Zamzama, the Cannon, was not a sentimental man. Once, according to his legend—he was a man who paid a lot of attention to the nurturing of his legendary aspects—Little Feet had kidnapped a mob pimp named Moosa Mouse who had been interfering with certain company girls, and had him sealed in a metal container at the docks, and had then hired a vessel to take the container out to the farthest reaches of the harbor where it was dispatched to the bottom of the sea. Two days later Mouse’s mother was on TV crying her eyes out. Zamzama said, “Get me her cell number now,” and a minute later, while she was still being interviewed on live television, he called her up. Bewildered, she answered the phone, and there was Zamzama’s voice in her ear saying, “Bitch, your mouse is now a fish, and if you don’t stop that noise you will shortly be keema yourself. Kaboom!” Keema was mincemeat. “Kaboom” was Zamzama’s favored sign-off and whoever heard that in his or her ear knew exactly who was speaking. The woman’s crying stopped, boom, like that, and she never spoke to any journalist ever again.
He also had no time for the kind of Bombay-meri-jaan romanticization of the past to which Nero was prone. “That city of dreams is long gone,” he told Nero unceremoniously. “You yourself have built over and around it and crushed the old under the new. In Bombay of your dreams everything was love and peace and secular thinking and no communalism, Hindu-Muslim bhai bhai, all men were brothers, isn’t it? Such bullshit, you’re a man of the world, you should know better. Men are men and their gods are their gods and these things do not change and the hostility between their tribes also is always there. Just a question of what’s on the surface and how far beneath is the hate. In this city Mumbai we have won the gang war but a bigger war lies ahead. Only two gangs in Mumbai now. The gang gang, the mafia, that is me. Z-Company, we only are that. And what are we, ninety-five percent? Musalman people. People of the book. But there are also the political gangs, and they are Hindu. Hindu politics is running the municipal corporation and Hindu politicos have their Hindu gangs. Raman Fielding, you know the name? A.k.a. Mainduck the Frog? You understand? Then understand the following: First we were just battling it out for territory. That battle is over. Now there comes holy war. Kaboom.”
Sultan Ameer “got religion” in later life but his was of the mystical, Sufistic kind. Zamzama Alankar by the beginning of the 1990s had become an adherent of a much more fiery version of their common faith. The person credited with making this profound change in Zamzama’s worldview and range of interests was a demagogic preacher named Rahman, founder and secretary of a militant organization based in the city and calling itself the Azhar Academy, dedicated to promoting the thought of a nineteenth-century Indian firebrand, Imam Azhar of Bareilly, the town which gave its name to the Barelvi sect of which the preacher Rahman was the leading light. The Academy had made itself known in the city by demonstrating against the ruling party, demonstrations that the ruling party described as “riots,” but which demonstrated, at the very least, that the Academy could put a substantial crowd on the street at short notice and then turn that crowd loose. To Nero’s great dismay Zamzama started parroting the demagogue Rahman’s words, often almost verbatim. The immorality and decadence of. The evil hostility and degeneracy of. Needs to be confronted head-on by. The pure and pristine teachings of. The correct perspective of. The true glory and splendor of. Our responsibility to save our society from. The benefit of the genius teaching of. Our resolve is greater than. Ours is a scientific mode of living in the world and in the hereafter. This world is nothing, only a gateway to the grandeur beyond. This life is nothing, only a clearing of the throat before the immortal song beyond. If it is required of us to sacrifice life we sacrifice nothing, only a clearing of the throat. If it is required of us that we rise up we will rise up with the flame of justice in our hand. We will raise the just hand of God and they will feel its tight slap on their face.
“Damn it, Zamzama,” Nero said to him when they met aboard the Kipling, Zamzama’s sailboat in the harbor, which was the Cannon’s preferred location for confidential discussions. “What’s got into you? You always struck me as a party man, not a praying mantis.”
“The time for loose talk is over,” the don replied, with a new note in his voice which Nero found menacing. “Now the time for hard deeds approaches. And also, dhobi, do not use blasphemous language in my presence ever again.” It was the first time Nero had been reduced from sahib to dhobi. He didn’t like the sound of that at all.
There were no more parties in Dubai. In the house behind the steel door, there was now a lot of praying. To a man of Nero’s temperament, it was bizarre. Perhaps the time had come, he thought, to detach somewhat from Z-Company. Complete separation would be impossible because of the mafia’s influence over the construction unions and even more over the nonunionized “immigrant” labor force converging on the city from all over the country without papers or legal standing. But perhaps he had worked on the money side long enough. Enough, perhaps, of smurfing, flipping and hawala. He was by now a legitimate tycoon and should divest himself of these shadier portfolios.
To Zamzama he said, “I think I’m getting too old and tired for the money work. Maybe I could train a successor to take my place.”
Zamzama was silent for a full minute. The Kipling, at anchor, its mainsail lowered and flaked, rocked gently on the water. The sun had set and the lights of the Back Bay glittered around them, an arc of beauty which Nero had never ceased to cherish. Then the mafia boss spoke. “Do you like classic American rock and roll band, Eagles?” he asked. “Glenn Frey, Don Henley, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera?” And, without waiting for an answer, he went on, “Welcome to the Hotel California.” Upon which, to Nero’s consternation, the don began—loudly, tunelessly, in a manner that struck fear into Nero’s heart—to sing.
“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
This was the beginning of the great darkness, Nero said in the darkness of his study in the Golden house. After this discussion I was in hell. Or, I had been in hell for a long time, but now I felt the fire burning the soles of my feet.
But also, you know the funny thing about that song, about the hotel? It wasn’t even true. Because leaving, when, where, how, that became his subject as well as mine.