His life is a metaphor for a turnaround. Abrar Qureshi, 48, a member of a butcher's family in Mumbai, frees animals after raiding the city's illegal abattoirs. The brawny cloth wholesaler from central Mumbai is now an officer with the Ministry of Environment and Forests' Animal Welfare Board and has saved over a thousand lives in the past five years. He has also survived nearly a dozen attempts on his life for the stand he has taken.

SAVING THEIR SKINS: Qureshi, with wife Zeenat, took up the cause six years ago

At the root of the problem is Mumbai's illegal meat trade. Over 25 illegal abattoirs slaughter 5,000 animals per day, including cows and calves, whose killing is prohibited by law. Added to that are over 50 mini-trucks that enter the city daily, stuffed with the carcasses of animals killed in Gujarat or in other towns of Maharashtra. This feeds the city's insatiable demand for cheap beef. These illegal slaughterhouses supply meat at prices ranging from Rs 15 to Rs 25 a kg, nearly half the price of meat from the city's sole authorised abattoir at Deonar. Not surprisingly, the trade has hit the legal meat shops hard and has fattened the meat mafia, many of whom have turned millionaires and regularly hand out hefty payoffs to the police and the corporation to look the other way.

Still, the businessman who runs a wholesale fabric store in Mumbai was a wildcard in the fight against the trade. His family members have been butchers since he can remember and even today own four meat stalls in Crawford Market. But it was an inter-religious marriage to Jayshree Salaskar which saw Qureshi being branded as the black sheep of the family and turned out of his home. The animal-rights conversion came in after he brought home a Doberman which was raised as a family member.

Six years ago, Qureshi decided to step up his campaign against illegal slaughterhouses as a distraction from the mundane business of supplying hand-embroidered cotton suits to stores in Mumbai. It proved sufficiently exciting to be more than just a distraction. Last fortnight he seized 40 tonnes of illegally slaughtered meat, a personal record.

Here's how a rescue takes place. A rudimentary but effective intelligence network-two motorcycle-borne youths ferret out information about locations of illegal sales-tips off Qureshi in his flat on Mira Road, a north-western Mumbai suburb. Within minutes of getting the lead, often well past midnight, Qureshi calls in the police, Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) officials and family members-including wife Zeenat (Jayshree's name after she converted to Islam), daughters Yasmin and Shaheen and son Imran, all animal welfare officers.

But the real headache, or in Qureshi's case, heartache, begins after the animals are seized from the illegal slaughterhouses. He has to hand the animals over to the BMC. But ironically, he has to rescue them within 48 hours or else the BMC auctions them, often to the same butchers from whom they were seized. The rescued animals are sent to a shelter north of the city, while seized carcasses are buried in landfills.

Saving the lives of hundreds of cattle has put Qureshi's own life in danger. Within his community, which controls nearly all the meat trade, it has earned him instant pariah status and death threats. In October 2002, one of his activists was beaten to within an inch of his life and is still in hospital. Qureshi has braved a dozen attempts on his life, most of them by enraged meat cleaver-waving butchers. Recently, after reports of a supari, or murder contract, placed on his head, he was given a police bodyguard.

Death threats do not affect him; what does is the charge of being un-Islamic, levelled at him by the community. "Do you know the Quran has nearly a dozen precise instructions on animal slaughter from the clothes and cap to be worn by the butcher to stipulations that the animal must be fed?'' Suffice to say, not one of these conditions are met in the over 25 roadside slaughterhouses, some in drains and on rubbish heaps, that Qureshi has raided in the past few years.

"It is a thankless job which promises nothing but threats and physical violence,'' shrugs Qureshi. Moreover, people are suspicious of a Muslim who is anti-meat. What keeps Qureshi going is the mental peace he gets from looking into the eyes of the animals he has helped rescue. A feeling of contentment that ensures he isn't likely to give up his campaign soon.