Anti-Narcotics Cell

The Anti-Narcotics Cell (ANC) of the Mumbai Police stands as the city's principal institutional adversary to the vast and lucrative drug trade that flourishes in its slums and underworld. Within the narrative, the ANC is not merely a background law-enforcement agency but a recurring, formidable presence whose investigations, arrests, and occasional failures directly shape the trajectories of several of the book's most powerful female criminals. Its dossiers and lock-ups serve as the official record against which the women's illicit empires are measured, and its pursuit of them reveals a persistent, often frustrating, cat-and-mouse dynamic at the heart of Mumbai's criminal justice system.

Mandate and Institutional Context

The ANC operates as a specialized unit within the Mumbai Police, its jurisdiction and purpose defined by the fight against narcotics. Its intelligence-gathering role is made explicit in the book's account of Jyoti Adiramalingam, the reigning godmother of Sonapur Lane, who is identified in the dossiers of both the Narcotics Control Bureau and the ANC as one of the many small yet dominant cogs in the Rs 1,000-crore drug trafficking industry in Mumbai. The ANC's reach extends to the physical spaces of law enforcement, as seen in its lock-up located inside the Esplanade Court compound, a bustling area that also houses the Azad Maidan police station. This lock-up, which faces the outside world and allows passersby to look in, becomes a stage where the power dynamics between the state and the accused are visibly played out. The unit's work is part of a broader legal framework that evolved over time; the stringent MCOCA law, promulgated by the Maharashtra government in 1998 after the abrogation of TADA, was formulated precisely because the state lacked a firm law with which to fight organized crime, a gap the ANC and other agencies had long struggled against.

The Pursuit of Mahalaxmi Papamani

The ANC's most sustained and dramatic engagement in the book is with Mahalaxmi Papamani, the illiterate slum-dweller who rose to become one of Mumbai's most feared drug baronesses. The unit's first major confrontation with her came in 1991, when Papamani split from her mentor Savitri to run her own heroin business. Her strategy was simple and devastatingly effective: she would buy five kilogrammes of heroin for between one and three lakh rupees, convert ten grams into forty pudis, and sell each pudi at twenty-five rupees, netting a profit of around three lakh rupees per month. The police tried to arrest her on several occasions, but she always managed to escape conviction for want of evidence, a pattern that frustrated the ANC's efforts. The unit's frustration culminated in 1993, when the ANC arrested her once again, this time confident about throwing her in jail for a very long time. Papamani, knowing she was in serious trouble, urgently roped in the narco-specialist lawyer Ayaz Khan, who successfully spotted loopholes in the ANC's case and secured her release on bail. This defeat highlighted the ANC's vulnerability to the legal expertise that wealthy criminals could command, a weakness that the women of the underworld learned to exploit.

The Limits of Enforcement

The ANC's struggles against Papamani were compounded by the extraordinary measures the slum-dwellers of Sion-Koliwada took to shield her. Escape routes were charted within the slum, which is built on the slope of a hill with shanties attached to each other and a narrow, maze-like path leading to them. To help her escape, the slum-dwellers created several routes, hideouts, and underground passageways within the connected hutments, routes that eventually led outside the slum. Every time the police came to arrest Papamani, people in the slum would be warned and she would be sent out through one of these routes. Matters became even more complicated when Papamani came up with a novel idea to escape arrests: several times, the police would be confronted with an impenetrable wall of eunuchs, who formed a human barricade for the entire stretch of the slum. These eunuchs were much stronger and more abusive than the locals, and the cops usually avoided any confrontation with them. The ANC, despite its mandate and resources, found itself repeatedly outmaneuvered by a combination of community solidarity, clever legal defense, and the sheer physical geography of the slum.

The Encounter Killing of Mehmood Khan

The ANC's name is also indelibly linked to one of the most controversial episodes in the book: the fake encounter killing of the gangster Mehmood Khan at Santa Cruz airport. The event unfolds from the perspective of his wife, Ashraf Khan, who, after hearing faint gunshots from the parking lot, ran towards a group of policemen and saw a pool of blood near a parked taxi. She overheard one of the policemen say that the man who had been shot had been taken to Cooper Hospital, but when she reached the hospital, both the reception and the staff were unaware of any patient admitted with gunshot wounds. After being directed from station to station, she finally learned at J.J. Hospital that a man named Mehmood Khan, a wanted gangster, had been shot dead in an encounter at Santa Cruz airport. Ashraf knew this was a lie, reasoning that Mehmood would not have been able to carry a gun past airport security. The incident, though not explicitly attributed to the ANC in the text, is part of the broader pattern of police encounters that the book critiques, and it underscores the lethal consequences that could accompany the state's war on drugs and crime.

A Broader Pattern of Enforcement

The ANC's methods and challenges are part of a larger history of law enforcement in Mumbai that the book traces. The institutional approach to controlling vice and crime has deep roots, as seen in the introduction of prohibition in the city on 1 August 1939, which created an exclusive police cadre called the X Division headed by a DCP, Prohibition. The diversion of this force for security measures during the Second World War in 1939 weakened its implementation, a pattern of shifting priorities that would recur. The book also shows how the police's reach extended into other forms of illicit activity, such as the raids on Jenabai Daaruwali's room at Chunawala building for her illegal grain trading, raids that never managed to gather enough evidence to book her. This recurring theme of the police's inability to secure convictions against resourceful criminals, whether they are dealing in smuggled grain or heroin, defines the ANC's role in the narrative as a powerful but often thwarted institution, one whose authority is constantly tested by the ingenuity and resilience of the women it pursues.

Significance in the Narrative

In the broader tapestry of the book, the Anti-Narcotics Cell serves as the institutional counterweight to the female criminal empires it documents. Its presence legitimizes the women's status as major players in the Mumbai underworld, while its repeated failures humanize them and highlight the systemic challenges of enforcing drug laws in a city where poverty, community loyalty, and legal loopholes converge. The ANC is thus not just a police unit but a narrative device that illuminates the complex, often adversarial relationship between the state and the marginalized women who turn to crime as a means of survival and empowerment. Its story is one of persistent pursuit and frequent defeat, a testament to the formidable obstacles that law enforcement faces in the sprawling, chaotic, and deeply stratified landscape of Mumbai.