Seven Oaks Magazine.

Book Review: Sacred Games, by Vikram Chandra (HarperCollins Publishers, 2007; $37.95)

In his most recent epic, set in the bustling city of Mumbai, novelist Vikram Chandra introduces us to the city’s criminal underworld, in which clashes of gangs, individuals, identities and cultures take place on an everyday basis.

As the thriller begins, its hero, Inspector Sartaj Singh, a 40-year-old divorcé, is given a tip that will change his life. The story's other protagonist, Ganesh Gaitonde, is reported to be holed up in a concrete fortress in central Mumbai. Singh is first caught off guard — gangsters of Gaitonde's caliber rarely make themselves this easily available, able as they are to lurk just under the radar. The events that then unfold further shock him; Gaitonde blows his brains out rather that give himself up.

Singh is both excited with his involvement in bringing down the infamous crime boss and disappointed that the case is over so quickly. So he can't believe his luck when he is approached by the Indian intelligence service and asked to investigate the circumstances surrounding Gaitonde’s death.

Much of the remainder of the novel involves Singh's quest for answers. The story, however, is anything but a straightforward crime tale. Gaitonde's narrative is revealed slowly in a confessional that tracks his rise to power, his triumphs and his failures. A great strength of the narrative is the complex exploration of identity. We discover that Gaitonde's ego is a mask for deep-seated insecurities, rending his character vulnerable and human. His cunning, ruthlessness and confident street smarts contrast with his fears of losing power and his feelings of loneliness. We discover that Gaitonde is constantly redefining himself and resisting self-definition at the same time.

Similarly, Singh is painted as an average police inspector, who is consistently passed up for promotion. He cannot escape the memories of his police-officer father and finds solace in his whiskey and occasional visits with his widowed mother. Brooding weighs over his broken marriage as does being steadily overtaken by more career-oriented colleagues, and he never seems as confident of himself as his very successful father. Singh's alienation is revealed in his attempts to lose himself in the mundane bustle of everyday life, but the distractions don’t always work. Early in his career, Singh prided himself on not taking bribes while doing his work, and as he carries out his investigation of Gaitonde's death he realizes that though the whole system depends on some amount of corruption. He finds himself wondering why he continues to be a member of the police force.

Chandra has done his homework in studying the workings of the criminal underworld and its characters. The story is convincing in its quotidian detail of the relationships between the various characters and provides a look into a fascinating and mysterious world most of us will never otherwise see.

Another backdrop of the novel is the dynamism and corruption of modern India. India is revealed in its numerous and fascinating historical changes from the horrific impact of the 1947 partition of the country into India and Pakistan and the resulting impact on Singh's family, to the inter-religious, caste and class injustices of life in urban and rural India and how those changes affect the trajectories of the novel's many characters.

And many characters there are. One of the challenges of reading Chandra's novel is keeping track of them all. To address this challenge he has included a long reference list of characters at the beginning of the novel to aid the reader. Chandra also leaves many words on each page untranslated from the Hindi language, leaving the reader to determine the meaning from context or from accessing the glossary. In doing so Chandra refuses to offer the reader a Mumbai that's easily accessible while offering dialogue that one can sense is true to the interaction, intersections and intrasections in the police and criminal worlds of India.

Then there's the length of the novel. At more than 900 pages there are numerous tangents that take the reader away from the story's two fascinating protagonists and one could easily wonder if more judicious editing would have resulted in a more engrossing novel. With that said there is much to admire in Chandra's deviation from much of the standard thematic material in recent South Asian fictional writing. He leaves us with a story with plenty of twists and turns, unpredictability and suspense to keep the reader turning the pages right to the end.