Mobster's moll

In the popular imagination, the mobster's moll is a creature of pure fantasy: a fair-skinned, scantily-clad woman with a perfect physique, a penchant for imported liquor and cigarettes, who sways in nightclubs with the same grace with which she sashays through the hearts of men. Her gambling habits at ritzy casinos are legendary, and she plays mischief-maker on demand at the insistence of her gangster boss. This is the image that Mafia Queens of Mumbai opens its examination of the figure with, only to dismantle it. The book argues that reel life, as it does with most occupations, only serves to exaggerate the real. The gangster's girl in Mumbai's underworld is nothing like her depiction in cinema; she is, in fact, more brains than beauty, and certainly doesn't dance in clubs or sip on liquor all day. The concept of the moll, as presented in the book, is a study in contrast between public myth and private reality, between the spectacle of the body and the strategic work of the mind.

The Myth and the Reality

The book's introduction to the moll is deliberately cinematic, sketching the stereotype that Bollywood action potboilers have ingrained in the average Indian. This figure is a fantasy of glamour and danger, a woman whose value is tied entirely to her physicality and her proximity to power. Yet the narrative immediately pivots to correct this perception. The most prominent examples of molls in Mumbai's underworld, the book notes, are the tech-savvy Mrs Paul and the rotund beautician Rubina Siraj Sayyed, both of whom were wooed by Dawood Ibrahim's Man Friday, Chhota Shakeel. While Dawood's weakness is Bollywood bombshells, Shakeel's choices have been rather different—ordinary, even unattractive. Behind his choices lay a clear agenda. With most of his aides behind bars, the Karachi-based Shakeel needed women who were less prone to scrutiny to supervise the activities of his gang in Mumbai. He roped in the ambitious wives and female relatives of his most trusted aides, who took instructions from him on the phone or over the internet and carried out all tasks as spelled out to them. This reframing is crucial: the moll is not a passive ornament but an active, if hidden, coordinator.

The Making of a Moll: Monica Bedi

The most developed portrait of a moll in the book is that of Monica Bedi, whose story illustrates the personal cost of the role. Her transformation is narrated through the eyes of Devendra Pardesi, a deputy superintendent of police with the CBI's Special Task Force, who is struck by her appearance during a handover in Lisbon. He sees a tall, slim woman with delicate features, her fair skin pale and almost translucent in the afternoon heat, clutching a Bible like a lifesaver. Pardesi thinks she fits the bill of a mobster's moll perfectly, and wonders how this otherwise naive-looking woman could have gotten involved in such a mess. The book then reveals the emotional truth behind the label through Monica's own account. She had known her lover as Arsalan, a businessman from Dubai, and it was only when he revealed his true identity as Abu Salem that she learned she was in a relationship with a gangster. The revelation was devastating, but what followed was worse: Salem told her he was already married to Samira Jumani and had a child with her. 'But I only love you and want to start my life afresh with you,' he said. Monica cried, feeling that fate had turned her into nothing more than a mobster's moll. The term, in this context, is not a glamorous title but a sentence of isolation and heartbreak.

The Moll as Media Spectacle

The book traces how the moll's identity is often constructed and consumed by the media, turning private tragedy into public spectacle. After her release from jail, Monica Bedi's life became a series of performances aimed at reclaiming her narrative. She rented a modest flat at Mulund and gave interviews to garner public sympathy. Her most significant act of self-reinvention came in 2008 when she joined Bigg Boss 2, the Indian version of Big Brother. Within a few episodes, she wooed the other fourteen contestants and the audience. In one episode, she broke down, saying she needed the prize money because she was leading a hand-to-mouth existence. 'People think Monica Bedi has a lot of money. But it is not true. I need this money to buy a home. Nobody gives me a house on rent because people are scared of me. I am here to change the image that the media has created of me,' she said between sobs. Her performance won the heart of millions, including Congress MP Sanjay Nirupam, who promised her an apartment in Lokhandwala. The book presents this as a negotiation with fame, where the moll must constantly perform her redemption to an audience that is both sympathetic and predatory.

The Moll's Counterpart: The Bar Girl

The concept of the moll finds a parallel in the figure of the bar girl, as exemplified by Tarannum Khan, the pin-up girl of suburban Mumbai's Deepa Bar and Restaurant. At twenty-four, Tarannum was no less popular than any Bollywood starlet, allegedly making over Rs 1.5 to Rs 3 lakh every day and attracting a clientele that comprised the affluent and the famous. Her performance of the Bollywood track Kajra Re is described in vivid detail: a girl draped in a glittering translucent pink sari with a cleavage-revealing blouse cavorts onto the floor, drawing the attention of every single person. The book notes that there is nothing extraordinary about her—she has long black hair, pale wheatish skin, and is only as pretty as the other girls—yet no one can take their eyes off her. This scene underscores the performative nature of the women's roles, where value is created through spectacle. Tarannum's story, however, takes a darker turn when an Income Tax raid on her bungalow, Tanishq, unearthed links to an international cricket betting racket, leading to her arrest and two months in Byculla Women's Jail. Her cellmate, actress Preeti Jain, described Tarannum as traumatised and frightened, spending most of her time crying. Yet Preeti also insisted that Tarannum was no run-of-the-mill bar dancer—extremely beautiful, well-groomed, and well-spoken, and that she did not regret being a bar dancer or care about the stigma the job brought with it. This duality—of public shame and private pride—is central to the book's understanding of these women.

The Moll's World: Space and Society

The lives of these women are inseparable from the specific geography of Mumbai's underworld, a world the book maps with ethnographic precision. The mobster's moll operates in a city of stark contrasts, from the sprawling 7.5-acre Bada Qabrastan cemetery near Marine Lines, a hundred-and-fifty-year-old reminder of mortality, to the cramped lanes of Dongri, a stone's throw from the cloth market in Kalbadevi. Dongri, once part of the original island of Mumbai, is now a predominantly Muslim area dominated by rickety, old buildings. Similarly, Sonapur Lane near Reay Road station, with its thousand shanties, is a nesting ground for crime and disease, its name referring not to 'gold' but to 'death' or 'sleep' because of the Muslim graveyards in the vicinity. The Sion-Koliwada slum on Antop Hill, infamous for its illicit hooch distillery in the '80s and later a drug den under Mahalaxmi Papamani, is another such space. These are the environments that produce and shelter the molls, where a woman like Gangubai, a five-foot-tall brothel madam dressed in a white saree, can command respect from sex workers who bow as she passes. The book's urban ethnography reveals that the moll's role is not an aberration but a product of a specific social and economic order, one where women navigate between the constraints of space and the demands of powerful men.

The Moll's Voice and the Book's Project

The book itself is an act of giving voice to these women, a project that is both journalistic and literary. The praise for Mafia Queens of Mumbai highlights this dual nature: it is a book that 'peels back Mumbai's thin veneer of civilization' and is 'essential to completing the portrait of a corrupt city,' while also being a work where the author 'has managed to be both a reporter and a raconteur.' The moll, in this telling, is not a simple victim or villain but a complex figure whose story reveals the workings of power, gender, and crime in the city. The book's structure, which moves from the schemer Jenabai Daaruwali to the drug baroness Jyoti Adiramalingam to the empress of the Sion-Koliwada slum, suggests a continuum of female agency within the underworld. The moll is one point on this continuum, a figure defined by her relationship to a gangster but also by her own capacity for survival, adaptation, and even performance. Whether it is Monica Bedi pleading for a home on national television or Tarannum Khan captivating a bar full of patrons with a single dance, these women are shown to be active participants in the construction of their own images, even as those images are used against them. The concept of the mobster's moll, as the book ultimately presents it, is a lens through which to examine the intersection of crime, gender, and media in contemporary Mumbai—a lens that reveals far more than the stereotype it begins with.