Shortly thereafter, the mobster was gunned down after rendezvousing with his lover alone, a foolhardy undertaking that the police, with whom the Razor was cozy, had discouraged. “It was an extraordinary detail to note about a gangster,” said Hussain Zaidi, the 38-year-old crime reporter to whom the book is dedicated. Chandra observed at the time, wore very expensive European cologne. Though lacking formal education, the gangster spoke sophisticated Urdu and, Mr. He met the Razor in his gangland den in south Mumbai. Chandra, who could pass for a graduate student, followed cellphone leads down squalid lanes and up narrow flights of stairs lined with video monitors to have tête-à-têtes with real-life hit men with names like Hussain the Razor. Like the police inspector, Singh, the soft-spoken Mr.
Sacred games vikram chandra crack#
Chandra, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, “Sacred Games” is the culmination not only of seven years of writing - he said he was surprised by the book’s length - but also months of Dashiell Hammett-style pavement pounding in the company of a crack crime reporter in Mumbai. (When a nervous gangster says, “I felt my golis sweat,” you know what he means.) It also revels in comic gruesomeness.įor Mr. The central story revolves around Ganesh Gaitonde, an existentially confused Hindu don with an aptitude for erasing people, and Sartaj Singh, a divorced insomniac Sikh police inspector first introduced by the author in his acclaimed 1997 short-story collection, “Love and Longing in Bombay.” Like spices in an Indian auntie’s grinder, the book mixes English with Hindi, Urdu, Marathi and mobster vernacular. In interweaving narratives and voices, “Sacred Games” takes on even larger themes, from the wrenching violence of the 1947 partition of India to the specter of nuclear terrorism. Money and corruption form the golden thread. Chandra’s third, was the subject of an intense bidding war among New York publishers, one apparently presided over by Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of prosperity, who bestowed upon this 45-year-old cherubic-faced author a seven-figure advance.Īs sprawling as the heat-drenched city it richly portrays, “Sacred Games” delves into many emotionally charged worlds of contemporary India, in particular the spidery links between organized crime, local politics and Indian espionage that lie below the shimmering surfaces of its economic renaissance. (Bhai is a Hindi and Gujarati term for wiseguy.) The book, Mr. The latest in what one London critic calls the “subcontinental doorstopper” school of epic Indian fiction, “Sacred Games” combines the ambition of a 19th-century social novel with a cops-and-Bhais detective thriller. Chandra’s long-awaited 900-page novel (excluding glossary) just published by HarperCollins. The Dickensian sweep of Bombay, as Vikram Chandra prefers to call the city - the cops on the take, the slums patrolled by mobsters, the whores turned Bollywood starlets, the headboards in million-dollar co-ops that slide away at the touch of a button to reveal hundreds of thousands in hidden rupees - is itself a protagonist in “Sacred Games,” Mr. 9 - A sweet Arts and Crafts bungalow with potted pansies and a puppy in the window seems an unlikely place to encounter a celebrated Indian author who possesses an intimate knowledge of what happens when a Mumbai gangster’s AK-47 meets up close and personal with an adversary’s skull.