Imagine this: You’re walking down a typical Mumbai street, teeming with people. You brush past a man whose appearance is thoroughly forgettable, nondescript being the only possible description. Nothing about the man registers in your mind. You walk on. The man goes on to meet a high-ranking police officer, who then busts a huge underworld racket.

The nondescript man is an informer, the all-important provider of crucial tip-offs to the police on whom most of our law enforcers depend for breakthroughs. It is to the lives of these little-known informers that Mumbai-based crime reporter J. Dey devotes his book Zero Dial: The Dangerous World of Informers.
Like all other crime reporters who’ve been around for a decade or so, Dey developed his own network of informers who, for a quick buck, fed him story after story. But only some turned into “exclusive reports”, most stayed in Dey’s mind, popping up every once in a while. It was a mammoth collection of bizarre and startling stories, but Dey knew they would never see the light of day from the pages of a newspaper. Hence, Zero Dial.
At the very outset Dey assures his reader that each and every character in his book is a real person, be it a cop, informer, gangster or elusive terrorist. And everything — from a characteristic quirk to the occasional eccentricity — has been recorded accurately and faithfully. The names, of course, have been changed, to protect the identity of police officials and informers, and, understandably, to escape libel. Dey does name most of the gangsters and the terrorist, though.
Ahmad and Rahim are the main characters in this 202-page spellbinder that will take you hurtling from the headquarters of Mumbai police’s Crime Branch, through streets ruled by various underworld gangs, to the murky world of terrorists. Fifty-year-old Ahmad, a short, lean, balding man, more the wronged hero than a crook, and 52-year-old Rahim, flashing rings and ringing phones, a beer-bellied victim of circumstance who turns into a crook, are both prized informers of more than one police officer. The two are joined by other informers — Sadeteen (three-and-a-half), Amjad, Chikna and others.
Ahmad and Rahim’s characters are extremely well fleshed out as Dey ventures into their lives before and beyond the tip-offs.
Ahmad runs around asking his contacts for money for a life-saving surgery his 10-month-old son Shabbir urgently needs, while trying to console his wife that he will set everything right. Ahmad is desperate, and yet refuses to betray his own kind — the informers living amongst the underworld worthies. Rahim, on the other hand, is pulled into the informers’ world after a drug bust goes wrong and has to kill to survive. Greed consumes Rahim — he switches loyalties from Nana Company to the D-Company, and is ultimately drawn into terror by, as Dey calls him, India’s most wanted man after Dawood Ibrahim, Riyaz Bhatkal — the man who reportedly co-founded the terror outfit Indian Mujahideen, and was allegedly the mastermind behind the blasts in Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, Jaipur and Delhi.
Dey describes, in tantalising detail, dozens of police operations, both against the gangs in Mumbai and in the chase to capture Bhatkal: there is Public Enemies-like stakeout of a lodge and the quintessential firing-at-the-door-and-barging-in routine of cops.
Despite a huge amount of mesmerising stories about the underworld, including the rise of almost every gangster worth mentioning, Dey manages to stick to his primary theme — the informers’ role in the police’s sustained, and yet failed, efforts to nab Bhatkal. And with a climax to rival any good Ruth Rendell or John Grisham thriller, Dey makes sure the reader remains hooked till the very last word.
However, in his attempt to sketch the life of an informer, Dey has the tendency to get, well, mushy, and this breaks up the tightness of the narrative somewhat. The conversations between characters too leave a lot to be desired. From stiff to downright cheesy at times, the dialogue lacks the sparkle and tension of a taut, well-knit crime novel. Granted, translating Hindi slang into English is always a challenge, especially when dealing with underworld lingo — khabri or zero dial (the underworld’s slang for an informer), Rampuri (knife), fielding (surveillance), katta (country-made revolver), saamaan (weapons) are just some gems from bhai-log’s lexicon that infiltrates into Dey’s narrative, yet he fails to make the dialogues sparkle to life.
With a specific plan in mind, that of telling the stories of the precariously balanced khabris dancing a dangerous tango with cops and criminals, wrapped around the police’s chase of a terrorist, Dey has penned a gripping book. Zero Dial is a follow-up and worthy successor to Dey’s previous work in Khalas — a sort of dictionary on Mumbai’s underworld where he explored the A-Z of the city’s gangland.