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.