His writing rarely veers from a straightforward agglomeration of facts, but he sometimes displays an acute eye for emotional detail. His writerly voice has always been that of a newspaperman: controlled, grim, often more notable for substance than style. I can do this in six weeks!' It took him five years. “God forgive me for this, like a lot of cocky reporters, once I decided to write it, I thought, there’s so much in place-witnesses, court documents, written evidence. Zaidi decided to write about the 1993 bombings, not so far in essence from his doomsday idea. “I wrote something about a nuclear attack on Mumbai, something that brought the government down to its knees, in which Ibrahim had been involved, and he told me, ‘If you can write a plot like this, you can write non-fiction.’'

“David Davidar (then publisher of Penguin India) asked me to write a fiction plot, to encourage me, in 1997,' he remembers. But that’s why they care a damn for the law in Dongri.'ĭongri to Dubai-Six Decades of the Mumbai Mafia By S. “If they hear that someone has a connection with the mafia, they use force because they must try and extract information. “It’s the cops’ job to detect crime,' he says. “A few bad guys come out of the place, the police dubs it the crime capital, they persecute many for the sins of a few.' Dongri is a historically Muslim-majority neighbourhood, but Zaidi refrains from making a larger criticism of systemic injustice.

“The issue in Dongri is something like Kashmir, or Ireland,' Zaidi says. Compared with Dongri to Dubai, Zaidi smiles, Mafia Queens is “almost leisure reading'. Last year’s popular success, Mafia Queens of Mumbai: Stories of Women From the Ganglands, which he co-wrote with Jane Borges, was a collection of reported stories of women in the Mumbai underworld and their power. Zaidi’s 17-year career reporting on crime has been full of big stories.

Dongri To Dubai by S. Hussain Zaidi