He is four feet, five inches tall, but one cannot miss Hassan Patel - alias Hassan Zallar. His eyes are not co-ordinated and he looks like he has accidentally walked out of a circus. His pointy brown beard looks like a one-tug prop.

But make no mistake: he was once an important part of the underworld. He was the trusted aide of the fugitive don, Dawood Ibrahim. He also worked with Dawood's sister Haseena Parkar and brother, Iqbal Kaskar. He has left all that behind him; the 65-year-old now works in a private hospital near Mumbai as a co-ordinator for civic records.

For over 14 years, he worked in various capacities with the big D's syndicate, and later guarded Parkar. He has a trove of stories, and is willing to share some if we don't land him in trouble, he says. He refers to Dawood's syndicate as the "Company".

Dawood fled Mumbai in 1983, but Patel worked in the Company's "delivery" department. Dawood had an enviable network of men who delivered smuggled gold and silver to jewellers.

"Code words were used freely and the system was more or less foolproof. Gold was called tel or oil because groundnut oil looks like gold, and silver was paani or water," he says. "There were three types of gold - Marie, Glucose and Cadbury. Marie gold biscuits were round, Glucose was exactly of the same size and shape as the biscuit, while the Cadbury gold was the size of a Cadbury chocolate."

In the Seventies and right until the early Eighties, the government had slapped a high import duty on gold. So smuggling of gold flourished as a trade through the Gulf nations. The gold came by the sea route and landed in Konkan and off Mumbai coasts. Patel would carry the gold in his trouser pockets, to be delivered to jewellers and others who wanted to hoard or buy gold at cheaper rates.

Little chits with the exact number of gold biscuits written on them were placed near the upper molars or in the folds of shirt sleeves. The delivery boys generally travelled on scooters. Patel still remembers one episode when he and his friend had gone to a building in Lalbaug in central Mumbai.

They had just exchanged the gold for a bag of money and were coming out of the building, when a man snatched the bag and disappeared into the shadows.

Lalbaug, a Shiv Sena stronghold, was the fiefdom of mill workers and working-class Maharashtrians. Only a Shiv Sainik could commit such an act, the men reasoned. So they went back to their office in Bohri Mohalla in Dongri and reported the matter.

A batch of 15 men, who were in the syndicate's dirty works department, which included the use of weapons and bats, landed at the local Sena office. The Sena leaders were not unsympathetic - Dawood had a big contingent of local Hindu Marathi boys and was himself a Konkani speaking Maharashtrian, after all. So the chief of the Sena unit dug out some videos to check the identity of the Sainik who could have decamped with the cash.

The man was identified. The team went to his house and found the money hidden inside a 10kg aluminium container used for storing wheat.

Another time, Patel's scooter was intercepted by the customs department. Those were the days when its Marine Preventive Wing was an enforcement agency to reckon with. Patel was so tiny that the moment he realised that the customs cops were trailing him, he nimbly got off the scooter and jumped into a double decker bus. He then called his boss, Shakeel Lambu.

"You know, Shakeel Lambu looked very elegant - like Haji Mastan, but with a longer face. Shakeel Lambu wanted to know if my chehrapatti had happened. Chehrapatti is when the police identify your face. I said, no. But my boss wanted me to lie low for three days and he was happy that the maal was lying safely in my trouser pocket."

Not surprisingly, Patel was also known as Hassan Zadugar as he had the ability to slink out of trouble. He was never caught red-handed by the customs or the police. Patel says he went to the police station four times in his life and for issues not related to his stint with the D company. He was also called Zallar, which in Mumbai slang means hot air.

Patel says that on some days, he would do a hundred deliveries. His work timings were from 10am to 10pm and he was paid Rs 1,000 for his effort and loyalty.

"Dawood Ibrahim was the big boss who wore T-shirts and pants and white Pathani suits on Fridays. He was very soft-spoken and did not yell or scream and neither did Ibrahim Kaskar. Dawood's attire and mannerisms changed once he went to Dubai. He really looked suave and debonair."

When the government relaxed gold import norms, smuggling was not financially viable anymore. So the D Company switched to hawala - illegal foreign currency exchange.

Patel would deliver the required currency - carrying half of a one-rupee note. "The customer had to produce the other half before we handed over the money." For 10 years, he worked for Kaskar, after Dawood fled India in 1983.

Patel's work changed after 1992. Hasina Parkar's husband was killed by a rival group run by Arun Gawli. In retaliation, Dawood planned an attack on one of the killers, Shailesh Haldankar. Haldankar was recuperating in jail custody at the state-run Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy Hospital in Mumbai, when he was gunned down on September 12, 1992, by the Dawood group. Two policemen who were guarding Haldankar were killed, and five others were injured.

The daring daylight operation, right under the nose of the then Bombay Police, put a spanner in the works of many of Dawood's businesses. So Hassan Patel found himself unemployed. He was shifted to the residence of Hasina Parkar.

"Hasina apa was benevolent. She helped in the treatment of my mother's cataract operation and also helped with money when we were hard-pressed. Eventually, she became the matriarch of the family and helped solve financial disputes between warring businessmen. Most of these meetings took place after 12 at night at her residence. Policemen also buzzed in and out of the building."

Once, he says, a group of policemen sped past him, and he pulled them up for rushing around. "They asked me where Hasina apa lived. I said I didn't know. Later, when Hasina apa asked me to get Thums Up for them, the cops wondered who I was. She told them that I was in her employment. The cops accosted me later and wanted to know why I'd refused to tell them about Hasina apa's residence. Eventually, when this became a constant headache, I realised it was better to leave. I joined this hospital and now I earn Rs 8,000 and am happy. I don't have a family, but dote on my brother's children."

Any regrets? "I look at my past and think of it as a passing memory. It was good while it lasted but this job gives me sukoon (peace). Peace of mind is a must," he replies.