MUMBAI, May 31 -- One day, towards the end of the 1990s, the phone rang in the office of the newspaper I then worked at. The caller spoke gruffly, but not roughly, to complain about a story on Dawood Ibrahim the paper had run. It was one of those reader complaints to which there was no real response, for the man speaking at the end of the landline said he was Chhota Rajan.

At the time of this call to the newspaper, Chhota Rajan was supposedly living on a ship somewhere off the coast of Malaysia. Was it really him calling on a satellite phone? Hard to tell. But this is to illustrate how so much of the underworld, and the reportage around it, was smoke and mirrors despite the real terrors Mumbai was then undergoing.

A slew of recent books...