Old men in the district nodded to one another, and compared the relative calm on their streets with the chaos that tumbled and trawled through the streets of other districts. Children looked up to the young gangsters, sometimes adopting one as a local hero. Restaurants, bars, and other businesses welcomed Salman’s men as preservers of peace and comparatively high moral standards. And the informing rate in the areas of his control, the amount of unsolicited information supplied to the police—a sure indicator of public popularity or displeasure—was lower than in any other area across the whole seething sprawl of Bombay. We had pride, and we had principle, and we were almost the men of honour that we believed ourselves to be.
Still, there were a few grumbles of complaint within the clan, and some council meetings hosted fierce, unresolved arguments about the future of the group. The heroin trade was making other mafia councils rich. New smack millionaires flaunted their imported cars, designer clothes, and state-of-the-art electronic gadgets at the most exclusive and expensive venues in the city. More significantly, they used their inexhaustible, opiate-based income streams to hire new men: mercenaries who were paid well to fight dirty and to fight hard. Little by little, those gangs expanded their territories in turf wars that left a few of the toughest men dead, many more wounded, and cops all over the city lighting incense sticks to give thanks for their luck.
With similarly high profits derived from the new and insatiable market for imported, hard-core pornographic videos, some of the rival councils had accumulated enough money to acquire that ultimate status symbol for any criminal gang: a hoard of guns. Envious of the wealth amassed by such gangs, infuriated by their territorial gains, and wary of their growing power, some of Salman Mustaan’s men urged him to change his policy. First among those critical voices was that of Sanjay, Salman’s oldest and closest friend.
‘You should meet with Chuha,’ Sanjay said earnestly as he, Farid, Salman, and I drank chai at a little shop on Maulana Azad Road near the brilliant, green mirages of the Mahalaxmi Racecourse. He was talking about Ashok Chandrashekar, an influential strong-arm man in the Walidlalla gang. He’d used Ashok’s nickname, Chuha, meaning the Rat.
‘I’ve met with the fucker, yaar,’ Salman sighed. ‘I meet him all the time. Every time one of his guys tries to squeeze out a corner of our territory, I meet with Chuha to set it straight. Every time our guys get in a fight with his guys, and give them a solid pasting, I meet with Chuha. Every time he makes an offer to join our council to his, I meet with him. I know the fucker too well. That’s the problem.’
The Walidlalla council held a contiguous border with our own. Relations between the gangs were generally respectful but not cordial. Walid, the leader of the rival council, had been a close friend of Khaderbhai and, with him, was one of the original founders of the council system. Although Walid had led his council into the heroin and pornography trade that he, like Khaderbhai, had once despised, he’d also insisted that no conflict with Salman’s council should occur. Chuha, his second in command, had ambitions that strained at the leash of Walid’s control. Those ambitions led to disputes and even battles between the gangs, and all too often forced Salman to meet with the Rat at stiffly formal dinners held on neutral ground in a suite at a five-star hotel.
‘No, but you haven’t really talked to him, one on one like, about the money we can make. If you did, Salman brother, I know you’d find out he talks a lot of sense. He’s making crores out of the fuckin’ garad, man. The junkies can’t get enough of the shit. He has to bring it in by fuckin’ train. And the blue movies thing, man—it’s going crazy. I swear! It’s a fuckin’ deadly business, yaar. He’s making five hundred copies of every movie, and selling them for five hundred each. That’s two-and-a-half lakhs, Salman, for every fuckin’ blue movie! If you could make money like that by killing people, India’s population problem would be solved in a month! You should just talk to him, Salman brother.’
‘I don’t like him,’ Salman declared. ‘And I don’t trust him, either. One of these days, I think I’ll have to finish the madachudh once and for all. That’s not a very promising way to start up a business, na?’
‘If it comes to that, I’ll kill the gandu for you, brother, and it will be my pleasure. But up to then, like, before we actually have to kill him, we can still make a lot of money with him.’
‘I don’t think so.’
Sanjay looked around the table for support, and finally appealed to me.
‘Come on, Lin. What do you think?’
‘It’s council business, Sanju,’ I replied, smiling at his earnestness. ‘It’s got nothing to do with me.’
‘But that’s why I’m asking you, Linbaba. You can give us an independent point of view, like. You know Chuha. And you know how much money there is in the heroin. He’s got some good money ideas, don’t you think so?’
‘Arrey, don’t ask him!’ Farid cut in. ‘Not unless you want the truth.’
‘No, go on,’ Sanjay persisted, the gleam in his eyes brightening. He liked me, and he knew that I liked him. ‘Tell me the truth. What do you think of him?’
I glanced around at Salman and he nodded, just as Khader might’ve done.
‘I think Chuha’s the kind of guy who gives violent crime a bad name,’ I said.
Salman and Farid spluttered their tea, laughing, and then mopped at themselves with their handkerchiefs.
‘Okay,’ Sanjay frowned, his eyes still gleaming. ‘So, what … exactly … don’t you like about him?’
I glanced again at Salman. He grinned back at me, raising his eyebrows and the palms of his hands in a Don’t look at me gesture.
‘Chuha’s a stand-over man,’ I replied. ‘And I don’t like stand-over men.’
‘He’s a what?’
‘A stand-over man, Sanjay. He beats up on men he knows can’t fight back, and takes whatever he wants from them. In my country, we call those guys stand-over men because they really do stand over little guys and steal from them.’
Sanjay looked at Farid and Salman with a blank expression of confused innocence.
‘I don’t see the problem,’ he said.
‘No, I know you don’t have a problem with it. And that’s okay. I don’t expect everyone to think like me. Fact is, most people don’t. And I understand that. I get it. I know that’s how a lot of guys make their way. But just because I understand it, that doesn’t mean I like it. I met some of them in jail. A couple of them tried to stand over me. I stabbed them. None of the others ever tried it again. The word got around. Try to stand over this guy, and he’ll put a hole in you. So they left me alone. And that’s just the thing. I would’ve had more respect for them if they’d kept on trying to stand over me. I wouldn’t have stopped fighting them—I still would’ve cut them up, you know, but I would’ve respected them more while I did it. Ask the waiter here, Santosh, what he thinks of Chuha. They came in here last week, Chuha and his guys, and slapped him around for fifty bucks.’
The word bucks was Bombay slang for rupees. Fifty rupees was the same amount, I knew, that Sanjay customarily tipped waiters and better-than-average cab drivers.
‘The guy’s a fuckin’ millionaire, if you believe his bullshit,’ I said, ‘and he stands over a decent working guy like Santosh for fifty bucks. I don’t respect that. And in your heart of hearts, Sanjay, I don’t think you do, either. I’m not going to do anything about it. That’s not my job. Chuha makes his graft by slapping people. I understand that. But if he ever tries to stand over me, I’ll cut him. And I tell you, man, I’ll enjoy doing it.’
There was a little silence while Sanjay pursed his lips, twirled his hand palm upward, and looked from Salman to Farid. Then all three of them burst out laughing.
‘You asked him!’ Farid giggled.
‘Okay, okay,’ Sanjay conceded. ‘I asked the wrong guy. Lin is a wild guy, yaar. He gets wild notions. He went to Afghanistan with Khader, man! Why did I ask a guy who’s crazy enough to do that? You ran that clinic in the zhopad
patti, and you never made a fuckin’ paise out of it. Remind me of that, Lin brother, if I ever ask you for your business opinion again, na?’
‘And another thing,’ I added, keeping a straight face.
‘Eh, Baghwan!’ Sanjay cried. ‘He’s got another thing, yet!’
‘If you think about the slogans, you’ll understand where I’m coming from on this.’
‘The slogans?’ Sanjay protested, provoking his friends to bigger laughter. ‘What fuckin’ slogans, yaar?’
‘You know what I mean. The slogan, or the motto, of the Walidlalla gang is Pahiley Shahad, Tabjulm. I think I’m right in translating it as First Honey, Then Outrage, or even Atrocity. Isn’t that right? And isn’t that what they say to each other as their slogan?’
‘Yeah, yeah, that’s their thing, man.’
‘And what’s our slogan? Khader’s slogan?’
They looked at one another, and smiled.
‘Saatch aur Himmat.’ I spoke it aloud for them. ‘Truth and Courage. I know a lot of guys who’d like Chuha’s slogan. They’d think it was clever and funny. And it sounds ruthless, so they’d think it was tough. But I don’t like it. I like Khader’s.’
At the sound of an Enfield engine, I looked up to see Abdullah park his bike outside the chai shop and wave to me. It was time for me to go.
I’d spoken the truth, as I saw it, and I meant every word, but in my own heart of hearts I knew that Sanjay’s argument, although not better, would turn out to be stronger than mine. The Walidlalla gang under Chuha was the future of all the mafia councils, in a sense, and we all knew it. Walid was still the head of the council that bore his name, but he was old and he was ill. He’d ceded so much power to Chuha that it was the younger don who ruled. Chuha was aggressive and successful, and he gained new ground by conquest or coercion every few months. Sooner or later, if Salman didn’t agree to merge with Chuha, that expansion would come to open conflict, and there would be a war.
I hoped, of course, that Khader’s council, under Salman, would win. But I knew that, if we did win, it would be impossible to claim Chuha’s territory without also absorbing his trade in heroin, women, and porn. It was the future, and it was inevitable. There was simply too much money in it. And money, if the pile gets high enough, is something like a big political party: it does as much harm as it does good, it puts too much power in too few hands, and the closer you come to it the dirtier you get. In the long run, Salman could walk away from the fight with Chuha, or he could defeat him and become him. Fate always gives you two choices, Scorpio George once said: the one you should take, and the one you do.
‘But hey,’ I said, standing to leave, ‘it’s got nothing to do with me. And frankly, I don’t really give a damn one way or the other. My ride is here. I’ll see you guys later.’
I walked out, with Sanjay’s protests and his friends’ laughter rattling above the clatter of cups and glasses.
‘Bahinchudh! Gandu!’ Sanjay shouted. ‘You can’t fuck up my rave like that and then walk out, yaar! Come back here!’
As I approached him, Abdullah kick-started the bike and straightened it from the side stand, ready to ride.
‘You’re in a hurry for your workout,’ I said, settling myself onto the saddle of the bike behind him. ‘Relax. No matter how fast we get there, I’m still going to beat you, brother.’
For nine months, we’d trained together at a small, dark, sweaty, and very serious gym near the Elephant Gate section of Ballard Pier. It was a goonda’s gym set up by Hussein, the one-armed survivor of Khader’s battle with the Sapna assassins. There were weights and benches, a judo mat, and a boxing ring. The smell of man-sweat, both fresh and fouled into the stitching of leather gloves and belts and turnbuckles, was so eyewateringly rancid that the gym was the only building in the city block that rats and cockroaches spurned. There were bloodstains on the walls and the wooden floor, and the young gangsters who trained there accumulated more wounds and injuries in a workout week than the emergency ward of a city hospital on a hot Saturday night.
‘Not today’ Abdullah laughed over his shoulder, pulling the bike into a faster lane of traffic. ‘No fighting today, Lin. I am taking you for a surprise. A good surprise!’
‘Now I’m worried,’ I called back. ‘What kind of surprise?’
‘You remember when I took you to see Doctor Hamid? You remember that surprise?’
‘Yeah, I remember.’
‘Well, it is better than that. Much better.’
‘U-huh. Well, I’m still not very relaxed about it. Gimme another hint.’
‘You remember when I sent you the bear, for hugging?’
‘Kano, sure, I remember.’
‘Well, it is much better than that!’
‘A doctor and a bear,’ I called out above the growl of the engine. ‘There’s a lot of space between them, brother. One more hint.’
‘Ha!’ he laughed, coming to a stop at a set of traffic lights. ‘I will say to you this—the surprise is so good that you will forgive me for all that you suffered when you thought I was dead.’
‘I do forgive you, Abdullah.’
‘No, Lin brother. I know you do not forgive me. I have too many bruises, and I am too much sore from our boxing and karate.’
It wasn’t true: I never hit him as hard as he hit me. Although he was healing well, and he was very fit, he’d never fully recovered the uncanny strength and charismatic vitality he’d known before the police shooting. And when he removed his shirt to box with me, the sight of his scarred body—it was as if he’d been savaged by the claws of wild animals and burned with hot iron brands—always made me pull my punches. Still, I never admitted that to him.
‘Okay,’ I laughed. ‘If that’s the way you’re gonna play it, I don’t forgive you!’
‘But when you see this surprise,’ he called out, laughing with me, ‘you will forgive me completely, with a full heart. Now, come on! Stop asking me about it, and tell me, what did Salman say to Sanjay about that pig—that Chuha?’
‘How did you know that’s what we were talking about?’
‘I can see the look in Salman’s face,’ he shouted back. And Sanjay, he told me, this morning, that he wants to ask Salman—again—to make business with Chuha. So, what did Salman say?’
‘You know the answer to that one,’ I replied a little more quietly as we stopped in traffic.
‘Good! Nushkur’Allah.’ Thanks be to God.
‘You really hate Chuha, don’t you?’
‘I don’t hate him,’ he clarified, moving off with the flow of cars. ‘I just want to kill him.’
We were silent for a while, breathing the warm wind and watching the black business unfold on the streets we’d both roamed so often. There were a hundred large and small scams and deals going down around us every minute, and we knew them all.
When we found ourselves twisted into a knot of traffic behind a stalled bus, I looked along the footpath and noticed Taj Raj, a pickpocket who usually worked the Gateway area near the Taj Mahal Hotel. He’d survived a machete attack years before that had all but severed his neck. The wound caused him to speak in a rattling whisper, and his head was set at such an ill-balanced angle that when he wagged it to agree with someone he almost fell over. He was working the stumble-fall-pilfer game with his friend Indra serving as the stumbler. Indra, known as the Poet, spoke almost all of his sentences in rhyming couplets. They were deeply moving in their beauty, for the first few stanzas, but always found their way into sexual descriptions and allusions so perverse and abhorrent that strong, wicked men winced to hear them. Legend had it that Indra had once recited his poetry through a microphone during a street festival, and had cleared the entire Colaba Market of shoppers and traders alike. Even the police, it was said, had shrunk back in horror until exhaustion overcame the Poet, and then they’d rushed him as he paused for breath. I knew both men, and liked them, though I never let them get closer than an arm’s stretch from my pockets. And sure enough, as the bus fina
lly grumbled to life and the traffic began to ease forward, I watched Indra pretending to be blind—not his best performance, but good enough—and stumbling into a foreigner. And Taj Raj, the helpful passer-by, assisted both of them to their feet, and relieved the foreigner of his burdensome wallet.
‘Why?’ I asked, when we were moving through free space again.
‘Why what?’
‘Why do you want to kill Chuha?’
‘I know he had a meeting … with the men from Iran,’ Abdullah shouted over his shoulder. ‘People say it was just business—Sanjay, he says it was just business. But I think more than business. I think he work with them, against Khader Khan. Against us. For that reason, Lin.’
‘Okay,’ I called back, pleased to have my own instincts about Chuha confirmed, but worried for my wild, Iranian friend. ‘But don’t do anything without me, okay?’
He laughed, and turned his head to show me the white teeth of his smile.
‘I’m serious, Abdullah. Promise me!’
‘Thik hain, Lin brother!’ he shouted in reply. ‘I will call you, when the time is right!’
He coasted the bike to a stop and parked it outside the Strand Coffee House, one of my favourite breakfast dives, near the Colaba Market.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ I demanded as we walked toward the market. ‘Some surprise—I come here nearly every day.’
‘I know,’ he answered, grinning enigmatically. ‘And I am not the only one who knows it.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You will find out, Lin brother. Here are your friends.’
We came upon Vikram Patel and the Zodiac Georges, Scorpio and Gemini, sitting comfortably on bulging sacks of lentils beside a pulses stall, and drinking chai from glasses.
‘Hey, man!’ Vikram greeted me. ‘Pull up a sack and make yourself at home.’
Abdullah and I shook hands all round and, as we sat down on the row of sacks, Scorpio George signalled a chai-runner to bring two more glasses. The passport work was often keeping me busy at night because Krishna and Villu—both of them with young children in their growing families—had taken to staggering their shifts, giving themselves valuable hours at home during the day. That work with the books, and other commitments to the Salman council, prevented me from going to Leopold’s as often as I once had. Whenever I could, I’d met with Vikram and the Georges near Vikram’s apartment on the edge of the Colaba Market. Vikram was there most days, after his lunch with Lettie. He kept me up to date with the news from Leopold’s—Didier had fallen in love, again, and Ranjit, Karla’s new boyfriend, was becoming popular—and the Georges filled me in on what was going down on the streets.
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