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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In Vikram Chandra's new novel, "Sacred Games" (HarperCollins; $27.95), Ganesh Gaitonde, a sort of Bombay Al Capone, expresses his contempt for the English-speaking classes, people oblivious of the rampant criminality underpinning their serene existence: "These Englishwallahs were always superior, as if the world they lived in was some other one, far from my barrack, my streets, my home." Describing the exploits of Gaitonde and his determined pursuer, Sartaj Singh, a Bombay cop, Chandra's intensely ambitious nine-hundred-page work seems, at times, an attempt to make amends for the ignorance of Englishwallahs. Gaitonde not only relishes murder and destruction but also dabbles in filmmaking, works closely with Indian intelligence, and gets involved in a Hindu extremist plan to detonate a nuclear bomb in Bombay and provoke India into a suicidal war with Pakistan. Few pages go by in "Sacred Games" without a reminder that "the world is shot through with crime, riddled with it, rotted by it," or, as Gaitonde's spiritual adviser, Guru-ji, puts it, "Life feeds on life, Ganesh. And the beginning of life is violence."
This violence takes explicit form in many scenes of torture and murder. Englishwallahs may be discomfited to learn that "the sound of a finger breaking is not very large, but it is dry, sharper than you expect. It is a quick, creaky sound, a small firecracker bursting." Chandra's stylish, worldly prose attains a Tarantinoesque rapture when it describes Gaitonde severing an arm with a sword, slashing at a human eye with a razor blade, or burning, in an "elegant way," a slum: "There is the crisp tinkle of glass and the small sparking flares now bloom into flowing rivers that run smoothly across rooftops, down walls, into windows. The fire speaks now, it makes a joyous, throaty grumbling as it eats, there is no stopping it."
In the interconnected stories of "Love and Longing in Bombay" (1997), Chandra gracefully evoked a city of immense struggles, dreams, and pain. In "Sacred Games," that city, dominated by megalomaniacal criminals and corrupt cops, has put on much "resplendent and rotting flesh." But then Bombay itself has transformed rapidly in the past decade and a...
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