Sacred Games By Vikram Chandra

Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games, in its epic sweep of characters and dazzling diversity of a richly imagined world, is the closest one can come to The Great Indian Novel — the elusive grail that has goaded and haunted every practitioner of Indian Writing in English.

Ostensibly, the novel is a noir thriller that epitomises the quest of a middle-aged cop for the ultimate trophy of his career — India’s most wanted gangster. But that’s just the frame: Chandra plays with the conventions of a detective novel to weave an opulent exhilarating narrative of crime and punishment, friendship and betrayal, the inherently corrupt human condition, the quest for love and the longing for redemption.

Although Sacred Games has a dizzyingly varied cast of minor characters — each with a fascinating story to tell and who slip in and out of the novel’s over 900 pages with unobtrusive ease – the action centers around Sartaj Singh, a 40-something Sikh cop trying to crack the mystery of Bombay’s satanically seductive ganglord Ganesh Gaitonde.

Sartaj’s life takes a dramatic turn when one day he gets an anonymous tip-off giving him the opportunity of a lifetime to capture the larger-than-life criminal overlord of the G-company. It is not, however, the chase so much that rivets the reader’s imagination, but Gaitonde’s story, told by that czar of crime in the first person, in his inimitably self-glorying tone and authentically Mumbai lingo that fascinates and repulses at the same time and moves the crime narrative beyond bourgeoisie canons of good and evil.

The author has conjured up the glamour of evil and its many seductive incarnations that inhabit the twilight world of Mumbai’s underworld and showbiz in all its lurid and colourful details. But he has eschewed the temptations of moralizing and dips inside the twisted minds and hearts of mafia dons, corrupt policemen, venal politicians, contract killers, pimps, call girls, molls and maniacs who make the garish underworld with an acuity that is a triumph of the novelistic imagination.

In many ways, Sacred Games is probably the first Indian novel of the street, with an exuberant cacophony of street voices and a mélange of free-flowing, hybrid lingo that define the tone and tenor of the novel. Puritans may cringe at the author’s reckless use of Bombaiyya Hindi with all its spontaneous vulgarities and swear words, but this is precisely where the achievement of the novel lies ? the creation of an authentic Indian English language, sans any glosses and footnotes, that fits the characters and emanate from something deeper in a Mumbaikaar’s life.

The process of Indianizing English that was epitomized in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children has now been stretched to the limit in Chandra’s novel that has a generous sprinkling of local words like the bhais and boys, the gullels and ghodas, randis and chutiyas, the bidhus, bhadves and bhadvis, haramis, salas and salis, celebrating Bombay’s hybrid imagination and vitality.

Clearly, the 45-year-old author loves the city and has done his research well. In the seven years he took to write his magnum opus, Chandra met an interesting array of gangsters and their henchmen. He was struck by the corporatisation of crime and the incestuous linkage between the underworld and that machine of mass enchantment called Bollywood. “They are like corporate bosses, with their own PR spin, so their stance is very avuncular: ‘Come, come, sit, what do you want to know?'” he said in an interview.

These one-on-one meetings with impresarios of crime perhaps accounts for the novel’s amoral tone while describing the sleazy underlife of the swinging, humming, sexy metropolis.

In fact, more than any character, it is the many-faced Bombay, bristling with insatiable desires, runaway ambitions and dark deamons of a million abused humans, that is the central protagonist of Sacred Games.

Winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book in 1995 (Red Earth and Pouring Rain) and Best Book in 1997 (Love and Longing in Bombay), Chandra has sculpted an epic saga in Sacred Games that interweaves stories of ordinary and not-so-ordinary people in a city that has become the epitome of life’s appetite for itself and the will to live despite floods, riots and bouts of mass insanity that occasionally grips this ‘mayanagari’ (the city of illusions).