VC: I've been interested in this for a long time, just like anybody else reading the newspapers. Then, when I was writing the last book, which was the collection of short stories in which Sartaj Singh first appeared, I made contact during my research with some people from that world, though that story had nothing to do with organized crime. I became friends with a couple of these guys and they would tell me stories about what really went on behind the headlines. So as I was finishing my last book, I was already starting to think of this as a possible topic.
In fact, "Love and Longing" was published in '97, and the month before it came out, the second chapter of "Sacred Games" was published in the New Yorker, in its very early form. That was the image I started with, this gangster sitting inside this concrete house talking to a policeman over the intercom. And I think that came from some sense of how much fear was in the air, of terror as a kind of constant in our everyday lives: The fear of crime, of organized crime, and then the larger sense of terrorism, and then the stuff that was happening at the border. I think it's very much a part of our existence now in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
I was just in the San Francisco airport coming here to Toronto and there was a sign that said, "Threat Level Orange." You start thinking about how there are these reminders every day and how a large part of this is very useful to the powers-that-be, to governments and organizations, and so on, and then straightforwardly how it's useful as a way of selling you things.
But there's also that saying, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there's not someone hunting you." The paradox is that in some sense it's real. That also became part of the thematic interest of the book. You have that intelligence agent who reads thrillers. He thinks about how thrillers are stories that enable us to confront disaster. So nuclear explosions are something that only happen in thrillers: You finish the book, you put it on your bedside table, and you go to sleep feeling safe because it happened in the book.
We're so surrounded by fiction, and then when it actually happens, we can't really understand it as reality. We have difficulty actually dealing with it. When Gaitonde sees the second plane flying into the WTC on TV, his first reaction is, "Is it a film?" I got interested in that interplay between this media-saturated world that we live in and our sense of our own reality -- how we construct reality and how we resist reality sometimes because we're so used to fiction.
"Sacred Games" and Detective Fiction
AC: Going back to something you said earlier, about noir. Many reviewers have mentioned Chandler when discussing "Sacred Games," noting the hard-boiled detective influences on the novel, and you also reference Dev Anand, who I understand was a kind of noir figure in Indian film. So I wondered, first of all, if you could talk about how you work with the detective fiction genre and against it in the book, and second of all, if there is another Indian tradition that you were also working with.VC: I was certainly aware of all the detective predecessors, so to speak. In certain strands of Hindu thought, there is this idea that the only way you can transcend form is through form. In a lot of spiritual pursuits, for instance, they want to deny the physical world because they think that's what is going to take you toward enlightenment. In this way of thinking the only way you can get enlightenment is through the world itself. I actually enjoy these forms very much, and I really didn't want to do some kind of pastiche or parody or a condescending literary look at them because that's too easy, and because all you end up doing is creating another form for yourself, even as you pretend that you're above form.
In reference to Dev Anand, he was in a lot of early black and white 50s versions of mysteries and crime stories. What's also interesting about those movies is that to an Indian who has grown up later than that, someone like Sartaj Singh, they also represent a certain kind of innocence that's lost forever. There's something paradoxically sweet about those movies. They embody a kind of post-Independence optimism that things are going to get better rapidly; now that we're free, everything's going to be OK. This is something that people like Sartaj certainly don't feel anymore. They're at the other end of the spectrum: they're not convinced anything's going to get better ever. So Dev Anand works as a kind of marker of that old kind optimism and hope and innocence.
