Narcotics Control Bureau

The Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) is the Indian federal agency charged with combating drug trafficking, and in this chronicle of Mumbai's underworld it emerges as the principal institutional adversary of the women who built drug empires in the city's slums. The bureau's official dossiers serve as a key evidentiary source for the book's account of the narcotics trade, identifying individual traffickers and quantifying the scale of their operations. According to the dossiers of the NCB and the Anti-Narcotics Cell, Jyoti Adiramalingam, the reigning godmother of Sonapur Lane, is one of the many small yet dominant cogs in the humongous machine of the Rs 1,000-crore drug trafficking industry in Mumbai, and the forty-six-year-old is considered one of the most feared drug baronesses. The NCB's investigations and arrests thus provide the documentary spine for several of the thirteen women's stories, grounding the narrative in official records even as the book seeks to understand the complex minds and psyches of women criminals without glorifying them.