Maximum City

by Suketu Mehta

  The suspects had sent the document to the UN and the press, hoping to draw attention to the state of human rights in Bombay. I look for the document a long time, and finally a human rights lawyer sends it to me when I am in America for a short trip. It is a badly typed bundle of sheets with the title “VOICES—From the Draconian Dungeons.” I read it, horrified, in a quiet old farmhouse in New Hampshire, the fall unfurling all around me. Many of the interrogations that the document describes were conducted by Ajay or in his presence. The document claims systematic torture, not just of the suspects but also of their wives, mothers, and infant children. There is a particular focus, with wounded relish, on sexual torture of the women. “A beautiful newly married convent-educated girl was stripped and her naked body was placed on ice slab while the drunk policemen violated her naked body. Her body was inflicted with cigarette burns.” And, “Najma was forced to fondle with her father’s penis and eat up his shit too. . . . Young naked Manzoor Ahmed was forced to insert his penis into the mouth of Zaibunnisa Kazi, a woman of his mother’s age. . . . Sons-in-law were forced to undress their mothers-in-law.” Much of the document reads like a penny-dreadful novel. “Urine and feces were parts of the food, spitting into mouth and even spitting by especially bought lepers were just for the fun of it and heartily enjoyed by the police. Even Satan might have shuddered to his inmost at this sadistic savagery.”

  Parts of “Voices” are true; the difficulty is in knowing which parts. The basic facts of the story of Rakesh Khurana are true. Khurana owned a restaurant and a laundry in Bandra and had a peripheral connection with Piloo Khan, a drug smuggler. One night shortly after the blasts, when Khurana was having dinner with his family, the police came and asked him to come to the station for an inquiry. He told them he would come in later, and they left. All that evening, he seemed very troubled. Then he went into the station, came back, and drove his wife and son and daughter to a culde-sac in Juhu. As his wife attempted to shield the little children with her arms, he shot them all dead and then shot himself. What had the police said to him that so troubled Khurana? Here is the gray world between fact and hearsay. The “Voices” document claims that Khurana murdered his family after he saw what the police officer at the station, Maneckshaw, was doing to the wife of a blasts’ accused in front of Khurana at the station. “If you fail to find out Piloo Khan by tomorrow, I will call your wife and order my constables to rape her,” the document quotes Maneckshaw as saying.

  At least one part of the document is demonstrably true. In March 2000, the National Human Rights Commission ordered the Maharashtra government to pay five lakhs’ compensation to the family of Iqbal Haspatel for doing what it did to them over a fortnight in April 1993. Haspatel was a sixty-year-old weaver who lived with his extended family in Alibag, outside Bombay. A consignment of the arms and explosives used in the blasts had been smuggled in on the beaches of Alibag, and the local police were hot on the trail. When they burst in through the door of Haspatel’s house, they saw a suspicious cylinder in a showcase in the living room. The police officers decided it was a “rocket projectile,” arrested the entire family, and paraded them around the mosque, asking Muslims why they had nurtured “a serpent like him.” At the police station, they stripped Haspatel, his son, and his cousin in front of his wife, daughters, and daughter-in-law. When the women covered their eyes, the police struck their arms with nightsticks, ordering them to look. As the naked father tried to hide his privates from his daughters and daughter-in-law, he was kicked in the spine; he crashed headfirst into a table. The women were kicked and hit with a leather belt. Then the officers of the law took Haspatel’s twenty-five-year-old son, tied his arms and legs, hung him on a rod suspended between two desks, and played football with his body, kicking it with such force that it rotated clear around the rod. His father, watching this, prayed that his son would die. His son came near enough to it; he often lost consciousness and developed convulsions by the end of six days of this game. The family was kept in the police lockup for a fortnight.

  Meanwhile, another of Haspatel’s relatives found out what was happening. He led the police to a textile factory, where an engineer pointed out to the sleuths another cylinder that was exactly the same as the “rocket projectile.” It was a textile spindle. The family was allowed to go back home, where they found out that the police had destroyed all the furniture in the house and stolen much of the removable property. There was the usual inquiry. None of the Haspatel family’s tormentors were ever arrested, even though the whole incident was amply documented. One of the policemen who could not tell the difference between a rocket and a piece of textile machinery has been posted to the Intelligence Bureau.

  When I get back to India I ask Ajay about the “Voices” document. He says that most of it is fiction and points out logical inconsistencies within the document. After his work in the blasts, there were forty-seven petitions in court against Ajay from the suspects, alleging torture. None of them came to anything.

  What do I do with Ajay? He is a brutal interrogator; this I have seen for myself. But Ajay had become a friend of sorts. “We’ll miss you, Suketu!” he said with genuine feeling, when I was about to leave for America. “We got used to having you around.”

  What is in dispute is the extent to which he will torture people. What would be reassuring to believe is that he will only beat men that he knows are criminals, and that he will only beat them with a strap or have his men give them electric shocks—pain that will not permanently harm them but will act as that necessary spur, in the absence of a functioning judiciary, for them to give out information that will save lives, information that will prevent bombs from being planted that will blow up completely innocent people not connected to the gangwar in any way. It is evident that Ajay does not enjoy the torture part of his work. I have never seen him physically hit anyone, only direct others to do so. He is also unaffiliated with any political party, gang, or religion; I have never heard Ajay mention God, not even once.

  I am told by the human rights activist Javed Anand that Ajay has gone after the Sena thugs as few other officers dare to. And the journalist Jyoti Punwani also tells me that Ajay’s deposition before the Srikrishna Commission, investigating the riots, was much better than the lies the other policemen spouted. Even Sanjay Dutt says he is a good officer. And among the common people of his district, Ajay is a hero. He is one of the few senior police officers who sticks up for people without money; that is because he is one of the few police officers who doesn’t take money to do his job. The newspapers are filled with grateful statements about Ajay from Bandra residents fighting slum lords and builders.

  On the sliding scale of the Bombay Police, Ajay Lal is a good cop. Ajay will not shoot people wholesale. He hates the “exterminators” like Salaskar and Sharma and Sawant, not because death is a violation of human rights but, rather, bad police work. “It’s no light thing, to take a human life,” he says about the encounter specialists. “It requires a special kind of psychology.” What kind of psychology does it take to electrocute a human being’s genitals, when that person is incapable of fighting back? Ajay is convinced he is in a fight against evil. He sees himself as providing the same kind of protection to the weak as the Sena thought they were offering during the riots. Ajay and the Sena boys will become evil themselves in order to fight evil. In doing so, they are protecting the good doctors, traders, and professors of the city who, burdened by their consciences, are too weak to become evil to fight evil. When the call comes in from Karachi, threatening their children, their wives, they want Ajay to do whatever he has to. They don’t mind if he hurts the gangsters’ wives, their children.

  Ajay admits that the constant threats to kill his wife or blow up his sons’ school have affected him. “I would have left long back. But the department protects me. If I leave the department, where is the protection?” His sons would go to school unguarded. There would be no armed policemen outside his door. “So I’m now in this Catch-22 situation: I’m neit
her here nor there. I want to leave but I can’t leave.” He can never leave the police force while he is living in Bombay; not for lucre, not out of disgust. The work that put the President’s Medal on his uniform also ensured that the uniform would never come off.

  Last year, a top industrialist offered Ajay a way out. He asked Ajay to be head of security for his company. The package included a salary of three lakhs a month, plus a flat and a car in Bandra; his phone bills would be paid; plus one holiday abroad each year for the family, with first-class airfare, plus free education for his children—all if he would quit the force and be on their board of directors. He heard later from a mutual friend that they would have gone up to five lakhs a month, twenty-five times his current salary. He turned them down. I asked him why. “Right now I can make them wait. I made them wait half an hour for me out there. If I work for them they’ll make me wait three hours.” He won’t be anyone’s Gurkha. Besides, on his current salary, supplemented by the smart investments his friends have made for him, “we have established a lifestyle. We have what we need, and more won’t make a difference. I don’t mind these cars and everything being taken away.”

  “Do you want Rahul to be a police officer?” I ask.

  “No. Never.” He wants his son to get an MBA or become a doctor. He wouldn’t mind if he went into the civil service or the foreign service, but not the IPS. “I know what price I have had to pay. If I could do it again,” says the winner of the President’s Medal for Meritorious Service for his work in detecting the Bombay blasts, “I would have called in sick on the day they assigned me the bomb-blasts case.”

  So why doesn’t he do something else? Start a business, for example?

  And then Ajay admits it. After all the tortured explanations of study abroad and threats to his life and redeeming of parental honor, he finally spells out his doom, gives me the inescapable “The End” of his story: “If you ask me, I don’t think I can do anything else but this. I can’t do anything else but be a cop.”

  Black-Collar Workers

  THE SLAUGHTER WILL CONTINUE for three days. Thousands of goats and cattle have been brought to Madanpura, in central Bombay, for the Bakri Id festival. Girish has been invited for the feast by his good friend and occasional business partner Ishaq, another young entrepreneur, and Girish and I set out in a taxi. The streetscape as you approach Madanpura becomes heterogeneous, kaleidoscopic. A sign just before the overpass at Bombay Central heralds DR. GANJAWALA, ANESTHETIST. On the main street of Madanpura, you see a bonesetter next to a hotel next to a chemist next to an eatery making kababs on coals next to Ishaq’s STD booth, where people can make long-distance calls. There are thousands of small workshops here making blow lamps, belt buckles, textile machinery parts, and a myriad of small but essential items that keep Bombay’s economy humming. The roads are in danger of being overwhelmed from the Bihari slums spilling out over the sidewalks on either side. The back alleys have lots of mosques, one for each sect. There are boundaries everyone knows that separate the Muslim and Hindu areas. Before the riots, there were many Hindus in the Muslim area and vice versa. After 1993, the minority community on each side started selling out and leaving. The segregation is almost complete. “Mini-Pakistan,” people in the city call Madanpura.

  Sitting in the rough but air-conditioned office of Ishaq’s stove-parts factory, his cousin Shahbuddin, a movie-star-handsome doctor in his twenties, explains to me the meaning of Id-ul-Adha. “When Allah mia called upon Ibrahim to sacrifice his son, Ibrahim took him to the mountain. He closed his eyes, raised the sword, and when he was ready to bring it down, he saw a goat standing in his son’s place. The festival means that you have to sacrifice something to God that is dear to you.”

  We go outside.

  A young bull is led to an open space in front of the factories. It belongs to a pipe fitter who is extra grateful to God this year; for he has narrowly escaped extortion by a gang. They phoned him and then came to his factory, looking for him. He wasn’t there then, but the gang told his workers they would shoot him if he didn’t pay two lakhs. The pipe fitter called Ishaq. Ishaq and his men waited for the gang, armed with iron rods. But the gangsters didn’t show up, and the pipe fitter bought a bull for 20,000 rupees and is about to give a public demonstration of his thanks to God.

  The children are brought out. “The children should see,” says Dr. Shahbuddin. The animal is toppled to the ground and its head yanked back, its legs tied up. A one-year-old child is placed on the bull, then lifted up again. The imam asks in whose name the sacrifice is to be offered and is given a piece of paper. He reads seven names aloud and says a prayer. Then a man, not a professional butcher, draws a knife across the beast’s neck. I am watching from the ladder leading to Ishaq’s office, so I have a vantage point as the throat opens up, the blood gushes out, and the suddenly white arteries quiver madly. There is involuntary movement all over the animal’s body; the head is jerking, the feet are twitching. “The meat will keep trembling at home,” one of the men says to another. The muscle movements might continue for over an hour, during which time the meat will be dressed and put on the table, ready to be cooked. On the kitchen counter it may suddenly spasm, especially the outer muscles.

  In the broad street behind the factory, the road is sloppy with blood. I see another bullock being dragged by a gang of men. A rope has been dragged through its nostrils, and they are trying to topple it over. They tie up its front and rear feet and push. The beast goes over, but somehow it struggles and gets up again. With a jerk, the bull is splayed out again. One of the men holds its mouth closed. Another comes up with a foot-long sharpened blade. The spectators crowd around; it is still early on the first day. There are lots of very young children. The bull struggles a bit, there is a deep rumble from the depths of its being, and then the blade is drawn with one swift motion across a vein. A torrent of blood gushes out, they pull its head and body in opposite directions, and the whole neck is open to the street, blood streaming out in bucketfuls, all over the clothes of the professionals. The fresh blood has an unreal color about it, as if it is paint; it is not the deep red of a few moments later but a light, bright pinkish-red. A bucket of water is brought and splashed into the bull’s exposed throat, to keep the blood from clotting. The head and the body struggle separately. They leave it there for a few moments for the blood to drain out, then commence cutting the carcass. When a sack in its stomach is cut, it releases gobs of warm dung, mixing with the blood and the entrails. Next to it, another bull’s carcass, its skin cut away, suddenly releases a stream of yellow liquid; fifteen minutes after it has lost its head, the torso is pissing.

  As the fur and the skin and the flesh are cut away in layers, the animals’ bodies reveal treasures in multiple vivid colors: the brownish-red of the liver; the elegant white-and-red stripes of the inside of the rib cage; the brown, white, black of the fur; the crystal of the eyes; the pure cream of the intestines, unfurled. I see the marvelous arrangement of the cow’s body within and without, the complex cornucopia of its insides, the fine differentiation of the organs, each admirably suited to its purpose. All this had been working in tandem a minute before, and now each part is freed from the yoke of the mind and acts independently, twitching, pissing, growing, hardening. Now they will go their separate ways. After one cow is slaughtered, the children pull at the white fat inside its body; it stretches like an elastic sheet. A man pokes the open eye of the dead animal; its mouth suddenly opens in reflex, showing a line of teeth. The man repeats his gesture; the mouth opens again.

  One thing surprises me: Of the thousands of animals, live and dead, in these streets, there is no sound. No bleating of the terrified goats, no bellowing of the cattle. The killing takes place right next to the live beasts; a massive bullock goes on chewing grass while another is brought to its side right next to it. Similarly with the goats. Don’t the animals sense something, the stink of slaughter all around them? Aside from a slight trembling that I see in one goat, and a curious silence
, there is no reaction. They look, if anything, depressed. One bull allows itself to be brought to its side and lies there waiting for the knife with its eyes open. When the blade is drawn across its throat, it doesn’t even struggle.

  Grinning children run barefoot through the streets deep with blood, holding the freshly cut heads, all the eyes open. There are groups of municipal garbage collectors who take away the waste entrails, the dungfilled stomach sacs. Huge dumps are filled with these carcasses. A man stands inside a municipal garbage container, cutting a big animal’s insides, disposing of the remains right inside the container around his feet. Cats and dogs are having a feast on the leftovers. At the corner there are the knife sellers, and a man on a bicycle with a knife-sharpening wheel attached. As he pedals, the wheel spins; as he holds the blade at an angle to the wheel, a stream of sparks flows in one direction.

  The Muslims of this area are sensualists. On festival days and at weddings, the older folks take a napkin, anoint it with attar, put a pellet of opium on the tip, and stick it inside their ear. Then they can be high all evening. On the streets outside, the children of the Bihari slums, dressed in their best—like one little boy in a brown suit with a black bow tie stitched on—are being given rides in small hand-turned Ferris wheels. Men are playing games on the sidewalk. A ring is tossed over a group of toys and gadgets; if your ring lands and completely encircles, say, a deck of playing cards, the deck is yours. The narrow streets are slippery with blood and shit, the filthiest time of the year in the filthiest part of the city. On the road leading to the factory I notice a dead squashed rat, covered with flies. An open manhole reveals huge red cockroaches ringing the tunnel. The animal hides are stacked and put in front of mosques, for charity. Men walk about with reddened shirts; they look as if they’ve been playing Holi.