Eleventh September was Just Another Day In the Newsroom, JADIN for short, twenty-five years ago. We were gathering for the evening briefing at ET’s New Delhi office, when my friend and colleague, Abheek, came hollering from the far end of the hall. “WTC is burning!” We rushed to the nearest pillar on which the television monitor hung lazily above the desk crew huddled over computer keyboards sorting the day’s offerings … in pin drop silence. CNN, still muted, was screening, up close, a pall of dense dark foreboding smoke billowing out of the shattered glass façade of the world’s most prominent high rise. By the time a desk hand scrambled for the remote, we were staring beady-eyed at the unfolding drama of the world’s greatest manmade disaster in the making… almost 12,000 km too far. In a moment, a wide-bodied passenger jetliner glided into the South Tower right before of our eyes. Shortly thereafter, the two iconic glass and concrete edifices of the World Trade Center in Manhattan came crumbling down on West Street along the Hudson that day, their steel girders melting into rivulets of red lava. It was half past six in the evening. India Time.
Over the next 77 minutes between 8.46 am and 10.03 am EDT, the skies came crashing down on America -- four passenger jets, in all, grounding a nation to dust. Broadway had not staged anything more surreal than that.
The world had never watched anything quite as big as this before.
Here was high-tech Reality TV LIVE projecting a civilization-altering Hollywood spectacle, even as its plot was being scripted before our eyes. A ‘repeat’ telecast would follow from Mumbai, dramatically rescripted for a Third World audience, only seven years later.
Cut to May 2025: JADINY. Or was it ‘Just Another Day in New York…’ as Azam Gill would have us believe in his latest work, a frisson fantasy, recrafting, recalibrating, and recanting a plot that could have happened on that fateful day in New York, but never did? Or a tale that should never have happened, any which way you read it. Period. For those who have missed this rich pick selling below the radar, on Amazon, Gill could not have picked a more auspicious occasion (pun intended) to launch his spy thriller in India, bang in the middle of last summer's Operation Sindoor, Season One. His adrenaline rush, documented in meticulous diary jottings of the narrator’s private journal, gives readers a never-before sneak-peak into Pakistan’s real-time underground jihadi network, unmatched even by the blockbuster
Dhurandar minus its bold and big boom-boom bang.
It is another matter that JADINY reached me well past the Sindoor timeline. Just in time for Iran. And that leads us to some more remarkable and unanticipated outcomes that are likely Outside the framework of Bollywood’s exaggerated narrative, the Pakistan side of the story has never quite been told, as it should have been, by any serious historian, commentator, or storyteller.
Few Indians outside ‘Calcutta’ are familiar with Satyajit Ray’s classy, yet small time, private detective novellas; others fondly remember Hindi detective pulp at AH Wheeler’s that once made railway journeys engrossing. But no desi author has seriously ventured into spy craft genre, other than the few spymasters who have occasionally published their personal hagiographies. Gill’s is a first from a South Asian writer. That is what makes it interesting.
JADINY is not just another story for just another day. This is serious stuff. Academic in breadth, Gill gives us a ringside account of how the American intelligence network thrives, mostly Hollywood-style, in popular imagination, to project and impose America’s worldwide military supremacy and political authority. But that is not why we must negotiate his work. There are any number of books in that genre, in the West, by some of the world’s most famous espionage scholars. This work is remarkable on another score. It is must-read to figure out why the celebrated Virgina network failed, when it mattered the most, though that end of the tale is not Gill’s intended purpose. Let me take you there.
Gill leads us to interesting ‘gullies’ positing the no-tech world of Lahore’s Mughal-era communications network of messenger pigeons, secret tunnels, naksha shawls and shayari couplets for transcontinental home delivery of remorseless terror, hoodwinking the world’s most elaborate sci-fi gizmos, and deep-dive espionage think-tanks. He introduces us to a worldwide hawala network of cash transfers circumventing global digital payment gateways… to execute precision glide bombing campaigns with no bombs at all; just a ridiculous ceramic knife from a parallel universe lurking in the shadow zones of human civilisation. Pakistan has mastered and perfected this technology. That is good enough reason for the Pakistan Army boss Asim Munir to boast: “We will ram our dumpster trucks into their (India’s) Ferraris. We will light a fireworks spectacle over Jamnagar.”
How the hell can they do that?
There’s pointer in our very own 26/11, executed on an entirely different template, yet as deadly and brutal as 9/11, masterminded in the underground cavities of Lahore and the ISI’s barracks in Rawalpindi. There are others in the game too: for one, Iranian ghost ships ferrying sanctioned oil from the Persian Gulf.
“Bait bazi offers the framework for a very secure encryption system. A literary device born at the time of the Mughal Empire’s decline, when opium-sodden poets and princes would hold versification competitions,” Gill says. The first participant recites a verse, the challenger takes the bait with the last letter or the last line of the previous verse. That sounds familiar, if you please, like our popular antakshari. “In bait bazi encryption of the underground jihadi network, each letter has its number in the order of appearance in the language. This figure can further produce an end-result by a combination of additions, subtractions, multiplication, and fractional tables with a letter inserted in a simple and secure bait bazi cipher. An innocent exchange of obscure, little-known verses at any place, at any time, by people from a little understood, relatively backward culture, excites no attention. The US NSA’s Echelon program is known to use software to monitor phone-calls and email (and now, social media gossip) that can only recognize pre-selected words of mischief (just as the Facebook’s AI minders frequently do now), not bait bazi verses.”
Gill takes us to where and how the plotters, their sleeper cells, and the executioners of 9/11 composed an elaborate and highly sophisticated man-man interface out of elegantly irrelevant poetry that the cyber charged spy world of the Wild West took to be no better than nonsense verse.
To reveal that, Gill sneaks us through an elaborately labyrinthine money transfer architecture first designed by Sogdian merchants on the Silk Route, and later perfected by Sindhi, Gujarati, Marwari and Jain banias in Mughal India. It has now evolved into a scam of global of proportions for terror and drug money laundering. And for Iran oil for cash on the high seas that has massively funded the IRGC, Hezbollah and the Houthis.
“In 1998, after the US embassies were bombed in Kenya and Tanzania, we had proof that Dilshad Khan, a thaekedar in Pakistan, financed it. Mohammad Atta, one of the culprits involved in the massacre, received one hundred thousand dollars from Pakistan through hundi dealers,”
The British Chancellor of the exchequer gave an encouraging smile to the American Treasury Secretary. The ministers from Islamic states looked tense. The Indian press had openly reported that the former Intelligence Director of Pakistan was involved in the deal. The Pakistani Minister’s face was an inscrutable mask.
“Has nobody ever penetrated and broken up a hawala, sorry hundi ring,” the German minister enquired.
“According to Professor Barry Rider of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London, no intelligence organization, except the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence in India, has ever effectively cracked the system. One day, terrorism will set up its own Fort Knox. Then it’ll be too late.”
I could get a sense of Gill, having traversed the hawala route once for an innocent and innocuous deal. Twelve years ago on a visit to Bukhara, I was lured by a blood red pomegranate carpet, that I could no longer afford, having run out of dollars in a city where the ATM kiosks were 'out of order.' The carpet seller said money was not a problem, goodwill mattered. He packed the carpet for my flight back home. Days later, a Karol Bagh trader visited me in Gurgaon to collect the cheque in INR and issued me a perfectly legit receipt. “How will you deliver the payment to Bukhara?” I asked. “I will not send him any cash. I will deliver Indian silk garments, instead, worth this amount to his rep here to sell as Silk Route wear in Uzbekistan. No questions asked.”
Years later, I was flummoxed to read that the DRI had dug dirty hawala cash from a Kashmiri carpet dealer’s cellar in Delhi. The amount was to be channeled to the Valley’s jihadi enterprise. Courtesy ISI.
Gill knows his business well.
“Muslim hundi networks knew that the operation to gather the ‘khazana’ in one place had been successful. Promissory notes had already been issued to the most powerful of networks. The fools in the West could keep worming their way into bank transactions. Shortly, there would be none to trace. On coded signals, the hundi operators would leave money in dead drops. They would be paid by promissory notes cashed in annually. From BCCI (the now defunct Pakistani scam bank) to banks and charitable organisations to the khazana – they had Divine Guidance. It was time for the next prayer of the day.”
But where did all this money come from? Not underground Swiss vaults, did they?
To reach there, Gill escorts us to the hidden tunnels of Lahore, leading down from the 17th century CE haveli of a local hakim with Mughal pedigree directly to Aurangzeb’s Badshahi Masjid: Haveli Dilkusha had been granted in perpetuity by the emperor to Syed Alamgir, the poet, sage and hakim of village Malka Hans. His descendant, “(A) small man with a snowy beard, smooth cheeks and piercing black eyes silently entered the room from the depths of the haveli. Prayer beads dangled from a hand. Syed Mustapha Halimi (is) the inheritor, proprietor, and guardian of the haveli and all its mysteries.”
To locate the underground vault below the city, Gill once more marshals Mughal-era nostalgia of a world that cannot be reached by GPS. “The hakim lovingly removed a packet wrapped in tissue paper. Inside was a very old Kashmiri Naksha shawl woven of fine pashmina. Naksha means map, and centuries before the British SAS decided to give silk maps to their operatives, Indian princes had secret maps woven into the embroidery on shawls and handkerchiefs. They were never accessible to the public, and hid secrets to treasure rooms and grottos of esoteric and mystical practices." Gill points out that the most famous instance is the Srinagar Naksha shawl, produced in three variations, with one of these possibly exhibited at the Srinagar Museum. Although I have not yet visited the Sir Pratap Singh Museum, guides on the Murshidabad circuit in Bengal share similar stories about naksha shawls and hidden passageways. They claim that valuable gems and diamonds were secreted out of Delhi and the provincial subahs to the East India Company's Khoshbagh Residency in Murshidabad through that city’s secret tunnels by Jain bania merchants during the twilight years of the Mughal durbar following Mir Jafar’s great betrayal.
For the record, Gill has the right credentials for his faction: part fact-part fiction. He is a former Panjab Regiment Army Captain from the other side of the Fence, who served a tenure on the LoC facing Indian machine gun bunkers, around the time of the Bangladesh War. To that, he has earned other plaudits, with stints in the French Foreign Legion and French Navy, and a PhD summa cum laude to boot. He has also earned brownie points teaching English Literature to, of all people, the French, at the University of Toulouse. And as if that is not enough, he has busied, over the years, scripting three crime thrillers and five non-fiction scholarly works. JADINY is the latest feather in his beret, documenting years of painstaking research. Just for the sake of a story? Gill’s is serious stuff.
“Ismail Khan, the American Legal Attache’s butler, heard his cousin (Shukar Din) unburden himself over the affair of twenty thousand missing passports. Ismail Khan was no fool. Twenty thousand passports trafficked over a period of two to three years was more than smuggling illegal aliens. Something big was brewing… The Taliban in Afghanistan and their Arab friends and guests were looking for trouble. Next morning, as Shukar Din was cycling to work, he was run over by a speeding car.
The accident was fatal.
The car and its driver were never traced."
Gill builds hope over a dark and deep psychological chasm that seperates the world of militant Islam from the rest of humanity. I will not lead you to the end of his tale.
Sadly, the world is staring into that bottomless abyss once more. Now!
In the high stakes - high tech sweepstakes of the War on Iran, Tehran is too far from Texas. Yet it takes barely 12 hours for a B52 Stratofortress to fly half-way across the world from Louisiana to bomb Furdow. Getting back to terra-firma from the tunnel is quite another task. With naksha maps woven into the borders of Persian rugs out of public reach, you can never be certain if 9/11 will revisit us yet again. A quarter century later.
Gill does not bet on the future. For him, all is well in Paradise. Yet!
But it is only a matter of time.
The sordid threads of hawala cash, stolen passports, secret passageways, and handwoven pashmina maps with which Gill spins his yarn is grim reminder that the War on Terror will remain a never-ending game of light and dark.
9/11 was only the start.
(c) Shubhrangshu Roy
20 March, 2026
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