Gangs of Bombay Read online

  Gangs of Bombay

  From failing a million-dollar startup to creating a criminal empire

  DIVYANSH MUNDRA

  Cover illustration copyright © 2019 by Divyansh Mundra

  Editing credits- Ashrut Arya

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either products of author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  The author is a 22-year old perennial dreamer who has been engaged in a perpetual war with words for a better part of his life. Like every 22-year old living in the 21st century, his journey began with a borrowed laptop, a slow internet connection, and a pretty boring life carefully studded with gems of existential crises on Monday mornings.

  He started out by writing on the world’s biggest Q&A website called Quora; where other equally bored 22-year olds found a connection with his writings, leading him to amass the trust of over 46000 followers and more than 14-million viewers.

  The author is a self-proclaimed specialist at writing fictional crossovers (a genre he proclaims to have invented), where he narrates what would happen if a beloved fictional character from one universe was to meet someone from another. Many of his fictional-crossovers, most of them featuring Sherlock Holmes, have gone viral online, garnering him immense praise and extensive hate equally; which is a perfect balance to maintain for any work on the internet.

  When empty inboxes greeted him in response to his proposals to the publishers and literary agents, he decided to self-publish his debut novel on the internet at the age of 21, which became a Bestseller and spent time in Amazon India’s ‘Top 10 Selling’ and ‘Hot & New Releases’ lists. Frustrated with delays in the release of its paperbacks, the author decided to publish another novel on a whim, which is currently resting in your hands.

  The author spends his time experimenting with various writing styles when not running a fiction blog which has pulled readers from over fifty countries. He can be found writing Sherlock Holmes short-stories, fan-fiction, Honest Trailer reviews, first-person observational comedy pieces, and fantastic battle scenes when he gets time from binge-watching TV series. He is a cinephile, loves photography, likes to discuss world news and fashion trends with equal interest, and admires retiring to his solitude with an old dusty book of fiction and a cup of black coffee… with two sugars.

  Social Media presence:

  Instagram: @divyansh_mundra

  Facebook Page: Divyansh Mundra- Author

  Twitter: @iSherlockd

  To the torrential rains on a Sunday afternoon which disrupted the internet connectivity; leaving me with another bout of existential crises, and a bored mind which eventually thought of writing that story about those gangs from that place.

  Also to that online troll, who said treasure hunts are for kids and that I should try to write some real fiction…

  Thanks man!

  Contents

  Prologue: Raging a Nightclub Down

  Chapter 1: The Holy Grail

  Chapter 2: The Gangs of Bombay

  Chapter 3: An Aggressive Expansion

  Chapter 4: Becoming a God

  Chapter 5: A Brush with the Dark World

  Chapter 6: The Jobs That We Love to Do

  Chapter 7: The Court, The Bench, and The Gangs

  Chapter 8: Building an Empire

  Chapter 9: Wonderfuble

  Chapter 10: Massacre on Marine Drive

  Chapter 11: The Mad Monster

  Chapter 12: Surgical Strike

  Chapter 13: Demons

  Chapter 14: The Battle of Bombay

  Epilogue: All, But One

  “Lions don’t concern themselves with bits and pieces, they wait to seize an empire.”

  ~ Artavardiya, Ch. 8: Building an Empire

  Prologue

  Raging a Nightclub Down

  Hi.

  I’m someone. Someone whom you used to know; someone whom you used to idolise; someone whom you’ve easily forgotten since, and someone who will make sure that you pay for it. Look closely at my perfectly symmetrical face, stare hard into my deep dark brown eyes, admire my chiseled jaw and the visible blush on my cheekbones. Look at me and form your opinions. A charming young man for whom sky is the limit? An average Indian boy with a penchant to do something big? A man who’ll change the world and make it a better place?

  I’m someone whom your son will hate, I’m someone whom your daughter will love, and I’m someone who’ll spoil their lives if they are into drugs.

  So here comes the health advisory because once we get to the story, there will be no coming back.

  Don’t do drugs. It’s bad.

  I have been called a genius for as long as I could remember. Acing the exams, getting highest ranks in national competitions, graduating from IIT, I did it all. Even got a chance to meet the President of India when I was fourteen. I could speak in three foreign languages, win professional gaming competitions, and even came close to beating the national record for speed-cubing. I was a skilled cricket player, good at scriptwriting, and a national level shooting champion. Oh and by the time I was twenty-one, I had founded a million-dollar startup already. I started developing an algorithm to help me understand the stock markets as a side project back in college. But it grew on to predict stocks that could guarantee over twenty-five percent returns within a quarter.

  I tried, it worked. My friends tried, it worked. My seniors tried, and it worked again. We started making money and word about our little project got out. Soon, me and my little team were being offered tens of thousands of rupees and venture capitalists started lining up. After the first round of funding, we were backed by the biggest VC firm of South Asia and our company ‘Titanic’ was valued at twenty-seven million dollars. Word about us spread faster than a wildfire. When someone says that a bunch of college students have created an algorithm that could guarantee money-making stocks and make you rich really quick, you’d be surprised to know the number of people who were willing to let us handle their money.

  No way, we were young and rich, and by the time hedge funds from Wall Street started enquiring about us, we knew that Titanic would be the next big thing.

  Quite an odd name I must say, but I’m sure that less brains and more alcohol was involved when we named our company. Titanic— the ill-fated ship that sank on its maiden voyage. So it was only a matter of time that our Titanic sank too. Within a couple of months, red color started flashing on our portfolios more often than we would have liked. The predictions started going wrong and the losses of our investors started increasing. They say that it only takes one moment to bring down everything that you’ve built, and that moment for us came when ‘Tech Mojo Magazine’, considered the Bible of startup and technology mags in India came up with the article titled ‘False Titans: Is Titanic’s stock prediction algorithm the biggest con of the decade’?

  I always laughed at the saying ‘pen is mightier than the sword’. Apparently writers never fought in battles. But all it took for our investors to pull the plug on one of the most innovative startups of the time was one clickbait article. No one would trust a couple of twenty year olds with millions of dollars anymore.

  I was shattered, I was under debt, and boy did I cry. But what really killed me was not the fact that my efforts were in vain. I knew that the error rates that my algorithm was throwing up was only increasing, and it was about ti
me that something like that happened. But what killed me, was the fact that I was so close to achieving my dreams and building my empire, yet got pulled away so far.

  Pen is mightier than the sword? Right. But guess what, a bullet is mightier than them all.

  So there I was, a twenty-four-year-old young blood, standing outside one of the most happening nightclubs of Mumbai with my subtly dressed friends, who were ready to barge in and kill on the floor. Just like any twenty-four-year-old right? Wrong. I had turned twenty-four? True. I was standing outside one of the most happening nightclubs of Mumbai? True. With my friends? Yes. But my friends weren’t your ordinary folks. They weren’t kids with rich fathers for whom life was a party, nor were they your best buddies with whom you could enjoy a casual binge drinking session. They were criminals, just like yours truly, and instead of dressing well, they just picked out coats which could hide the semi-automatic guns that they were carrying inside. They had anger in their eyes, thirst for blood visible on their faces, and an unbearable hunger to end their prey— just the way I liked them to be. So when I say that they were ready to barge in and kill on the floor, they were literally ready to barge in, and kill on the floor.

  Yes, as you’d have guessed by now, I’m not your ordinary hero. And this isn’t your ordinary tale. I’m a bird that can’t be caged and I’m a force which cannot be contained. They laughed at me for my shyness when I was young, so I became the best debater of my school. They teased me for my looks when I was growing up, so I became someone girls can fall head over heels for.

  And they took away my million-dollar startup when I grew up, so I created one of the richest criminal empire in the history of modern India.

  And this, is my story.

  I took in a deep breath and prayed to the gods to let me out alive once the show was over, for I could foretell the spillage of blood that would soak the floor red inside the nightclub once my bullets met my foes. I was about to enter the enemy territory with my boys and we were going to set the place on fire. To understand our rivalry, you just need to understand that there are gangs— five to be exact, who run the dark show of crime in Mumbai. Bad blood, past tussles, and immorality reeks the people who run this racket. And these guys aren’t your slumdog millionaires. They live in mansions, have vacation homes, party with the stars and some even hold influence over the government. Needless to say, someone somewhere down the line cuts into the profits of someone else, and when the city sleeps, their men go on a silent war to spill the most blood and satisfy the egos of their horrible bosses.

  But I was different. Maybe because I fought alongside my men; maybe because I had just turned twenty-four and was only about a year in the drug trade, or maybe because my gang wasn’t big enough. But that doesn’t mean that there never is a scope for aggressive expansion. Use your brains and hit them when they are at their weakest, and you can make the worst of the crime lords fall. I wasn’t going to topple an empire in a single night, but I was going to start, even if it meant starting small.

  I didn’t pay much attention to what dress I had picked up for the night. I wore white sneakers to go with the black jeans, a gray t-shirt, and a dark cardigan with a hood to partially cover my head. We walked in slowly. It was already three in the night, and we could feel the sound vibrations below our feet. The music inside was loud, it had to be; for it was the New Year’s Eve, one of the biggest nights for a club. It was jam packed and that meant that it was good for the drug business. Children of the rich at fancy nightclubs are the cash cows in our industry, and my rival would definitely be busy to exploit it to the fullest.

  I was counting on that.

  The eight bouncers looked at me and my men and opened the doors for the thirteen of us. Throw money at them and they’ll gladly let you in the very fortress they were supposed to guard. Add a few zeroes to the sum and they’d not even let the police in. We passed a narrow hallway to arrive at the arena where the magic happened. Blinding lights numbed your senses and the thundering music gave you a high of a different kind. And there I looked at the people my age— throwing away their dad’s money on drugs, having a good time with the love of their lives, thinking that they only live once so why waste time and enjoy life to the fullest instead.

  Tell you what, I was about to ensure that they realise the worth of their lives after seeing their favourite dealers get shot dead.

  I lifted my hand and signalled half of my men to take the stairs to the right and light up the floor above, while I took the ramp to my left with the remaining men and headed towards the dealer’s room. Within seconds I found myself looking in the eyes of Wasim— a fat short-tempered dealer who worked for Abrash Ali Khan, the man I was looking for, and was himself infamous for attempting to assassinate a local politician. I had never met him personally but had heard about his theatrics and his love for non-Indian women. Anyway, if he would give me his boss, who was I to judge his preferences?

  As I approached him, the music almost matched my footsteps, and as soon as the beats dropped, I put two bullets into him— one in the shoulder and the other one in his big fat belly. He fell on the pillar behind him, unable to comprehend what had happened. His men on the other hand turned behind and started retaliating. I shot at two more, killing one and injuring the other, while my friends took down five others as everyone started their fires.

  The music rocking the nightclub was loud, but not loud enough to shroud the magnificent sound of gunfire. All the rich kids stopped dancing and looked towards the source of the noise. The darkness on the ramp built around the central arena didn’t allow them much to see, but when people start firing bullets at each other— things break, skulls shatter, and people tend to die. By the time warm blood starts spraying across your faces or when random bodies start falling down on the brightly lit dance floor, no drug or drink can save you from experiencing the primordial emotion that is hard wired in the human brains— fear.

  I took cover behind a pillar as our rivals came out and started firing on us. I looked at the man standing next to me and signalled him to go out first as I bent low to avoid the rubble blasting off the pillar walls as a result of retaliatory fire. He launched himself out from behind the pillar and bravely opened his assault, while also drawing attention from all the other guys who were standing ahead. They all took their shots on him, killing the poor sod instantly, but left the window open for me. Slinging automatic guns in both my hands, I came out from behind the pillar and took my shots. One, two, three… and the three of them went down. I did not stop and rushed ahead along with the five men trailing behind me towards a dying Wasim and held him by his neck.

  “Where’s Abrash? Where’s he hiding?” I yelled at him. But he was unable to respond, the blood oozing out from his mouth made it impossible for him to speak. He was shivering with pain, trying hard to breathe, and pleading before his death to let him live. But I wasn’t in the business of saving lives. I placed the barrel of my gun in the middle of his head and pulled the trigger, spraying the wall behind red and adorning it with Wasim’s blood and brains.

  I got up gradually and looked around as I reloaded my guns, while glancing at the seven of my men who were busy wreaking havoc on the floor above. They were loud, they were barbaric, they were borderline animals. The dealers present there didn’t encounter any less of a force as was evident from the number of them jumping down, preferring to break their legs, to evade their deaths for some more time and realise that their life was done.

  My men marched ahead, shooting down three or four on the ramps casually before coming outside the door of the dealer’s room. The dealer’s room is where the stash is kept, it is where the money flows, and it is where the real party is. If I had to find Abrash, he had to be in there.

  One of my men kicked the metal door open and was met by a bullet to his face. My enemies were prepared for the war it seemed. But the rest of us jumped in and started firing at any shadow that moved. The room was a large hexagon and filled with smoke, only the wicked red l
ights lightening the space and reflecting off the dull ochre colored pads mounted on the walls. But clear vision or low visibility, nothing would stop my kill machines. I took to the right as we all spread out after entering the room— one, two, four, six… I kept firing at my targets whom I could barely see through the thick cloud of smoke. I believe I shot five men down before something hard hit the side of my head.

  I turned around to see a rather burly man taking his swings at me like a professional boxer. He twisted my wrists in no time, unarmed me, and started cracking his punches on my face right and left. He was powerful, the force of his blows magnificent, and he definitely knew what he was doing. I tried hard to fend him off and grab one of my guns which had fallen down, but he was someone whom I couldn’t have defeated with brute force. He slammed my head on the bar counter inside and rammed his fists on my chest, probably even breaking a rib. But I was helpless and the lack of visibility in that chamber of red smoke only made it harder for me to comprehend what was happening. He left me for a second as he looked for my gun on the floor, and that was all the window that I needed. I grabbed a tequila bottle which was placed on the counter and shattered it gloriously on his plump face, soaking him in the heavenly poison, the glass from the bottle cutting him. And I didn’t waste any more time as I grabbed a lighter, lit it, and propelled it on his face.

  He torched up faster than a firecracker, and the tequila spread all over him burned fiercely. The burly giant met his primordial emotion too. He ran around blindly while yelling at the top of his voice, his burning face piercing through the red smoke spread in the room. He soon collided with a wall, before falling to the ground and squealing in pain. I took in a deep breath as I wiped off the little blood bleeding from my lips, as I looked around and picked up one of my guns, emptying it entirely on the fallen burning man in epic frustration. In the meantime, my boys had brought down the rest in the room and were all covered in the enemy’s blood.