Mumbai Police

Mumbai Police are presented as an institution whose authority can decide who is pursued, arrested, or killed, but whose actions do not command uncontested public consent. The force becomes central to the story when Abdullah Taheri is identified as Sapna and placed on a shoot-on-sight list: a mistaken identification, reported through others, sets in motion a fatal confrontation and a struggle over his body.

Orders, suspicion, and Abdullah

The threat to Abdullah reaches Lin through a crime reporter at The Times, whose information is relayed by Karla. The police orders, as she describes them, are to take Abdullah alive if possible but to accept no risk: if he hesitates, officers are to shoot. Authorities believe he is armed and will resist arrest. Their confidence rests on a tip they consider supported by solid evidence, and they identify him as Sapna, the figure associated with a series of killings. The warning makes the danger immediate; the police intend to find him that day, and Karla has been searching for Lin because she knows Abdullah is his close friend.

This account establishes the force’s operational logic as the characters understand it: a suspect classified as armed and dangerous is approached under an order that sharply limits the possibility of surrender. Yet the identification is wrong. The distance between the police’s certainty and the reader’s knowledge gives the mistaken classification its weight. The order does not merely describe a risk; it helps create the conditions in which a fatal encounter becomes likely.

The Crawford Market encounter

The details of Abdullah’s death come to Lin through Didier Levy, who says police officers recounted the incident to Mehmet, an owner of the establishment where they were speaking. Some officers from Colaba Police Station, across the road from the gathering place, were reportedly among those involved in the ambush. According to this secondhand account, police surrounded Abdullah in a small street near Crawford Market and called on him to surrender. He stood still; then he drew two guns from his jacket and fired. The officers returned fire, and Abdullah was killed.

The narration marks the limits of what can be known: Lin hears the story from Didier, who is repeating what the police allegedly told Mehmet. The officers’ emphasis on Abdullah’s long hair and black clothing, as Didier recounts it, lingers in the telling, but it does not explain the error that placed Abdullah in Sapna’s role. Nor does the reported account resolve whether a different outcome was possible once the police had surrounded him under shoot-on-sight instructions. For Lin, uncertainty offers only a desperate hope that Abdullah may still be alive, compelling him to go to the station himself.

The body and public resistance

After the shooting, police try to take Abdullah’s body to hospital in a van. A large crowd objects, attacks the vehicle, and forces it off the road. The police then take the body to Crawford Market police station, with the crowd following and shouting abuse. The episode shifts the focus from the armed encounter to control over what happens afterward: the police can move the body to a station, but they cannot quietly remove it from public view or prevent people from gathering around it.

The crowd’s intervention is not evidence that it can undo the killing or determine the official account. It does show that police authority meets an immediate form of collective opposition. The attempt to transport the body becomes another confrontation, with the crowd insisting through its presence that Abdullah’s death is not simply an internal police matter. The station, ordinarily a site of official custody, becomes the destination of a public dispute.

Arrest, political critique, and narrative role

The police also appear in the account of Lin’s imprisonment. Didier’s letter later identifies Madame Zhou as the person who betrayed Lin to the police, leading to his arrest and severe mistreatment in prison. This revelation connects state power to private enmity: Madame Zhou’s intervention puts the police in motion against Lin, although the evidence does not specify the means by which she secured his arrest or identify which officers were responsible. The episode makes Lin’s vulnerability to arrest part of the same wider landscape of coercive authority, without suggesting that his case and Abdullah’s are identical.

A political formula voiced by Abdul Ghani places policemen among the soldiers and officials who enforce the decisions of powerful rulers. In Ghani’s account, such agents possess practical power while serving systems whose leaders may later abandon them. This is his critique of political obedience, not an impartial description of every officer or police action in the story. Set beside Abdullah’s pursuit and Lin’s arrest, however, it provides a vocabulary for considering how institutional force can be exercised on behalf of decisions made elsewhere.

Mumbai Police therefore occupy a consequential but uneven position in the narrative. Their orders and actions shape the immediate fates of Abdullah and Lin, yet their authority does not settle the truth of Abdullah’s identity or secure public acquiescence after his death. By presenting the episode through warnings, reported police statements, and a crowd’s response, the story makes policing visible not as an abstract institution alone, but as a force whose claims and consequences are contested in the streets.