Rubina Siraj Sayyed

Rubina Siraj Sayyed's story is one of the most striking transformations in the annals of Mumbai's underworld: a celebrated beautician from the Dongri area of south Mumbai who became a powerful, feared aide to don Chhota Shakeel, only to end up convicted under the stringent Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA). A city tabloid first exposed her as 'Chhota Shakeel ki moti girlfriend' (Chhota Shakeel's fat girlfriend), a label that would define her public image. Yet her trajectory was far more complex than that dismissive epithet suggests, tracing an ambitious woman's determined, and ultimately doomed, attempt to propel herself into the world of politics via the launch pad of the underworld.

From Beautician to Underworld Aide

A couple of years before her arrest, Rubina worked as a much-in-demand beautician in south Mumbai's Dongri area, called for several social events and weddings for her expensive beauty treatments. Her annual income was high, far more than that of her civil contractor husband, Siraj Sayyed, but she was not satisfied. This mother of two had bigger dreams: she wanted to join politics and become a municipal corporator. It was this drive that later drew her to the underworld. An impressed Shakeel asked her to join his gang, an offer which was simply too lucrative for her to refuse. She assumed that her role in the underworld would boost her chances of contesting the municipal elections and becoming a municipal corporator. Hence, she started working for the gang almost immediately, carrying out all the tasks she was given. She took instructions from Shakeel aide Fahim Mach-Mach, coordinated with lawyers, handled the financial affairs of all the gang members between south Mumbai and Jogeshwari, and looked after all the needs of Shakeel's gangsters in jail. In only a few months, Rubina's lifestyle changed tremendously. Now more affluent than she had ever been, she moved from riding a two-wheeler to driving a car; and from being a beautician, she was now the notorious, powerful 'heroine' of an underworld gang.

The 'Pathan' and the 'Heroine'

The sobriquet 'Pathan' was not a reference to ethnicity but a description of her physical presence. She was not the tall, burly man one might have expected from the name, but a huge, uncouth, brusque woman in her late thirties. She had earned this sobriquet by virtue of being oversized and stocky. Intriguingly, despite her appearance, she was also addressed as 'heroine' by her fellow jail mates. This duality—the intimidating 'Pathan' and the celebrated 'heroine'—captured the contradictory space she occupied in the underworld's social hierarchy. Her fluency in English and tech-savvy nature allowed her to evade the police's electronic surveillance time and again, making her an unusually effective operative in an era of increasing state monitoring.

Arrest and Conviction Under MCOCA

The Crime Branch only discovered her activities a year after she began working for the gang, after one of Shakeel's men, Uday Pawar alias Pankaj, got in touch with her. For a couple of years, Pankaj had been demanding Rs 50 lakh from a film distributor and issuing threats to him. When the distributor agreed to pay Rs 10 lakh, Pankaj called Rubina to report this to her. The police happened to be listening in on this conversation. They soon began tracking Rubina's movements and calls, and in the process, recorded twenty-six conversations made to Fahim Mach-Mach and Shakeel. After watching her movements closely for over four months, the Crime Branch finally arrested her in 2004. First picked up by the Mumbai police in 2004, Rubina was convicted exactly two years later under the MCOCA for conspiracy charges. According to the police, at the last count, she was looking after twenty-five families of men affiliated to the Shakeel gang and would distribute Rs 1.5 lakh among them every month, apart from making payments for legal expenses. The special MCOCA court convicted her for charges under MCOCA and 120 (b) (Conspiracy) of the IPC and sentenced her to five years of rigorous imprisonment on 23 March 2006. Her case was fought by advocate Shahid Azmi, who years later, in February 2010, fell victim to a former shooter of the Chhota Rajan gang.

Life in Byculla Women's Jail

Rubina's conceit and arrogance only seemed to increase during her years in jail. The jail authorities were regularly inundated with complaints from prison inmates against Rubina for assaulting them. Among the most prominent of these cases was when Rubina, along with her cellmate and Gateway blast-accused Fahmida Sayyed, had attacked a diminutive Zahira Sheikh, who was serving out her perjury sentence in the Gujarat Best Bakery case. Following this, jail authorities punished Rubina by barring her from buying jail canteen coupons, which otherwise provided inmates access to luxury goods, such as soaps, biscuits, toothpaste and dry fruit. In one confrontation in the jail's pantry area, after a heated exchange with a jailer, the Pathan, annoyed at how the jailer had dismissed her complaint, stormed out, hurling abuse and threatening the jailer with a court notice. The jailer, accustomed to such brashness, walked away to clean herself up, a small but telling image of the disruption Rubina brought even to the institutional order of the prison.

Narrative Role and Significance

Rubina's story, as told in Mafia Queens of Mumbai, serves as a potent illustration of the book's central thesis: that the underworld was not merely a male domain but a space where ambitious women could carve out power, however precarious and ultimately self-destructive. Her trajectory from a respectable, high-earning beautician to a convicted gang operative inverts the conventional narrative of women as passive victims of crime. Instead, Rubina emerges as a calculating agent who saw the underworld as a means to a political end. Her failure—the arrest, the conviction, the years of rigorous imprisonment—underscores the brutal cost of that ambition. The 'heroine' of the gang became a convict, her story a cautionary tale about the seductive but fatal allure of underworld power, and a reminder that the launch pad of crime could just as easily become a prison cell.