Books
Mumbai confidential
by Carol Cromie
Set in Mumbai’s underbelly and peopled with good guys and bad guys, each corrupted in their own special way, Sacred Games has the whole shooting-box: power and coercion, loyalty and betrayal, abject poverty and obscene opulence, revenge and forgiveness, love and lust, saints and sinners, pimps and prostitutes (compromised Bollywood stars), mothers and sons, history and mystery.
More than a detective story, more than a thriller, this is a social study of two men on either side of the law in a cultural and religious miasma. It’s not just bloody – the killings and maimings are as graphic as any movie – it’s brilliant. The first paragraph is a treat, even if it is attached to a whacking 900-page doorstopper.
The nuances of human behaviour are wonderfully caught by Vikram Chandra; the talk is richly spiced with Hindi words and curses. There’s no glossary, but the message is clear. All mundanity comes to life here: street life, domestic life, relationships, food, drains, traffic, heat and beauty.
The main man is middle-aged policeman Sartaj Singh, the only Sikh inspector in the Mumbai force, like his father before him. His career lacks lustre, his ethics have collapsed into brutality and graft, his marriage has failed and he lives alone. His job is all he has. He and his partner in crime-busting, family man Constable Katekar, share a modest slice of the occasional spoils that are a police officer’s lot, sending the rest up to line the pockets above. The bucks stop only with the deputy commissioner, who’s in a spot of bother courtesy of the alliances and accommodations he has had to make along his way to the top.
We meet Inspector Sartaj and his sidekick in that first paragraph where the cuckolded Mahesh Pandey of Mirage Textiles is swinging a tiny white dog above his head propellor-style before flinging it five floors to the street below. The splattered brains of Fluffy are all in a day’s work for Sartaj, as is the murder awaiting him back at the station.
But his life is about to change. Garnesh Gaitonde, the most wanted gangster in India, is holed up downtown with a mysterious woman in a bunker. This scion of Mumbai’s mafia will speak to only one man: going-nowhere police inspector Sartaj Singh. When Sartaj tires of their communication and sends in the bulldozers, Gaitonde takes matters into his own hands, and it is Sartaj’s job to get to the bottom of it all. An opportunity has fallen into his lap and suddenly people in high places are bending his ear.
Sacred Games is not just Sartaj’s story, it is Gaitonde’s and teeming Mumbai’s, told in lurid detail, with flashbacks and fast-forwards taking in several generations. Mumbai’s streets are peopled with a fine cast, so many that the book includes a dramatis personae, and all are handled with enlightened good humour. The dead Gaitonde delivers his first-person account from the other side, reliving his life story at great length and with a mystical bent. The least successful sections of the book are four chapters called Insets, which seem too ambitious in their scope, barely linked to the whole and likely to make even a patient reader impatient just when the bodies are piling up.
Delhi-born Chandra divides his time between Mumbai and Berkeley, California. His family has close Bollywood connections, so Sacred Games, written over seven years with a million-dollar advance, brings together all his worlds. Perhaps he could have coalesced them into a melting pot a few hundred pages lighter.
SACRED GAMES, by Vikram Chandra (Faber, $39.99)
