"...the great Ganesh Gaitonde, gangster, boss of the G-company and wily and eternal survivor" is the most compelling character in crime fiction since Don Corleone offered a deal that couldn't be refused. The Hindu Don takes center stage in Vikram Chandra's much-touted literary epic, Sacred Games, bought by HarperCollins for over $1 million following a frenzied 2005 bidding war. Coming out in January, the 900-page novel that took seven years to write is a gritty exposé of Mumbai's underworld and the police corruption and world events that keep it flourishing. Chandra, 45, says that the happiest day of his life was when his wife, writer Melanie Abrams, marched out of her study holding the manuscript and told him: "I hate the way you made me like this guy Gaitonde."
"I didn't want Gaitonde to be a monster, a cardboard cutout of evil," Chandra says. "I wanted the reader to engage with him. We all tend to play off our goodness against another's badness, but millions of times a day when I was writing this book, I was aware that these people are just like me. Waiting on a line of 60 people in a bank in India while the clerk is reading a newspaper, I've thought: wouldn't it be nice to be Gaitonde?"
The other major character in Sacred Games is the policeman Sartaj Singh, who first appeared in the story collection Love and Longing in Bombay (Little, Brown, 1997). As Chandra remembers, "The Sikhs from my childhood were always imposing, elegantly dressed, with handkerchiefs matching their turbans; this was how I pictured my policeman." But Sartaj, too, is a flawed man. Early on in the writing, Chandra asked a very senior police officer, "in the tone of an injured citizen," if there were such a thing as a clean cop. If there is such a thing, he told Chandra, he's not very efficient.
The conversation made Chandra think about how it's impossible to function in a culture where corruption touches every level of life and be above it. Ordinary citizens in India face this every day, he says. "What I saw was that you play the game and struggle to maintain some sense of dignity. Sartaj does this by remaining small. He does the best he can."
Born in New Delhi and educated in the United States, Chandra divides his time between Mumbai (formerly Bombay), "the city that caught my heart," and San Francisco, where he teaches at Berkeley. Going back and forth, Chandra says, makes him more observant and more sensitive to the city that is so much a part of all of his books.
Unlike Mario Puzo, who wrote The Godfather claiming he never met a gangster, Chandra went out into the field and spent time with people in India who operate on both sides of the law, although as soft-spoken, boyishly handsome and gentle as Chandra comes across, it's hard to imagine him in the company of criminals—until you see how vividly he captures them in his novel.
When Chandra met the people he was writing about, he found it hard to write the kind of book that would have a good guy who could rise above it. "I didn't want a pure hero. Some people were angry at this depiction, but to me the gray areas are what make people interesting." He hopes his affection for Mumbai and its people comes across in Sacred Games.
The experiences and conversations Chandra had while working on the book give an undeniable authenticity. Descriptions of shootings and the effects of physical violence (what exactly does a head blown away by a bullet look like?) came from people who had witnessed these crimes.
Real life led him to the subject of organized crime. The mid-'90s were the height of gang warfare in Mumbai, and Chandra found himself living in a city where people were getting killed every day; he was under armed guard at his sister and brother-in-law's house (his family is in the film industry). As he tells it, while sitting in a policeman's office in South Bombay, there was a call that a music and film producer had been assassinated, a man he'd talked with at a party a few weeks before. "I suddenly felt like I didn't know enough about the culture that surrounded me, and I decided to ask questions and then I became obsessed." Chandra's take on the crime novel, especially the noir novel, is that as the detective follows the crime, he moves through society, from high to low, and uncovers things that explain the culture.
Tracing all the layers and characters that appear in the book took a long time—"Eric [Simonoff, Chandra's agent at Janklow & Nesbit] kept asking me how it was going, and I kept saying I was in the middle. I was in the middle for seven years!"—and a lot of space. "I really did think I was writing a shorter book, but as I got closer to the subject and to the characters, I kept discovering the connections with politics and religion and the intelligence agencies and the geopolitical strategies that are happening in the subcontinent, and the book got bigger and bigger."
Chandra, who's also published the novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain (Little, Brown, 1995) and the story collection, both Commonwealth Writers Prize winners, sees himself more as a storyteller than a writer. He wrote Sacred Games incorporating the slang of Mumbai "as if I were telling the story to a friend in a bar. I would speak English, but with all these words from various languages." Mumbai, he explains, is not just a physical location but a culture. "It's a city of immigrants, of opportunity, and a multilanguage city." The audience he imagines is a friend, his mother, his sisters. Chandra compares the language to England's cockney: colorful and looked down upon by purists, but, he says, "It has an energy. People speak it with great pleasure because it is so specific to the place." In Sacred Games, Gaitonde describes a prostitute: "I didn't need to see any more to know what sort of raddled randi sold her chut at stations in the back of an auto."
HarperCollins will put a partial glossary in the finished book and a more complete one on the Web. But Chandra, who decided not to italicize the slang, says readers adapt to unfamiliar words. "I experienced this as a child in India, reading British children's books." And there is a compensation: "After reading this book, you can go to Bombay and be well equipped to tell someone off."
Chandra attended boarding school in Rajasthan and had a year of college in Bombay before enrolling at Kenyon College in Ohio. "I felt the U.S. was a paradise for studying writing. I would go to the American library in Bombay and read the Kenyon Review, so I applied to Kenyon." He soon transferred to Pomona College because it was near Los Angles and he was interested in film. Next came film school at Columbia University, which he left halfway through to start working on Red Earth and Pouring Rain. He wrote that novel while getting an M.A. from Johns Hopkins University and an M.F.A. at the University of Houston, teaching and working as a computer programmer.
For Chandra, the experience of writing Sacred Games has felt "surreal." After he handed in the manuscript and got news of the auction, he remembers he and Melanie looking at each other and asking, "What the hell is going on?"
He says modestly that he doesn't know why the book generated so much interest among publishers. "You sit in a room and you write and you write.... Melanie's joke is that I could be happy in a cave with a fast Internet connection and 10 books."
And what of the expectations? HarperCollins, having spent heavily to acquire the book, is also investing in a serious pre-pub marketing campaign. It distributed glittering gold galleys at BEA and has sent galleys in serial form to booksellers, in the spirit of the great 19th-century novels. So far, rights have been sold in 14 countries and the novel was the #1 bestseller in India when it launched in August, selling an unprecedented 20,000 copies in the first three weeks.
Now it's up to Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity. As Gaitonde says early on: "[L]et Lakshmi go with happiness, don't be afraid, and she comes back to lavish blessings on you."
