Guide into the underworld | Vikram Chandra

I first met S. Hussain Zaidi in the winter of 1997, when I had just begun writing a novel about the Mumbai underworld. I desperately needed help, and was lucky enough to have a sister who knew Hussain through their shared profession of journalism. So I met up with him at the cheerfully-named Bahar restaurant in the Fort area of Mumbai. I asked questions, and Hussain told me stories about greed and corruption, about shooters and their targets, and despite the chill that passed over my skin, I was aware of a rising swell of optimism – this guy was really, really good. I didn’t know that day that S. Hussain Zaidi would become a friend, an extraordinary inside informant about matters relating to crime and punishment, and my guide into the underworld. But that is exactly what happened. Over the next few years, as I wrote my novel, Hussain generously shared with me his vast knowledge, his canny experience, and his host of contacts. I can say with certainty that I would not have been able to write my book without his ever-ready help and advice.
It makes me very happy that Hussain has finished his magnum opus, Dongri To Dubai : Six Decades of The Mumbai Mafia, so that the general reader can now benefit from his expertise. This book does much more than narrate the saga of one man’s rise, it brings alive the entire culture of crime that has grown and formed itself over the last half-century in India. And as much as we like to distance ourselves by pretending that the underworld exists quite literally under us, beneath us, the truth – as Hussain shows – is that we mingle with it every day. The influence of organized crime reaches into the economy, our polity, and everyday life.

Yet, our knowledge of the intentions and operations of the players – on all sides of the law – is mostly a mixture of legend and conjecture. Our histories begin with a few names – Haji Mastaan, Varadarajan, Karim Lala – imbued with dread, and continue with still others – Dawood, Chotta Rajan, Daya Nayak, Vijay Salaskar – haloed with matinee glamour. What we have lacked is a narrative that provides both detail and perspective, that lays out the entire bloody saga of power-mongering, money, and murder. From Dongri to Dubai is that necessary book, and more. It gives us an account that is vast in its scope and yet intimate in its understanding of motive and desire. Hussain moves us from the small gangs of early post-Independence India to the corporatizing consolidations of the eighties and through the sanguine street wars of the nineties; we better comprehend our present, with its abiding undercurrent of terror, if we follow the stranger-than-fiction history that puts an Indian gangster in a safe-house in Karachi, with a daughter married to the son of a national celebrity, and his coffers enriched by the bootleg sales of Mumbai movies to Pakistanis.

Anthropologists like to use the phrase “thick description” to describe an explanation of a behaviour that also includes and explains context, so that the behaviour becomes intelligible to an outsider. For most readers, I think, reading Dongri to Dubai will at first feel like a journey into an alien landscape with a trustworthy, experienced guide; by the end, though, Hussain has made us see, helped us to understand, and we recognize this terrain as our own world, and the bhais and the women we meet become perhaps not quite our brothers and sisters, but human beings like ourselves.

I am grateful for this book. The work that Hussain does is exacting and sometimes dangerous. Reporting about these deadly intrigues and the human beings caught within them is not for the faint of heart; the web stretches from your corner paan-shop to the bleak heights on which the Great Game is played, and there are many casualties. We all profit from Hussain’s intrepid investigations.

- Vikram Chandra