Arun Gawli with his family members at their Dagdi chawl residence.

MUMBAI, May 27: The steeled gates of Dagdi Chawl shelter behind them one of Mumbai's most hardened criminals. The infamous central Mumbai address is also home to some middle-class Maharashtrian families. If you see a contradiction in this, its only your imagination. People here don't bat an eyelid when talking about their notorious neighbour - Arun Gawli.

In fact, when he returned to the launching pad of his criminal career after his release from the Amravati jail recently, he did so under the protective cover of a busload of women - most of them residents of Dagdi Chawl.

Although figures vary, an estimated 20-30 women, both from the chawl and the neighbouring area, accompanied Asha Gawli to Amravati to escort Gawli home. This floated around the theory that like the Libyan leader Gaddafi, Gawli too had a female security cordon to protect his hide.

This, however is refuted by members of the female brigade, who claim it was a spontaneous decision. ``We've seen Asha's (Gawli's wife) condition,'' says Shakuntala Gupta, whose working-class credentials make it difficult to believe she could have anything to do with an underworld don. ``Anyone who heard Bhau's name came,'' she explains.

A picture emerges of a strong female support base for Gawli, bred by Asha Gawli, who is rumoured to have run the show in his absence.

The chawl is marked by law enforcement agencies as a breeding ground for criminals. Residents complain of constant mid-night knocks by the police, who promptly land up there if any crime has occurred in the city. By cocking a snook at the police and by treating them the way they allegedly treat the chawl residents all the time, Gawli, a home-grown Robin Hood, has achieved cult status. The 27 cases registered against him and his reputation as a ruthless criminal are dismissed as police-sponsored.

Primary ties score over any question of morals. ``He and my son played together as children. He is like my own son,'' declares Lakshibai Kokate. She was one of the 3,000-odd women who had gheraoed the hapless police when they came to arrest Gawli in February. ``The cases against him are all false. It is the police who made him what he is today,'' she claims.

A feisty seventy year-old Hirabai is visibly moved when she speaks of the don's return. ``I equate him with my son,'' she says. ``He is no gunda, he never gave anyone any trouble. We are proud of him, at least now there is someone to take care of us...''

These statements, watchfully supervised by Gawli's henchmen, paint him as someone who takes ample `care' of his neighbours by arranging their marriages, providing them with jobs, and bailing them out financially. For people staying in tiny cramped spaces that pass off as their homes, his methods of earning money get dwarfed by his alleged largesse.

The police term the residents' claim of Gawli's innocence as ``a cock and bull story.'' They say this because they belong to the area, they state. Yet Gawli's sway over the place seems complete. So complete that the chawl women do not refer to him by the three-letter word people outside the high walls of the place know him as - don-, but the word closer to their existence - God.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.