A Moses on his Harley Davidson

We left early the next morning. Earlier than usual, because we had a tiring day’s ride all the way up to Goa. It was already March 22, and both had to report to work on Monday, March 25. We would need to recoup over the weekend. Besides, the two days of complete rest would ensure that the security personnel at each of our offices would recognize us enough to let us in. We had been literally in the sun since we set out from Bombay, barring a few days in Bhubaneswar. When we woke up the children were still asleep. But early school ensured they were up in time to wave us goodbye with their mother.

We rode out of Mangalore in the early light. Our next stop was going to be Goa. But before Goa we would pass a spectacular stretch of Highway which I remembered from bus trips to either Mangalore or Kerala. The bus would always pass a strip of road, not more than a mile long that was the blacktop of a natural divide between the Arabian Sea on the one side and a clear water of a river on the other. It was always magical, made more elusive and even slightly mythical, because the drivers of inter state buses hardly ever paid homage to that great beauty with a halt. Sometimes, we passed the stretch during the night, and I would stay awake to see the sight from the bus window. Now, Rohan and I were going to ride over that tapering finger of land that neatly cut the frothing sea from the serene river Sowparinika.

Rohan had already loaded the magazine into his camera. But much before the dream landscape arrived, hunger stung the innards. We passed the temple town of Udupi.

In Bombay Udupi was a particular kind of South Indian cuisine. Udupi restaurants in the city was run and owned by Shettys of Karnataka, though not necessarily those from Udupi, always served safe, clean, and affordable South Indian meals. Udupi was also a very revered centre of Hinduism.
However, we did not stop at Udupi. We kept going, trying to cover as much distance as possible while the sun was still hospitable, and the sea breeze retained some cool. Eventually, we would once again be battered by the full blown equatorial sun on the scorching highway. Goa was far. We stopped for breakfast at a junction where the road that led to Kundapura town met the National Highway 17.

When we entered the restaurant, it was reeking of incense. The manager had just started the day with his prayers to the deity placed strategically over the cash counter. The place was just cleaned and wiped; the waiters had begun a fresh new day. We probably were the second set of customers that morning.

We settled into our narrow seats, so reminiscent of Udupi restaurants of
Bombay.

“We will be in Bombay by tomorrow night,” said Rohan, almost as if it was
a most spontaneous prediction rather than the culmination of our three
week long ride carving out a rough heart of Indian peninsula.

“Yes, indeed. So, better think up whatever you have to do before you
reach there.”

“I have not bought anything for Alpana, yaar.”

“I thought you bought some silver jewellery from Bhubaneswar.”
“Yes. But, there is nothing for my mom either.”

Bombay was nearing, and the trip was ageing for Rohan. As we had our breakfast, he spied a large cloth banner announcing the sale of handloom sarees, bedsheets, and towels. It said the sale was on the first floor of the hotel.

“Shall we check upstairs?” he said.

“Yes, of course. But it may be too early.”

We checked with the man at the cash counter whether the exhibition-cum-sale of handloom cloth had started. He said, the man in charge of the sale had just sauntered in with his helpers, so it should soon be on.

By the time we finished our breakfast of idlis and fine filter coffee, we might even be able to buy some token sarees for our women back home.

Interestingly, sambhar, the traditional vegetable curry served with most popular south Indian breakfasts like idlis and dosas, here in Kundapur, so close to Udupi, did not have the regulation sugar in it.

Udupi restaurants in Bombay regularly put a bit of sugar or jaggery into their sambhar. One of the owners I had asked about it told me that their Gujarati customers, probably the majority, found the sambhar too spiced, while at the same time, they loved to have idlis. Gujaraties being fundamentalist vegetarians by and large prefer to eat at restaurants that served only vegetarian food. Udupi restaurants were always “pure vegetarian.” Therefore, it was natural that Udupi restaurants had a huge Gujarati clientele in the metropolis. The business had bent to the consumers’ demand, at the cost of the authenticity of the cuisine.

We went up, and were the first visitors of the exhibition that day. Rohan and I chose a couple of sarees each, and hurriedly stuffed them into our backpacks.

“I am going to tell Alpana and my mother I brought these all the way from Orissa,” Rohan told me.

“But nobody goes to Orissa to buy these cheap cotton sarees. They
are available all over Bombay. Even outside your house,” I said.

“Maybe, but who is going think it is not authentic if I told them it is.” The matter rested there. There are still a couple of simple women who wear with pride authentic Oriya sarees bought from humble Kundapur in Karnataka. And not all of them are in Rohan’s family.

We got on with our ride towards Goa. In about forty minutes we reached the sea. On one side was the frothing Arabian Sea, and on the other were thick coconut palms and occasional beetlenut palms, looking like demure, more delicate female companions of the sturdy coconut palms.

The sea excited Rohan. He wanted to stop and click some pictures right away. It was a big effort to stop him from stopping, because I knew the famed Kundapur splitting of the sea from the river couldn’t be too far now.

And it was not. We hit the road that was jet black, with the loose red
mud on its edges like delicately applied red mascara. At the beginning we
could see the black road snaking right through the middle of two clearly
different kinds of water. On our right was a swelling river of clear
marble, crystalline bottle-green, with a stray boatman at the far end, like
an obdurate cliché clinging on for relevance. On our left was the strip
of golden beach that separated the blue epileptic sea that foamed turgid
muddy clay at the other edge of the beach. The sea was ebbing that late
morning, so the waves were benign, devoid of the wild energy of high tide rollers.

What sheltered the road from both water bodies was a wall of black-grey granite, that held the sides of the road as it were from being consumed by either waters.

There was not a dog on site would have been a lie. There was one lone dog in sight, and that at the far end of the Maravanthe beach, which some claim to be one of the most beautiful beaches in the world. That morning, I would have doubted any claim less than hyperbole.

Rohan promptly went berserk with the camera. He went across and wanted me to take his picture as he rode the bike on that heavenly strip of the National Highway 17. I did as I was told, tried to get Rohan on Camera as he split through the water on his Bullet, and hoped he would get the feeling that he wanted the picture to communicate. He wanted it to seem as if a road was forming under his bike wheels as he streaked right across the place where a river met the sea, cleanly cutting the river from the sea. A Moses on his Harley Davidson. There are some seventeen frames of that stunt in search of some digital special effects man in Rohan’s closet.

It was then that he realized that we both did not have a single frame on the bike together, except a few tame ones that Anupam had hurriedly clicked when we were leaving the Orissa capital.

Still gasping at the sight, Rohan went to the other side of the road,
fidgeted with his camera, and placed it precariously on a milestone next
to the road. He raced back, to the precariously placed me on our parked
bike, and jumped right behind me like a cowboy might have done in a
rescue act. He hugged me, and got me wincing into the camera, while he
smiled broadly. When he unclasped me, he told me he had timed the camera.

Goa was still 285 kilometres away, and we left Kundapura, despite its allure. The heat was hardening, gaining intensity, as we rode away. The landscape was again thinning of greenery. We were still along the western coastline of India, but the sea we last saw was in Kundapura. The next sighting of the sea, from our route along the national Highway would be much later in Karwar.

As we cruised, we saw several local people going about their business. There were less and less homes that opened out directly into the highway. Most of those establishments were hotels, or other shops, besides the ubiquitous tyre shops, an occasional bus stand where intercity buses stopped to pick locals for the next town or city.

We rode away, falling silent, relenting to the gathering heat. We soon saw a flock of burkha clad girls cross the street. Young, not too overly concerned about the way they held their headscarves. In fact, in places they were merely girls who looked like school girls anywhere.

Their burkhas, or head scarves looked as if somebody had just flung them onto a flock of schoolgoing girls, who did not notice that the burkhas and headscarves had settled on them They looked like students of some local educational institute.

Eventually, more young people, all students of some local higher secondary school or pre-university college, converged; either the college was nearby or the students were commuting from their homes, and this junction was a place they had to cross regularly.

The gaggle of sophomores, woke me up from the heat induced glaze that had missed registering much for nearly an hour or more since Kundapura. The children were distinctly Muslims. We were possibly nearing Bhatkal.

I looked around, and the shoulder of the Highway was splattered with small boards announcing Madarassa E Faizul Islami. Later, another board that spelt in English Noor E Huda. The Arabic sounding names increased, and the stamp sized small boards with Arabic names started to gather with the frequency of raindrops on the windshield. Masjid E Toor…. and so many more, that I lost count.

We had entered Bhatkal, a small town on coastal Karnataka that had first entered my consciousness in 1994, when I was a crime reporter for the The Indian Express in Bombay.

Bhatkal was what was called a strategic landing point along the western coast often used by gold smugglers to land their contraband.

Gold smuggling had since become less profitable, but through the seventies and eighties, duty structures made smuggling a major source of illegal money. In the seventies, it was always silks, synthetic cloth, and watches. Later, when the tariff made gold too exorbitant to be imported, the yellow metal became the prized contraband.

Gold, as well as synthetic cloth and watches, Seiko from Japan was a particular favourite, were always sourced from the Gulf countries. For one, Dubai and other Gulf capitals were always unbound by the hefty duties that the Indian government levied on these products. The second reason was that Indian demand for “imported” stuff was almost insatiable during the closed economy of the seventies and eighties, ‘imported’ often becoming an exclusive status symbol. The third, and the most important reason, was that there were more Indians working in the Gulf countries than ever before.

The smuggling trade was almost always controlled by the Muslim mafia based in Bombay. After the Pathans, it was Haji Mastan, a dock worker who rose to be a feared underworld don in the seventies, who finally died a mildly amusing novice trying to cut his teeth on political legitimacy.

But after Mastan, the next don to take over the gold smuggling ring was Dawood Ibrahim. Dawood was the son of a Konkani Muslim constable working with the Bombay police. He rose to be the most powerful don of the Bombay underworld, who cut out the niceties of spawning a fan club and cultivating a Robin Hood image among those he lived with, and those who were his immediate neighbours and fellow ghettoites through benign as well as facile social work for the poor, from the duties of his notorious and fearful office.

Dawood’s predecessors like Mastan, and later the Tamilian hooch king of Bombay, Varadarajan Mudaliar, were both the old fashioned dons. Mastaan had a reputation, as did Mudaliar, of helping the desperately poor with two bits of their ill-gotten wealth. Mudaliar never had control of the smuggling network. He made his money beating the ill-advised prohibition of Morarjee Desai.

Dawood was more of a “new economy” don, ruthless and terrifyingly ambitious.

He consolidated his hold over the Bombay underworld and controlled extortion, contract killing, as well as smuggling. Though gold smuggling had become less profitable, Dawood was still using the old smuggling routes to land contraband along the Konkan coast. One of his strengths was the goodwill of Muslim seafarers along the coast, whom he co-opted into his smuggling operations.

He landed contraband from the Gulf along these quiet sleepy outposts along the coast away from Bombay, which was far too heavily guarded by enforcement agencies. The goods were then transported to Bombay, the main market for them.

Though Dawood was a Muslim don, like all before him, some of his main lieutenants were Hindu goons. Many of his contract killers and
sharpshooters were Hindu too. The secularism of Bombay crimedom was such that traditionally only Hindu shooters were used to kill Hindus. But all
that camaraderie evaporated after Hindu zealots brought down the Babri
Masjid in Ayodhya, in the wake of the storm of rightist resurgence that LK Advani’s rath yatra had whipped up across most of North India. That was on December 6, 1992.

The communal riots that followed in Bombay were the worst ever in this city with a very high reputation for secularism and cosmopolitanism. The riots changed a lot of things. The deadliest of changes wrought was Dawood Ibrahim, who became a born again Muslim don.

After the riots, Dawood, who had grown beyond all imagination, decided to avenge the riots of December 1992 that killed more Muslims in Bombay than any other before. The riots were perpetrated and fanned by the Shiv Sena, Bombay’s own militant Hindu party.

Dawood, who by then had flown Bombay for seven years and was operating from Dubai, decided to single handedly avenge what he saw as a conspiracy of the predominantly Hindu establishment against Muslims. The don chose as his target not the government, nor the administration that did not protect Muslims. He instead chose to wreak his vengeance on the city of Bombay itself.

Much before the 1992 riots, he had flown several of his key henchmen, many Hindus included, away from the clutches and reach of the Bombay police into the safe environs of Dubai. He had set up legitimate businesses there, and ran his criminal empire in Bombay long distance, on the phone through those of his men he had in the city.

Dawood, in his blind lunge at revenge, found a too willing ally in the Pakistani intelligence agency Inter Services Intelligence. And in an unprecedented operation in terms of scale, or ambition, smuggled tons of RDX into Bombay. For this, he used his old smuggling network, which had fallen into complacency thanks to the dwindling profits of smuggling gold. But the machinery that was well oiled through the years of smuggling in the seventies and eighties was rusting, but not fully incapable of operation. Even a very senior official of the Customs, who was bribed by the gang, let pass the deadly explosive thinking it to be routine contraband gold. Tons of RDX, as also AK 47 assault rifles, were landed at several spots along the western coast, from where they were transported into the city. And on March 12, 1993 he blew up Bombay in twelve strategically placed serial blasts that claimed 292 lives. He had done an Osama Bin Laden to Bombay in 1993, and his ambition was not only to bring down one defining monument of the city, but twelve such important landmarks of the city that had been home to him.
He placed, through his vast network of the underworld, RDX at the Bombay Stock Exchange, the Air India building, the Shiv Sena Bhavan, and other similar busy market places.

All this Dawood did, without a whiff to his Hindu lieutenants. That
single decision forever, perhaps, split the Bombay underworld along
communal lines. His Hindu gang members separated. He himself had to move into Karachi, under the protection of the Pakistani establishment.

In an act of symbolic irony, in September, precisely three months before communal riots erupted on December 6th 1992 in Bombay, the Dawood gang or D company as it was called, had accomplished its last secular killing. In his turf fight with Hindu gangland boss Arun Gawli, Dawood had ordered a kill of Gawli’s man Shailesh Haldankar, who was an undertrial. Haldankar, a Hindu, was to be bought to the JJ Hospital in Central Bombay, to be treated. He was chained to his cot, when Dawood’s men struck. In a sensational shootout, they killed Haldankar inside a municipal hospital, while he was being guarded by policemen. When the policemen returned fire, some of the gang members were injured.

The man who killed Haldankar was Subhash Singh Thakur. That was the last ritual of deputing Hindu gangsters to kill rival Hindu gangsters, and keep communalism from the business of crime.

But why all this now?

After the serial blasts case investigation began, Bhatkal was under
intense watch just like other similar beaches used by the Dawood gang to land contraband explosives and arms. Because Bhatkal had a Muslim majority, some stray incidents were reported. There were reports of arms landing there too.

The reason all this came to mind was because of a peculiar incident. Years earlier, a man walked into my newspaper office to meet me. He was a well built man who was not shy of accumulating middle-age fat. He said he knew me because of my reports, and from several officers of the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence in Bhatkal.

The introduction over, I asked him why he had come all the way from Bhatkal in Karnataka to Bombay in Maharashtra, to meet a byline. That is when he told me the real business that had brought him to Bombay.

He was an informer of the revenue intelligence agencies. He had provided information on which the DRI had recovered a huge cache of weapons as well as gold, and some other contraband, he said. Informers were always given rewards by the government, which in the case of gold, was a clear 20 per cent of the value of the seized contraband.

The man’s problem was that he was being sent from pillar to post by various officers, delaying his reward money. He was apparently caught in the internecine quarrels and ego tussles among officers. Though he was the informer on whose specific intelligence a significant seizure was
made, some new officer had replaced the earlier one at the top, and this
new officer was making it difficult for him and he wanted to know if I could help him claim his just reward.

This was several months after the riots had collapsed Bombay’s spirit. The city had started to rehabilitate itself. But, the scars and seams, and new divisions that the riots created imperceptibly were to live amidst the throbbing throng that was daytime Bombay. I asked him whether there was any trouble of similar nature in Bhatkal. He told me a very poignant
story, which I remembered when we passed through Bhatkal.

The story was that several families in the town had had connections and sympathies for extremist Islam. He said, in his own neighbourhood, a
family had stockpiled some crude bombs, what is called IED or improvised explosive devices. This particular family was pretty large, and had several children in the small house.

It seems that one of the children in the house, a small girl of six or thereabouts, was playing with one of these crude bombs, when it exploded.

I seem to remember a small detail, the girl was trying to throw the bomb, which she thought was another toy to play with, into a well. I do not know whether she was recruited by the family to dispose of the thing in a moment of panic when they heard of a possible police search mission reaching their home. All I distinctly remember is that the bomb exploded when she was near the well of the house. I am not sure if the girl was killed, or maimed.

That is the story he told me, and I seem to recollect a distinct loss in him. I could never confirm the story. Life moved on. I think I called some senior officials and told them of his reward. I do not know whether he ever got it, or if he did, whether my own good offices had anything to do with it.

Till that instance, I had not known about this place called Bhatkal. After that, I kept recollecting the informer and his story of that little girl who played with bombs. I seemed to recollect him telling me that that particular family gave up on stocking explosives after that. But that could have been a spin he engineered since he knew I was a Hindu. Perhaps he was gingerly trying to find out whether I did have any extremist Hindu sympathies, and whether I hated Muslims.

After that I saw Bhatkal pass during a few bus trips to either Mangalore or Kerala. General talk elicited the usual Hindu prejudice about Bhatkal. Like all stories in living rooms of Hindu families, there was suspicion and distrust about Muslim dominated areas. There was the usual toting up of criminal activities in Muslim alcoves, how they kept multiplying and refused to get a western education for their children.

As we entered Bhatkal, I was amused to see a doctor’s board that said “Dr S K Shetty, MBBS, Skin Specialist,” And next to the English text was presumably the same thing in Urdu, or Arabic.

It was obvious that Urdu was the other major language after Kannada in Bhatkal. I discovered the reason later. Bhatkal incidentally had a direct and ancient connection to Arabs.