They said his mother died in a robbery.
But Nawaz remembers the silence.
Not the silence after the gunshot — no, that came later. He remembers the silence before it. When she saw the man pull the gun. When her hand tightened around Nawaz's wrist. When she stood in front of him, like a wall of flesh between death and a seven-year-old boy. That silence — the one soaked in fear and instinct — never left him.
He was seven when they killed her in a dingy Mumbai alley for saying "no" too loud.
The basti boys called it bad luck. The cops called it a "case closed." Nawaz called it the day the world stopped making sense.
His father was a driver. Not the Ola type — the kind who drove for people who carried guns in the glove box and had blood under their fingernails. He never asked questions. Until one day, he did. And they shot him in the back of the head while he was fixing a flat tyre for his boss.
Nawaz was eleven.
He didn't cry.
By thirteen, his grandfather — the only person left who told him to pray, to eat properly, to stay human — was crushed under a milk truck. "Accident," they said. Nawaz didn't believe in accidents anymore.
The only person who stayed was the Don. His father's boss.
He wasn't a good man. But he didn't pretend to be. He fed Nawaz. Protected him. Taught him how to aim. How to listen. How to survive. He gave him a cot in the back room of a bar and a Glock on his fifteenth birthday.
"People respect death more than words," he said once. "Learn to speak their language."
At sixteen, Nawaz stopped calling him "Uncle."
Because the Don died that year.
It wasn't in a grand shootout. There was no opera music, no slow motion. It was just two bullets to the chest, one to the head — while shielding Nawaz from a hit gone wrong. Bleeding out, he pulled Nawaz close and whispered a truth that cracked whatever was left of the boy.
"You were never just the driver's son. You were mine too."
Nawaz didn't flinch. Didn't scream. Just sat there in a pool of blood, watching another father figure turn cold. The Don's real son arrived hours later, late as always. The right hand man? Gone. Scared.
The underworld smelled weakness.
But Nawaz wasn't weak.
The next morning, he walked into the same bar, covered in blood stains, sat in the same chair, and dropped a bag on the table. Inside it? The head of the man who ordered the hit.
Nobody asked questions after that, but they sure trembled at his sight.
They called him the "Devil"...The Devil of Mumbai.
But Nawaz didn't care about names.
He only cared about who was next.