Singing The Song Of Gaitonde

Vikram Chandra, born in 1961, announced his arrival in 1995 with the publication of a tender, exuberant, unruly novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain. The book was 500-plus pages and extraordinarily ambitious in its two-fisted, its excessive bravado. His new novel is almost double that size, but it seems trimmer in a way: it tells one big story. A vertiginous crime thriller in the style of a Hindi potboiler, Sacred Games has two heroes, but its true star is the impossible, and impossibly seductive city of Bombay.

Sartaj Singh, a policeman, is the book’s moral centre, though morality here is a relative condition. He takes bribes—after all, he is a Bombay cop and a realist—but not from those who cannot afford it. He is past 40, divorced, a lone wolf. The reader is privy to his meals, his solitude and desire, his bitterness. In these ways he is reminiscent of characters in police procedural and noir novels, although he doesn’t drink enough. And although the word ‘hero’ is regularly thrown his way, he is upstaged by Ganesh Gaitonde, a career criminal, whose narrative parallels his.

Gaitonde is the devil to Sartaj’s tarnished but unfallen angel. He is "triply secure: in my patriotism, in my spirituality, in my sex". And as with Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, the author’s sympathy is for the devil. Gaitonde gets the best lines; his story is told in the first person, while Sartaj’s is relegated to the third; and when Gaitonde dies, the novel’s narrative engine sputters and coasts to a close. Ganglord, film-maker, insomniac, spy, piles sufferer, yoga advocate, consumer of Gucci and Armani, taker of boys and virgins, teetotaller, assassin, disillusioned bhakt, patriot, philosopher and visionary, Gaitonde embodies Bombay’s corruption and vitality, its virulent double-or-nothing energy, and its—to use a word that appears several times in this book’s accelerating pages—velocity. Emblematic of the city, this violent, amoral man is also a beacon, a force for good, a benevolent leader and patriarch. His last words, "Bas, enough" signal the end of what has been an exhilarating ride. The rest of the book, particularly two "insets", seem unnecessary, if not anti-climactic.

For my money, this is the great Bombay book of the last decade. It gets the city’s corrosive heat, the absolute knockdown democratic fever of it; and it goes some way to explaining why Bombay engenders loyalty among all those who live or have lived there. A telling passage comes around halfway through the novel. Gaitonde has been impotent with his new bride. Then, during the riots, he and his boys torch a Muslim basti. When he comes home, the book’s various themes, among them sex, violence and religion collapse into one:

There was a sloping river in the sky, a sinuous curve of light. There was the sky above, and us underneath. There were Hindus, and there were Muslims. Everything sits in pairs, so brutal and so lovely.

"Close the door," I said.
Now she spoke. "What?"
"You heard."

Detective novels derive their power from brevity, but Chandra is attempting something new, an epic thriller that ranges from India to Southeast Asia and the US, and spans more than half a century. The narrative dips in and out of the heads of a dizzying array of secondary characters. Some appear, rendered in miniature, only to disappear for a hundred pages or more. But where the cameos work, they are dazzling, as in a set piece that features Sartaj’s mother as a little girl during Partition.

And one of the delights, for this reader at least, is the Bambaiyya Hindi, presented without italics, explanation, or apology: the apradhis, khabaris and pocket-maars, the bhais and boys, the gullels and ghodas, the phataks and phachaks, the kutiyas, chaavvis and randis, the bibis and bhabhis, the chutiyas, maderchods and bhenchods, the bidhus, budhaus, bhadves and bhadvis, the mausambis and dudh-ki-tankis, the khaddas and golis, the langotiya yaars and bada dushmans, the dhandas and dandis, the thokos and ghochis, the gaandus, namoonas, haramis, saalis and saalas, the lauda lasoons and langda-lullas. These are words that occur so often in Bombay they can be plucked out of the city’s dirty air. But Chandra has done more. He uses them with such unerring gusto that they become celebratory, incantatory, not a code for insiders but something shared, like a song on the radio.