At the outset, let me confess to a grave error of judgement. Sometime ago when I laid my hands on Rommel Rodrigues’ book Kasab: Face Of 26/11 ” I quickly put it down. Its charcoal black cover with a not-too-remarkable impression of Ajmal Mir Kasab and the title in shocking yellow failed to convince me of the author’s seriousness. It seemed a quick-fix job, the colour contrast meant to grab instant attention. Haven’t we seen so many books on sportsmen around the time of Olympics, Commonwealth Games and the like, I reminded myself. I was determined to use the wisdom accumulated over the years and not succumb to reading an account of Kasab’s life, soon after 26/11. As it turned out, I was guilty of judging the book by its cover. This week as news poured in that Kasab, the lone gunman captured for the 26/11 attack on our territories, had been executed, I toyed with the idea of picking up the book again. As various channels beamed almost identical footage of the terrorist and the execution, I decided I needed more on the matter than just “breaking news” that rolled out like a weather bulletin. This time, I started flipping through the tale of the young man with thin hair who, as a little boy, dropped out of school in fourth grade and regularly played truant to his father, Mohammed Amir Kasab, whose occupation ranged from being a vegetable vendor to a labourer to a cook to fritters’ seller. And lo! I was amply rewarded for my patience as contrary to my initial misgivings, I came across a riveting account of the man who stays in our collective memory as the face of 26/11, the man with the Kalashnikov, anger, not remorse writ large on his youthful face — and in defiance of stereotypes of terrorists, he had no beard!
Yet, if it were not for a piece of literature, Kasab would have remained a mere image — a well-dressed youth in a pair of cargo pants to go with a black shirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, a watch visible on his left wrist. Take away the AK-47 on his right hand and he could be another man on the urbanscape of India. That he was far, far removed from such innocence, comes through Rodrigues’ book, a 276-pager that painstakingly puts together the Kasab puzzle. The book talks of his humble, real humble, beginnings in a village with hardly any pucca roads and huts and houses with no lavatories. Then the author proceeds to share the story of Kasab, the man destined to go places, yet not often for the right reasons.
Back in Pakistan, he was born in Faridkot district — there are plenty of Faridkots on both sides of the divide — and named Ajmal, the most handsome one. He did not do many handsome deeds though, and right from the beginning, made statements which proved to be the purveyors of doom in the years to come. As Rodrigues notes in the book, Ajmal “was defiant and boldly resisted authority and anyone who tried to dominate him… Due to his unyielding nature, nobody ever dared mess with him… Ajmal did not like school and would often run back home. Minor things would annoy him, eliciting such a tantrum that Noor (his mother) found it difficult to control him. ‘Look at his anger! This boy would grow up to become a big dacoit,’ Noor would tell Ajmal when he played truant. ‘I won’t become a petty thief. Watch out, I will become a mafia don one day, with a big gun. The whole world will know me and be scared of me,’ little Ajmal would declare.
The words had an eerie ring to them. As luck would have it, once his father was coming back home from Lahore with clothes and toys for the family. For the girls, he picked clothes and dolls, and for Ajmal, he picked a toy gun! Little did he know that the boy would grow up to wield a real one to kill the innocent. With such instances, Rodrigues pieces together the tale of Kasab without ever letting sentimentality creep into his narration. And at the end gives us a book that demands attention. Now.
As for me, well, once I was guilty of putting away a book on a seasoned Hindi film villain too because the title reminded me of the way filmmakers used his name in countless movies. Time to make amends before it is too late.
