Altaf Tyrewala - Mumbai Noir

This collection is comprised of works of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Published by Akashic Books

©2012 Akashic Books

Series concept by Tim McLoughlin and Johnny Temple

Mumbai map by Aaron Petrovich

eISBN-13: 978-1-61775-112-7

Print ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-027-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011902728

All rights reserved

First printing

Akashic Books

PO Box 1456

New York, NY 10009

info@akashicbooks.com

www.akashicbooks.com

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Barcelona Noir (Spain), edited by Adriana V. López & Carmen Ospina

Boston Noir , edited by Dennis Lehane

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For Y.T. and D.T. —

who missed each other forever by a single day

Aboiling July afternoon. A monster traffic jam on Mumbai’s tony Peddar Road. My taxi driver peers up through the windshield. Billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s twenty-seven-floor home looms over the thoroughfare like a mammoth pile of Lego blocks. The cabbie remarks in the Bambaiya patois, “What building Ambani has made— right on the road. Some terrorist just has to drive by with a rocket launcher and buss !” He glances at me in the rearview mirror with raised eyebrows: khel khatam, game over. Looking through the passenger window, I observe, “Even an AK-47 would do a lot …” The cabbie is skeptical. “From the road? Angle will be difficult to sustain, saab,” he says. “Plus, vehicle will have to go very slow for gunman to do serious damage …” I look again. The man has a point.

The traffic lets up a bit, but we continue to analyze, without a hint of irony, the vulnerabilities of the Ambani residence. Between 1993 and 2011, Mumbai has weathered eight terror attacks. Its inhabitants—12.43 million according to Census 2011—have become unwitting authorities on all the ways that an ordinary day in the city can turn out to be one’s last.

Life in the island city wasn’t always so chancy. Until international terrorism cast its vague shadow over the metropolis in the early ’90s, the pains in Mumbai’s collective neck most often had a face and a fixed address. The city’s denizens knew the names and backgrounds of underworld majordomos. They were familiar with the bastions of extremist religious parties. And they tried their best to stay away.

Before the liberalization of India’s economy in 1991, perhaps the only thing worth striving for was one’s ability to stay on the good side of the law. Mumbai’s middle and working classes were easy to recognize back then: they toiled hard, wore polyester, and fantasized about migrating to the West. Their heroic struggle to choose a righteous life over an easy life often invoked the respect of those who had done away with such bourgeois moral anxieties. The outlaw narrator of Abbas Tyrewala’s story in this volume reminisces how the bhais of his time never harmed Mumbai’s common folk because they were awed by their courage to live honestly and bring up children.