Chota Gulab

Chota Gulab, known as the Little Rose, is remembered as a Bombay area boss whose decision to employ a penniless young Abdel Khader Khan opened the door to Khader’s life in the criminal underworld. The episode joins an almost comic beginning—an ambitious ticket seller confronted by street thugs—to the repeated violence that marked the period before the council system.

A Local Boss in Bombay

Chota Gulab controlled the area where Khader began reselling tickets to popular Hindi films. Khader had arrived in Bombay after leaving Kandahar and travelling across Pakistan and India. He had lived in a slum, learned Hindi, and used his savings to buy tickets that he could sell at a profit once cinemas displayed House Full signs. The work quickly brought him into conflict with the local power structure: two men armed with a sword and a meat chopper took him to Chota Gulab.

The narrator underscores the reversal in Khader’s later standing by recalling that the future don was then an eighteen-year-old in the custody of two street thugs. Chota Gulab was the boss of the area, and he wanted to see the newcomer who had intruded on his ticket business before having him beaten as a warning to others. His authority rested not only on controlling a profitable black market but on the men and past losses he invoked to explain how he had secured that control.

Khader’s Recruitment

Faced with Chota Gulab, Khader admitted to being afraid but made a direct offer instead of pleading for release. He said he had no family and no other means of earning money, and offered to work for the boss as a loyal, resourceful young man. Chota Gulab laughed, asked where Khader had learned English, and gave him a job after hearing his story.

The exchange established a personal bond as well as a working arrangement. Chota Gulab became a kind of father to Khader in Bombay, and their closeness was visible from their first meeting. Chota Gulab showed Khader his gold replacement teeth, an intimate gesture that other men in his circle regarded with envy. Yet the favour also placed Khader in a contested position: some of Chota Gulab’s men resented his closeness to their boss from the outset.

A Soldier in the Pre-Council Underworld

Khader went to work as one of Chota Gulab’s soldiers, enforcing his rule with fists and weapons. The account presents those years as a time before the council system, when fighting occurred day and night. Chota Gulab’s organization offered Khader a place and a livelihood, but that place was inseparable from territorial conflict and the expectation that its members would defend the boss’s authority.

One of Chota Gulab’s men, resentful of Khader’s relationship with him, found an excuse to start a fight. Khader killed the man; when the man’s closest friend attacked him, Khader killed him too. He then killed for Chota Gulab, and continued killing. The recollection closes on Khader’s pause and the repeated acknowledgment that it happened again, leaving Chota Gulab’s appointment as the beginning of a pattern in which loyalty, rivalry, and violence became bound together.