SAVAK

SAVAK is Iran’s secret police, represented in the novel not only as an agency of repression but as a network whose reach follows opponents into exile. Accounts by Iranian refugees link the service first to imprisonment under the Shah and then to the new authorities, while its agents’ reporting and covert violence help draw the Bombay underworld into conflicts extending beyond India.

Identity and changing regimes

In Mahmoud’s account, opposition to the Shah began as a family history of state violence: his parents were killed in prison after resisting the regime. As a child, he saw their deaths as part of the cost of political opposition; when he grew up, he too fought against the Shah and was imprisoned twice. His testimony describes imprisonment and torture as recurring instruments of the secret police, not as abuses confined to one period of his life.

The revolution did not, in Mahmoud’s experience, dismantle that machinery. After Ayatollah Khomeini came to power and the Shah fled to the United States, the same officials who had served the old regime continued working for the new one. Mahmoud was again arrested and tortured. His friends died in prison or in the war against Iraq, and he eventually escaped Iran for Bombay. The continuity he describes is therefore personal and institutional: a change at the top does not bring safety when the people and practices of the security system remain in place.

Surveillance beyond Iran

SAVAK’s influence in the novel extends beyond prisons inside Iran. Iranian agents circulate among exiles in India, reporting on people who fled the Iraq war or opposed Khomeini. Their targets include families who remained behind. In Abdullah Taheri’s account, reports about him led to the torture and rape of his sister and the killing of his uncle after the family could not pay the secret police quickly enough. Those consequences make surveillance more than observation: information gathered abroad becomes pressure applied to relatives at home.

The service’s reach is also shown through the men operating in Bombay. They conduct business in drugs, guns, and passports, while spying on Iranian refugees and passing information back to the new SAVAK. The overlap between clandestine intelligence and criminal trade gives the organization an indirect presence in the city: its agents move through expatriate networks whose members are trying to survive, but whose activities can also provide cover and access for political surveillance.

Conflict with Abdel Khader Khan’s network

The Iranian agents’ campaign brings them into conflict with Abdel Khader Khan. Abdullah explains that the agents hated Abdel Khader Khan both for helping Iranian exiles and for supporting the mujaheddin in Afghanistan. When Abdullah wanted to leave Abdel Khader Khan’s organization to pursue the men responsible for his family’s suffering, Abdel Khader Khan persuaded him to stay and promised that they would find the spies together.

With Abdel Khader Khan’s help, Abdullah and Farid tracked down six of the nine men identified at the beginning of their search and killed them. Three survived. The surviving agents knew that a spy had penetrated Abdel Khader Khan’s council, making the struggle more dangerous than a hunt for operatives alone: the enemy had information from inside the organization. The account identifies Abdul Ghani as that insider. He came from Pakistan and had connections in its Inter-Services Intelligence; the narrative describes cooperation among that service, the new SAVAK, the Central Intelligence Agency, and Mossad. SAVAK thus appears within a web of intelligence relationships rather than as an isolated foreign agency.

The trap and its aftermath

The surviving Iranian agents worked with Abdul Ghani to set a trap for Abdullah near Crawford Market. At the time, Abdel Khader Khan and Abdullah did not know that Sapna was working with Abdul Ghani or planning to move against them. The Iranian men fired first; police mistook Abdullah for the shooter, and he returned fire when he believed he was dying. The episode shows how covert violence could exploit confusion between agents, criminal factions, and police, with the immediate consequences falling on the person caught in the trap.

Abdel Khader Khan’s men recognized Abdullah and forced their way into the police station during a riot to remove him. A truck and Doctor Hamid were waiting to take him to hospital, where he was saved. The rescue does not end SAVAK’s larger role in the story; rather, it reveals the human cost of a campaign that reaches from Iran’s prisons to the families of exiles and the contested streets of Bombay. Through these linked accounts, SAVAK is defined by the persistence of its methods across regime change and national borders.