Preeti Jain

Preeti Jain enters Mafia Queens of Mumbai not as a gangster or a queen of the underworld but as a conduit between the jail cell and the page. A Bollywood starlet who had stirred a hornet's nest by alleging that director Madhur Bhandarkar had raped her, she was herself serving time at Byculla Women's Jail, charged with hiring gangster Arun Gawli's hitman to kill the director. It was there that she spent around thirteen days in the same cell as the bar dancer Tarannum Khan, who had been arrested for her links to an international cricket betting racket. That fortnight of shared confinement made Preeti the book's most intimate witness to Tarannum's ordeal, and the authors acknowledge her directly: their special thanks go to the starlet who willingly opened up to them on Tarannum for the chapter 'Bewitching Beauties'. Her testimony, given freely to the authors, is the raw material out of which one of the book's most human portraits is built.

Cellmate and Confidante

The Preeti who emerges from the book's account is defined by her capacity for empathy inside a space designed to strip it away. Reminiscing about her days with the bar girl, Preeti told the authors that Tarannum had spent most of her time in jail crying. According to Preeti, Tarannum was initially traumatised and frightened at the thought of being locked behind bars and would break down often. 'As a human being, I could relate to her pain. I became a shoulder for her to cry on,' Preeti said. The phrase is striking: a woman accused of conspiring to murder a film director casting herself as a shoulder for a woman accused of cricket betting. Preeti's account insists that the bond was real and mutual. Later, the duo bonded really well and became comfortable in each other's company. As Preeti said, 'During those few days I spent with her, we played board games, ate food and also watched television together.' The domesticity of the detail—board games, shared meals, television—cuts against the grimness of the setting, and it is Preeti who supplies it.

Defender of Tarannum's Reputation

Preeti's testimony does more than record the texture of jailhouse life; it actively reframes how Tarannum should be seen. The starlet maintained that Tarannum was no run-of-the-mill bar dancer. She claimed that Tarannum was extremely beautiful and not only well-groomed but well-spoken. 'People have this preconceived notion about bar girls being crass. Tarannum was anything but that. The best part is that she did not regret being a bar dancer or care about the stigma that the job brought with it.' This is a pointed intervention. The book's own portrait of Tarannum at the Deepa Bar and Restaurant—a pin-up girl in a glittering translucent pink sari who captivated crowds with her dance to Kajra Re—could easily feed the stereotype Preeti is pushing against. Her insistence that Tarannum was dignified, articulate, and unashamed of her work gives the reader a counterweight, a jailhouse defense of a woman whose public image had been reduced to scandal.

From Jailhouse to Screen

The friendship did not end with the cell door. Months after her release, Preeti signed a lead role in the low-budget film titled Deepa ki Tarannum, a movie on a bar dancer, which in Preeti's words was inspired by 'her friend in jail'. The film's title fuses the bar where Tarannum danced—Deepa Bar and Restaurant—with Tarannum's own name, collapsing the dancer's two identities into one screen persona. That Preeti, herself a figure of scandal, would play a bar dancer inspired by her cellmate is a strange loop: the woman accused of plotting a murder playing the woman accused of betting on cricket, both of them transformed into entertainment. The book records this without commentary, but the irony is structural. Preeti's trajectory—from accused conspirator to jailhouse confidante to actress playing her friend's story—mirrors the book's own method of turning the women of the Mumbai underworld into narrative.

A Source and a Subject

Preeti's role in the book is double. She is at once a source, whose testimony the authors rely on for the Tarannum chapter, and a subject, a starlet whose own scandalous history gives her credibility as a witness to suffering. The authors' acknowledgements make this explicit, thanking her for willingly opening up on Tarannum. But the book also lets her speak in her own voice, and what she says is consistently generous toward her cellmate. Her claim that she could relate to Tarannum's pain suggests a recognition of shared vulnerability: both women were public figures brought low by accusations, both were locked in the same jail, both were fighting to control their own stories. In a book full of queens, killers, and kingmakers, Preeti Jain is the one who listens, the one who turns a cell into a confessional, and the one who carries her friend's story out into the world.