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More reviews by Niranjana Iyer
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Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra
Readers acquainted with VIKRAM CHANDRA's 1997 short story collection Love and Longing in Bombay will find several characters in SACRED GAMES familiar. The doughty police detective Sartaj Singh, the protagonist of the story Kama, stars in this novel, as does his trusty sidekick, the police constable Katekar. But sharing the spotlight with Sartaj this time around is Ganesh Gaitonde, an underworld don considered India's most wanted gangster.
No Manichean good-versus-evil story, this: Sartaj, nominally the hero, is soon revealed to possess a dodgy moral compass, while Gaitonde, self-confessed murderer of innocents, has a backstory that tempts the reader into a sneaking sympathy for him. At its most basic, Sacred Games is a cops-and-robbers chase through the underworld of nineties Bombay. But to strip the story to its spine is to ignore the array of colorful characters who bring Bombay to opulent life. The cast includes Zoya Mirza, Bollywood star and fourth runner-up in the Miss Universe contest; Bipin Bhonsale, the Hindu fundamentalist politician; Katekar's young sons, the euphoniously-named Rohit and Mohit, to name a few.
Sacred Games is storytelling at its very peak. Characters leap off the page to punch one in the gut, the narrative keeps the reader panting to know what happens next for every one of its 900 pages, and the author's mastery of his subject -- nothing less than India itself -- makes the novel as redolent of the country as skinny-dipping into a vat of hot sambhar.
The book is filled with non-English words (a mix of Hindi and Marathi, for the most part). The conversation is sauced with a vast range of expletives, all again in Bombay-talk, and the setting is a Bombayite's Bombay. There are knowing references to yaars and chaavis, to bastis and kholis; many of the terms will be incomprehensible to people from, say, the south of India, let alone the California where Chandra teaches (creative writing at UC Berkeley).
Here, then, is an India being offered on its own terms to the reader, who may be Indian or non-Indian; familiar or unfamiliar with the country; and significantly -- a reader whose identity is not key to the creation of the work. Self-assured and confident about its audience, the narrative never pauses to elaborate upon its many references to events in Indian history, the Bombay film industry, or even Indian street food, and there's no helpful glossary on the last page.
Anita Desai, in her introduction to Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, likens the writing to a "horse at full gallop that will not stop and wait" in its refusal to slow down and explain. It's a perfect simile for Chandra's own muscular style and the boldness of his vision. Sacred Games is reminiscent of Midnight's Children in several ways -- in its disregard for convention, its polyglot prose, its consciously cinematic imagery, but most of all, in the fearlessness and vigor of its prose. If you've been underwhelmed by recent writing from India that, with a few exceptions, seems all too predictable in image and language, writing that wears its post-colonial heart on its sleeve and its reliance on the plot devices of arranged marriage and East-meets-West on its dust jacket -- then run, don't walk towards Sacred Games. This thrilling, epic work is nothing less than a kick to the seat of the pants of recent Indian literature.
The events of the book, fantastic as they might seem, are often based in reality. The story of religious riots orchestrated with the connivance of the machinery of the state, the financing of much of the Bollywood film industry by the underworld, and the shootouts between rival gang leaders, to name a few episodes, occurred in Bombay not long ago. Sacred Games will leave some readers wondering how one the city's inhabitants retain their sanity and dignity in this brutal, cynical environment -- and others asking how anyone could bear to leave the exuberant chaos of this megapolis to emigrate to quiet gray shores.
Sartaj comes to embody this dichotomy -- the simultaneous attraction and repulsion the country imposes upon its inhabitants. Not above taking the odd bribe, ready to exhibit casual violence in front of a thirteen-year-old boy, cognizant of the corruption of the system and of his own participation in the same, he is still the best hope for justice for many of India's dispossessed. If Sacred Games were a film, the audience would be arguing whether Sartaj was hero or villain even before the credits scrolled on, Ebert would face off with Roeper, and Madonna would sport a t-shirt proclaiming "I heart Ganesh Gaitonde". Of course, if we lived in a just universe, the book would suffice to create the buzz.
Niranjana Iyer
31/12/2006
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Niranjana Iyer is a writer living in Ontario, Canada. She blogs at Brown Paper. |
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