It’s been seven years in the making and reportedly bagged a seven figure advance after a heated bidding war on three continents. A $300,000 marketing blitz has spread the word across the literary landscape, and it’s been translated into 11 languages. Now Sacred Games (HarperCollins) by Vikram Chandra is in the hands of readers, all 900 pages of it – a heft that can hardly be supported in the subway or even in bed!
Defying and subverting genres, Chandra takes what could have been your regular cops-and-robbers thriller and transforms and reinvents it as high drama, an epic tale, setting it in the complex, frenetic city of Mumbai of the 1990’s.The protagonists set on a collision course are police inspector Sartaj Singh and mafia overlord Ganesh Gaitonde, and the novel is as overpopulated as Mumbai itself with scores of unforgettable characters. Originally Chandra had envisaged the novel at just 300 pages, but as his characters and the machinations of the city took over, the novel took on a life of its own: “What I became really fascinated by was the mesh of this huge network of events and human lives and political agendas and historical forces sort of threading through each other, making this weave, and individual people caught up in this, often being affected by things that were thousands of miles away, and not knowing why.” Desi readers will get a real pleasure out of reading Hindi words peppered through the novel and lots of Bombaiyya slang, which brings the city alive. In fact the book has so much street talk and so many characters that it comes with a glossary and a listing of a who’s who! Chandra did much of his research pounding the pavements of the city and actually meeting with the bhais of the underworld. Was he ever in danger? He says with a disarming smile: “For the most part everyone was very avuncular as in ‘Come, come, sit and have a cup of chai.’ Especially the higher level guys, they operate like they are nationally famous, they operate like corporate heads, and they are interested in spin. It’s not that easy but you can get to talk to some of them.
“A lot of the lower level guys were harder to find, because they are always afraid. A lot of them never sleep more than one night in the same place. Everyone was perfectly courteous and invariably the last line was – and I’m translating from Bombaiyya now – ‘If you ever have a problem, come talk to me!'” Chandra is bemused at the interest his research of the underworld has generated, pointing out that a novel is all about the world of imagination: “I think we live in a somewhat confessional age and, like it or not, authenticity is attached to personal experience, but that’s not what writers do. Writers lie for a living. And I think we should remember that!”-Lavina Melwani |
Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games
