Dawood146;s classmate chronicles the big city146;s dark underbelly

Standing on the long and winding Byculla flyover under a merciless May sun, Rashid, 48, looks down at the clogged Mohammed Ali Road, and says: 8216;8216;It was my anger. I drowned my angst in literature, making the pen my weapon8230;I get characters from these crazy, chaotic streets.8217;8217;

Tracing his growth from a wayward youth to a committed writer, he says it wasn8217;t easy. When he wrote his first novel, Ragon Mein Jami Barf Frozen Ice in Veins, at 20, Rashid recalls how his father, taking a dim view of his effort, tried to destroy the first few copies because the theme was anti-Emergency.

Last week, a dozen Urdu fiction writers assembled at a suburban hotel to assess Rashid8217;s latest work, Ek Chhota Sa Jahannum. Though widely appreciated, the collection received some brickbats too.

8216;8216;Your prose is brilliant, but all the villains are Muslims. It8217;s a stereotype painfully practised in Hindi films,8217;8217; wrote Qaiser Tamkeen, a Birmingham-based novelist.

Rashid was quick to react. 8216;8216;It8217;s a baseless charge. I grew up in an era when Muslims ruled Mumbai8217;s underworld. Karim Lala, Haji Mastan and Dawood Ibrahim were the sultans. Arun Gawli, Rama Naik and Babu Resham were mere pygmies.8217;8217;

Rashid himself had easy access to Lala and Mastan, visiting them often at their residences. The latter he describes as a large-hearted and flamboyant don who handed out favours and money. 8216;8216;Very unlike Dawood, who was miserly.8217;8217;

Recalling the early years spent with the most dreaded gangster of them all, Rashid says: 8216;8216;We were in Std VII at Ahmed Sailor High School, Nagpada.

Dawood was a lovable, naughty boy. I never knew the rascal would become a don.8217;8217;

While his friend dropped out of school and took to a life of crime, Rashid fell in love with literature, devouring Tolstoy, Chekov, Maupassant, Manto and Rajinder Singh Bedi. 8216;8216;Dawood once wanted all our classmates to meet in Dubai in the 1990s. I politely rejected the offer.8217;8217;

With Urdu readership shrinking, Rashid now writes in Hindi too.

He has won the prestigious Katha Award twice. A weekly column, Zindagi Nama now in the Hindi Mahanagar, which he edits, has been running since 1977.

Rashid has also been approached to write for Hindi cinema and television, but says work in the Hindi film industry is 8216;8216;merely ornamental8217;8217;.

For a man who has modelled himself on the lines of progressive writers such as Ali Sardar Jafri, the idea of plotting a formula film is clearly repelling.