Sacred Games
is Vikram Chandra’s third work of fiction, published in early 2007. It
is a large novel, both physically as well as in scope and ambition.
Judging by its 900 pages, it doesn’t appear that the author was
slacking off during the seven years that it took him to complete it.
The book is set in turn-of-the-century Bombay and has as its central
characters a mafia don, Ganesh Gaitonde, and a police inspector, Sartaj
Singh. The broad plot could be straight out of a thousand thrillers: a
nuclear device is about to be set off in Bombay. The intention is to
make it appear to be the handiwork of Muslims, in order to ensure all
manner of mayhem. The don Gaitonde has unwittingly helped in the
importation of nuclear material, but panics after realizing this. He
builds a bunker in the middle of Bombay to try and survive the nuclear
explosions. For some reason, he then commits suicide, but not before
tipping off the police inspector to his presence there.

The
book has the police procedural and popular detective fiction as its
templates, but these are merely structural frames. Chandra’s real skill
is as a weaver of stories. Much of the book is devoted to the career of
Ganesh Gaitonde, narrated in the first person: his rise from a
small-time crook to a major don, his criminal exploits, his going
international, his living on a yacht in Thailand, and his spiritual
awakening and involvement with a guru. This narrative is interleaved
with the present, where Sartaj Singh is involved in other police work.
In addition, there are so-called “insets” in which Chandra brings in
additional stories, of characters who impinge upon the lives of
Gaitonde and Sartaj Singh. Here is where Chandra’s remarkable skill as
a teller of stories is revealed. In particular, his account of the
traumas of Sartaj Singh’s mother’s family during the partition of India
is very well done. This inset has little to do with the main plot, but
adds immeasurably to the reader’s experience. Indeed, this kind of
loving attention is lavished upon almost all of the characters in the
book. This is really what sets this book apart. Even if you are not
particularly impressed with the detective work or titillated by the
Pulp Fiction type of gangster narrative, you can soak in the warmth of
knowing the characters intimately.

The
characters themselves are swept up by circumstances beyond their
control. While their stories begin very far apart from each other, they
are eventually linked with each other. In one inset, we are told about
K. D. Yadav, the intelligence operative, who kills two people involved
in the Naxalite movement in the late 1960s or early 1970s somewhere in
eastern India. In another inset very late in the book, the son of one
of these people recruits a struggling but educated Muslim youth called
Adil. After a career as a revolutionary, Adil becomes disillusioned and
escapes to Bombay, where he organizes small robberies. We then realize
that this ties up with an encounter described earlier in the book,
where Sartaj Singh’s partner, constable Katekar, is killed. Sartaj
Singh has to report upon his progress in the Gaitonde suicide
investigation to Anjali Mathur, K. D. Yadav’s protege in the
intelligence establishment. This is but one of the intricate
connections in the book. This common literary conceit, of stories tied
together, runs the risk of becoming too obvious and predictable.
Chandra’s success can be gauged by the fact that the reader never loses
interest in the characters or their stories. His dexterity at tying the
various strands together is remarkable – the metaphor of a delicately
woven carpet comes to mind.

While
Mumbai is the setting for much of the action in the book, this novel is
not about the city. Nevertheless, it does capture much of the ambience
and the lingo, down to the mandatory cussing in Hindi. As far as the
cussing goes (and it does go quite far), one does not expect any less
in a gangsters-and-policemen saga. I do think though that Chandra’s
experiment integrating Hindi cuss-words with English is largely
successful. The words are not italicised, some of them are used in
their verb forms, and the glossary at the end, while reasonable, is not
exhaustive. Judging by reader reactions on Amazon.com, this does not
seem to be much of a stumbling block for people unfamiliar with Hindi
or with the Mumbai variant of it.

Although
the tale is told from several perspectives, Chandra is quite
sympathetic to the enforcers of the law, be they lowly constables and
police inspectors or the cloak-and-dagger types from RAW or IB,
India’s spy agencies. The regular violence and the petty and middling
corruption of the police are depicted in a very matter-of-fact manner.
Yet, the policemen turn out to be quite competent, street smart, and on
the whole, good guys. The intelligence agencies are shown to be on top
of everything. These are the parts that strain credulity, but do not
detract much from the book. As with most fiction, we have to allow the
author his or her premises, and watch what he or she builds from them.
Vikram Chandra builds a very readable novel, but what stays with the
reader long after the lurid details are forgotten, are the embedded
nuggets of the smaller stories.