KEM Hospital, the King Edward Memorial Hospital in Parel, is one of Mumbai's oldest and most prominent public hospitals. In the world chronicled in this book, it serves less as a place of healing than as a site where the consequences of the city's criminal violence arrive, often fatally. Its most significant appearance comes with the murder of Neeta Naik, the wife of the gangster Ashwin Naik, who was rushed there after being shot and who succumbed to her injuries a day later. The hospital thus stands as a somber landmark in the geography of the Mumbai underworld, a place where the personal tragedies spawned by gang warfare and domestic violence reach their grim conclusion.

The Murder of Neeta Naik

On 13 November 2000, Neeta Naik arrived at her Byculla home around noon. As she reached her door and was unlocking it, two men, identified as Manoj Bhalekar and Sunil Jadhav, brutally gunned her down. Neeta was rushed to KEM Hospital in Parel, where she succumbed to her injuries a day later. The following day, the media was filled with stories of her murder, with her liaisons with other men ascribed as the cause for her tragic end. This end was said to have come at the hands of her own husband, the very person she had encouraged into the world of crime. After her murder, five persons were arrested, but two of them were later acquitted. Three others—Bhalekar, Nilratan Mukherjee, and Jadhav—were convicted. Jadhav was later killed in an encounter. Based on the confessions of Bhalekar and Mukherjee, Ashwin, who was already behind bars, was charged under the special MCOCA for the murder of his wife. According to police records, the conspiracy was hatched by the gangster while inside Tihar jail. On 31 January 2009, a special MCOCA court acquitted Ashwin of his wife's murder for lack of evidence, and the Ashwin-Neeta love story that had turned sour was finally shut for good.

A Place of Death in the City's Geography

KEM Hospital's role in the book is not isolated. It is part of a network of institutions and locations that define the city's underbelly, where life and death are precarious. The hospital is a place where the wounded are brought, but in the narratives of the women who populate this book, it is rarely a place of recovery. It is a place where the finality of violence is confirmed. The hospital's presence in the story of Neeta Naik echoes other moments of death and suffering across Mumbai, from the murder of Sapna in Hujjrah Mohalla, who was stabbed over twenty-two times and brought to a hospital dead, to the fake encounter killing of Mehmood Khan, whose wife Ashraf was sent from hospital to hospital before finally being directed to J.J. Hospital, where she identified his body in the morgue. These institutions, meant to preserve life, become the stages where the state's and the underworld's power over life and death is made visible.

The Broader Context of Violence and Loss

The violence that brings Neeta to KEM Hospital is part of a larger pattern of brutality against women in the book. Madhu, a sixteen-year-old girl sold into a brothel, is raped repeatedly by Jaggan seth, and her suffering is so great that she begins to think of death. Sapna is tortured and killed by Dawood and Shakeel's men, her body riddled with wounds. These stories, like Neeta's, are testimonies of trauma, where the women are subjected to extreme violence, often at the hands of men who are supposed to protect them or who are acting on the orders of powerful gangsters. KEM Hospital, as the place where Neeta dies, becomes a symbol of this pervasive violence, a place where the consequences of the city's criminal and patriarchal structures are made tragically concrete.

A Landmark of the Underworld's Human Cost

In the book's urban ethnography, KEM Hospital is a fixed point in a city of shifting allegiances and violent power struggles. It is a place where the human cost of the Mumbai underworld is paid, a place where the stories of the women who are caught in its web often end. The hospital's significance lies not in its medical function but in its role as a repository of the dead and the dying, a silent witness to the tragedies that unfold in the city's lanes and bylanes. For Neeta Naik, it was the final stop in a life that had been shaped by crime, a life that ended not in the dramatic shootout of a gang war but in the quiet, brutal act of being gunned down at her own doorstep. KEM Hospital, in this context, is not just a building but a marker of the underworld's reach, a place where the personal and the criminal intersect in the most final way possible.