That’s where the similarities end, however. While unstinting in its ambition and flourishing in its characters, “Sacred Games” is not trying to emulate the great Victorian epics. Instead Chandra aims for a more intriguing act of literary decolonization–of low, not high, fiction. His hero–the jaundiced Sikh police inspector Sartaj Singh–brings all the force of noir convention to the mean streets of Mumbai. He is world-weary in love, stalled in his career, with a hint of violence in his set jaw. His principles are dirtied but never drowned by the cesspool of corruption that is Mumbai. He pursues rich as doggedly as poor–the blackmailer of a stylish and adulterous housewife, the murderer of a Bangladeshi immigrant. And although his nemesis, the underworld don Ganesh Gaitonde, dies early on, his unfolding backstory serves as a mirror for Singh’s own darker impulses.
Like the best noir, “Sacred Games” is cinematic in scope. But here the model is Bollywood, not Hollywood. Gaitonde, figuratively speaking, is Singh’s evil twin. They fall in love with sisters, unknowingly. Singh’s mother is a paragon of maternal virtue; the don’s is a whore. And yes, characters do occasionally break out in song, if only in the way that nearly everyone in that hit-crazy country does from time to time.
Indeed, the point is that in Mumbai none of this is quite as implausible as it sounds. By telling his tale in popular form, Chandra has found a vehicle particularly suited to the New India–to its passions and poverty, its outsize dreams and insecurities. Gaitonde may be larger than life in his appetites but not in his ambitions. The reader can recognize the same desperate striving in him as in a lowly Bihari slum dweller, a cop on the make.
Readers might quibble that the book runs on too long, that some of the exquisitely drawn portraits of minor characters are extraneous to the plot. (Chandra did spend seven years working on the novel, apparently not much of it trimming.) One might say the same of a Bollywood movie, though. As a screenwriter explains to Gaitonde as he’s producing his first film, “You can’t get away from the rules.” “Sacred Games” is no less beholden to convention–and at its best, no less rollicking a ride.
