Dubai

Dubai is the book's great offshore pivot, the place where the Mumbai underworld's money, power, and escape routes converge. It is the city to which Dawood Ibrahim relocated when he left Mumbai, the city from which Mehmood Khan makes his anxious phone calls, and the city where a mysterious businessman named Arsalan Ali draws Monica Bedi into a web of love and captivity. More than a mere setting, Dubai operates as a shadow capital of the mafia world, a jurisdiction beyond the reach of Mumbai police where gangsters bank their fortunes, plot their returns, and sometimes meet their ends. Its presence in the narrative marks the boundary between the local and the transnational, between the cramped lanes of Dongri and the open horizons of global crime.

A Refuge for the Underworld's Elite

Dubai's role as a sanctuary is established early in the book through the fate of the old gangland order. When the 1992–93 Bombay riots convulse the city, an old, fragile-looking seventy-two-year-old woman—Jenabai Daaruwali—finds herself alone in her efforts to bring peace back to Dongri. Her power centres in the underworld are fading fast: top mafia bosses Karim Lala and Mastan are old and ailing and living a retired existence, while Vardharajan Mudaliar has long since died after retreating to Chennai in 1988. Reigning ganglord Dawood has also relocated to Dubai. This single detail—Dawood's relocation—signals Dubai's status as the preferred haven for the underworld's most powerful figures, a place where they can oversee their empires from a safe distance while the city they once terrorized burns. The contrast is stark: while Jenabai locks her windows and curtains against the riots, Dawood watches from the Gulf, his power intact, his person untouchable.

The Exile's Voice: Mehmood Khan's Calls

Dubai also functions as the distant origin of commands and pleas that reach into the heart of Mumbai's criminal families. In one of the book's most intimate scenes, a woman waits anxiously for a phone call from Mehmood Khan, who has called from Dubai. Her neighbour arrives panting, as if he had come running from his house, to deliver the message: 'Mehmood bhai has called from Dubai. Come quickly, he said he will call back soon.' Hearing Mehmood's name, her restive gloom lifts. She puts on her chappals quickly and rushes out of the door towards her neighbour's house, leaving her own home unlatched. She reaches their house in less than a minute but has to wait for five minutes before the phone rings again. When it does, she picks up the receiver and is about to say something, when the line on the other end goes dead. She puts the receiver down and sits quietly in anticipation of another call. It is ten minutes later that the phone rings again. This time, she can clearly hear the person on the other end. He has a husky voice, and since it is an international call, he sounds louder than usual—it is Mehmood. The last time she had heard from him was ten days ago. The scene captures Dubai's peculiar intimacy: a city thousands of miles away, yet its voice arrives with startling clarity, carrying the weight of a man's absence and the hope of his return.

The Lure of the Gulf: Monica Bedi's Story

Dubai's magnetic pull extends beyond the underworld's inner circle to the world of Bollywood ambition. Monica Bedi, a struggling actress whose films have failed to make a mark at the box office, receives a call from a businessman in Dubai who introduces himself as Arsalan Ali. He says he is organising a show in which he wants her to perform. She agrees. A few days later, he calls again, and this time they hit it off and speak for a really long time. She realises he does not speak English fluently; while she would occasionally break into English, Arsalan does not go beyond a 'hello' or a 'thank you'. She does not have a problem with this because her Hindi isn't very good either at one point. Soon the calls become very regular, and she starts getting more than friendly with him. The strange part is that she hasn't even met him. It is through their phone calls that she realises they have a connection. She enjoys speaking to him and waits anxiously for his calls. She wakes up in the morning anticipating a call from him and goes to sleep at night thinking about the conversation they'd had during the day. Suddenly, she has begun to think less about her family and more about him. It is very strange: she hasn't even seen him and she doesn't know what he looks like either, yet she is drawn to him. Over the next few months, they become really close. It is only a matter of time before she knows she is in love with him. She never thought she'd ever fall for a man merely talking to him over the phone. Dubai here is not just a place but a voice—a disembodied presence that seduces from afar, promising success, love, and escape from a failing career.

The Trap Closes: Arsalan's Revelation

When Monica finally meets Arsalan in person, Dubai reveals its darker face. He is waiting for her at the Arrivals section at the Dubai International Airport. He looks remorseful, and she can sense a lot of tension on his face. He doesn't speak much in the car. She asks him why he had asked her to come to Dubai immediately, but he sidesteps her questions. It is only when they are at his home that he speaks to her. 'You can never go back to Mumbai,' he tells her. For a moment, she is stunned. She had left her clothes, her apartment, her car, everything behind because she thought she would be back in two weeks at the most. Now Arsalan is telling her that she wouldn't be returning to the city of her dreams. 'Why?' she asks. The scene transforms Dubai from a place of promise into a gilded cage. The city that had seemed to offer her a new life becomes the site of her captivity, a place where her Bollywood dreams die and her fate becomes entangled with the mafia. The airport, the car ride, the home—each step draws her deeper into a trap she had walked into willingly, lured by the voice on the phone.

A Gateway for Smugglers and Gangsters

Dubai's role as a hub of illicit commerce is woven throughout the book's accounts of smuggling and crime. Haji Mastan, the yesteryear don who was Mumbai's most notorious gold smuggler, started off as a mechanic, repairing cycles before moving to the Mumbai docks as a coolie in 1944. There his job was to unload huge boxes and containers from ships coming from Aden, Dubai, Hong Kong. In the years to come, he made millions of rupees from smuggling gold, silver ingots and electronic goods and, along with Karim Lala and Vardharajan Mudaliar, went on to form one of the most formidable gangs in Mumbai. His villa, his Mercedes and his tremendous influence were all off-shoots of the enormous wealth he had hoarded illegally over the years. Dubai appears here as one of the ports of origin for the goods that built the Mumbai underworld's fortunes. The city is also a node in the drug trade: Mahalaxmi Papamani, the drug baroness of Sion-Koliwada, buys five kilogrammes of heroin at anywhere between one to three lakh rupees and converts ten grams of heroin into forty pudis, selling each pudi at twenty-five rupees, making a profit of around three lakh rupees per month. While the heroin itself may not originate in Dubai, the city's position in the global drug trafficking network is implied by its recurring presence in the book's accounts of transnational crime. The lens of world-systems analysis reveals Dubai as a key node in the global capitalist economy, where illicit flows of gold, drugs, and people are integrated into the same structures of trade and finance that govern legitimate commerce.

The Extradition: Dubai's Role in Justice

The city's significance culminates in the dramatic extradition scene at Lisbon airport, where the police convoy cuts across the runway, its blaring sirens not raising even one eyebrow amidst the din. The gun-toting guards accompanying the convoy give the impression of it being a mobile fortress. The cars screech to a halt and officers of the Policia Judicia step out, escorting a thirty-six-year-old man, dressed in a black T-shirt and track pants. He has a stooping gait and seems to be smiling nervously. The Portuguese police speak to him before he is taken over to the eagerly waiting contingent of Indian officials. For a moment, deputy superintendent of police, Special Task Force, CBI Devendra Pardesi, can't believe his eyes. He has handled tough cases and tougher criminals, but this one seems a bit unreal. The man the Portuguese police is handing over just doesn't fit the bill of one of Mumbai's most dreaded gangsters—someone who had masterminded some of the most gruesome murders in the annals of Mumbai crime history. The occupant of the second car steps out: a woman whose fair skin appears pale and almost translucent in the afternoon heat. Tall and slim, she has very delicate features that are strained at the moment as she clutches a Bible like it is a lifesaver. Her long, thin legs and narrow waistline are emphasised in the figure-hugging T-shirt and jeans that she wears. This is Monica Bedi, the woman who had been lured to Dubai by Arsalan Ali, now being extradited back to India. The scene closes the circle: Dubai, which had seemed a place of refuge and promise, ultimately delivers its captives back to the justice they had fled. The city's role in the narrative is thus double-edged—it is both the underworld's sanctuary and the stage for its undoing, a place where the global and the local, the criminal and the legitimate, the glamorous and the sordid, all converge.