Bookplanet: the new big novel everybody's talking about: Sacred Games, an Indian gangster epic (think literary Godfather)

An Author’s Vision of the Mean Streets of Mumbai -- by PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN/NY Times

A sweet Arts and Crafts bungalow with potted pansies and a puppy in the window seems an unlikely place to encounter a celebrated Indian author who possesses an intimate knowledge of what happens when a Mumbai gangster’s AK-47 meets up close and personal with an adversary’s skull.

The Dickensian sweep of Bombay, as Vikram Chandra prefers to call the city — the cops on the take, the slums patrolled by mobsters, the whores turned Bollywood starlets, the headboards in million-dollar co-ops that slide away at the touch of a button to reveal hundreds of thousands in hidden rupees — is itself a protagonist in “Sacred Games,” Mr. Chandra’s long-awaited 900-page novel (excluding glossary) just published by HarperCollins.

The latest in what one London critic calls the “subcontinental doorstopper” school of epic Indian fiction, “Sacred Games” combines the ambition of a 19th-century social novel with a cops-and-Bhais detective thriller. (Bhai is a Hindi and Gujarati term for wiseguy.) The book, Mr. Chandra’s third, was the subject of an intense bidding war among New York publishers, one apparently presided over by Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of prosperity, who bestowed upon this 45-year-old cherubic-faced author a seven-figure advance.

As sprawling as the heat-drenched city it richly portrays, “Sacred Games” delves into many emotionally charged worlds of contemporary India, in particular the spidery links between organized crime, local politics and Indian espionage that lie below the shimmering surfaces of its economic renaissance. Money and corruption form the golden thread. In interweaving narratives and voices, “Sacred Games” takes on even larger themes, from the wrenching violence of the 1947 partition of India to the specter of nuclear terrorism.

The central story revolves around Ganesh Gaitonde, an existentially confused Hindu don with an aptitude for erasing people, and Sartaj Singh, a divorced insomniac Sikh police inspector first introduced by the author in his acclaimed 1997 short-story collection, “Love and Longing in Bombay.” Like spices in an Indian auntie’s grinder, the book mixes English with Hindi, Urdu, Marathi and mobster vernacular. (When a nervous gangster says, “I felt my golis sweat,” you know what he means.) It also revels in comic gruesomeness.

For Mr. Chandra, who teaches at the University of California , Berkeley, “Sacred Games” is the culmination not only of seven years of writing — he said he was surprised by the book’s length — but also months of Dashiell Hammett -style pavement pounding in the company of a crack crime reporter in Mumbai.

Like the police inspector, Singh, the soft-spoken Mr. Chandra, who could pass for a graduate student, followed cellphone leads down squalid lanes and up narrow flights of stairs lined with video monitors to have tête-à-têtes with real-life hit men with names like Hussain the Razor.

He met the Razor in his gangland den in south Mumbai. Though lacking formal education, the gangster spoke sophisticated Urdu and, Mr. Chandra observed at the time, wore very expensive European cologne. “It was an extraordinary detail to note about a gangster,” said Hussain Zaidi, the 38-year-old crime reporter to whom the book is dedicated.

Shortly thereafter, the mobster was gunned down after rendezvousing with his lover alone, a foolhardy undertaking that the police, with whom the Razor was cozy, had discouraged. Desire had triumphed over fear of death.

In Mumbai, where Mr. Chandra’s family still lives, he communed with “a yoga-practicing vegetarian hit man.” Indeed, “Sacred Games” is rife with characters with topsy-turvy moral compasses.

“They have the kind of power that can shut down a city, but they’re living in constant fear,” Mr. Chandra said. “So they construct a comprehensible moral universe for themselves. I asked one of these guys, ‘How can you justify murder?’ And he said, ‘Look, their death is already written,’ pointing upwards. Murder in their view is part of the divine play of the Lord.”

Thus “Sacred Games.”

The book’s initial germ was a rackety shootout not far from Mr. Chandra’s family’s co-op. Like many of the city’s elite, he had some firsthand experience with extortion.

He comes from a creative, precocious family: his mother, Kamna Chandra, is a well-respected screenwriter best known for “Prem Rog” (“Virus of Love”), directed by the legendary Raj Kapoor , and “1942: A Love Story,” a film directed by Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Mr. Chandra’s brother-in-law. Mr. Chopra is married to the author’s youngest sister, Anapama, a well-known film critic.

His sister Tanuja Chandra’s first English-language film, “Hope and a Little Sugar,” a Muslim-Sikh love story set in New York right before Sept. 11, recently won best feature film at the South Asian International Film Festival in Manhattan.

Over the years, Mr. Chandra said, friends and relatives have routinely received extortion calls, most notably Mr. Chopra. Around the time “1942: A Love Story” came out, bodyguards appeared at the house. “Suddenly my little nieces and nephews were growing up with men with guns as part of the landscape,” Mr. Chandra recalled. “I felt freaked out the first week. But over time, it became ordinary. We chatted about cricket.”

Mr. Chandra arrived in Mumbai as a 15-year-old after a peripatetic childhood that included boarding school in Rajasthan. (His father, Navin, is a retired chief executive of an international trading company.) He was, by his own account, “a weird little kid” with thick glasses and a literary bent, gravitating first to science fiction.

“I was a nerd, to put it bluntly,” he said. “I would walk around in circles bouncing a ball in a trance and making up stories in installments in my head.”

Seeking a writing community, he persuaded his parents to send him to college in the United States, where he got his B.A. at Pomona College in California and then moved to New York to attend film school at Columbia. But in the university’s Butler Library one day, he stumbled upon an original 1840 edition of the autobiography of Col. James Skinner, a 19th-century soldier and adventurer.

“I saw it as a novel,” he said, and it became the basis for his first novel, “Red Earth and Pouring Rain.”

That book was written when he was a graduate student and under the tutelage of two important mentors: John Barth at Johns Hopkins and Donald Barthelme at the University of Houston . To supplement his income as a teaching assistant, the nerd morphed into a geek, developing a side business as a software programmer and writer. (Technology remains an obsession.)

Last year Mr. Chandra wed his longtime sweetheart, Melanie Abrams, a novelist and fellow faculty member, in a double ceremony: a Jewish one in Los Angeles, followed by a three-day extravaganza in Mumbai. He describes his long-distance courtship of Ms. Abrams, 34, whom he met at an Asian arts festival in California, as “a Victorian e-mail relationship.”

The couple spend about five months a year in India. Their home in Berkeley is an intriguing blend, with the requisite hot tub in the backyard and, in the front hall, a lotus-leaf menorah and a shrine to Ganesh, the elephant-headed divinity, “the god of beginnings, the remover of obstacles,” Mr. Chandra said.

Early photos of the extended family hang on the walls. In many ways, he observed, the story of his own family is that of post-independence India: the movement from villages to cities, the rise of the middle class and an obsession with education that laid the groundwork for a generation of accomplished writers from the subcontinent, including Salman Rushdie , Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri, Vikram Seth and Kiran Desai.

With the notable exception of Ms. Roy, most are part of an intercontinental literary diaspora. The prizes and big advances snapped up by authors writing in English outside India has elicited public sniping among Indian intellectuals, prompting Mr. Chandra to take them on eloquently in a widely read essay in The Boston Review called “The Cult of Authenticity.”

William Dalrymple, the British historian who lives in New Delhi, said he believed that much of the criticism was unfair. Still, he said, the perception persists of “a bunch of middle-class guys who got out of India at the first possible opportunity living it up in Manhattan while passing themselves off as third world real McCoys.”

Though “Sacred Games” was released in India last summer, Mr. Chandra has yet to receive feedback from mobsters. But they welcomed their eggheaded Boswell — once he assured them that he was writing fiction.

“Even gangsters are aware of the value of spin,” Mr. Chandra said before heading out to a local Indian restaurant. “Invariably, their last line was, ‘If you ever have a problem, come talk to me.’ ”