Vast city, colossal tale

Much-anticipated 'Sacred Games' an outsized detective story awash in teeming Mumbai

Clayton Moore, Special to the News

Published January 5, 2007 at midnight

Text size

More Airlines & Aerospace

Indian-born author Vikram Chandra originally set out to craft a clear-cut crime thriller about cops and robbers in the teeming city of Mumbai (formerly Bombay). To say his novel grew, both in size and literary merit, would be an understatement of vast proportion.

His 900-page phone-book-of-a-novel, is one of the most hotly anticipated books of the new year - a crime story with outsized literary ambitions and a price tag that is rumored to have come in at $1 million. In short, it's a book that comes loaded with enormous expectations.

I'm happy to report that those expectations are fulfilled - with gusto.

The book that took seven years to write may be saddled with a Dickensian volume, but Sacred Games becomes much more than the sum of its spiraling parts through Chandra's skillful storytelling and his absolute absorption with India's menacing charms.

The fates of a noble policeman and a ferocious criminal are inexorably tied together in Sacred Games, a colossal, keenly imagined, Byzantine detective story. In the end, both hero and villain are defined as much by the vivid culture of India, awash in all its multihued glory, as they are by the nefarious game being played out between them.

At the heart of its elaborate story about good men brought low is our hero, Sartaj Singh, a Sikh policeman who first came to life in Chandra's short story "Kama" in Love and Longing in Bombay. (Chandra is also the author of the novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain). While Sartaj is cut from the familiar cloth of the jaded detective, the character is distinctive in his traditional turban and beard and approaches his job with a uniquely Indian perspective.

Having negotiated an uneasy peace with his place in the world, Sartaj seems at first resigned to the bribery and corruption that makes Mumbai tick. Yet for all his cynicism, Sartaj also maintains a guarded, almost romantic belief in the basic decency of people that props him up as often as his flagging faith fails him.

The fractured mirror image confronting Sartaj at every turn is Ganesh Gaitonde, the aging but still feral leader of the G-Company, a.k.a. the Gaitonde Gang, a single-minded conspiracy of criminals akin to the Mafia. Once the ally of government investigators, the treacherous Gaitonde has long since gone rogue and succumbed to his ravenous appetites for women, power and money.

The union of Sartaj and Gaitonde comes to a head almost immediately. Following a tip from an informer, Sartaj and his paunchy partner Katekar find Gaitonde under self-imposed siege in a concrete bunker, making his last confession to Sartaj through an intercom. Gaitonde, the architect of countless felonies, is facing the consequences of his last crime: the murder of a madam and consort named Jojo Mascarenas, whose death - at his own hand - has wounded him deeply. It's in this desperate moment that the gangster begins telling Sartaj his life story with an awkward intimacy, as if Sartaj were a brother and not an adversary.

Gaitonde's life ends abruptly when he shoots himself to avoid arrest but his strange sermon persists beyond his death. Through an eerie narrative device analogous to Alice Sebold's dead narrator in The Lovely Bones, he carries on talking to Sartaj, delivering his cautionary tale from beyond the grave. The crime lord's machinations, remembered in tragic and bloody detail, range from political intrigue to Bollywood filmmaking to straightforward terrorism, and each crime has left its mark on him. "Build it big or small, there is no house that is safe. To win is to lose everything, and the game always wins," Gaitonde says.

Where Gaitonde's side of the story evokes just comparisons to The Godfather, the subsequent investigations of Sartaj and his colleagues in the police and secret service veer closer to the equally sizeable thriller The Company. Like Robert Littell's vast valentine to the CIA, Sacred Games is as much about the culture of a place as it is about the inevitable self-destruction of a single character. Chandra's sweltering Mumbai, a place far bigger than both men, is boiling over with caste violence, petty crime, poverty and prostitution. As he delves into its darker corners, Sartaj's search reveals the human condition in all its myriad iterations. A simple day-in-the-life sketch that introduces the book finds the detective busting a brothel, frightening a reckless youth, saving a beaten wife from her husband, and only finally going to evict Gaitonde from his lair.

No question that Chandra's sprawling story has its challenges. For one, the author threads British slang, criminal patois and Hindi together with abandon and without definition. The resulting experience delivers the flavor of Sartaj's world without the comfort of explanation, building meaning sometimes solely through context. The overall effect can be jarring at first, but it soon becomes intoxicating, drawing the reader into a fully realized world.

Then there's the structure, spider-webbed like a crack in a window across time and space. The paths Chandra chooses are winding, and while his sketches of minor characters are generally fascinating, they are often irrelevant to the story at hand. Fleshing out and connecting the destinies of Sartaj and Gaitonde takes lengthy interludes, some hundreds of pages long. These range from the dubious recollections of a dying secret service agent to Sartaj's mother's memories of rural India and sometimes make a reader yearn to return to Sartaj's determined search for the truth or Gaitonde's fall from grace.

"If you want to live in the city you have to think ahead three turns, and look behind a lie to see the truth and then behind that truth to see a lie," says Gaitonde, recalling one of the lessons of his youth. One could say as much about the ample splendor of Sacred Games. Much more than a simple exercise in crime fiction, Chandra's tour de force is ambitious in all its facets. With its striking prose, ruthless capacity for violence and Gordian composition, Sacred Games offers up a world worthy of the effort required to take it all in.

Sacred Games

• By Vikram Chandra. HarperCollins, 900 pages, $29.95.

• Grade: A

Clayton Moore is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Kirkus Reviews, Dirty Linen, Bookslut and Paste Magazine. He recently moved from Denver to Massachusetts.

Subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News