Gangsters in Exile

New York-based writer Suketu Mehta's nonfiction book on Bombay will be published by Alfred A. Knopf next January

If Chotta Shakeel had not become the effective boss of the most feared criminal syndicate in South Asia, what would he have grown up to be? What is the secret ambition that lurks within the gangster's breast, the man wanted in India on multiple counts of murder and conspiracy? "You know how in school people write on the topic: 'What do you want to be?' I had a vision of becoming a military officer, and I wrote a composition on it. I wanted to die for my country."

This is what the underboss of the Dawood Ibrahim syndicate, or the "D-Company," told me in September of 1999. But life took him down the opposite path. Instead of dying for his country, he was sitting in a mansion in Karachi, a guest of the enemy country, unable to return to his birthplace, afraid of being liquidated at any moment by his hosts.

The dons of the Bombay underworld are unique in the annals of organized crime: they direct their operations in the city of their origin from outside the country—or "upstairs" as the underworld lingo has it— from the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and, especially, from Pakistan. The most powerful criminal syndicate in India is headed by Shakeel and his godfather, Bombay native Dawood Ibrahim, son of a police constable, who now depend on the tender mercies of the Pakistani government for their continued existence.

Shakeel and Dawood can't return to Bombay because they bombed the city in 1993. The Bombay underworld did not set off the bombs, which killed 257 people, in a vacuum. It relied on the tacit understanding if not outright support of Bombay's Muslim community, which had recently been traumatized by riots in which hundreds had been burned alive, stabbed, and shot by Hindu street mobs. The blasts reminded the Hindu community that the Muslims were not powerless.

Afterward, the underworld in Bombay began to enjoy a stature it had not possessed before the riots. Muslim street toughs and hoodlums became newly respectable, as defenders of the community and their faith. After the blasts, many of the plotters went "upstairs." I met some of them in Dubai; they spend their days watching Hindi movies, their nights on mobile phones plotting murder and extortion across the Arabian Sea. They speak with enormous nostalgia about Bombay, and with hatred about their new neighbors—the Arabs do not treat South Asians well, and the Pakistanis are suspicious of their new guests. They've left family and friends and the psychedelic magic of the Bombay streets behind. And when all is said and done, they are only refugees, albeit highly privileged ones.

How do they comfort themselves in exile? The way gangsters always have—with molls. B-grade starlets are regularly called up to Dubai to do their duty by the guys who finance the bulk of the Bollywood product. Or the mobsters order up young dancers from the beer bars of Bombay and relieve them of their virginity. Such activities require a fitting stage. One of the dons has ordered himself a bed from Dubai for a princely $36,800—not including the mattress.

But last December's suicide attack on the Indian Parliament by jihadis linked to Pakistan put a crimp in the style of the D-Company. India moved 1 million troops to the border and demanded the return of 20 fugitives, including Dawood and Shakeel, and five other men from Bombay who masterminded the 1993 blasts. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf says he has no knowledge that they're living in his country. They shouldn't be that hard to find. I still have their Pakistani phone numbers and addresses from 1999. Musharraf has privately told U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell that the non-Pakistanis on India's list would be the likeliest to be extradited. At the moment, the Bombay underworld has gone well and truly underground. At one point Dawood was surrounded at all times by a contingent of state security men who scrutinized every visitor. I remember he was also regarded suspiciously by the local gold smugglers and real-estate mafias, who don't want the newcomers poaching on their turf.

Dawood has, at various times, spoken voluntarily about returning to India if he can get a fair trial, or escape the death penalty. A don's life in a Bombay prison might be preferable to a life, however opulent, in a country toward which he feels no attachment and in which he lives in a state of constant fear. It was said of Sadat Hasan Manto, the great Urdu writer, that he started dying the moment he left Bombay for Pakistan; the same may be true for Dawood and Chotta.

"What I wanted to do—become a military officer—that dream I had, that was crushed from the beginning. Now what dream should I see, what wish should I have for the future?" Shakeel asked me, plaintively. Then he reverted to the language of his beloved Bollywood. "The way life goes, the 'The End', only Allah knows."

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