Sacred games /

THIS immense, demanding novel can be recommended, with scarcely a cavil, to well-educated Indians who have lots of free time, are fluent in (at the very least) English and Hindi, and have a thorough knowledge of South Asian politics; Hindu, Muslim and Sikh religious practices; and the stars and story lines of hundreds of Bollywood films. Longtime Bombay residents will have an extra advantage, since they will know, without consulting a gazeteer or Google, why the city is now called Mumbai. Prospective readers who don't fit this profile will have some catching up to do. Fortunately, "Sacred Games" supplies the uninitiated with enough information to prevent them from giving up in despair - although not, it must be mentioned, with much solicitude for slow learners. If Vikram Chandra were a swimming instructor, he'd be one of those no-nonsense types who toss pupils into the deep end of the pool and then walk away, confident that immersion and panic will provide sufficient motivation for staying afloat. So it goes here. Those who plunge into the novel soon find themselves thrashing in a sea of words ("nullah," "ganwars," "bigha," "lodu," "bhenchod," "tapori," "maderchod") and sentences ("On Maganchand Road the thelawallahs already had their fruit piled high, and the fishsellers were laying out bangda and bombil and paaplet on their slabs") unencumbered by italics or explication. A "selective glossary" appears at the back of the book, but consulting it is more troublesome than simply forging ahead. Context and repetition can work wonders, though, and those who persevere will discover that what one character describes as "some knocked-together mixture, some Bombay blend" of English and Hindi, begins to make sense - especially the naughty bits - in the same way that Anthony Burgess's futurist Russian-English in "A Clockwork Orange" eventually becomes comfortably ho-hum. Still, Chandra's second novel, and third work of fiction, attracted a bidding war among American publishers, with the pre-emptive offer rumored to be in the million-dollar range, not because hordes of potential customers, having mastered "Finnegans Wake," craved a new linguistic challenge. The appeal of "Sacred Games" lies in its mix of several commercially reliable formulas (the thriller, the mob saga, the police procedural) along with considerable helpings of sex and violence plus enough genrebending twists to keep pulp aficionados off balance and intrigued. A scene that would form the climax of many conventional crime or suspense novels pops up at the beginning of "Sacred Games." One night Sartaj Singh, the only Sikh police inspector in all of Mumbai, receives a call at his home. "Do you want Ganesh Gaitonde?" asks an unfamiliar voice. The question is rhetorical. Countless law enforcement officials in Mumbai, not to mention India and beyond, would love to capture this infamous gang boss. Following up on the tip, Inspector Singh and Ganpatrao Katekar, his longtime friend and constable, arrive at "an impregnable white cube," a bunkerlike structure outfitted with security cameras. Through an intercom, Singh begins a conversation with the person inside, evidently Ganesh Gaitonde himself, who politely declines the inspector's invitation to surrender and instead begins telling his life story, starting with the murder that produced his first big payday and the seed money for his spectacular criminal ascent. This narrative is interrupted by the arrival of a bulldozer; when the police force their way into the building, they find that Gaitonde has shot half his head away. Near his corpse lies that of a woman, a bullet wound in her chest. The end of Gaitonde's life hardly closes his case. Almost immediately, Singh receives a visitor from Delhi, a woman highly placed in the government's research and analysis wing, or RAW, who urges him to find out everything he can about Gaitonde's last days (why he returned from his long, enforced exile; why he lacked his usual complement of guards) and about the woman found with him. Above all, this investigation must be kept hush-hush: "Security concerns at the highest level are involved. Is that clear?" While Singh plods off dutifully in search of details, Gaitonde, somewhere in the afterlife, resumes the autobiographical narrative so rudely interrupted by his suicide. The plot moves forward along parallel tracks and, with a few variations, in alternating chapters: Singh's discoveries are amplified and explained by Gaitonde's posthumous confessions. Chandra marshals these two approaches dexterously, using the grinding, pedestrian nature of Singh's labors as a counterweight to the increasingly grandiose and preposterous dimensions of Gaitonde's life of crime. It begins to seem as though trysts with movie stars, the safe haven of 130-foot yachts and a scheme to set off a nuclear device somewhere in Mumbai all amounted to just another day at the office. Those who like their tales of potential apocalypse served up lean and bloody may find "Sacred Games" a little too well done. The novel devotes much of its space and energy to establishing the complex characteristics of its two central figures and the tumultuous city, "this labyrinth of hovels and homes, this entanglement of roads," that sustains and imprisons them. Singh, in his early 40s, divorced and with "middling professional prospects," tries to balance his sense of honor (inherited from his father, also a police inspector) with the necessity, now that his well-to-do wife has left him, of accepting the bribes and kickbacks that enable him to stay financially afloat. He keeps in mind the words of his superior (and flamboyantly corrupt) officer and mentor: "We are good men who must be bad to keep the worst men in control. Without us, there would be nothing left, there would only be a jungle." Gaitonde speaks for the jungle. Utterly shameless (he brags about executing an informer by hacking off his arms and legs with a sword), he is also mordantly funny: "A reputation for ruthlessness can do wonders for peace." "A rumor is the most cost-effective weapon ever, anywhere." "Riots are useful in all kinds of ways, to all kinds of people." Once he becomes an investor in Bollywood films, Gaitonde also becomes a critic. "The scenes," he remarks after viewing one of the Schwarzenegger "Terminator" movies, "seemed flat because even in the most dramatic moments the American actors spoke quietly to each other, as if they were discussing the price of onions. And there were no songs." By paying homage to both Ian Fleming and James Joyce, Chandra risks alienating the constituencies of each - of writing a thriller that's too serious and a serious novel that's too much in thrall to an absurd story. But in the post-9/11 era, madmen intent on blowing up all or even a small part of the world don't seem quite as unrealistic as they once did. If you keep that in mind, you may find "Sacred Games" as hard to put down as it is to pick up. 'We are good men,' a policeman explains, who must be bad to keep the worst men in control.'