by Suketu Mehta
The first interrogation of the evening begins. Two plainclothes police officers and a plainclothes constable come in, bringing a veiled figure. The officers tell Ajay that the suspect is a shooter in the gang that killed a mob lawyer. When the veil is removed, it discloses a puny man, scarcely five feet tall, so scrawny you wouldn’t look at him twice in the street. As the towel is removed, he brings his palms together in a hesitant namaste.
Ajay presses him for details. “When did you get the order for the work?”
“Eleven . . . before eleven. It was before eleven, early in the morning, that bhai called me to do the work.”
“Do the bhais ever wake up before eleven?” Ajay demands angrily, catching the lie. “Bhais never wake up before eleven!”
After the suspect and the plainclothes policemen leave, Ajay tells me he’s almost sure the man didn’t do it. He’s being paid to take the fall for someone else the gang wants to protect. “But I suspect that officer is mixed up in it”—indicating the chair to my left, where the big policeman was sitting.
I am astonished. Ajay is referring to a police officer nominally under his own command.
“He’s a mole.” Ajay might have to interrogate him himself, if he doesn’t get the information by the next morning.
The new political structure doesn’t want Ajay in Bandra. He doesn’t expect to last in his office past September. Ajay’s boss, the police commissioner, is about to be replaced, and he does not know whether the new man is someone he can trust. When he does not know whether his chiefs themselves are beholden to the gangs, he has to operate in secrecy from his superiors. If he lets them know who he’s going after, and if the suspect happens to be from the gang that the superior is allied with, the gang will be tipped off. So Ajay has to hide what he’s doing, both from the bandicoots in charge of the stations and from the politically savvy men above him.
For the last couple of years, and especially since his posting to Bandra, Ajay has been unable to sleep at night. He tosses and turns, thinking of his various operations, anticipating the gangsters’ next move. “When I get up in the morning, I think I don’t want to go to the office. I think I would like to get sick. I’m burning out.” On the rare Sunday that he doesn’t go to his office, he starts getting panicky by evening, thinking he’s losing control of his region.
The previous morning, his wife said to him, “Your son needs you.” Ajay points to the newspapers on his desk. In one of them is the news that Rahul has scored a winning goal for his school hockey team, which he captains. His son hasn’t read the report. Ajay won’t get home in time to congratulate his son, so he calls Ritu to do so. “When I leave early in the morning he’s sleeping, and when I get back late at night he’s sleeping. I haven’t seen my son at all.”
An unmarked Maruti Omni pulls up outside the station, and some men are led out with their heads covered. A detective comes into Ajay’s office escorting Akbar, a thirty-one-year-old rickshaw wallah from Andhra, a shooter who is suspected of killing several members of the D-Company. Akbar has studied up to the third standard at the Jogeshwari municipal school. He is wearing a dirty white shirt with a green alligator on it. He seems a bit slow; he holds his head and scratches it when attempting to dig up a name. “What was his name . . .?”—slowly moving his fingers through his hair—“What was his name . . .?” But he is avoiding nothing. Without being prompted, he comes out with the fact that he fired the bullets. He used to own a rickshaw, which he sold to raise money for his sister’s wedding. Then he drove a rented one. The policemen slap him around a little, but it’s really not necessary. He talks readily about his works. First was a man at a motor training school. His accomplice had fired two rounds at him, and he had fired once.
“How did you learn to fire a gun?” asks Ajay.
“He gave me the gun and told me to press a button. The bullets were already filled.” Akbar’s main concern seems to be to protect his brother, who figured marginally in the job, having picked up some of the gang’s money on his way home from the station.
“I’ll drag your whole family in,” promises Ajay. “How much money did you get?”
“I got fifteen hundred rupees to shoot the bullet.” Then there was the work of a D-Company member whom he had shot two bullets into at a traffic light, as the victim frantically attempted to hide in the back of his jeep. “I got a net of thirty-five hundred rupees.” For three murders, total.
“What did you do with the money?”
“I gave it to my family, to my wife and kids. I have two kids, one six years and the other six months.”
“So you’ve destroyed your kids’ lives!” Then Ajay puts to him a question I had been asking a lot in Bombay: “Don’t you feel anything about taking a life?”
Akbar replies, “After the bullet fires I just don’t know where it goes. I hit him from very close.” He shows how, stretching out his arm; he had hit him at arm’s length. “If I had to shoot from afar I couldn’t do it.”
The detective turns to Ajay. “This is a demon. He should be finished off.”
After the man is led out, Ajay tells me his gang is behind the biggest shootouts of the past couple of weeks. They work for the Rajan gang and have, unluckily for them, been caught with five guns that ballistics confirmed were used in the shootouts. “Fifteen hundred rupees,” Ajay repeats. That’s what Akbar was paid to pump two rounds into a living human being. And now he will spend at least ten years of his unfortunate life paying for it behind bars, for the sake of $35 to give to his wife and children.
“What’s the lowest price for a life you’ve seen in Bombay?” I ask Ajay.
He thinks for a while. Then he tells me about the ragpicker.
In 1995, several pieces of a body were found in the municipal dump in Deonar. An informant tipped Ajay off on the murderer: He was a sixteen-year-old boy, a ragpicker, who lived in a shack on the dump. The boy was brought in for interrogation and confessed. He had been approached by a boarder staying with a couple. The husband of the couple was working the night shift in the Mazagaon docks and had taken in the boarder. It is unwise for married men to work the night shift, and the inevitable happened: love bloomed between the boarder and the wife. The husband was the thorn. He suspected his wife and beat her. One day the wife cooked drugged food for the husband; he ate it and fell asleep. The boarder and the ragpicker then smashed in his head with a rock and transported the body to the Deonar dump. There, the ragpicker spent two hours cutting the body into many pieces, and distributing them around the dump. The wife filed a missing person complaint.
Ajay asked the boy how much money he’d been paid for all that work: killing the husband, transporting his body, sawing away at it, walking around with the bloody head and torso and limbs looking for strategic spots to dump them.
“Fifty,” said the boy.
“Fifty thousand?”
“No. Fifty rupees.”
It was the month of May. In June the rains would come. The ragpicker needed 50 rupees to buy a gunnysack to put on the roof of his shack so his home wouldn’t get flooded in the rain. So he killed a man for a sum of money that would not buy a cup of coffee at a good hotel in the city.
After the interrogation, I invite Ajay to dinner at my house. Ajay asks if we can write a book together; he trusts me. He has never been in the slightest doubt that I am writing a book; when he has people beaten in his office, he can see me on the sofa in the back of the room, scribbling away in my notebook, noting each slap, writing down the exact wording of each death threat. Isn’t he afraid he’ll get into trouble after this gets published? All I have told him by way of reassurance is that the names in my book will be changed. Perhaps he lets me sit there because he needs someone to stand witness, to keep a record of these melancholy evenings of his life. Or perhaps he is simply past caring.
Encounter
On the threshold of sleep and waking one morning, I have a dream. My eyes haven fallen on a document on Ajay’s desk. It is about me. He is out of the ro
om, so I filch it. They have been monitoring my movements, tapping my phone. He is leading the surveillance operation on me. There is a plan drawn up to eliminate me; the special squad has been named. I run, take a rickshaw. I have to get myself and my family out of Bombay. When he comes back to his desk he is going to notice the missing document and throw all his men on my track. They are going to encounter me.
It is an innocuous word, “encounter,” suggesting a chance meeting while strolling in the park. But in Bombay it has come to mean murder by the state without benefit of trial, an extrajudicial killing. It occurs when the police arrest and interrogate a suspect and then take him to a public place and shoot him dead. The explanation they give out to the press is that they “encountered” a dreaded gangster, asked him to surrender, found themselves fired upon, and fired back in retaliation, killing him. The gangwar boys have shortened the word still further. “He has been ‘countered,’” they will say.
Naeem Husain, the crime reporter for one of the leading Bombay dailies, is to meet with Assistant Police Inspector Vijay Salaskar, the top “encounter specialist” of the Bombay Police. He takes me along. Salaskar’s office is in a little hut all the way in the back of Nagpada Police Station. We wait for him to come back from headquarters.
As we are waiting, I hear an agonized screaming. The office across the corridor, which has been open, now has its doors closed and a man is howling inside.
“Interrogation?” I ask a senior inspector.
He smiles, nods. Nobody else looks up from their tea, their newspaper.
Just as Salaskar is about to come into the office, two boxes of milk sweets come in, and I am offered pedas from a huge box. Before realizing what I am celebrating, I have eaten one. Salaskar has just been acquitted in the Sada Pawale encounter case. The gangster had set out to get away from Bombay. He asked his sister and his brothers to travel with him in the car. The car was stopped at a junction by Salaskar and his men, and the family was made to get out. The sister knew what was coming; she put her body around her brother’s and said, “Don’t shoot him.” The police separated them and shot him at the junction, in front of his family. Five of them testified about the encounter. The police put a constable in Pawale’s home and attached a loudspeaker to the phone, so that every incoming call rang around the house. They told the sister, Do you want to lose your youngest brother also? The Aguiar Commission, investigating the incident, held that the encounter was fake, but the high court had just cleared Salaskar because all the witnesses, including the victim’s brother, sister, and sister-in-law, had suddenly recanted their testimony. Four sets of fresh testimonies appeared in court: We didn’t say what we said, we didn’t see what we saw.
All the time I am in Salaskar’s office, top policemen come in and shake his hand and tell him, “Congratulations.” One of them says in Marathi that starting tomorrow he should resume the killings “with full force.” Salaskar receives their greetings with a smile. He seems curiously gentle for Bombay’s top encounter cop; he has the demeanor of a middle-class Maharash-trian engineer. But he has almost single-handedly wiped out the Gawli gang, killed five of their top shooters. This is why, says Husain, “Salaskar allegedly has links to Shakeel.” Every senior police officer has these alleged links, even Ajay. The gangs watch the records of individual policemen jealously. Is he shooting more men of the D-Company? Then he must be a Chotta Rajan man. Is he killing off the Gawli boys? Then he must be a Sena man. These rumors attach themselves to a person, and they are hard to shake. The only way to clear your name is to kill some people of the gang you allegedly have links to. Salaskar, when Husain asks him if he has specially targeted the Gawli gang, protests that he has killed Shakeel men too.
Husain asks him how many encounters he’s been involved in and what kind of gun he uses.
The cop thinks. “Deaths . . . twenty.”
Salaskar brings a black leather pouch out of a cupboard, unzips it—and then I’m holding it in my hands. It is a six-shooter, with a brown handle and a steel barrel. It bears the logo TITAN TIGER, and, below it, .38 and the provenance: MIAMI, FL. On the handle is engraved a bearded Norse god. It looks like a prop in a Hollywood movie of the 1950s. I stare down the barrel.
I ask Salaskar if he has ever felt bad after an encounter, after taking a human life.
“They are not humans,” he replies immediately. “They are animals. Waste.” To take a human life, you first of all have to deny that the victim is human. You have to reclassify him.
Husain asks if he has ever been in any kind of personal danger during an encounter. Never, he says. The trick is to fire on the targets “before retaliatory fire.” He says that he or his men get very close to the target before firing. He is not a good marksman, he admits, but then he has never had to fire from a distance of more than twenty-five feet.
As Judge Aguiar wrote in his report on the recent encounter:
It is amazing that despite Sada Pawale having fired from a sophisticated weapon, namely, an AK-56 which is capable of firing 600 rounds per minute and having an effective range of 300 meters, neither API Salaskar nor PSI Desai, or any of the police officers, suffered any bullet injury. . . . The police officers must surely bear a charmed life.
The gangs will never go after the policemen, says Salaskar, not even after a constable. “What you saw in Satya”—referring to a scene in a gangster movie in which a police commissioner is shot dead by the gangs—“only happens in the movies.” He doesn’t feel personally threatened. “I am fair. I know where the criminals’ families are, but I never touch them.”
Husain asks Salaskar about his family. He has a ten-year-old daughter.
“Do you want your children to join the police force?”
The cop shakes his head emphatically: no.
The parade of felicitators continues all through our conversation. The screaming in the next room also continues. Nothing can be heard of the screaming man’s interrogators; there are no shouts, nothing but the steady, full-throated screaming. Then I hear a series of thwacks, some instrument hitting something soft. Nobody is taking any notice except me. A senior inspector says they will have to get everybody on the team that did the encounter together and celebrate. Salaskar will now have whatever strictures that remained on his behavior lifted. The Titan Tiger is ready to take its twenty-first life.
“Does it have a safety catch?” Husain asks, turning the gun over in his hands.
“No safety catch.”
Husain tells me later about seeing a man begging for his life shot dead by the police. “It’s wrong to call it an encounter. It was cold-blooded murder.” He was taken to the spot ahead of time by the police. He was shown his place to stand and watch. Don’t move from here, he was told. You could get hit by a bullet. “What chutiapanthi”—bullshit—Husain says to me.
He describes what he saw. It was 11:30 p.m. Six policemen came in two gypsy vans to the spot. The man knew what was coming. He was groveling, pleading for his life. “I have children, sir, please spare me. I’ll do anything, I’ll become an informer, anything.” As he was begging, the police raised their guns and began firing, different shots from different angles, according to a prearranged plan. One policeman would stand at a particular spot and fire two shots, another at a different spot; it was agreed that about six or seven rounds in all would be fired upon the begging man. As they fired, they were cursing vigorously at him, but there was no regret or rationalization on the faces of the cops that Husain saw. After the man hit the ground, they brought out a revolver, holding it with a handkerchief, put it in the dead man’s hand, and made the corpse’s hand squeeze off two shots. Whatever public there was at the spot had long since fled after hearing the police’s first shots. The cops waited for forty-five minutes, till there were no more signs of life in the body, then took it to a hospital. “I couldn’t sleep till 3 a.m. that night, and I couldn’t eat for three days,” Husain recalls. “I had seen someone begging for his life. I saw blood squirting out of his head.”
It changed his relationship with the cops. “I hate them. Bombay cops are the worst.” Husain is probably the city’s best crime reporter, and he works for a major newspaper. He has never written about that incident. He now realizes that everything the press reports about police encounters is nonsense; he is a glorified stenographer. “We are the munshis of the police.”
The police, the newspapers, and the courts all keep up the fiction of the encounter killing. They know the script—the gangsters are always supposed to have fired first, and the police fire only in self-defense—and they never bother to ask questions, just as they never bother to ask logical questions about the plots of Hindi movies. If you were to believe the press reports of encounters, you would think that all gangsters are astoundingly bad shots. The police, on the other hand, get their man every time.
In America they call it the thin blue line, the cops who (dressed in blue) separate us, society—men and women who work in jobs in offices and come home and sleep and go to work the next day—from the bad guys, the people who are constantly peering into our brightly lit living rooms from the road below. In Bombay it would be the thin khaki line. But the line here is fuzzy. It is not discernibly a part of us, and it is not clear who is being protected from whom. It is a ragged, childlike slash with a piece of heavy chalk. At times it is fat and sturdy; other times it is so faint it has all but disappeared. They are constantly watching for such gaps, such breaches, into which they can slip, like otters into water on a dark night.
Among the public, there is a steadily increasing tolerance for violence. In October 1998, the Mumbai Police formed six secret Special Teams “whose sole brief was to gun down gangsters,” according to a report Husain wrote in his newspaper. The police had killed ten people in encounters in the nine months before setting up the Special Teams. In the five months after the teams were formed, the police shot dead fifty-three alleged gangsters in forty-three encounters. One of the death squads was headed by Salaskar, another by Ajay. The teams were not limited by jurisdiction; they could roam far and wide over the city, picking off targets as they chose. When an encounter occurred, it was officially credited to the nearest police station. This did not make the front page in Husain’s newspaper; no other paper followed up on Husain’s exclusive. There was no reaction from the public, no outrage that the police had decided to turn executioners.