The Golden House

He was about to be eighty years old and had started forgetting very recent events but the past glowed more and more brightly in his memory like gold at the bottom of the Rhine. The river of his thought was no longer clear, its water an opaque and muddied flow, and within it his consciousness was slowly losing its grip on chronology, on what was then, what now, what was waking truth and what had been born in the fairyland of dreams. The library of time was disordered, its categories jumbled, its indexes scrambled or destroyed. There were good days and bad days but with every passing day it was his faraway yesterdays that shone more clearly than last week. Then the past called him on the phone in the dark of night and all he had buried rose from its grave all at once and swarmed around him and he made a phone call of his own. In what followed I hear an echo of another Hitchcock movie. We were no longer in Rear Window. We were entering the world of I Confess.

(You remember I Confess? A murderer confesses his crime to a Catholic priest who is bound by the rules of the confessional to keep the killer’s secret. Hitchcock hated Montgomery Clift’s Method-acting techniques, and some people hated the film’s total humorlessness, but Éric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol praised the film for its “majesty” in Cahiers du Cinéma, pointing out that as the priest is silenced, the film is dependent on the actor’s expressions. “Only these looks give us access to the mysteries of his thought. They are the most worthy and faithful messengers of the soul.” Riya Zachariassen, hurrying across Manhattan at dead of night, was no priestess, but she was about to receive a confession. Would she keep the secret? If so, how would her looks and glances communicate what she knew? And: would possession of the secret endanger her life?)

The past, his abandoned past on the storied hill. The hill had always been a magical place ever since Ram’s brother Lakshman shot an arrow into the earth and brought the faraway Ganges here to quench their thirst. An underground spring burst through the ground and they drank. There was still fresh water in the Banganga Tank. Baan, an arrow in Sanskrit, and Ganga of course the mother river. They lived among the living stories of the gods.

And after the gods, the British, and in particular the Hon. Mountstuart Elphinstone, governor of the city between 1819 and 1827, who built the first bungalow on the hill and all the city’s grandees followed his example. Nero remembered the hill of his childhood, a place of many trees and some low elegant mansions with their red tiled roofs visible among the foliage. He walked in memory through the Hanging Gardens and watched his sons play in the Old Woman’s Shoe in Kamala Nehru Park. The first tower block was built on the hill in the 1950s and people laughed at it. Matchbox House they called it because it looked like a giant matchbox standing on its end. Who would want to live there, people jeered, look, how ugly. But the machis buildings went up and the bungalows came down. That was progress. But this was not the story he wanted to tell. He wanted to finish the story he began to tell me that day in the Russian Tea Room.

(He let Riya in himself. They went to his darkened study and sat in darkness. She said nothing, or almost nothing. He had a long story to tell.)

He first met the man he started calling Don Corleone around the same time as the theatrical release of The Godfather, back when he was getting his feet wet for the first time in the world of film production. At that time everyone else called the don Sultan Ameer. His crime family was S-Company, “S for Sultan, Super and Style,” as the don liked to boast. He was a big-time criminal, master smuggler, but people loved him because he allowed nobody to be killed and he was a sort of social worker at heart. Helped the poor in the slums and the petty shopkeepers also. Prostitution he did, it’s true; brothels in Kamathipura, yes, he ran them. Bank robberies, also. Nobody’s perfect. So, yes, on the whole, give or take, a Robin Hood type, you could say. Not true, not really, operating on that mega scale is not to be compared to a bunch of small-operator bow-and-arrow bandits in Sherwood Forest, UK, but people thought him a good guy, more good than rotten. He was the first celebrity gangster. Knew everybody, was seen everywhere. Police, judges, politicians, all in his pocket. Walked the city freely, without fear. And without gangsters like him half the movies people loved would not have been made. Major investors, the mafia dons. You could ask any big filmmaker. Sooner or later the mafia came to call, with bags of money in its hands.

He trained the next generation, all local boys nurtured by him. What did Zamzama Alankar know about smuggling that Sultan Ameer didn’t teach him? He trained Zamzama (a.k.a. KG, for “Kim’s Gun,” or just the Cannon), he trained Little Feet, he trained Short Fingers, he trained Big Head, all the top guys. They, all five of them, loved movies, and Sultan Ameer had a film-star lover—this was the girl called Goldie, he poured money into dud movies trying to make her an icon—so naturally they went into the motion picture business. Nobody called it Bollywood then, that was a much later invention. Bombay film industry. Bombay talkies. It was just called that.

(Bombay Talkie, if I may briefly interject, was and remains my favorite Merchant-Ivory movie, especially the song-and-dance number “Typewriter Tip Tip Tip” in which dancers pirouette on the keys of the giant “fate machine,” and the director explains, “As we human beings dance on them we press down the keys and the story that is written is the story of our fate.” Yes, we are all dancing out our stories on the Typewriter of Life.)

So. Don Corleone in the Bombay talkies helped some falling stars regain their footing, Parveen Babi for example, also Helen. He was friends with Raj Kapoor and Dilip Kumar. His smugglers smuggled and his thieves thieved and his whores whored and his judges and politicos and cops did as they were told but up there on the silver screen at Maratha Mandir his movie Kuch Nahin Kahin Nahin Kabhi Nahin Koi Nahin, “Nothing Nowhere Never Nobody,” held the record for most consecutive weeks screened until of course that other bloody movie, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, came on and broke every damn record in sight. But KN4, as people called his biggest hit, Sultan Ameer / Don Corleone was proud of that, his proudest achievement, he used to say, and he had his own name for it, “Everything Everywhere Everytime Everyone,” or “E4All,” because that’s what it was, all things to all people. And it was true his beloved Goldie never made it to the top, was never above-the-title as Hollywood types say, but she was happy, he bought her a big house in Juhu next door to the great Dev Anand and she could invite that living god over for samosas and cups of tea.

And Nero: he was just a businessman, putting most of his energy into the construction business, going up in the world like his buildings, and also like everyone else in that starry-eyed city obsessed with the movies. He met the don at so-and-so’s beach house in Juhu, or maybe such-and-such’s, it wasn’t important. One of the two or three great hostesses who dominated the city’s glittering nightlife, let’s say that. They hit it off immediately and at the end of the night Sultan Ameer said, “Tomorrow I’m going to see Smita to narrate my new picture, why not come along?” With those words he seduced Nero forever and the businessman’s life started to move down a new path.

Superstars—ultrastars!—didn’t read scripts. One went to them and narrated the picture, told its story, and made sure in the telling that the superstar’s role came across as the indispensable central element of the project. Smita was one of the most beloved actresses of her time, not just a beauty or a sex symbol but a wonderful, powerful actor. She led an outrageous life by local standards, carrying on openly with a famous star who was also a married man. In the end puritanism and vilification would drive her out of the business and she became a wounded recluse, but that was later, right now she was the highest of the high, on the pinnacle of Mount Kailash, a goddess of goddesses, the top. For Nero his meeting with her was one of the great events of his life, even though the narration didn’t go well, because the part required Smita to age, during the course of the film, from seventeen to maybe fifty-five. “You see,” the immortal personage said to the don, “I am so grateful you came to me with this, because most parts are not stretching, isn’t it, and what I want to do as an artist is to stretch, to expand, so this picture, I love it. I just love it. There are just one-two things, okay, I want to put them right out in the open, right on the table, because everything should be hundred percent agreed before we start shooting, isn’t it, when we are on set we should all be hundred percent pulling in the same direction, so can I say?” Of course, Sultan Ameer replied, this is why we are here, please. She frowned and looked in Nero’s direction. “And he is who?” she wanted to know. Sultan Ameer clucked his tongue and made a dismissive gesture. “Not to mind him,” he said. “He is just like that.” This diminished the frown. Then the celestial entity turned back to the don and said, “You see, as you narrated, the character becomes the mother of a nineteen-year-old girl. Now I have never—never in my life!—played the mother of a teenage child. This is my difficulty. You understand that the choices I make, the pictures I choose, seriously affect the annual box office performance of our whole beloved industry, so I must be careful, isn’t it? I hear a voice speaking, from the public that loves me!—from the star that I am!—and the voice is saying—” Sultan Ameer interrupted her. “Storyline can be changed,” he said. “Tell your voice to stop speaking.”—But it was too late. “ ‘No,’ the voice is saying. ‘You owe it to the world.’ ”

Nero, who sat silently in the corner, Nero who was just like that, was entranced. When they left the divine presence he said, “I’m sorry she didn’t like it.” Sultan Ameer snapped his fingers. “She will like it. Story is easy to shift. And maybe a Mercedes and if there is a suitcase in the dickey containing black money then, fataakh! Done deal.” He clapped his hands. Nero had just begun to nod to express understanding when the don added, “This can be your investment in the project.”

“The Mercedes?”

“And the suitcase. The suitcase is very important.”

That was how it began. In the next few years Nero established a profitable sideline as the don’s money launderer and bagman. How did that happen? He just slid into it, driven by his obsession with the movie world. Stardust in his eyes, filmi glamour turning his head, and the money everyone made was crazy. Or, more accurately, there had always been a lawless side to him, the construction business was scarcely law-abiding, after all, it was crooked as corkscrews, as W. H. Auden might have put it. In those days the construction boom had begun and tall buildings, “matchbox houses,” were rising all around the city and Nero was at the heart of the transformation. In the new high-rise grab for the sky, how many laws were flouted or broken, how many pockets were lined to make troubles go away! The buildings went up and kept on going up beyond the number of floors authorized by the municipal corporation. Afterwards the electricity or water or gas authorities might threaten to cut off supply to the floors that should not exist but there were ways of smoothing those ruffled feathers. The movie star’s suitcase was by no means Nero’s first. It also happened that many of the new buildings were straightforwardly illegal, built without properly sanctioned plans, not conforming to the proper codes. Nero was guilty of such work also, but so was everybody, nobody was innocent, and like the other big builders he had friends in the other type of high places, so like everyone else he got away with everything he did. “The builder is the law,” he liked to say. “And the law is, keep on building.” Ethics? Transparency? Those were foreign words, words for people who didn’t understand the city’s culture or its people’s way of life.

That was who he was. He knew it, his sons knew it, that was the way of the world. His friendship with Don Corleone a.k.a. Sultan Ameer unlocked the door to the dungeon in which the deeper lawlessness was lurking, waiting to be set free. Now there were starlets at his parties and cocaine in the bathrooms and he had moved from being a straight, suited-and-booted, ditchwater-dull high-rise builder with a blueprint and a briefcase to becoming a figure in the city in his own right. And with status came more business, and with business came more status, and so on, around and around. During these years he developed the frankly vulgar self-promotional manner which still hung around him like a flashy fur coat in his New York years. He moved his family into the luxury Walkeshwar home. He bought a yacht. He had affairs. His name glittered in the night sky from Andheri to Nariman Point. Life was good.

There were many different ways in which money could be cleaned. For smaller sums there was smurfing, a way of breaking up dirty money into small amounts and using it to buy things like money orders or bankers’ drafts, which would later be redeposited in different banks, still in smallish amounts, and then withdrawn as laundered cash. Nero used this method for things like the money suitcases. But for larger projects, a larger-scale method was required, and the real estate business was the ideal vehicle. Nero became, to those in the know, the unacknowledged master of “flipping one” and “flipping two.” “Flipping one” was purchasing high-end, big-ticket real estate with black money and then quickly reselling it, usually for a profit, as prices were rocketing. The money from the sale was white money, clean as a whistle. “Flipping two” was buying property—with the seller’s agreement—for less than the market value, paying him the balance under the table in black money, and then proceeding to “flipping one.” Nero ran the largest real estate brokerage firm in the city and in underground parlance it became known as “Flipistan,” the country to which dirty money went for a vacation, to get cleaned up and come back with a nice honest tan. For a price, of course. Nero used Flipistan for his own black-money deals, but whenever members of S-Company asked for his services, he made a generous percentage on the deal.

Then the sky fell in on Don Corleone. The prime minister’s son Sanjay Gandhi, formerly his drinking buddy, went after Sultan Ameer during his mother’s years of authoritarian Emergency rule and the S-Company godfather was convicted in courts controlled by Sanjay, not by him, and he was sent down for a year and a half. Curiously, just as the Emergency ended and Sanjay fell from grace, the don was freed. But he was a changed man, had lost his nerve in prison and found God instead. Even though they were both of the same religious persuasion Nero was a Muslim in name only and this new devout Corleone was not to his liking. The don gave up gangsterism and tried, unsuccessfully, to enter politics; the two men drifted apart. In the 1980s Sultan Ameer was withered and all but forgotten, beginning his long struggle against the cancer that eventually claimed him, and Nero was a big wheel. But an even bigger wheel had begun to turn.

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.)

It was Aibak, the film about Qutbuddin Aibak the first of the Slave Kings and the building of the Qutb Minar, that showed the industry that the new godfather meant business. The high-budget historical drama had been a lifetime pet project of one of the grandees of Bollywood, the producer A. Kareem, and it featured three of the “six boys and four girls” who, according to common parlance, were the ultrastars of the time. Two weeks before the commencement of principal photography Kareem received a note informing him, a Muslim himself, that the proposed film was insulting to Islam because it referred to the new ruler as a slave, and demanding that the project be canceled, or, alternatively, that a “permission slash apology fee” of one crore of rupees in used, nonsequential banknotes be paid to the representative of Z-Company who would present himself in due course. Kareem immediately called a press conference and publicly jeered at Zamzama Alankar and his gang. “These philistines think they can phuck with me?” Kareem cried, pronouncing both ph’s as powerfully plosive sounds. “So ignorant they do not know that the names by which this dynasty is known, Mamluk or Ghulam, both mean ‘slave.’ We are making a banner production here, a landmark picturization of our history. No bunch of goons can stop us.” Four days later, a small heavily armed group of men led by Zamzama’s lieutenants Big Head and Short Fingers invaded the secure lot in Mehrauli near the real Qutb Minar where the extremely elaborate set for the movie had been built, and set it on fire. The film was never made. A. Kareem complained of intense chest pains soon after the destruction of the movie set and died literally of a broken heart. Doctors examining the body said that the organ had literally burst apart inside him. Nobody ever jeered at Zamzama Alankar again.

Nero continued to invite Zamzama to parties at his home, and the movie industry’s A-list continued to attend. Zamzama himself began to throw the most lavish affairs anyone had ever seen, flying planeloads of guests to Dubai, and everyone went. This was how it must have been in the heyday of Al Capone, the dark glamour, the seduction of danger, the heady cocktail of fear and desire. The Zamzama parties were reported in all the papers, the stars glittering in their nocturnal finery. The police sat on their hands. And sometimes on the morning after a great fireworks of a celebration, there would be a knock on the door of a producer sleeping off his overindulgences in a stateroom on a Z-Company yacht, perhaps in the company of a starlet who was too stupid to know that this was never, ever the way to the top; and there would be Big Head or Little Feet with a contract for the producer to sign, giving away all the overseas rights of his latest film at highly disadvantageous terms, and there would be a large weapon pointing at his head to help persuade him, and the days of gallantry were gone, nobody told the naked starlet in the bed to make herself decent and run. Party in the front, business in the back, that was the Z-Company way. Many of Bollywood’s leading lights had to ask for, and receive, police protection, and they were never sure if it would be enough, or if the men in uniform would turn out to be beholden to Zamzama, and the guns intended to protect would point inward at the principal rather than outward toward the dangerous inscrutable city. And the law? The law turned a nearly blind eye. Small fry were sometimes thrown in jail as a sop to public opinion. The big fish swam freely in that sea.

Daughter, daughter, Nero said. I was among the worst of them, because they never tried to extort me. I willingly did their money work, and they were good to me financially, and I accepted it all, it was the way of the world, I thought, and maybe it was, but the world is a bad place, you should look for a better world than the one we have made.

He was not a victim of the extortion racket but he didn’t have to be. The threats and assassination attempts and actual killings of those years had him scared stupid. He had a lot to lose. He had expensive property, he had buildings going up all over town, he had a wife, and he had sons. He had all the weaknesses Zamzama looked for and needed. It was not necessary for the Z-Company people even to mention these weaknesses to him. They were the unspoken bond between the mob and Nero. Who was he to them? They had the dirty washing and he did their laundry. He was their dhobi. They actually called him that, Big Head the dwarf and Short Fingers with the orange hair and Little Feet who had the biggest feet anyone had ever seen. “Hey, dhobi!” they said on the phone. “Got some washing for you. Come and take it to the ghat.” When he saw them they would snap their fingers. “Get it cleaned up,” they would command. “Chop chop.” Zamzama himself was more respectful, always using terms of respect along with Nero’s real name. Sahib, ji, janab. The respect was a way of expressing contempt. The meaning of the respect was, “I own you, motherfucker, and do not forget it.” Nero didn’t need reminding. He was not a hero. He didn’t want to lose his family or his toes. There was no chance that he would forget.

The villains were spilling off the movie screens, jumping down into the cinemas larger than life, movie-sized, and charging down the aisles and out into the streets, guns blazing, and he had the guilty feeling that the industry was responsible, it had created these monsters and made them glamorous and sexy and now they were taking over the town. Bombay meri jaan, he thought, humming the song, Bombay my life, my darling, where have you gone, the girls on Marine Drive in the cool of the evening with wreaths of jasmine in their hair, the Sunday morning jazz jam sessions on Colaba Causeway or Churchgate, listening to Chic Chocolate, to Chris Perry’s saxophone and Lorna Cordeiro’s voice; Juhu beach before people like him surrounded it with buildings; Chinese food; the beautiful city, the best city in the world. But no, that was wrong, the song which was to the city what “New York, New York” was to another metropolis had always warned that it was a tough town, difficult to live in, and it was that song’s fault, too, the gamblers and the cutthroats and the thieves and the corrupt businessmen it sang about had poured out of the lyrics like the actors leaping out of the movies, and here they were now, terrifying decent folk, folk like the naïve girl in the song who defended the great city, oh heart it’s easy to live in this town, but even she warned, look out, you will reap what you sow. You will reap just what you sow.

(Yes, it was the movies’ fault, it was the song’s fault. Yes, blame art, Nero, blame entertainment. So much easier than blaming human beings, the actual actors in the drama. So much more pleasant than blaming yourself.)

He went on doing it, the suitcases, the smurfing, the flipping. He even agreed to become one end of a big-money hawala chain, when “asked nicely” by Zamzama Alankar himself—with a little cascade of sahibs, janabs, and jis—one evening during a pool party at the Willingdon Club. They never tried to extort me. They didn’t have to. He was Zamzama’s willing pawn. He thought himself a king in the city but he was only a humble foot soldier. Zamzama Alankar was the king.

And he wasn’t completely telling the truth about the extortion. He admitted it. The truth was that they never tried to extort cash money from him. What they extorted was much, much worse.

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.

You are shocked by me, he said. You are horrified by me and you haven’t even heard the bad part yet. You are frightened by what I have told you and there is only one question in your mind. You loved my child. My poor confused child. You loved my child and you are asking, without words you are asking, I see in your eyes in the dark that you’re asking. How much did my children know.

As for your beloved, in everything I have told so far he is free of all guilt. He was not born, or a little boy. As for the others, they grew up in a certain social stratum, the stratum of big city big business, and they knew what it took. Without greasing the palms, nothing got done. They knew about my Don Corleone, yes. But he was a well-liked guy. For them all this was normal as it was for everyone else. They liked the movie world also. The movie stars at our home. The ease of being with A-list women. As if they also had stepped up onto the silver screen. This was pleasurable and if the dons were there too, so what, it was a known thing. Nobody cared. In the time of Sultan Ameer nobody judged. But when Alankar took over, then I shielded them from my involvement. The less they knew the better for everyone. This was a different type of individual and I kept my family away. My business was my business, I accept there are criticisms to be made, I neither justify nor defend my choices and actions, I only state. Your boy was seven years old in 1993 and twenty-two in 2008 when we came to New York. I must say that of all three of them he was always the most self-absorbed. His war was within himself, I see it clearly now. His cannons trained on himself from then until. Until. So to keep things from him was simple. The things I needed to keep from him, I don’t think he knew. Also the oldest boy, my damaged boy, Harpo they called him, it could be a cruel town, yes; for him too the great question of his life lay in his head, a question with no answer. Him also I absolve. There remains the question of Apu. Apu who was Groucho then. Apu, to be frank: I think he knew. He knew but he didn’t want to know and so, the drink the drugs, to deafen himself and blind himself and make himself unconscious. I never spoke to him about the dark side. He didn’t ask. “If my father was a dentist,” he said to me once, “would I care how many fillings or root canals he did today, on whom? So, I think of you like that. You’re the dentist when you go to work but at home you are the father. That is what your family needs from you. Not fillings but fatherly love.”

I told him very little. Only the surface things which everyone knew. Bribery, corruption. Small potatoes. But I think he guessed the big potatoes. I think this was why the debauchery, the drink, the women, the drugs.

Back home he was not that much of an artist. He had the lifestyle of the artist but not the work ethic. He was a bohemian but in Bohemia they make beautiful glass. He made very little of anything except making love and let me say though you will find it vulgar, excuse me, the drugs do not make one a better lover except in one’s own estimation. So probably he was ineffective also in that department. When he came to America he cleaned up his act. (A snap of the fingers.) Just like that. By this I was impressed, he was a new man, and so everything began to work for him. His talent came out and everyone saw it. I saw it for the first time. I never suspected he had so much talent.

All three of them shared this ability: to close the book of the past and to live in the present. This is a fortunate gift. I myself am closing the book of the present and living mostly in the past.

But there remains the matter of the buzzing in Apu’s ears, the voices, sometimes the visions. He had a long history with hallucinogens. You could say if this is how you understand things that they made him more sensitive to what is unseen, that they revealed to him the pathway to the visionary world, opening, what are they? The doors of perception. Or you could say that that is all nonsense. You could say alternatively that he suffered damage. That he too was damaged in the brain, in the heart of himself. Three sons and all with damage in the brain, in the heart of themselves! This is not an equitable fate for a father. This is not just. Nevertheless it has been my fate. Apu saw visions and heard voices. So he was crazy too.

So I think he knew what I did but also he arranged with himself to un-know. This is why he went back with his woman and did not think about it first. He went back home and died. I think when he died he would have known what killed him and why. He would have known it was the consequence of my actions. This I also understand. The message was sent and I have received it. The darkness is gathering. There is not long before the end. This is why I speak tonight. So that everything can be said.

There are two things to talk about and they happened fifteen years apart. 1993, 2008. These are the dates.

In December 1992 Nero was on the Kipling with Zamzama Alankar again. The mosque built by the first Mughal emperor Babar in the northern city of Ayodhya had just been destroyed by Hindu activists who claimed that it stood on the mythological site of the birthplace of Lord Ram, the seventh avatar or incarnation of Vishnu. There were riots in Mumbai. First Muslims rioted then the party faithful of the Hindu extremist Shiv Sena attacked them in return and the police, Zamzama said, were openly partisan, openly pro-Sena and “anti-us.” These riots were in the process of dying down but Zamzama’s rage was volcanic and knew no bounds.

Last straw, he shouted at Nero. Camel’s back is broken and now the camel must be shot.

It is not wise to get involved in this matter. Focus on your strong points. Business is good.

It is not a question of wisdom. It is a question of necessity. And to destroy a holy mosque because of the rumored location there of the origin point of an imaginary being, this is what is unwise.

They do not think he is fictional.

They are incorrect.

Alankar had had contact with concerned persons from a neighboring country. The neighbors felt strongly that action must be taken.

A plan has been formulated, Alankar said. A major consignment of arms, ammunition and RDX explosive will be sent by the neighbors, by sea to the Konkan Coast in the first week of January. The landing place is Dighi. It will be necessary for you to arrange the suitcases for the coast guard so that a gap will be left in the water through which the consignment will come on speedboats.

For me, Zamzama? This is not my kind of business. Politics? No, no, no. You must not ask this of me.

Yes, yes, yes. Your house is so well fortified, isn’t it? I have seen it, the motorized heavy metal gates, the alarm systems, the security guards. Your family must feel safe there. Do they feel safe? They must. Do they sometimes go out of doors? Of course, they are Mumbaikars, they lead a full life. A happy family. Congrats.

We are old associates, you and I. This is not a way to talk to me.

You have become so successful, so wealthy, well done. How unfortunate if your workers down tools. How tragic if by chance, a fire.

So there is no choice but to do it. Very well, it will be done.

Also there will be a second consignment some weeks later, at Shekhadi. Same drill.

The neighbors’ plan required a precise sequence of actions. First there would be killings. In Dongri, the previous fiefdom of Daddy Jyoti who had been driven out of town by his soda-bottle beating, there lived a community of what were called mathadi workers, that is, laborers who carried loads on their heads. These were street sleepers so they were easy to acquire. A number of these head-load workers would be acquired and the dispatching would be done with small knives to the throat to give the appearance of a ritual religious rite. Dongri was an area of high communal sensitivity and the neighbor was confident that the ritual killings would cause the opposition to rise up in force. The opposition was highly organized and had police support but they would face heavily armed resistance. Weapons would be prestocked in flashpoint zones. And there would be grenades and there would be bombs. And then the bombs would incite more opposition crowds and those crowds would be met by automatic rifles and more explosives. And a fire would be lit that would spread across the country and the neighbors would be glad because the bastards would have been taught a lesson.

God willing, Zamzama said, we will give the bastards one hell of a bloody nose.

It was the last time Nero ever set foot aboard the Kipling. It was almost time to go ashore but the Z-Company chief had one more thing to say. You and I, he said, maybe we will never meet again. It will not be possible for me to remain in this country after the events that will occur. For you the position is easier. I have always been thoughtful regarding you and there is as you are aware a long chain of intermediaries between us and you have one hundred percent deniability, so I think it will be okay for you to stay put with your wife-family. But maybe just in case you also should construct an exit strategy.

Zamzama was right. The two men in fact never met again. And he was right about the exit strategy too.

The events of March 12, 1993, were widely reported and it will not be necessary to go into details. Car bombs and scooter bombs. Bomb in the basement of the Stock Exchange. Three bazaars, three hotels, airport, cinema, passport office, bank, kaboom, kaboom, kaboom. Even Mahim fishermen’s colony, kaboom. Taxi-bomb at the Gateway to India, big fucking kaboom.

The neighbors must have been disappointed, however. There was considerable loss of life but the hoped-for civil war did not occur. The city and the nation kept their nerve. There were arrests, things calmed down, peace returned. Zamzama Alankar was gone along with his lieutenant Short Fingers, and these two were named Public Enemies #1 and #2. It was widely believed they eventually settled down as guests of the neighbors, and Zamzama continued to run Z-Company by remote control. The neighbors, however, claimed to have no knowledge of the fugitives’ whereabouts.

In the following years there was a major rift in the underworld. After the attacks the police assault on Z-Company was unprecedented, all the arrangements and understandings fell apart, and the whole edifice came this close to disintegrating. The satphones and online secure communications systems went on working so Zamzama was able to send instructions and rule the roost, but wasn’t it just a little too grand of him and Short Fingers to issue orders from a distance, they weren’t the ones taking the heat. Gradually the distance between the two absentee leaders and the two in situ, Big Head and Little Feet—who had to face gangsterism and terror charges, and the not-proven verdict that allowed them to walk free took five years to engineer, that was five years of life under the hammer of the law—it caused resentment. At the end of five years Z-Company was still Z-Company, the loyalty of the cadres was still there, but everyone knew there was a Splinter-Z, a group that owed primary loyalty to the dwarf and the guy with the huge shoe size, and though a kind of truce held between those two and the two staying with the neighbors there was, increasingly, little love lost there.

Nero was invited in for a meeting with Head and Feet. This did not take place on a luxury yacht in the harbor but in a basti deep inside the Dharavi slum, to which he was taken by men who didn’t speak to him and didn’t look like they wanted a chat. Inside the slum dwelling Head nodded at him and Feet pointed a toe at a brick. Sit, Feet said.

So here’s what we know about you, said Head.

You’re the dhobi, said Feet.

What is dirty, you clean.

Therefore, hard to believe you knew nothing. We knew nothing. That is a matter for us to resolve with the boss. But you? You knew nothing? That stretches our credulity.

That puzzles our dimaags.

However. Our brains also know the following, (a) and (b). (A), you don’t like politics.

And (b), you don’t get involved in religion.

So, there’s a balance. On the one hand, on the other hand.

It has been decided to give you benefit of doubt.

The following is our position. This operation has damaged the Company. From now on it is our intention to disengage from such operations.

We have put this to the boss and Fingers.

They are in agreement.

A fresh start. Return to basics. Not straying from our area of maximum expertise.

However, in Company business, there are many issues of trust. And our trust in you is, how to say it.

Compromised.

Shaken.

Shot.

An untrustable trust is untrustworthy.

It is a distrust.

However, we have given you benefit of doubt.

See above.

Therefore we simply disengage from you. You continue with your life, we with ours.

But if at any time any single information leaks from you regarding ourselves.

We will cut off your penis.

And your sons’ penises.

And we will put them in your wife’s mouth.

And I will fuck her from behind.

While I slit her throat from the front.

You are a free man. You may go.

Go fast.

Before we change our mind.

That penis thing sounds like a good idea.

No, no. He is joking only. Goodbye, dhobi.

Goodbye.

Fifteen years passed. Fifteen years: a long time, long enough to forget what one wants to leave behind. His sons grew up, his wealth grew too, and the shadow of the underworld, the shadow that rises from below, no longer lay upon his house. Human life continued with its ups and downs. He had his exit strategy in place but there was no need to use it, no need to leave home, no need to tear his world in half and throw half of it away. Fifteen years. Long enough to relax.

Then it was 2008. And in August 2008, at the airport, as he stood in the immigration line after a business trip to New York, Nero saw a ghost. The ghost was standing in the passport control line next to his own, and its trademark orange hair was gone. Now it was black like everyone else’s. But other than the hair it was obviously him. Public Enemy #2. Nero looked at Short Fingers in wonderment. Surely he would be seized at any instant, gunned down if he tried to resist? His eyes met Fingers’, and he frowned his puzzlement across to the Z-Company megaboss. Fingers just gave him a big thumbs-up sign (with, it must be said, a very small thumb) and turned away. They approached the passport control windows. Uniformed officers carefully scrutinized documents in the super-bureaucratic manner perfected by all minor Indian functionaries. And when Short Fingers was second in line, there was an extraordinary chance occurrence. All the computers in the immigration hall went down, boom! Like that. All the screens black. There followed several moments of consternation as immigration officers tried to reboot their machines, and other officers ran hither and yon. The computer crash was as total as it was mysterious. The waiting lines grew restive. Finally, there was a signal from a senior immigration officer, and the lines began to move, everyone was waved through, manual check only, and Fingers was cleared and gone, and two minutes later, as Nero approached his window, boom!, the computers all came back on. Z-Company had not lost its touch.

Why had Short Fingers taken the great risk of returning? Why had Zamzama sent him? These thoughts preoccupied Nero deep into the night and at two o’clock in the morning he had his answer because for the first time in a decade and a half his cell rang in the coded sequence that spelled trouble. Three rings, off, one ring, off, two rings, off, answer the fourth time. Yes he said. The voice of Short Fingers in his ear like the claws of the Devil sucking him down into the abyss. One more time, Fingers said. One last time.

The Western Region of the Indian Coast Guard was divided into five DHQs. DHQ-2 was the Mumbai department and boasted three stations along the coastline, at Murud Janjira, Ratnagiri and Dahanu. Each station had at its disposal a number of offshore patrol vessels, inshore patrol vessels, fast and extra-fast patrol vessels, and smaller, even faster patrol and interceptor boats. Also helicopters and surveillance aircraft. But the sea was a large place and with proper organization it was possible to leave a specified zone unwatched. The number of suitcases required for such an operation was large.

What is it this time.

Don’t ask. Just make the arrangements.

And if I refuse.

Don’t refuse. The don is in poor health. The neighbors are not the best of hosts. His personal situation is restricted, his finances are running low. He thinks he has little time left. He wants this one last great deed. He has no choice. The neighbors insist. There is a threat of eviction.

It has been fifteen years. I’ve been out of the game a long time.

Welcome to the Hotel California.

I’m not going to do it.

Don’t refuse. I’m asking nicely. I’m saying please. Please: don’t refuse.

I see.

On November 23, 2008, ten gunmen armed with automatic weapons and hand grenades left by boat from the hostile neighboring country. In their backpacks they carried ammunition and strong narcotics: cocaine, steroids, LSD, and syringes. On their journey they hijacked a fishing boat, abandoned their original vessel, brought two dinghies aboard the fishing boat and told the captain where to go. When they were near the shore they killed the captain and got into the dinghies. Afterwards many people wondered why the coast guard had not seen them or tried to intercept them. The coast was supposed to be well guarded but on this night there had been a failure of some sort. When the dinghies landed, on November 26, the gunmen split up into small groups and made their way to their chosen targets, a railway station, a hospital, a movie theater, a Jewish center, a popular café, and two five-star hotels. One of these was the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel, where Nero’s wife, in the aftermath of a quarrel with her husband, was in the Sea Lounge eating cucumber sandwiches and complaining about her marriage to her friends.

I can’t speak, Riya said.

Don’t speak.

You helped the gunmen enter the city, the ones who killed your wife.

There is no need to speak.

And then you fled. You and all your sons.

There is a little more to say. After what happened the body of the gangster Short Fingers was found dumped on a street in Dongri. He had been killed with short knife cuts to the throat. His former associates Big Head and Little Feet were angry at the attack, which placed the Company and its operations in jeopardy once again. This was their message to Zamzama Alankar. Later, Apu also was the victim of their rage. They were sending me a message. The message said, we know you helped, and this is our reply. These are the names the man Mastan is coming to give me. These names I already know.

So you are responsible for your son’s death as well as his mother’s.

What I did, I did to save their lives. I compromised myself to protect them. I am the king of my house but I became a servant. The laundryman. The dhobi. But you are correct. I failed. You accuse me and I am guilty of it and fate has punished me by taking my children. One child dead at the hands of my enemies, one by his own hand, one at the hand of a madman, but all three are my punishment and my burden to bear forever, yes, and their mothers too. I have been taught the lesson and I have learned it. The dead bodies of my children and their mothers weigh on my shoulders and their weight pushes me down. You see me crushed, daughter, like a cockroach beneath destiny’s heel. You see me crushed. And now you know everything.

And what do I do now, now that I know everything?

It will not be necessary for you to act. Tomorrow morning at 9 A.M. sharp the angel of death is coming to take tea.