Sacred Games of Crime and Devotion

In scope and content, Vikram Chandra's masala epic is the literary equivalent of a Bollywood film-three hours plus intermission of heroes, gangsters, and lovers scuffling, bawling, disco-ing, and lip-synching Hinglish. At a whopping 900 pages, Sacred Games accommodates a similarly crazy potpourri of genres-two-parts biting thriller, one-part Godfather, a delicate romance, a dab of human solitude, and an ethereal touch of Rig Veda.

Sartaj Singh is the typical "unlikely protagonist": a divorced Sikh police inspector stationed in Mumbai, jaded but not cynical, exhausted but hardworking. He receives an anonymous tip-off regarding the notorious Hindu gangster Ganesh Gaitonde. Sartaj finds Gaitonde hiding out inside a seemingly impenetrable, surrealistic white cube. Unable to force open the door with a chisel, Sartaj requests a bulldozer that trudges through Bombay while Ganesh-a chatty, clever, and refreshingly original non-villain, begins a narrative of his life through a Sony security camera and speaker system. Once the cube is forced open, the real plot begins to unravel, capering forth when Ganesh and an initially unidentifiable woman are discovered already dead inside, Ganesh having shot them both during the bulldozer commotion. The gangster's story, however, is far from over: his life, as narrated to Sartaj (though the inspector can't hear him), continues after his death in chapters titled, "Ganesh Gaitonde Remakes Himself," or "Ganesh Gaitonde Explores the Self," or even "Ganesh Gaitonde Makes a Film."

Meanwhile, a murder erupts in Navnagar, and a slew of other crimes and squabbles pours into Sartaj's station, some petty, some grave, some alarming. Despite these welcome digressions, which occasionally include background stories of minor characters, the novel neatly alternates between Ganesh's own retelling of his life story and a third-person account of the inspector's investigations after the bulldozer incident. Chandra's apparent literary ambition was to search across space and time for what binds us all as humans. In this respect­-especially in portraying the transcendence of characters even after they are dead-Chandra triumphs. "We are debris," Sartaj thinks to himself, "randomly tossed about and nudging into each other, splitting each other's lives apart."

Chandra, who also authored the award-winning novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain and the critically acclaimed story collection Love and Longing in Bombay, attended Columbia's graduate film program. Sacred Games cements a monolithic slab onto an incipient legacy of educated, and apparently often Columbia-educated, Indian Americans writing in English: In 2000, Jhumpa Lahiri, an alumna of Barnard, won the Pulitzer for The Interpreter of Maladies; Kiran Desai, a graduate of Columbia's graduate creative writing program, was awarded the Man Booker Prize in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss. And it was from Riverside Church in Morningside Heights that Arundhati Roy (Man Booker Prize for The God of Small Things) spoke out acrimoniously against U.S. involvement in Iraq.

Still, Chandra's novel is anything (and everything) but more of the same: Sacred Games manages to evade the already amorphous category of Indian-American diaspora literature. Unlike the works of his compatriots, Chandra's novel only briefly visits the United States; its glimpses into the sullied corruptions of Bombay and the obdurate caste system are treated as essentially Indian concerns. Yet its characters resonate-flailing actresses looking to please men with power and lust, gangsters in precarious luxury, policemen buffeted with bribes while upholding a strange dignity, some notion of justice in a "jungle," as the sharp Parulkar calls the city he's mastered. Chandra shines most as a writer in his moments of careful, consistent characterization, arguably the most daunting demand of fiction.

Religion anchors the story, as the title might suggest, but still affords Chandra leverage in shifting the focus to either a broadly public or a deeply personal level. Firmly rooted Hindu-Muslim animosity, for example, appears simultaneously on an international, communal, and personal level. To recognize Chandra's colliding planes of spirituality, however, requires some competence-or better yet, a native cultural Hindi fluency. Why, to choose just one example, Ganesh's spiritual mentor constantly calls him "Arjun," (the name of the Mahabharata hero who, torn by moral predicament, refused at first to fight a war of dharma) a name that might be difficult for the common reader to understand. An inadequate glossary in the back often demands further familiarity with Hinduism, dexterity with Google, willingness to just plough on, or all three. Even readers who do follow Chandra's homage to ancient epic may be disappointed to find that the allusions are often tenuous and only mildly provocative.

Sacred Games is long and its pace sometimes less than breakneck. If a typical thriller's plot is a briskly loping river, Chandra's epic straddles a web of trudging rivulets, each worth the scrutinizing but somehow forgiving eyes Chandra carries into Bombay. On a linguistic note, Chandra's unapologetic mincing of languages distinguishes his otherwise primarily functional prose, accurate but with a florid tinge in a few well-chosen spots. In the end, Sacred Games really is about the question and not the answer. Though Ganesh dies in the first 50 pages, his last words ask a question that opens the novel's philosophical arena: "'Sartaj Singh, do you believe in God?'" No answers. But 900 enthralling pages later-if we haven't forgotten that question-we might try to conjure up some of our own.