guys got hit. One of them was Hussein—you know, he runs the numbers in Ballard Pier now. That’s how he lost his arm—he took a shotgun blast, both barrels of a crowd-pleaser, a sawn-off, and it tore his arm right off his body. If Ahmed Zadeh hadn’t wrapped him up and dragged him out of there, and off to hospital, he would’ve bled to death, right there in the car park. All four of them who were there—Jeetudada and his three guys—got wasted. Khaderbhai put the last bullets into their heads himself. But one of those Sapna guys wasn’t in the car park, and he got away. We never tracked him down. He went back to Delhi, and he disappeared from there. We haven’t heard anything since.’
‘I liked that Ahmed Zadeh,’ Sanjay said quietly, dispensing what was, for him, extravagantly high praise with a little sigh of sorrowing recollection.
‘Yeah,’ I agreed, remembering the man who’d always looked as though he was searching for a friend in a crowd; the man who’d died with his hand clenched in mine. ‘He was a good guy.’
Nazeer spoke again, grunting the words at us in his wrathful style as if they were threats.
‘When the Pakistani cops were tipped off about Khaderbhai,’ Sanjay translated, ‘it was obvious that it had to be Abdul Ghani behind it.’
I nodded my agreement. It was obvious. Abdul Ghani was from Pakistan. His connections there went deep, and high. He’d told me
about it more than once when I’d worked for him. I wondered why I hadn’t seen it at the time, when the cops raided our hotel in Pakistan. My first thought was that I’d simply liked him too much to suspect him, and that was true. More to the point, perhaps, was how flattered I’d been by his attention: Ghani had been my patron on the council, after Khader himself, and he’d invested time, energy, and affection in our friendship. And there was something else that might have distracted me in Karachi: my mind had been filled with shame and revenge—I remembered that much from the visit to the mosque when I’d sat beside Khaderbhai and Khaled to hear the Blind Singers. I remembered reading Didier’s letter and deciding, in that shifting, yellow lamplight, that I would kill Madame Zhou. I remembered thinking that and then turning my head to see the love in Khader’s golden eyes. Could that love and that anger have smothered something so important, something so obvious, as Ghani’s treachery? And if I’d missed that, what else had I missed?
‘Khader wasn’t supposed to make it out of Pakistan,’ Salman added. ‘Khaderbhai, Nazeer, Khaled—even you. Abdul Ghani thought it was his chance to take out the whole council in one shot—all the guys on the council who weren’t with him. But Khaderbhai had his own friends in Pakistan, and they warned him, and you made it out of the trap. I think Abdul must’ve known he was finished from that day on. But he held his peace, and he didn’t make any moves here. He was hoping, I guess, that Khader, and the whole lot of you, might be killed in the war—’
Nazeer interrupted him, impatient with the English that he despised. I thought I understood what he’d said, and I translated his words, looking to Sanjay for confirmation that my guess was correct.
‘Khader told Nazeer to keep the truth about Abdul Ghani a secret. He said that if anything happened to him in the war, Nazeer was to return to Bombay and avenge him. Was that it?’
‘Yeah,’ Sanjay wagged his head. ‘You got it. And after we did that, we had to fix the rest of the guys who were on Ghani’s side. There’s none of them left now. They’re all dead, or they got the fuck out of Bombay.’
‘Which brings us to the point,’ Salman smiled. It was a rare smile, but a good one: a tired man’s smile; an unhappy man’s smile; a tough man’s smile. His long face was a little lopsided with one eye lower than the other by the thickness of a finger, a break in his nose that had settled crookedly, and a mouth that hitched in one corner where a fist had split the lip and a suture had pulled the skin too tightly. His short hair formed a perfectly round hairline on his brow like a dark halo that pressed down hard on his slightly jugged ears. ‘We want you to run the passports for a while. Krishna and Villu are very insistent. They’re a little …’
‘They’re freaked out of their fuckin’ brains,’ Sanjay cut in. ‘They’re scared stupid because guys were getting chopped all over Bombay—starting with Ghani while they were right there in the fuckin’ cellar. Now the war’s over, and we won, but they’re still scared. We can’t afford to lose them, Lin. We want you to work with them, and settle them down, like. They’re asking about you all the time, and they want you to work with them. They like you, man.’
I looked at each of them in turn, and settled my eyes on Nazeer. If my understanding was correct, it was a tempting offer. The victorious Khader faction had reformed the local mafia council under old Sobhan Mahmoud. Nazeer had become a full member of the council, as had Mahmoud Melbaaf. The others included Sanjay and Salman, Farid, and three other Bombay-born dons. All of the last six spoke Marathi every bit as well as they spoke Hindi or English. That gave me a unique and very significant point of contact with them because I was the only gora any of them knew who could speak Marathi. I was the only gora any of them knew who’d been leg-ironed at Arthur Road Prison. And I was one of the very few men, brown or white, who’d survived Khader’s war. They liked me. They trusted me. They saw me as a valuable asset. The gangster war was over. In the new Pax Mafia that ruled their part of the city, fortunes could be made. And I needed the money. I’d been living on my savings, and I was almost broke.
‘What exactly did you have in mind?’ I asked Nazeer, knowing that Sanjay would reply.
‘You run the books, the stamps, all the passport stuff, and the licences, permits, and credit cards,’ he answered quickly. ‘You get complete control. Just the way it was with Ghani. No fuckin’ problem. Whatever you need, you get it. You take a piece of that action—I’m thinkin’ about 5 per cent, but we can talk about that if you don’t think it’s enough, yaar.’
‘And you can visit the council whenever you want,’ Salman added. ‘Sort of an observer status, if you get my meaning. What do you say?’
‘You’d have to move the operation from Ghani’s basement,’ I said quietly. ‘I’d never feel happy about working there, and I’m not surprised the place has got Villu and Krishna spooked.’
‘No problem,’ Sanjay laughed, slapping the table. ‘We’re going to sell the place anyway. You know, Lin-brother, that fat fuck Ghani put the two big houses—his own one and the place next door—in his brother-in-law’s name. Nothin’ wrong with that—fuck, man, we all do that. But they’re worth fuckin’ crores, Lin. They’re fuckin’ mansions, baba. And then, after we sliced and diced the fat fuck, his brother-in-law decides he doesn’t want to sign the places over to us. Then he gets tough, and starts talking lawyers and police. So we had to tie him up over a big dubba of acid, yaar. Then he’s not tough any more. Then he can’t wait to sign the places over to us. We sent Farid to do the job. He took care of it. But he got so fucked up, yaar, with the disrespect Ghani’s brother-in-law showed us, and he was real angry with the madachudh for making him set up the acid barrel and all. He likes to keep things simple, our brother Farid. The whole hanging-the-cunt-up-over-the-acid thing, it was all a bit—what did you call it, Salman? What was the word?’
‘Tawdry,’ Salman suggested.
‘Yeah. Taw-fuckin-dry the whole thing. Farid, he likes to get respect, or cut to the chase and gun the motherfucker down, like. So, angry as he is, he takes the brother-in-law’s own house as well—makes him sign over his own house, just for being such a big madachudh about Ghani’s houses. So now he’s got nothing, that guy, and we got three houses on the market instead of one.’
‘It’s a vicious and bloodthirsty racket, that property business,’ Salman concluded with a wry smile. ‘I’m moving us into it as soon as I can. We’re taking over one of the big agencies. I’ve got Farid working on it. Okay, Lin, if you don’t want to work at Ghani’s place, where would you like us to set it up for you?’
‘I like Tardeo,’ I suggested. ‘Somewhere near Haji Ali.’
‘Why Tardeo?’ Sanjay asked.
‘I like Tardeo. It’s clean … and it’s quiet. And it’s near Haji Ali. I like Haji Ali. I’ve got kind of a sentimental connection to the place.’
‘Thik hain, Lin,’ Salman agreed. ‘Tardeo it is. We’ll tell Farid to start looking right away. Anything else?’
‘I’ll need a couple of runners—guys I can trust. I’d like to pick my own men.’
‘Who’ve you got in mind?’ Sanjay asked.
‘You don’t know them. They’re outside guys. But they’re both good men. Johnny Cigar and Kishore. I trust them, and I know I can rely on them.’
Sanjay and Salman exchanged a glance and looked to Nazeer. He nodded.
‘No problem,’ Salman said. ‘Is that it?’
‘One more thing,’ I added, turning to Nazeer. ‘I want Nazeer as my contact on the council. If there’s any problem, for any reason, I want to deal with Nazeer first.’
Nazeer nodded again, favouring me with a little smile deep in his eyes.
I shook hands with each man in turn to seal the deal. The exchange was a little more formal and solemn than I’d expected it to be, and I had to clench my jaw to stifle a laugh. And those attitudes, their gravitas and my recusant impulse to laugh, registered the difference between us. For all that I liked Salman, Sanjay, and the others—and the truth was that I loved Nazeer, an
d owed him my life—the mafia was, for me, a means to an end and not an end in itself. For them, the mafia was a family, an infrangible bond that held them from minute to minute and all the way to the dying breath. Their solemnity expressed that kin-sacred obligation from eye to eye and hand to hand, but I knew they never believed it was like that for me. They took me in and worked with me—the white guy, the wild gora who went to the war with Abdel Khader Khan—but they expected me to leave them, sooner or later, and return to the other world of my memory and my blood.
I didn’t think that, and I didn’t expect it, because I’d burned all the bridges that might’ve led me home. And although I had to stop myself from laughing at the earnestness of the little ceremony, the handshake had, in fact, formally inducted me into the ranks of professional criminals. Until that moment, the crimes I’d committed had been in the service of Khader Khan. As difficult as it is for anyone outside that world to understand, there was a sense in which I’d been able to say, with sincerity, that I’d committed them for love of him: for my own safety, certainly; but, beyond every other reason, for the father’s love I’d craved from him. With Khader gone, I could’ve made the break completely. I could’ve gone … almost anywhere. I could’ve done … something else. But I didn’t. I joined my fate to theirs and became a gangster for nothing more than the money, and the power, and the protection that their brotherhood promised.
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