Mumbai Noir Read online

  MUMBAI NOIR

  This collection is comprised of works of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Akashic Books

  ©2012 Akashic Books

  Series concept by Tim McLoughlin and Johnny Temple

  Mumbai map by Aaron Petrovich

  eISBN-13: 978-1-61775-112-7

  Print ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-027-4

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011902728

  All rights reserved

  First printing

  Akashic Books

  PO Box 1456

  New York, NY 10009

  [email protected]

  www.akashicbooks.com

  ALSO IN THE AKASHIC NOIR SERIES:

  Baltimore Noir, edited by Laura Lippman

  Barcelona Noir (Spain), edited by Adriana V. López & Carmen Ospina

  Boston Noir, edited by Dennis Lehane

  Bronx Noir, edited by S.J. Rozan

  Brooklyn Noir, edited by Tim McLoughlin

  Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Tim McLoughlin

  Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth edited by Tim McLoughlin & Thomas Adcock

  Cape Cod Noir, edited by David L. Ulin

  Chicago Noir, edited by Neal Pollack

  Copenhagen Noir (Denmark), edited by Bo Tao Michaëlis

  D.C. Noir, edited by George Pelecanos

  D.C. Noir 2: The Classics, edited by George Pelecanos

  Delhi Noir (India), edited by Hirsh Sawhney

  Detroit Noir, edited by E.J. Olsen & John C. Hocking

  Dublin Noir (Ireland), edited by Ken Bruen

  Haiti Noir, edited by Edwidge Danticat

  Havana Noir (Cuba), edited by Achy Obejas

  Indian Country Noir, edited by Sarah Cortez & Liz Martínez

  Istanbul Noir (Turkey), edited by Mustafa Ziyalan & Amy Spangler

  Las Vegas Noir, edited by Jarret Keene & Todd James Pierce

  London Noir (England), edited by Cathi Unsworth

  Lone Star Noir, edited by Bobby Byrd & Johnny Byrd

  Los Angeles Noir, edited by Denise Hamilton

  Los Angeles Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Denise Hamilton

  Manhattan Noir, edited by Lawrence Block

  Manhattan Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Lawrence Block

  Mexico City Noir (Mexico), edited by Paco I. Taibo II

  Miami Noir, edited by Les Standiford

  Moscow Noir (Russia), edited by Natalia Smirnova & Julia Goumen

  New Jersey Noir, edited by Joyce Carol Oates

  New Orleans Noir, edited by Julie Smith

  Orange County Noir, edited by Gary Phillips

  Paris Noir (France), edited by Aurélien Masson

  Philadelphia Noir, edited by Carlin Romano

  Phoenix Noir, edited by Patrick Millikin

  Pittsburgh Noir, edited by Kathleen George

  Portland Noir, edited by Kevin Sampsell

  Queens Noir, edited by Robert Knightly

  Richmond Noir, edited by Andrew Blossom, Brian Castleberry & Tom De Haven

  Rome Noir (Italy), edited by Chiara Stangalino & Maxim Jakubowski

  San Diego Noir, edited by Maryelizabeth Hart

  San Francisco Noir, edited by Peter Maravelis

  San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Peter Maravelis

  Seattle Noir, edited by Curt Colbert

  Toronto Noir (Canada), edited by Janine Armin & Nathaniel G. Moore

  Trinidad Noir, edited by Lisa Allen-Agostini & Jeanne Mason

  Twin Cities Noir, edited by Julie Schaper & Steven Horwitz

  Wall Street Noir, edited by Peter Spiegelman

  FORTHCOMING:

  Bogotá Noir (Colombia), edited by Andrea Montejo

  Buffalo Noir, edited by Brigid Hughes & Ed Park

  Jerusalem Noir, edited by Sayed Kashua

  Kansas City Noir, edited by Steve Paul

  Lagos Noir (Nigeria), edited by Chris Abani

  Long Island Noir, edited by Kaylie Jones

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  Seoul Noir (Korea), edited by BS Publishing Co.

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  Venice Noir (Italy), edited by Maxim Jakubowski

  For Y.T. and D.T.—

  who missed each other forever by a single day

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  PART I: BOMB-AY

  RIAZ MULLA

  Justice Mahim Durgah

  PAROMITA VOHRA

  The Romantic Customer Andheri East

  DEVASHISH MAKHIJA

  By Two Versova

  ABBAS TYREWALA

  Chachu at Dusk Lamington Road

  PART II: DANGEROUS LIAISONS

  AHMED BUNGLOWALA

  Nagpada Blues Nagpada

  SMITA HARISH JAIN

  The Body in the Gali Kamathipura

  ANNIE ZAIDI

  A Suitable Girl Mira Road

  R. RAJ RAO

  TZP Pasta Lane

  AVTAR SINGH

  Pakeezah Apollo Bunder

  PART III: AN ISLAND UNTO ITSELF

  ALTAF TYREWALA

  The Watchman Worli

  SONIA FALEIRO

  Lucky 501 Sanjay Gandhi National Park

  NAMITA DEVIDAYAL

  The Egg Walkeshwar

  KALPISH RATNA

  At Leopold Café Colaba Causeway

  JERRY PINTO

  They Mahim Church

  Glossary

  About the Contributors

  INTRODUCTION

  THE TRAFFIC-CHOKED ACCIDENT BY THE COAST

  Aboiling July afternoon. A monster traffic jam on Mumbai’s tony Peddar Road. My taxi driver peers up through the windshield. Billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s twenty-seven-floor home looms over the thoroughfare like a mammoth pile of Lego blocks. The cabbie remarks in the Bambaiya patois, “What building Ambani has made— right on the road. Some terrorist just has to drive by with a rocket launcher and buss!” He glances at me in the rearview mirror with raised eyebrows: khel khatam, game over. Looking through the passenger window, I observe, “Even an AK-47 would do a lot …” The cabbie is skeptical. “From the road? Angle will be difficult to sustain, saab,” he says. “Plus, vehicle will have to go very slow for gunman to do serious damage …” I look again. The man has a point.

  The traffic lets up a bit, but we continue to analyze, without a hint of irony, the vulnerabilities of the Ambani residence. Between 1993 and 2011, Mumbai has weathered eight terror attacks. Its inhabitants—12.43 million according to Census 2011—have become unwitting authorities on all the ways that an ordinary day in the city can turn out to be one’s last.

  Life in the island city wasn’t always so chancy. Until international terrorism cast its vague shadow over the metropolis in the early ’90s, the pains in Mumbai’s collective neck most often had a face and a fixed address. The city’s denizens knew the names and backgrounds of underworld majordomos. They were familiar with the bastions of extremist religious parties. And they tried their best to stay away.

  Before the liberalization of India’s economy in 1991, perhaps the only thing worth striving for was one’s ability to stay on the good side of the law. Mumbai’s middle and working classes were easy to recognize back then: they toiled hard, wore polyester, and fantasized about migrating to the West. Their heroic struggle to choose a righteous life over an easy life often invoked the respect of those who had done away with such bourgeois moral anxiet
ies. The outlaw narrator of Abbas Tyrewala’s story in this volume reminisces how the bhais of his time never harmed Mumbai’s common folk because they were awed by their courage to live honestly and bring up children.

  This promise of a “clean life” has driven millions of people over several centuries to abandon India’s rural hinterland and throng Mumbai’s streets in search of employment and social equality. It helps that under its urban façade, the city comprises numerous villagelike communal ghettos where people of similar religious and caste backgrounds can flock together. In Namita Devidayal’s piece, the wealthy, pill-popping homemaker resides in an “all-vegetarian” Jain building, where the appearance of a single nonvegan egg can wreak havoc. Anyone who has gone apartment hunting in Mumbai will testify that the city’s communal boundaries are often as impermeable as national borders.

  The provincialism dictating who one’s neighbors may or may not be doesn’t, thankfully, extend to Mumbai’s commercial life. When it comes to making money, the city has been by and large blind to caste, class, or creed, exalting productivity and wealth-generation above all else. History has shown that in its unabashed pursuit of profit, Mumbai can also be deaf to considerations of ethics and morality.

  Through the early half of the nineteenth century, a large number of local Parsi, Marwari, Gujarati Bania, and Konkani Muslim businessmen were involved in the opium trade, shipping Indian-grown opium out of Bombay to China, in direct competition with the British East India Company, which exported the product out of Calcutta. While millions of Chinese sunk into the despondency of addiction, Bombay’s capitalist classes grew staggeringly rich. The success of the opium trade, followed by the cotton boom in the 1860s, sparked the ascension of Bombay from a barely profitable port town to a roaring trade center. Much of the city’s infrastructural development, including its lasting social and educational institutions, was paid for with the dirty money of these local businessmen. It is a historical ethical conflict that the city has never quite faced up to.

  Over the centuries, crime has remained at the service of commerce in a city that was cravenly capitalist long before the rest of the nation followed suit. If a demand exists— even for something as wishful as the “elixir of youth”—you can bet some enterprising chap in Mumbai will move heaven and earth to fulfill it. Even if it means having to strip human corpses of their testes, as the elixir-peddling hakim does quite profitably in Kalpish Ratna’s time-warping tale. In Sonia Faleiro’s unsettling glimpse into the city’s transgender subculture, death isn’t even a prerequisite: the dai earns her keep by relieving sentient (and willing) men of their jewels.

  Paisa pheyko, tamasha dekho. Throw the cash, watch the dance. These words from an erstwhile Hindi film song have become the de facto motto of Mumbai. Cash can get things moving in a rusty bureaucracy. Cash can help you get away with murder. Sometimes a little cash can help you save big money.

  In Mumbai’s dance bars, whole wads of cash must be thrown to get the women moving. Outlawed in 2005, these dens of misogyny and exploitation still manage to scrape through under the euphemistic moniker of “orchestra bars,” where the concept remains unchanged: tantalizingly dressed women dance or sing in front of a lusty male audience. No self-respecting tome on Mumbai would be complete without a riff on this seedy city institution. Avtar Singh’s story fulfills Mumbai Noir’s dance-bar quota. To his credit, Singh infuses genuine romance into an overly romanticized setting.

  Like its dance bars, Mumbai too has been heaped with exaggerated depictions in recent decades. The city’s chroniclers—its novelists, essayists, poets, journalists, and filmmakers—often seem overawed by the idea of Mumbai, rendering its quotidian realities in brushstrokes of grandiose narratives. What inoculates the stories in this collection from the hyperbole of “maximum city”—that much-abused term coined by the astute Suketu Mehta to describe Mumbai—are the restraints set by the noir genre, which stipulates, among other things, an unflinching gaze at the underbelly, without recourse to sentimentality or forced denouements. (But not without the courtesy of a glossary of Indianisms, to be found at the back of the book.) When viewed from a plane (or hotair balloon), any metropolis might strike one as jaw-dropping. For a majority of Mumbai’s residents, however, the city’s overcrowded public transportation and decaying infrastructure fail to provide even the minimum of relief.

  Unending traffic. Sparse greenery. Corrupt governance. Mumbai always seems on the verge of a massive breakdown. What keeps the city somewhat peaceful and functioning is the very thing that makes it overwhelming: the population density, which is one of the highest in the world. Mumbai’s ever-present multitudes serve as eyes on the streets, pitching in during moments of crises, and at other times inhibiting acts of random violence. This has helped the city earn its reputation of being one of India’s safest urban centers.

  While Mumbai’s civil society is remarkably accommodating to all varieties of lifestyles and individual preferences, perhaps the biggest threat to the city’s famed cosmopolitanism comes from its twin banes: Mumbai’s ultranationalist groups and its increasingly sectarian police force.

  Bombay was officially renamed Mumbai in 1995 when an alliance of these ultranationalist groups controlled the state government. The renaming was meant as a symbolic undoing of the country’s colonial past. Ironically, other legacies of the British colonial rule were left untouched, such as Mumbai’s suburban rail system, its water and sewage infrastructure, as well as its enduring colonial-era architectural landmarks.

  In December 1992 and January 1993, during the Hindu-Muslim riots that swept through Mumbai following the demolition of the Babri Masjid, the city’s police force, possibly for the first time in its history of serving the city, abandoned neutrality and sided with the Hindus, turning what would have been a routine communal skirmish into a catastrophic minipogrom. For the citizens of the city, and for its minorities in particular, the communalization of the police was the start of Mumbai’s darkest chapter. Devashish Makhija provides a heartrending depiction of cynical police officers let loose on Mumbai’s religious minorities. In this story, the international war on terror is echoed in Mumbai, turning every Muslim man into a suspect following a bomb blast. Riaz Mulla takes a converse approach, delineating how an ordinary businessman can turn into a bomb-planting extremist. Mulla looks unflinchingly at how events may have unfolded leading to Mumbai’s first terrorist attack.

  In March 1993, in a misguided attempt to settle the score after the Babri Masjid riots, Mumbai’s Muslim-dominated underworld unleashed a series of thirteen bomb blasts throughout the city. The mastermind of these blasts, Dawood Ibrahim, was a Mumbai-born gangster operating out of the Middle East. Two hundred and fifty people lost their lives in the explosions and hundreds more were injured. (Those interested in understanding the often mundane genesis of headline-making terror attacks may look up Anurag Kashyap’s award-winning film Black Friday, based on S. Hussain Zaidi’s book Black Friday: The True Story of the Bombay Bomb Blasts.)

  Since 1993, there have been no further communal riots in the city. Instead, in a kind of outsourcing of violence, Mumbai has been targeted by international terrorists no less than seven times. Each attack jars the city out of its intense commercedriven routines. But life resumes normalcy within hours, once the corpses and debris have been cleared out and the injured deposited in hospitals. Social commentators accuse Mumbai of a savage sort of indifference. Absolutely nothing seems to affect the city. Or maybe that’s a wrong way of looking at things. Maybe Mumbai isn’t just one city, but an organic conglomerate of innumerable subcities, each thrumming to its own vibe. A tragedy in one part of Mumbai barely registers elsewhere. People fall off moving trains, bombs erupt in busy bazaars, lives are made and broken in the city’s daily flux, and things go on as usual.

  Altaf Tyrewala

  Mumbai, India

  December 2011

  PART I

  BOMB-AY

  JUSTICE

  BY RIAZ MULLA

 
Mahim Durgah

  The court will now pronounce its verdict,” the judge remarked plainly, as if he was going to read out the evening news.

  Asghar Khan stood up in the witness box with the anticipation of a man in that twilight zone of hope when the decision has been made but not yet announced.

  “The defendant has been accused of planting a bomb in the crowded Zaveri Bazaar area which killed three people and injured many.”

  Asghar Khan wondered whether it was necessary to revisit the circumstances; does a doctor open the incision to check if the surgery has healed?

  “The court has been convinced that there was no motive behind this dastardly act but to kill innocent people and create terror.”

  The night came alive for Asghar and even today it seemed as unreal as it had seven years ago. He had watched terrorized from his hideout on the terrace as the distant sounds grew louder and the street was suddenly filled with a multitude of swords, tridents, and flames. The group first torched his scooter and in the light of the fire he could see them—known faces made grotesque by the flames. He had bought the scooter secondhand for twelve thousand rupees, the first vehicle of his life. As the tires and seat went up in flames, the mob broke open the shutter of his small travel agency office, Haafiz Tours and Travels. An enterprising insurance agent had once told him to get everything insured; but how does one insure against the betrayal of friends? They unplugged the phone and flung it to the ground and started to ransack his cupboards, throwing everything they could lay their hands on into a huge pile in the middle—passports and airline tickets and application papers—and he realized they were not just going to burn his office but also the small business he had successfully managed to set up. None of his clients at his budding Haj and Umrah travel agency would be able to perform pilgrimage that year; some, like his parents, probably never.