Opening with a telephonic conversation between the author and Dawood Ibrahim (which also happens to be the last published interview of Dawood Ibrahim), there couldn’t be a better start to a book on Mumbai’s underworld. This work establishes the don as hiding in the port city of Karachi and then unravels the story of the D-company and brings to light the cunningness and the hunger for power — the same things that have kept the fugitive away from Americans and Indians despite him being declared a global terrorist.
With humble beginnings in the Independence era and the formation of small gangs, the book chronicles the growth, activities and varying trends in revenue generation of the Mumbai mafia. It also talks about Bombay baddies such as the feared trio of Karim Lala, the flashy Haji Mastan and the quintessential don Varadarajan Mudaliar aka Vardha bhai. How each of them set up base in Mumbai and took to crime forms the rest of this gripping narrative. Though their lives have been explored in painstaking detail, it still only forms the background of the cream of the book which is the story of the son of a Mumbai head constable whose unchecked childhood shenanigans lead to a sinister money-making and blood-spilling campaign.
Dawood Ibrahim’s life has been written about in great detail right from his childhood days in Dongri, a Muslim-dominated area, where his father was a well respected policeman, to his first robbery, love affairs from his youth and his transition from a local hood to an internationally recognised terrorist. While the narrative is interesting, it would've helped if the author had mentioned the dates more frequently because it becomes difficult to keep turning the pages to place any incident in the book on the timeline.
Among other information offered in the book is interesting trivia about the origin of the ‘Rampuri chaku’, the basis of gang formation, and even naming the first history-sheeter in the Mumbai police records.
Born and raised in the suburbs of Mumbai, Author S Hussain Zaidi has covered the Mumbai mafia for two decades as a crime reporter. It serves as the right qualification for the intense subject matter. He has raised the bar for gangster non-fiction by offering details that is only rarely heard of.
amitkutty@gmail.com
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