Before he was notorious, Zamzama Alankar was known for his mustache, a growth so thick and ominous that it seemed to be a parasitic organism originating somewhere deep inside his head, perhaps even in his brain, and growing down his nose until it reached the outside world, like an alien emerging onto his upper lip and bringing with it news of its host’s immense and dangerous power. It was a mustache that won a mustache competition back home in the coastal village of Bankot, but Zamzama was after far bigger game. He had been born the son of a policeman in that remote township on the shore of the Arabian Sea near an old sea fort, but, perhaps because his relationship with his stern father soured during childhood, he never had much time for the law or the officers who enforced it, whether on the water or on solid ground. He first rose to prominence because of his central role in the hawala system by which money was transferred from place to place by word of mouth and without paperwork—handed to a hawala broker in place A, who then, for a small commission, communicated receipt to a broker in place B, who paid an equal sum of money to the designated recipient as long as the recipient knew the password. Thus money “moved without moving,” in the words of the hawala, and there could be many more links in the chain if required. The system was popular because the commission paid by the client was far lower than in the normal banking system, and, in addition, the procedure could bypass problems such as variable exchange rates; the hawala chain fixed its own exchange rate and everyone adhered to it. The whole network relied on the honor of hawala brokers around the country and indeed the world. (Though if a hawala broker acted dishonorably, it would have been unwise to bet on his living to a ripe old age.) The system was illegal in India because, like smurfing and flipping, it was an effective means of money laundering, but Zamzama continued to operate it on a large scale, not only in the Indian subcontinent but also throughout the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, and even certain parts of the United States. Hawala wasn’t enough for him, however. He wanted to sit in the kursi, that is, on the throne of the underworld, and with Sultan Ameer out of the way in jail, he made his bid for power, assisted by his lieutenants Big Head, Short Fingers and Little Feet. He faced competition from the associates of a rival boss named Javed Greasy but he soon brushed the challenge aside, using a technique that came as a profound shock to all the members of Sultan Ameer’s relatively nonviolent crime family. The name of this technique was murder. The bodies of Javed Greasy and his family, laid out like fish on a slab on Juhu beach at low tide, not only resolved the leadership issue; they also sent a message to the whole city, overworld as well as underworld. It was a new day, the corpses said. There was a new player in town, and there were new rules. S-Company was Z-Company now.
His brother Salloo, known as Salloo Boot, had helped Zamzama establish his first foothold in the city by targeting the don of the Dongri district, Daddy Jyoti, and taking a bunch of his men to surround Daddy and his men and beating them severely with empty glass bottles of soda water, Campa-Cola and Limca. That got rid of Daddy, who was never seen again in the city, but a more serious gang war followed, against the Pashto gang from Afghanistan, who started in the money-lending business with offices in the ideally named Readymoney Lane, but moved rapidly into small-scale extortion, obliging little shopkeepers and small businesses to pay protection money, in the city’s slums as well as its markets. The prices at tailors’ shops, watch-repair services, hairdressers, and vendors of leather goods rose to cover the requirements of the racketeers. Prostitutes on Falkland Road had to charge their marks more as well. The costs of extortion could not be absorbed by businesses with such tight margins, so they were passed on to the consumer. In this way much of the city found itself paying, so to speak, an extra, gangland tax. But what to do? There was no option but to cough up.
The Pashtos also decided to eliminate Boot and Cannon—that is, Zamzama—and hired Manny, a top dacoit or bandit from Madhya Pradesh, to do the job. Now it so happened that Salloo Boot had a dancer girlfriend, Charu, and one night in the early 1980s he picked her up from her home in Bombay Central and drove her in a Fiat toward a love nest in Bandra. But Manny and the Pashtos were on his tail, and surrounded the Fiat at a gas station where Salloo Boot had stopped en route. With genuine gallantry Manny and the Pashtos asked Charu to get out of the car and buzz off. After that they shot Boot five times and left him dead. They went as fast as possible to Zamzama’s base at Pakmodia Street to catch him off guard before news of his brother’s death reached him, but the building was heavily guarded and a major gun battle ensued. Zamzama was unhurt. Soon afterwards the Pashto leaders were arrested and charged with Boot’s murder. When they were standing trial a Z-Company shootist, a Christian killer called Derek, burst into the courtroom and shot them dead with a machine gun.
During the 1980s at least fifty mobsters from Z-Company and the Pashtos were killed in the continuing gang war. But in the end the Afghan mob was eliminated and godfather Zamzama had his throne.
After his older brother’s death Zamzama took the decision to dispense with a personal life. “Girlfriend is weakness,” Nero heard him say. “Family is weakness. This in others is valuable. But in the boss it cannot be permitted. I am the cat that walks alone.” Alone, that was to say, except for a twenty-four-hour bodyguard detail of twelve persons—that is, thirty-six persons working twelve at a time in eight-hour shifts. Plus a team of twelve trained countersurveillance drivers behind the wheels of armored Mercedes stretches, experts in the arts of dry cleaning, which was to say, making sure the motorcade was not being tailed. (Again, four drivers at a time, three shifts.) And the front door of his house was solid steel and the windows also were bulletproofed and boasted thick metal shutters, and there were heavily armed men on the roof at all times. The city was governed by a man living in a cage he had built for himself. Making himself invulnerable, he made the vulnerabilities of people’s persons, families and capital assets the foundations of his wealth and power.
(I am not an expert in the industry now known as Bollywood, but it loves its gangster movies as much as its gangsters. The film buff entering this universe might well start with Raj Gopal Varma’s Company, Apoorva Lakhia’s Shootout at Lokhandwala, Sanjay Gupta’s Shootout at Wadala, or Milan Luthria’s Once upon a Time in Mumbaai and Once upon a Time in Mumbaai 2. The extra a in Mumbaai is an example of a new numerological fad. People add or subtract vowels to make their names, or in this case the names of their movies, luckier and more successful: Shobhaa De, Ajay Devgn, Mumbaai. I am unable to comment on the efficacy or otherwise of such alterations.)