Music

In Vikram Chandra’s great tome we follow the rise of gangster Ganesh, nemesis of Sartaj Singh, one of the only Sikh inspectors in the Mumbai police force. The two men’s stories run side by side, one the familiar tale of a man on the make, the other of a recently divorced, disillusioned cop whose career prospects depend upon the defeat of this notorious mobster and his empire. What’s fascinating about the novel is the portrayal of modern Mumbai.

Darker than any New York of American mafia fiction, it’s a claustrophobic hotbed of organised crime and spirituality whose residents cower in the shadow of ‘film city’. Chandra depicts a metropolis gone septic: like Nathanial West’s LA of the ’30s, this is a world fuelled by prostitution and plastic surgery, and the desperate desire for stardom is even more poignant in the context of India, where social and financial mobility is so hard to come by.

This is a book about violence, greed, yachts, mafia yogis, nuclear bombs, Partition and Miss India competitions, written in English interspersed with Hindi. Chandra manages to forge an intimacy between the reader and the two often morally unattractive men who rage across these 900 pages. At times, his page-consuming effort to make Sartaj into an endearing cop can seem forced, and you find yourself wishing he would just stand back and allow Ganesh and his vices to take centre stage. Though sometimes repetitive, ‘Sacred Games’ is both riveting and brilliantly vile.