When cliches pass off as reality bites
Harsh A Desai

Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra Penduin/Viking. Pages 900. Rs 650.

It would seem that now Mumbai has become not only the favourite haunt of international terrorists but also international best-selling authors. After Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City and Greg Roberts’ Shantaram, both about the dark underbelly of Bombay, now comes, Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games which was seven years in the making Vikram is the critically acclaimed author of Red Earth and Pouring Rain and Love and Longing in Bombay but his new book leaves a lot to be desired. It does not come up to the standard set either by Maximum City or Shantaram.

One of the major problems with the book is that it is 900 pages long and, as we Mumbaikars like to say, is not paisa vasool. What justifies an author from inflicting 900 pages on what P.G.Wodehouse used to call the "unsuspecting public?" Well we have so little time. Either it should be an epic like Tolstoy’s War and Peace or Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. If you are going to write a story which will not grip a reader for 900 pages, you might as well make it short. It should be sprawling in its sweep to sustain attention. This book fails to do that. One of the characters of the book says that once the air of this place gets you, you are useless for anywhere else. This book says this but fails to show why that is the case.

Early on in the book Sartaj Singh, a senior inspector with the Bombay police, gets a tip-off that Ganesh Gaitonde, a notorious gang leader, can be found at a particular address. The Sikh inspector goes there and finds the criminal holed up in a fortress. While the inspector waits for a bulldozer to push open the door to capture Ganesh Gaitonde, he tells the story about how he came to Mumbai and established himself and how he became a top gangster. This is a literary device. This story alternates with the investigation that Sartaj Singh undertakes when he goes into the house and finds a dead Gaitonde along with a dead woman who is presumed to be the latter’s moll.

As Sartaj Singh starts his investigation he suddenly finds that intelligence officers from Delhi have flown down because there are national security implications. What those national security implications are is the most interesting aspect of the book. But it wears off and is not enough to sustain the book. To create atmosphere and to portray the so-called ‘reality’ of Mumbai, Chandra pulls out every imaginable clich`E9 from the closet and airs it, sometimes for 50 pages sometimes for a hundred – actresses selling their bodies to get to the top, police corruption, how gangsters are established and influence politics etc – I mean this twaddle is old hat.

Man tell us something new. If this is supposed reality heighten it, twist it into something. Don’t just dish it out on a plate with watercress and celery.

Since Amrita Shah’s interview of the gangster Varadarajan in Imprint 25 years ago, we Mumbaikars have been living with gangsters in our backyard and are not surprised when we read about this. Another serious problem with the book is that there is minimal romance and minimal sex. You should have thought of us poor Mumbaikars who get so little love!A strong point of the book is that like the city it is truly cosmopolitan. There are Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians in abundance.

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