The Saturday Story | Run Rahul Run: A gangster's redemption story

A DH journalist meets a former gangster in Pune. He left behind the world of crime to become an ultra-marathoner and the face of de-addiction programmes.

Young men are at the gate, pleading with jaded guards to let them out, or at least give them a cigarette. Grown men are crying, walking from room to room, seeking answers they can’t have. The elders are slouched over, staring at their toes, waiting for the ground to cave.

So far, everyone within eyeshot at the Muktangan Rehabilitation Centre in Pune has avoided eye contact.

Out comes Rahul Jadhav. He’s the ultra-marathon runner I have been trying to meet for a year after hearing his story from Mufeed Mahdi Rizvi, the journalist who broke the story for a Mumbai-based daily in 2018.

Tall, with the slightest hint of a hunch, cautiously smiling through chipped incisors, dishevelled hair, conflicted eyes behind smudged, rimless glasses... Jadhav’s looking right at me. He seems regular enough.

In this mosh pit of broken dreams, I feel a wave of sympathy, but curiosity prevails, so I follow Jadhav up the stairs before being offered a seat in a small, dusty room with a torn calendar among other forgettable paraphernalia.

Somewhere between his grace, the anxiety in me and among others at the centre, and the mild muskiness of this room, I had forgotten that I was talking to an erstwhile gangster.

“…you know my story? What else can I say?” he begins.

Four years in jail

Jadhav’s story is not new — there was even a book written on him by journalist Puja Changoiwala called ‘Gangster on the Run’ in 2020 — but there’s a newness to it each time he tells it.

In his jocular retelling of everything he experienced, the certified counsellor turns this ill-kempt workstation into a screen filled with an unexpected tale of love, forgiveness, penance and perseverance.

Jadhav was an extortionist and a hitman with the organised crime syndicate in Mumbai in the early ’90s and the 2000s. He shot people for a pittance. He was arrested in 2007 and remained at Arthur Road Jail for nearly four years on account of 17 cases, including several attempt-to-murder charges. He resorted to substance abuse to quell his conscience after being acquitted of all charges in 2013.

It is hard to believe all of this because, for one, he’s sitting in front of me, and secondly, he’s so whimsical and humorous in his storytelling. If I didn’t pay attention to how his frame tightened and loosened depending on the degree of trauma his body remembers, I could’ve mistaken that he was telling someone else’s story.

Taut: “I used to hide drugs in my anus. I would pop pills (painkillers) just before the cops would begin to hit me. Wouldn’t feel a thing.”

Slack: “I found my wife at this very centre. She was looking to find someone for me. I told her I wanted her. I married her.”

Taut: “When my boss (based out of Bengaluru) didn’t come to my rescue after I was jailed, I studied law.”

Slack: “When I earned Rs 70 making fertilisers for this centre, my mother was happy to receive that from me. She never took money from me when I was with gangs.”

Taut: “Dina…”

Slack: “I was anyway running away from cops all my life so being able to run marathons was only natural (laughs).”

Dina?

On his tenth birthday, Jadhav ran over to his best friend Dina to give her gulab jamuns. She was by the well, looking in. She embraced him with a broken smile. Dina broke the embrace and jumped into the well.

Jadhav heard the splash, a crowd rushing to the well, the gasping, the wailing.

Jadhav was now without his only friend. Jadhav’s life wouldn’t be the same again. This tragedy would forever sit on his shoulders, but that didn’t stop him from falling in love with another. When that fizzled out too, the Dombivli teen decided to dive into his shadow.

For the riches

Between Dina, the girl who got away, and the intense shame he carried for not being able to speak English all his life, Jadhav sought refuge in the empathetic delinquents of the neighbourhood. He didn’t have much use for an education because he believed in the lower-middle-class Indian’s idea of providence: get rich quick.

“I used to play the lottery, and video games. I became friends with people who were different. You can’t exactly call them criminals, but I suppose you could say they were on the wrong track…”

“Basically, whenever they were fighting, they would pick up machetes and cycle chains, and go for those fights, but their intention was not to make money, they just wanted to get that status (of being badass). When they had time between all this, they would play the lottery. I wanted to make money. I mingled with them and we became friends.”

The issue wasn’t so much that Jadhav didn’t have money. The trigger was also that those who had studied with him were making money. So, envy got the better of him.

“As I got older, my school friends started getting jobs and I grew jealous of them. I had a girlfriend then so I felt fine initially. But when she got a job in an advertising company, things changed. Why would anyone want to be with a bewda (drunkard)? She was the one person who could have put me on the right track, and now she was gone,” he says.

“I was hanging out with the lottery boys more because she wasn’t there. The fights they would get into increased and I would tag along. That was the first time I was exposed to violence like this. I also went to jail for the first time because one of these fights. At this point, I didn’t even know that I was part of the organised syndicate. I did what I was told.”

Studied law

Jadhav did find out eventually because he spent more time shooting at debtors and swapping stories with fellow prisoners than he did on the streets. At one stage, he had 17 cases against him, and the odds of him leaving prison became near impossible.

“I was booked under the MCOCA (Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act of 1999), so vaat lag gayi (I was in deep trouble). And because there were so many cases against me, ‘my people’ left me there,” he says.

“I studied law when I was in prison because I realised no one was coming to save me. My family sold land, my mother sold her jewellery, and I got out eventually.”

Then?

Job despair

Because of his ‘previous life’ Jadhav wasn’t employable even if capable so he resorted to biding time at the bottom of whiskey bottles with marijuana-laced fingers.

It didn’t help that the cops would put him behind bars every chance they got because he was suspect numero uno. “I had to go to jail every day and sign (the police register) there, but the issue was that they would pull me up for every crime that took place in Mumbai. Because of all this, I didn’t even have the time to find a job. I spent time sleeping on park benches, drunk or stoned; but, hey, I only did the organic stuff so my brain was not all that messed up (laughs).”

Ready for rehab

Jadhav’s parents, fairly certain that they had lost their boy for good, stepped in and convinced him that he should check into Muktangan.

“I went for one month, and they taught me how to handle stress, anger, and criticism. They gave me recovery tools and all, but implementation is not that easy, no? In reality, when you go to a police station and they beat the hell out of you, all of these teachings go out the window. How can I do anger management? How can I ‘take a deep breath’ when they beat you so badly? I naturally went back and drank.”

Jadhav went back and forth several times before asking the centre to let him stay there for good as a volunteer, and eventually as the janitor.

“No one cares about the past of a housekeeping person, no (laughs),” he says. “It was funny because I had dreams of making big bucks in Dubai, Saudi (Arabia) and so on and here I was cleaning shit.”

Delivery gig

But his diligence found him a way forward when a recovering client offered him a role as a chocolate delivery boy in Mumbai. “…. as soon as I got the job, I went to the police. I gave them my phone number, my identity proof, the job address, and told them I will come to them every day if they want, but they shouldn’t come to work and harass me,” he says.

A new problem appeared around this time though. Despite working his backside off, Jadhav wasn’t able to sleep. “I felt a lot of guilt. There’s this thing they do at Alcoholics Anonymous (at the rehab centre), they tell you to find people you have wronged and ask them for forgiveness,” he shares. “How the $%^& can I ask forgiveness from someone I have shot? But, I did. I found people and apologised to them. Some hit me, some felt pity, some were nice, but in the end, I could sleep.”

Running helped too.

Hit the road, Jadhav

Jadhav was never too fond of running, but it was something he had done consistently while escaping the police so he figured he may as well take it up as he grew stronger in sobriety. “Everyone was wondering what race a charsi (stoner) would run, but somehow I knew I could. They thought I was signing up to run away from the centre,” he says with a laugh. This was in 2015.

Running then became Jadhav’s meditation, and he did it seriously enough to get invited to WhatsApp running groups. After all, you can only ignore someone running the length and breadth of Mumbai at night for so long.

Naturally, the cops caught him. He got away after showing his medals as a runner and even earned their approval, but the lessons didn’t stop there. “I remember in one race, one fellow fell down from exhaustion. I didn’t care, but someone shouted at me and asked me to help him up,” he recalls. “I did, at the cost of losing time, but I was laughing later because I used to shoot people for money, and now I was saving someone for free.”

In spending time with runners, Jadhav was beginning to see another side to life, one which he dreamt of but didn’t have the bandwidth for, until now. “I used to see families after runs, and I knew I wanted that so I started looking.”

Degree in psychology

Given his history, marriage sites weren’t brimming with options. Miffed as he was, Jadhav would spend his spare time at the centre helping people with his stories. Eventually, he was offered the role of a counsellor but he didn’t take it up until he graduated with a degree in psychology.

“I listen to patients, look into their addiction history, their birth development and provide programmes and achievable goals for them. When I realise that isn’t working, I slide in my story to say ‘Hey, if I can get out of all of this, you can too. My entire funda is to give people hope. Without hope there is no recovery,” he says.

Finding love

While his professional life, and that of a runner, was going swimmingly, he still had his personal life to sort out. “… she (his future wife) was trying to find me a girl, and then she asked me what sort of a girl I would like. I said ‘Someone like you’. She laughed. I told her she should get married to me,” he says.

“She was okay (with the idea), but how to get her folks to agree? I went to her place a little later. As I sat there with her mother offering me something to eat, I saw a police jeep arrive. Her father was an assistant inspector. Then her brother came on a bike. He was a police sub-inspector. Then her sister came in a scooter. She was a head constable,” he recalls. “I genuinely thought they were coming for me. Little did I know they would become my in-laws.”

They were married on August 31, 2019.

Somewhere in the arc of this story, Jadhav ran for 19 days and seven hours to reach India Gate in New Delhi from Gateway of India in Mumbai. It was an effort to educate people about the perils of substance abuse. He then received an apology from the underworld don who was once his boss, and was made the face of numerous de-addiction programmes by the police.

It has been over an hour since this conversation kicked off, and I am not tired. Jadhav is.

“One last question?”

“Haan (Yes)?”

“Planning on having children?”

“Arey, we’re old. I am 43, and she’s four years older than me. It doesn’t work. Also, why the tension? I have already taken so much stress in life. Imagine having kids and they get addicted or do something wrong, and I have to start running again, why? Bheja fry ho jaayega (The mind will get messed up).”

As I walk out of the centre, I wonder how that hadn’t happened already. I need a smoke. I light one up. The young men from the centre can see me through those gates. Amid those rage-filled eyes, Jadhav continues to smile and wave.

Poignant.