Numb in India, part 6: The greater game
With gods and gangsters in the streets of Mumbai
Once again, Numb at the Lodge is on holiday. Paid subscribers can join us in a brain-melting tourist odyssey across the past and future of Indias real and imagined. The really good stuff is behind the paywall: this time, it’s about the Upanishads of the underworld. If you want to come along, all you have to do is click the button below:
Today I’m once again writing from my jail cell in Mumbai, where I’ve been accused of being a footsoldier in the Lawrence Bishnoi gang, personally responsible for the recent murder of local political legend Baba Siddique. Siddique had been a councillor in the Municipal Corporation and a minister of state in the Maharashtra government; he’d sat on any number of important committees; he founded a political dynasty. He was gunned down by the Bishnoi gang outside his son’s constituency office for reasons unknown. Last time, I said I didn’t even know who Baba Siddique was until he was assassinated last month, and that’s true. Even so—and my lawyer has begged me not to write this bit, but my first duty is always to the truth—I’m not entirely innocent either. This is how I ended up here, and what happened next.
You have to understand what coming to Mumbai was like. For weeks, I’d been trudging around various dusty, dilapidated towns in Rajasthan, dutifully checking in on the historic palaces and the historic forts and the historic palaces inside the historic forts, half of them ruined, with bats hanging from the rafters and guano piling the floor where the tyrants of a less squalid age had once piled their gold and silks. I ate in godawful tourist restaurants with extensive menus full of burgers and fries. These people would have been horrified to discover what a burger really is, but that didn’t stop them selling any number of slimes between two buns under the name. I dodged tuktuks and human shit on narrow streets with no pavements, just a fringe of dust and heaped-up plastic, where I couldn’t walk for ten seconds without someone blocking my path—yes my friend! you want shopping? you want spend money?—proffering fake pashmina scarves or plastic idols or camel leather handbags or sometimes more ordinary things when there was nothing else to hawk, handfuls of broken masonry or bits of wood, biro caps, long ribbons of apple peel: yes my friend, you want pulp, you want chalk, you want worms? It’s a decaying world up there. Rajasthan is the most traditional, hidebound part of the country, but that doesn’t mean they’re interested in actually conserving the things they’ve received from the past, just that all they know how to do is moulder away. Brits and Israelis keep flocking to see the old forts and palaces, even if those forts are surrounded by a broad moat of filth; no need to live in anything other than comfortable squalor. Let it rot; all rot is picturesque.
Anyway, try to imagine what it was like for me to start the day in a dusty Rajasthani town on the edge of the desert, and arrive that evening in Mumbai. To drive down the Coastal Road and just see skyscrapers, hundreds of spindles of light all along the shore of the Arabian Sea, and more of them further inland, visible in the gaps between, thousands more: a city that keeps going, glittering endlessly for miles into the haze, and all of it superdense, all crushed and glowing like a neutron star. The hypercity; South Asia’s only real metropolis. In a country of one and a half billion people, this one city produces more than a third of the total tax revenue. Delhi might be big, in a strictly demographic sense, but it feels like a hypertrophied version of a poky little town. Mumbai feels extraplanetary. It keeps on going across the bay, into the sprawling warehouses of Navi Mumbai, liquid urban stuff flooding the hinterlands of Maharashtra; it keeps going beyond our world. Across asteroids and exoplanets there are tracts of slum housing and salvage zones, chipped signs in Hindi and Marathi in the warrens where bony stunted children take apart starships for scrap, street hawkers scurrying under skies with two suns or none at all. Coming here was like being dragged facefirst across the centuries, from the ruins of the eighteenth to the furnace of the twenty-third.
As soon as you see the skyscrapers, Mumbai’s famous slums make perfect sense. All of India floods into this one city, and I get it. If you were a Bihari peasant farmer, scraping dust out of the dust, shitting in a communal ditch, sleeping in the same one-room hut as your goats, as your ancestors had scraped and shat and slept for five thousand years—but you knew that you lived in the same country as Mumbai, this science-fiction city bursting with money and danger, you’d have to be an idiot not to go. So they come here, to live in slums. There’s no neighbourhood in Mumbai so ritzy it doesn’t have its slums. Malabar Hill has them, swelling like boils in between the towers. This is where all the energy of the city is generated. An overflowing pool of dirt-cheap labour, flooding into the cracks. Bataille once noted that nature is in constant high tension, exploding extravagantly: cut a path through a grassy field and new plants will immediately start growing in the bare earth. But you only get this rich fecundity when every individual organism is desperately poor, on the point of starvation, gasping for space in a saturated world. Mumbai is the same. If there’s six square feet of land along a railway track, or behind the back of some luxury mall, or in the gaps between office towers, someone’s already put up a lopsided corrugated-iron shack. Or, more likely, ten of them, a hundred, crammed together, sharing zero toilets. Whole families in a room, half the size of the one they shared with the goats back home.
But obviously not everyone here lives like grass. The fifty thousand dollar millionaires in this city, and the millions more in the comfortable middle classes, get to prance around in the meadow. It’s easy not to see the misery here if you don’t want to: I was too entranced by how nice it felt to be in a real city again. Mumbai has pavements. It has a big monumental downtown, partially built by the British, but mostly built by the local commercial classes in a high Victorian style. Gothic clock towers, all niches and gables. Neoclassical fountains featuring allegorical sculptures of nude women with tiny European tits, to represent Industry and Thrift and Cleanliness and Sexual Repression. Mumbai has a Zara and a Uniqlo and it’s even got Pret A Manger. Supermarkets too. Not a street market, not mud-crusted plastic buckets full of fly-crawling fruit, not skinned lambs dangling from their collarbones in the street, but shelves full of hygienically packaged products, all plastic-smooth. I could have been in Tesco. In fact, I was: the Star Bazaar supermarket chain is a 50-50 joint venture between the Tata Group and Tesco plc. And maybe it was the weird familiarity of this place that made me act out.
What you need to know is that Lawrence Bishnoi is currently India’s most feared gangster. He’s the man who orchestrated the murder of Baba Siddique; he’s also, according to the police, my boss. Bishnoi took the usual route into organised crime, which is to be born into the kind of respectable middle-class family that names its children after colonial-era British administrators, and then enter the underworld via the medium of student politics. While he was studying at Punjab University, Bishnoi ran for the student council and lost; next time, he realised that instead of risking another ordinary campaign, he could just threaten to kill anyone who voted the other way. He won, and was then promptly arrested. His time in jail changed his goals but not his strategy. This is how the Bishoi gang works: pure extortion. They don’t smuggle drugs, they don’t traffic women, they don’t make loans or organise illegal gambling; they just demand money and threaten to kill you if you don’t pay up. Sometimes, it’s true, they’ll kill you for other reasons. Bishnoi has vowed to kill the Bollywood actor Salman Khan over a 1998 poaching incident in which Khan shot an antelope. Lawrence Bishnoi comes from the Bishnoi panth, a caste of deeply religious tree-huggers from Rajasthan. In 1730, the Maharaja of Marwar sent soldiers to fell trees near a Bishnoi village for a new palace. Hundreds of villagers each wrapped their arms around a tree: if you want to cut this down, you’ll have to cut through me too. So they did: more than three hundred Bishnoi were sawn in half defending their trees. The Bishnoi worship all the gods, but they have a particular reverence for Agyana, god of blissful ignorance, and the antelope is his mount. Which is why, three hundred years later, Lawrence Bishnoi’s men fired a volley of gunshots at Salman Khan’s house. At least, that’s the official reason. But in the entertainment industry, nothing is what it seems. Not so long ago, everyone in Bollywood was gleefully murdering each other. Big men, famous men, shot down in the street so some actor could get out of a contract he didn’t like, or to secure international distribution rights for a frothy romance film with lots of song-and-dance numbers. And just when it looked like the bloodshed was finally winding down, the Lawrence Bishnoi gang moved into town with a laminated menu of execution methods, hired assassins to the stars. And now Bishnoi is killing politicians. Baba Siddique, local kingmaker, gunned down in the middle of Mumbai. Beyond that, things get too murky to see. According to the government of Canada, Indian intelligence is using the Bishnoi gang to murder Sikh separatists on Canadian soil. Bishnoi’s graduated into a greater game now, the game that produces the thing we call the world.
The police aren’t looking for Lawrence Bishnoi. They’ve already found him. For the last nine years, he’s directed his gang’s rise to supremacy in the Indian underworld from a cell in Sabermati Jail in Gujarat. Apparently, the authorities are powerless to stop him.
My own criminal history is less exciting, but when I was younger, I went through a shoplifting phase. Everyone does it, I’d tell myself, waddling out of Waterstones with a book in each armpit. Everything should belong to everyone, I’d think, scurrying out the supermarket with a big wedge of purloined cheese. Emerging from H&M wearing four ugly shirts at once and a pair of sunglasses stuffed in my left sock, I’d reason that if they didn’t want me to steal this stuff, they should have simply caught me before I took it. I’m not proud of myself, but to be honest I’m not really that ashamed either. I was young and broke, and then I grew up a bit and stopped. What I am ashamed of are the thoughts I started having as I dutifully poked around the Hindu temples of the north. As I mentioned last time, my Jewish upbringing made me strangely uncomfortable with all the images and icons; what I didn’t tell you was that every time I saw some faithful doddering old man leave a ten-rupee note in front of the black figure of some god, I had a sudden and intense urge to just grab it. What did this idol need with money? Why not me instead? Obviously it would be unthinkable to actually do it: to come to a much poorer country and nakedly steal from its people: I wanted to believe that we British were actually past that sort of thing. But in Mumbai—some of the people in this place are rich.
In Malabar Hill I had a good gawp at Antilia, a private skyscraper one hundred and seventy metres tall, where Mukesh Ambani and his family live among floating badminton courts and six-storey elephant stables and an aquarium extending the entire height of the building for their beloved minke whale. Outside, the police have parked an actual tank. The soldiers guarding the naval port and military headquarters all have rusty old Russian rifles, but outside Antilia the cops are twitching with nasty little Belgian and Austrian submachine guns, all lasers and silencers and spectroscopic sights, ready to perforate any prole in sight at the first sign of trouble. Later, in a nearby temple, I watched a man in a moustache and a combover plonk down a slim but respectable stack of five-hundred-rupee notes in front of the god. The statue of Agyana, seated beatifically on his antelope, didn’t seem to acknowledge the gift, and when the bald man left I didn’t even think. I made the justifications to myself later, though. This holiday isn’t cheap, and unlike my big trip last year it doesn’t look like it’ll pay for itself. My subscribers are a good 30% less interested in the India series than my one on China, and whose fault is that? Not mine. My writing is impeccable. It’s this country’s fault, for failing to fascinate Western audiences to the same degree, and aren’t I owed some compensation? It took about an hour before my bullshit started to wear thin, and I decided to give the whole stack to the first beggar I saw. But it was only as I was counting out the notes that I noticed the little slip of paper folded within. It said:
Hello Sam We see you We know what you’ve done Be outside Building Number 35, Kherwadi, Bandra East, Mumbai 400051. Tonight. 9 pm. Come alone. HE IS BEYOND KNOWLEDGE AND INCOMPREHENSION
After my arrest, I tried to tell Detective Shiv Vaktashirana of the Mumbai Crime Branch what happened next.