The Mountain Shadow

He was growing fast, already almost as tall as any man in the room. But still he seemed small and frail in that winged chair, once a throne for the king of South Bombay crime.

Behind Tariq was Nazeer, his hand resting on the handle of a dagger: the boy’s protector, and my close friend.

I moved past the long table to greet Tariq. The boy brightened for a moment when I shook his hand, but quickly assumed the cold impassive stare that had hardened the bronze of his eyes since the death of his uncle.

When I looked at Nazeer, the older man gave me a rare smile. It was a grimace that could tame lions, and one of the favourite smiles of my life.

I took a seat beside Tariq. Abdullah and Hussein took their places, and the meeting recommenced.

For a while, Sanjay directed the discussions through business matters: trouble with striking workers at the Ballard Pier dockside had slowed the supply of drugs into South Bombay; some fishermen at Sassoon Dock, anchorage of the biggest fishing fleet in the Island City, had formed an association and were resisting the payment of protection money; and a friendly city councillor had been caught by a police raid on one of the Company’s prostitution dens, requiring a favour from the mafia Council to hush the matter up, and save the man’s career.

The mafia Council, which had carefully set up the raid to force the city councillor deeper into its embrace, authorised the sums required to bribe the police, and determined that twice the amount should be charged to the councillor in question, for doing him the favour.

The final matter was something more complicated, and went beyond business. The Sanjay Company, and the Council that ordered its affairs, ran the whole of South Bombay, an area that stretched from Flora Fountain to the Navy Nagar near the very southern promontory of the Island City, and included everything in between, from sea to sea.

The Sanjay Company was the sole black market authority in the area, but wasn’t generally despised. In fact, a lot of people took their disputes and grievances to the Company, in those years, rather than the police. The mafia was usually quicker, often more just, and always cheaper than the cops.

When Sanjay took the leadership, he called the group a Company, joining a gangster trend that divided the city along business lines. Khaderbhai, the dead Khan who’d founded it, was strong enough for the mafia clan to have no other name but his own. Echoes of Khaderbhai’s name gave the Sanjay Company an authority that Sanjay’s name didn’t, and still held the peace.

Occasionally, however, someone decided to take matters into his own hands. One such rogue element was an ambitious landlord in the Cuffe Parade area, where tall, expensive apartment buildings stood on land reclaimed from the sea. He’d begun hiring his own thugs. The Sanjay Company didn’t like it, because the Company had the reputation of its own thugs to consider.

The private goons had thrown a rent defaulter from the window of a second-storey apartment. The tenant survived the fall, but his body landed on a cigarette and hashish shop owned by the Company, injuring the operator, known as Shining Patel, and a popular customer who was a renowned singer of Sufi songs.

Shining Patel and his black-white-market shop was just business for the Sanjay Company. The injury to a great singer, loved by every hash smoker in the southern peninsula, made the offence personal.

‘I told you this would happen, Sanjaybhai,’ a man named Faisal said, clenching a fist on the table. ‘I’ve been warning you about this kind of thing for months.’

‘You warned me that someone would fall on Shining Patel’s shop?’ Sanjay sneered. ‘I must’ve missed that meeting.’

‘I warned you that respect was slipping,’ Faisal said, more quietly. ‘I warned you that discipline was slipping. Nobody’s afraid of us, and I don’t blame them. If we’re so scared that we put mercenaries on the door, we’re the ones to blame.’

‘He’s right,’ Little Tony added. ‘This problem with the Scorpion Company, for example. That’s what gives chutiyas like this landlord bahinchudh the idea that he can go past us, to create his own little army.’

‘It’s not a Company,’ Sanjay spat back at them. ‘Those Scorpion fucks haven’t been recognised, not by any of the other Companies in Bombay. It’s a gang. They’re just North Bombay guys, trying to squeeze into the south. Call it what it is, man, a cheap little gang.’

‘Call it what you will,’ Mahmoud Melbaaf said softly, ‘it is still a problem. They have attacked our men in the street. Not a kilometre from here, two of our best earners were hacked with choppers, in the middle of the day.’

‘That’s right,’ Faisal added.