Facilitating a meeting for a celebrated writer like V.S. Naipaul with members of the Bombay mafia is not exactly a journalistic assignment. As a young reporter, I was naturally overwhelmed. I promptly called him and was told that he was researching for a book on India and I had to help by organising a meeting between him and members of the underworld. Rather excited, I worked the phone and by lunch had fixed a rendezvous in the evening at a safe house in an upscale residential area near Shivaji Park in Dadar. I was supposed to meet Mr Naipaul in the lobby of the Taj.

'Please don't come up to my room. Call me from the reception and I will come down,' he instructed me when I called him to confirm the appointment. We drove to Dadar in a non-AC taxi, which was rather uncomfortable given Bombay's high humidity levels. But Mr Naipul seemed not too concerned about the weather. The conversation drifted to what I would learn years later was Mr Naipaul's considered — some would say uncharitable — view of the Muslim community. He had concluded, or had been told, that the mafia in the city was made up of Muslims and Muslims alone. 'As a community they somehow seem to be historically more drawn towards crime than all the others,' he observed. I reckoned I was just an ordinary journalist to contradict such a great man, but I summoned the courage to tell him that one couldn't draw such sweeping conclusions and that crime knew no religion or region. Given that he equated the underworld with Muslims, it was rather ironic that the safe house I took him to was occupied by hitmen, gangsters and their friends who were all Hindus.