Tihar Jail

Tihar Jail appears in the book as a place of confinement that is also a place of continued agency, a paradox embodied most fully in the story of Ashwin Naik. In August 1999, the police arrested Ashwin while he was trying to cross the border from Bangladesh into India, and he was sent to Tihar. The arrest came after years of his absconding, during which his wife Neeta Naik had begun to build a life and a political career of her own. Tihar, in this telling, is not the end of Ashwin's story but a new phase of it: the jail becomes the site from which, according to police records, the conspiracy to murder Neeta was hatched. The man who could no longer move freely through Mumbai nonetheless, the police alleged, directed his henchmen from inside the prison walls, acquiring photographs of his wife with her private bodyguard Laxmi Zhiman and ordering the killing that would take place on 13 November 2000. When Neeta was gunned down at the door of her Byculla home, the trail of evidence led back to Tihar, where Ashwin was already behind bars. Based on the confessions of two of the convicted men, Manoj Bhalekar and Nilratan Mukherjee, Ashwin was charged under the special MCOCA for the murder of his wife. Yet on 31 January 2009, a special MCOCA court acquitted him for lack of evidence, and the Ashwin-Neeta love story that had turned sour was finally shut for good. Tihar, in this arc, is the place where a husband's possessive violence was said to have been converted into a fatal order, and also the place where the legal case against him ultimately collapsed.

A Prison in the Geography of the Underworld

Tihar Jail is one of several institutions of detention that structure the book's landscape, appearing alongside Arthur Road Jail, Chanchalguda Jail, and Central Jail Bhopal as the places where the figures of the Mumbai underworld are held. The prison is not described in physical detail; rather, it functions as a narrative location, a fixed point in the itineraries of arrest, extradition, and imprisonment that the book traces. It is the destination of Ashwin Naik after his capture at the Bangladesh border, and it is the place from which, the police alleged, he continued to exercise control over his criminal network. The jail thus operates as a kind of negative space in the narrative: the more confined the gangster, the more his influence is said to reach outward, a dynamic that gives Tihar a menacing quality that its bare walls never need to be described to convey.

The Conspiracy and the Murder of Neeta Naik

The central event associated with Tihar in the book is the murder of Neeta Naik. After Ashwin's arrest in August 1999, Neeta told a tabloid that his homecoming was not really a celebration, saying she could not face people and could not fight anymore, though she did not regret being Ashwin Naik's wife but did regret her whole existence. The separation had already lasted years, and Neeta had begun to look for support elsewhere, allegedly finding it in her private bodyguard Laxmi Zhiman. Ashwin, always a possessive man, had earlier ordered the killing of electrical contractor Eknath Khanvilkar after he worked in the house and was supposedly intimate with Neeta. The final straw came when his henchmen acquired photographs of Zhiman and Neeta together. On 13 November 2000, Neeta arrived at her Byculla home around noon and was brutally gunned down at her door by two men identified as Manoj Bhalekar and Sunil Jadhav. She was rushed to KEM Hospital in Parel, where she succumbed to her injuries a day later. The media ascribed her liaisons as the cause of her tragic end, said to have come at the hands of her own husband, the very person she had encouraged into the world of crime. Five persons were arrested, two were acquitted, and three—Bhalekar, Nilratan Mukherjee, and Jadhav—were convicted, with Jadhav later killed in an encounter. Based on the confessions of Bhalekar and Mukherjee, Ashwin was charged under MCOCA, with police records stating the conspiracy was hatched while he was inside Tihar jail.

The Limits of the Law

Tihar Jail also marks the limits of the legal system's reach in the book. The MCOCA charge against Ashwin, built on the confessions of his alleged co-conspirators, was meant to hold him accountable for a murder committed while he was in custody. Yet on 31 January 2009, the special MCOCA court acquitted him for lack of evidence. The acquittal closes the Ashwin-Neeta story not with justice but with the failure of the state to prove its case, a pattern that recurs throughout the book's treatment of the underworld. The jail, which had seemed to offer a way to contain the gangster's power, ultimately proved unable to do so in the eyes of the law. Tihar thus stands as a symbol of the porous boundary between confinement and continued criminal agency, a boundary that the book suggests is maintained as much by the limits of evidence as by the walls of the prison.