Chapter 310 Life in Exile
Arab countries' light industry, daily necessities, electronics, and clothing are basically dependent on imports, with products positioned in the middle and low end and priced in the middle to lower end.
Customers here usually order large quantities and like to place orders based on samples. Once they like something, they will place an order within three to five days.
This is almost tailor-made for Sur Electric Appliances. Ron's products are not very high-end, but they are definitely cost-effective.
In order to strike while the iron is hot, he stayed in Dubai in person to supervise the processing of various procedures.
With Shakir's approval, Mary and Karuna began interviewing Dawood's gang members to obtain as much material as possible.
The man who led them was called Zamir, with an unshaven beard and bloodshot eyes.
Unexpectedly, he was not as ferocious as Karuna had imagined, but instead smiled kindly when he saw them.
Karuna responded a little stiffly. He was a little nervous. They were so close to each other, just like friends shopping together.
Mary, on the other hand, was very calm and even took the initiative to strike up a conversation.
"Do you like it here?" she asked curiously.
"No." Zamir shook his head without hesitation.
"How long have you been here?"
"Half a year."
He took them to an Indian restaurant, where they met one of Zamil's classmates, a stocky Malayali who had changed his Indian name, Sri, to Shahib, when he joined the Dawood gang.
Zamir and Shahib complained to Karuna that the Arabs in Dubai called them beggars or bastards and that they were often discriminated against and humiliated.
They have no friends among the locals and are discriminated against in every way. They miss their families and even have to clean the toilets themselves.
Later that day, Zamir was taking Karuna to see the neon lights of Dubai and asked Mary if she needed to go back to the hotel to rest.
Not only did she not mind, she even wanted to go along. After spending more than half a year in Dubai, Zamir was no longer surprised by this kind of thing.
The streets of the United Arab Emirates are teeming with call girls: very young Malays and white-skinned bears in hot pants, swaying gracefully up and down the empty avenues.
They went into a bar and Zamir ordered an Irish stout, which he drank in long gulps.
"I can't go back. Mumbai has no room for me anymore," he said matter-of-factly.
"Why?" asked Mary.
"Someone wants to kill me." Zamir was a little depressed.
He and Mary told their stories, the wars and vendettas between gangs.
That was half a year ago, not long after Zamir arrived in Dubai. He ordered Satish to assassinate a herdsman named Salim, who was originally their accomplice. Later, he followed Rajan and killed three bombers in a row. His next target was Zamir.
He was scouting around Zamir's house, and Shakir learned of this and decisively ordered: "Traitor, kill."
Zamir then sent Satish to kidnap Salim, locked him in a car and tortured him. Salim begged for mercy on the phone, asking Zamir to spare his life.
"His voice was shaking badly and he was very emotional." Zamir spread out his palms and shook them left and right.
Salim said he would never dare to do that again and he promised to work only for the Daud Gang from now on.
Zamir angrily denounced him as a traitor to the nomads. He was speaking from a telephone booth below his apartment, which was not in Mumbai but in Dubai, across the Arabian Sea.
But there was a technical problem in killing Salim: Shakil had promised the Mumbai police that the Dawood gang would not use guns during the Maharashtra elections. Satish had no choice but to kill Salim with a knife and disemboweled him.
"Blood spurted out, and even the kidneys were clearly visible. The person holding the knife must have had some courage," Zamir commented.
Half an hour after Salim's death, Satish called Zamir again to report that the mission had been successfully completed.
From Monday to Wednesday, Salim's body lay undiscovered on the rooftop of a building on Mira Road.
Rajan, who sent Salim to assassinate Zamil, naturally knew that his men were missing since Monday. He reported the case to the police and told them the location of Zamil's house.
The police waited at Zamir's door, but unexpectedly, Zamir was already in Dubai at that time.
Zamir's family is very nervous. He has not been able to speak to them since he fled to Dubai, fearing that the police will tap his home phone.
Zamil's brother was silenced during the interrogation, and Zamil asked his younger brother to pay the police 50,000 rupees to redeem his brother's life.
"If they kill him," the little man said excitedly, "I might drop a bomb or anything."
Karuna, who was recording, was shocked. When they met in the morning, the man smiled at them kindly.
They had also had lunch together and were now sitting together at the bar.
As a result, he suddenly said this, and it was easy to make a decision whether the Mumbai bombing was like this.
Mary gave Karuna a look, indicating that he should continue writing and not interrupt Zamir's narration.
Zamir said he had paid a large sum of money to bail out Satish's brother-in-law, who had helped Satish kill Salim.
Shakir gave Zamir a total of two lacs of "activity funds", which was a good thing that Zamir did not make a one-time "order" deal.
If he took the job for one lak, the subsequent expenses would likely exceed the budget, and it would be embarrassing for Zamir to ask Shakir for money again.
In their line of work, 100,000 rupees is a high price. Some of that goes to Satish and his crew, who actually do the work, and a final 50,000 rupees is left as a bribe to the police.
Fortunately, Shakir never sets a fixed price. The amount of activity funds is proportional to the difficulty of the task. Zamir can take more if he needs more, or less if he needs less.
"The gangs are very responsive to this," Zamir said.
"So what will you do after coming to Dubai? How will you make money and how will you live?" Mary asked.
"Big brother will give us money." Zamir shook his head proudly. The big brother he was referring to was naturally Shakir.
Zamir was deeply grateful for the generosity of the Dawood gang. He and Shahib and others shared an apartment with an annual rent of 35,000 dirhams, which is roughly equivalent to 250,000 rupees.
He has his own laundry room, TV, stereo, and even a satellite phone with a monthly bill of 70,000 rupees. In addition, any expenses his family needs, such as wedding planning, will be delivered by Shakil immediately.
Zamir estimated that it would cost Shakir eighteen lacs a year to settle him in Dubai.
So despite his dislike for Dubai, Zamir still did his best. He left his two hundred men in Mumbai and directed them remotely from Dubai, planning the assassination, arranging escape routes, and formulating strategies for dealing with police interrogations (if the killer was arrested).
He drew up various diagrams in pencil to help him better see the situation in Bombay.
"It's a pity Satish died," Zamil said, taking a sip of his wine. "I was planning to bring him to Dubai this month, but he was shot dead in a warehouse by the Federation."
"Will you avenge him?" asked Mary.
"Of course!" Zamir answered without hesitation, "But we have to wait for the order from Big Brother. Without his permission, we can't act on our own."
After finishing their beer, they decided to move to another place to continue. The air was humid, and the entrance of a nightclub was lined with dancers' signs.
Zamil and Karuna turned into the nightclub to relieve themselves. Karuna walked to the urinal and Zamil went into the stall next to it. This was the unwritten rule for two heterosexuals to go to the public toilet.
As a result, Zamir quickly opened the door again and walked out quickly.
"There are cockroaches," he said, and the former Mumbai gangster was scared and ran away.
Karuna really saw white cockroaches on the ground, and for a moment he almost couldn't help laughing.
The second floor of the nightclub was divided into two compartments, and the music was incessant.
"Babayang music! Don't miss it if you pass by." The doorman invited them into the room where the ghazal poets were singing.
"Indian dance! Come and take a look." Another doorman, not to be outdone, invited them into the beer bar where there were dancers.
The two tried their best to sell: "This way, please! This way, please!"
Without hesitation, Zamir entered the room with the Indian dancers, followed by Mary and Karuna.
It is called a beer bar, but it is really a wolf in sheep's clothing.
There were few customers in the bar, and the tape recorder was playing old songs that only Indian immigrants liked, such as "He Stole My Heart" and "Our Love Letter".
The fat girl from Mumbai adapted to the local customs and sat on the stage wearing Arab women's trousers. The dry ice machine next to her was just for show.
"When I was in Mumbai, there were a few crime department police officers sitting in every bar. I couldn't sleep in peace without bodyguards surrounding me." And in this strange country, almost no one knew who Zamir was.
He escaped to safety in Bombay, but it was no different from exile.
Some mysterious force prevented him from returning home. If Zamir insisted on going back, he would die as soon as he left the airport. He would either be encountered by the police or assassinated by Rajan Jr.
So he had to stay in the country he hated, and sit in the living room every night watching programs on All India Television to relieve his homesickness.
He dreamed of riding the train on Mira Road again, but reality only allowed him to brag about the 55 flyovers in Mumbai. He personally gave orders in repeated calls with his subordinates to destroy his hometown, which he missed so much, bit by bit.
In three months, Zamir might be in Karachi or Bangkok, somewhere he would hate more than Dubai.
He said that in Dubai, at least people follow the rules.
The exiled Zamir belongs to a very special type of refugee. He is not a political refugee or an economic refugee, but a criminal refugee.
Back at the hotel, Karuna was very excited. He felt that the trip was worthwhile. It turned out that this was the kind of life that the top leaders of the Dawood gang lived overseas.
"It's a waste to just make documentaries! Boss, we should adapt these materials into TV series and movies! People will love them. They are both afraid of and curious about gangs, and these films and TV shows can allow them to glimpse the mysteries in a safe environment."
"What do you think?" Ron asked Mary.
"There's a lot of potential, we could even do multiple seasons."
"Okay, you guys research this on yourselves."
Ron sighed a little, thinking that the gangsters exiled to Dubai were not living a good life.
He also understood that the gang war in Mumbai would never end.
Because its core is not the fighting between gangs or the life-and-death struggle between the black and white worlds.
At its core, it's about a young man with a Mauser rifle trying to use politics, rewrite his destiny, and fight history.
Its core is the cutting of lives, and the path to cutting lives is paved by one murder after another.
(End of this chapter)
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