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 successfuclass="underline" 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.