"Sacred Games" focuses on two men, Sartaj Singh, a forty-something Mumbai policeman whose career and personal life have both plateaued, and Ganesh Gaitonde, a bhai, or mafia boss, who rose to power from poverty. The two lives intersect when an anonymous tip leads Singh to Gaitonde's secret hideout, a concrete bunker where the don has holed up with a woman. While Singh figures out how to break in, Gaitonde watches through a surveillance camera and talks to him over an intercom, telling him the story of how he gained his first foothold in the world of organized crime and realized that he was not like other men.
Though the scene ends with Gaitonde's suicide, the bhai continues the story of his life even after death. The novel cuts back and forth between the third-person account of Singh's investigation and Gaitonde's first-person narration. The structure of the book is further complicated by a series of four insets, almost short stories within the novel, that diverge from the main plot to provide back story.
Like the novel, my conversation with Chandra covered an impressively wide range of topics, from detective fiction to Hindu aesthetics to computer programming and chaos theory. His book has been called "an anatomy of modern India," but by the end of the conversation I felt that this description short-changes his work, which speaks to modern life in general, in any city of the world.
Film and Organized Crime
About.com: You have a background in film -- your mother and one of your sisters are screenwriters, and you went to film school yourself. How has that influenced your fiction?Vikram Chandra: I'm sure it has quite profoundly influenced the way I tend to think and imagine. It was a large part of my imagining of this book. For instance, it influenced the narrative technique in large sections: instead of using narrative transitions, I would just cut. And just in terms of police procedure, detective, noir, and all that -- I was very aware of the visual traditions of those things.
And I knew right from the beginning that the Hindi cinema was going to play a large role. As is widely known, money flows between the underworld and the movie production business. I think that happens all around the world, but in India especially because only quite recently have movies been recognized as a legitimate industry. The government and the banks have only been allowed to give loans for filmmaking for the last few years. Before that, if you wanted to make a movie and you were looking for a loan, you had to ask shady financiers who gave you money at very high rates of interest, and you didn't ask them where it came from.
AC: Is that how you became interested in crime as a topic for a novel?
VC: Well, crime has certainly been treated a lot in Indian movies and other media over the last twenty years, but it was more immediate to me because I've grown up on the peripheries of the film industry. I knew people who were getting extortion calls and getting shot at. And then it came very close to home. My brother-in-law, the producer and director of "Mission Kashmir," started getting these calls, and he refused to pay up, and suddenly there were armed bodyguards following him around. So quite apart from the general feeling that one had in the 80s and 90s about the increasing power of organized crime, this was all happening to me and my family, to people I love. That was the immediate provocation.
