Sacred Games

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The New Yorker wrote about it in a lengthy review. It was roundly lauded in publishing-industry magazines and online sites, and in the Sunday book supplements of the nation’s largest newspapers. Really, most of the nation’s critics have been beside themselves over this ambitious novel, and with good reasons.

Vikram Chandra’s intricate Sacred Games was one of the more anticipated titles of 2007, the subject of an international bidding war among publishers.

Chandra is the award-winning Indian author of the novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain and the short-story collection Love & Longing in Bombay. He teaches creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley. Seven years of his life went into writing Sacred Games and it shows in the book’s scope.

On the surface, it’s the story of India’s most-wanted master criminal, Ganesh Gaitonde, and his relationship with corrupt Sikh police inspector Sartaj Singh, who has made a career of tracking him down.

But this is no simple Holmes-Moriarty adventure or merely an entertaining read. It works on numerous levels, the most vibrant of which paints a realistic landscape of India and the intrinsic machinery that allows it to move forward, when the laws of sociology suggest the country should have collapsed long ago. It addresses crime, politics, religion, the caste system, history, business, the psychology of power, the juxtaposition of good and evil, and the effects of merging cultures on a nation—to name a few of its topics.

The hub of the book’s action is the port city of Mumbai, formerly Bombay, a metropolis of an estimated 18 million people—from corporate moguls to slum dwellers. Mumbai is the teeming center of India’s entertainment (Bollywood) and business industries—including such disparate trades as banking and prostitution—and is one of the world’s most ethnically diverse cities. Opportunity and intrigue rule. So do graft, bribery and various strata of other corruption.

It is against this setting that Chandra’s stories-within-a-story spin, and what glorious diversions they are.