By M H AHSAN

Visitors have, as custom demands, taken off their shoes at the threshold of the home where Abu Salem Abdul Qayoom Ansari grew up. Nobody responds to the doorbell, though; a neighbour insists no one is at home. When her attention is drawn to the shoes, she slams her door shut in response. Half a world away in Mumbai, where Abu Salem made his life, his many friends in the city have turned off their mobile phones or have told their staff to say they are indisposed. At the shopping complex where he began his adult life, people who must have met him each morning insist their paths never, ever crossed.

At some point in his life, it seems reasonable to speculate, Abu Salem must have had that most seminal of Mumbai working-class experiences: of gazing out at the bright lights of the big city, and wanting to step out of the darkness where he stood. In a curious way, the trial of the terrorist, murderer and mafia baron Abu Salem, conducted out not just in Mumbai courtrooms but on television and newspaper frontpages, concerns not just his crimes. It is also a trial of a city and its values; of a system of wealth and the ways in which it is sustained. Abu Salem's story offers an opportunity to examine the dark spaces between Mumbai's bright lights: to learn about crimes committed by people who will never see the inside of a courtroom.

Born in November 1971 to Abdul Qayoom Ansari, a lower-court lawyer in the western Uttar Pradesh town of Azamgarh, Abu Salem grew up in circumstances of great hardship. His father died in a road accident in the mid-1970s, and villagers say that his mother was reduced to supporting her several children by rolling beedis. Abu Salem's subsequent career needs to be read against the cultural climate of Azamgarh. Home to a radical literary tradition - the great poet Kaifi Azmi was born in a village just a few minutes drive from Sarai Meer - Azamgarh was also the site of intense criminality.

Unlike much of Uttar Pradesh, Azamgarh has no real history of serious communal violence. It is, however, at the centre of a region where violence is an integral part of political and social life. Bamhaur, near Azamgarh, is one of the major hubs of illegal handgun manufacture in western Uttar Pradesh, a cottage industry which feeds the demand created by murderous land feuds and armed robberies. In just the last 16 months, police records show, Azamgarh has 35 gangsters killed in shootouts with the police - a record that far exceeds that of most big cities.

In the mid-1980s, Abu Salem moved to Mumbai, where he set up a labour recruitment service that operated out of the Arasa Shopping Centre in the western suburb of Andheri. His choice of profession is instructive. Ever since the late 1970s, Azamgarh had supplied growing number of workers to West Asia, an enterprise for which Mumbai had emerged as a major hub. "The Gulf worker boom", says Azamgarh Senior Superintendent of Police S.K. Bhagat, "played a major role in the rise of a culture of crime in this region. Workers needed passports, sometimes fake ones, which led to corruption. Hawala remittances from the Gulf also meant there was cash lying around, which in turn fuelled violent crime."

Abu Salem was first introduced to the Mumbai mafia of Dawood Ibrahim Kaksar after the failure of his first business by a small-time gangster named Abdul Aziz `Tingoo'. By the late 1980s, crime was his principal occupation. It brought with it a profound personal transformation. Known to his peers as a religious conservative, Abu Salem bucked the tradition by eloping with a 17-year-old college student, Samira Jumani, in 1991. Jumani's parents filed a police complaint. However, Jumani and Abu Salem married; the charges were dropped. Soon after, though, Abu Salem met Monica Bedi, an actress who had moved to Mumbai from the small Punjab town of Hoshiarpur to begin what proved to be a nondescript film career. The two became lovers. Jumani was relocated to the United States with funds provided by Abu Salem. In a recent television interview to the journalist Sheela Raval, she described him as a "terrible husband" and a "bad father".

Abu Salem was, however, well on his way to becoming the kind of person he had wanted to be when he left Azamgarh: a man whose mother did not have to roll beedis for a living; a man who could send money home; a man who had things that other men desired. In the mafia, he had found a means to become the kind of person who had that most valuable of things: respect. It is easy to think of Abu Salem's choice as sordid, but it is unlikely to have appeared so to a young man in Mumbai at the time. Although Dawood Ibrahim had fled Mumbai in 1986, to avoid criminal prosecution, he remained a central figure in Mumbai society. Film stars, cricket players and politicians all met him at his Dubai home; Dawood Ibrahim was in practice just another affluent expatriate, not a fugitive from justice.

In Mumbai itself, the mafia was tolerated. To understand just how respectable it was, consider this fact: bar his brief encounter with the police after he eloped with Jumani, and despite his frequent run-ins with the law because of his growing extortion and protection opertions, Abu Salem was never charged with one single crime until 1994. "To understand Abu Salem," says a senior Mumbai Police officer, "you have to think of Mumbai as a badly-built circuit board made of poor quality wire, serving users who draw on the system without caring what it can take. Every now and then, it threatens to go up in flames. So, someone has put in a whole set of circuit-breakers. Mumbai's political system is one circuit-breaker. Its police is another. And there is a third that is hidden away: the mafia."

It more closely resembles a unique north Indian vision of hell than a temple of justice. Tis Hazari, a sprawling court complex in north New Delhi, is a Kafkaesque maze of dank rooms and dark corridors, the walls stained with paan-spit, where lawyers, litigants, touts, policemen, and vendors of soft drinks and snacks all fight for space and air. Amidst the chaos, no one pays much attention to the diminutive man who, clad in spotless white, arrives every so often at the court of additional sub-judge Deepak Jagotra, for trial in what the sheet of untidily-typed paper outside the room informs the curious is case number 1S-98. His name is Romesh Sharma, and he looks exactly like what he was: a politician, businessman, and fixer of deals, a species commonplace in New Delhi.

Although no one in the Tis Hazari complex seems to think he merits a second glance, Sharma became, for a while in 1998, India's best known criminal, an emblem of the corruption and decay of its political system. What is less well known, though, is that he was Abu Salem's first mentor in the world of crime, a long-standing business associate and a close friend. Sharma's story, and his curious relationship with Dawood Ibrahim's empire, cast fascinating light on the history of Abu Salem. It makes clear, as perhaps nothing else can, that Abu Salem was a part of the system, not outside of it; that his ambition was to wield power and influence within society, not over it. In short, Abu Salem was no terrorist bent on murder and destruction: he was, instead, an aspiring insider.

Sharma was Abu Salem's ticket to building an empire of his own. Like the Azamgarh lawyer's son, Sharma had began his adult life as a migrant to Mumbai. Having started out as a worker at a textile concern, he began operating his own air-conditioning business, which was funded by a city businessman in return for a 75 per cent share of the profits. Soon, the business was providing Sharma with an income of Rs.30,000 a month, no small amount of money in the late 1970s. At some point during this time, he met Dawood Ibrahim, then a rising star on Mumbai's crime landscape, through common friends in the city congress. The mafioso soon had a proposition for his new contact: joint investments in property, through which the underworld could turn its illegitimate cash into solid assets.

Abu Salem's life intersected with Sharma's at this point. Desperate for opportunity after the failure of his early business operations, Abu Salem took an offer to work as Sharma's driver, gaining close insights into the workings of power in the process. In the event, the job proved shortlived. In 1981, Sharma had made the first of his acquisitions for Dawood Ibrahim, a large property adjoining the Sun and Sand Hotel on Mumbai's upmarket Juhu seafront. Soon after, however, the building burnt down - the consequence of Sharma having attempted to usurp the property from Dawood Ibrahim. Sharma was provided security in Mumbai, allegedly on the say-so of senior Congress politicians, but decided to take the prudent step of moving base to New Delhi.

By all accounts, Sharma's efforts to join the circle of Youth Congress figures around Rajiv Gandhi, soon to be Prime Minister, yielded few results. It was only in 1991 that fresh opportunities began to present themselves, at least on a scale of real significance. One of the young politicians Sharma had become close to in New Delhi was Yashwant Kumar Ranjan, a Jawaharlal Nehru University student who worked with Subodh Kant Sahay, a Congress politician from Bihar who is now Union Minister ...