by AJITH PILLAI
The conversation drifted to what I would learn years later was Mr Naipaul’s considered—some would say uncharitable—view of the Muslim community. He had concluded, or had been told, that the mafia in the city was made up of Muslims and Muslims alone. ‘As a community they somehow seem to be historically more drawn towards crime than all the others,’ he observed. I reckoned I was just an ordinary journalist to contradict such a great man, but I summoned the courage to tell him that one couldn’t draw such sweeping conclusions and that crime knew no religion or region. ‘Why, there are people from all communities even in Dawood Ibrahim’s gang. His main man is Chota Rajan, a Hindu,’ I said and went on to reel off the names of Hindus in the mafia including Amar Naik, Arun Gawli, Varadarajan Mudaliar… Given that he equated the underworld with Muslims, it was rather ironic that the safe house I took him to was occupied by hitmen, gangsters and their friends who were all Hindus. I had not planned it that way, but the meeting at short notice (Mr Naipaul wanted it over and done with in a day) was somehow ordained to be so. We reached our destination after meeting a contact at a paan shop near the Portuguese church in Dadar, who took us to the address in Shivaji Park—close to where cricketer Sandeep Patil lived. Anyone stepping into the safe house—a well-appointed ground floor flat—would think they had come to a typical upper middle-class home with a TV set and sofas in the drawing room. But once you wandered into the rooms, it resembled a Bollywood gangland set, with pistols and arms of various descriptions littered around.
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Because of some misunderstanding, Mr Naipaul kept thinking I had brought him to meet a Muslim gang. He had to hastily change his line of questioning once he realized he was actually dealing with Hindu gangsters. For a start, he enquired if there were any Muslims in the gang. He was told that there were indeed a few of them but as a gang leader he didn’t trust members of that community in his team. In retrospect, I suspect the mafia man was perhaps playing to the gallery and saying things Mr Naipul wanted to hear. So, in the course of the next half hour or so, the man elaborated on how Muslim criminals were low class, unlike their Hindu counterparts who were decent middleclass folk with the benefit of a good education. The noted writer kept taking notes even as I was asked which British paper he was representing. When I said it was for a book he was writing, the gang leader suddenly had that vacant uninterested look. But to keep Mr Naipaul engaged, he spoke about how he believed in Santoshi Ma (an incarnation of goddess Durga), to whom he claimed the gang prayed before every operation.
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