The review copies of Vikram Chandra’s first book since Love and Longing in Bombay have taken wing, and the verdict is –

Mumbai is India’s only genuinely exciting city

– Rediff

We’ll let you know the minute we get through the 900 pages. [Link]

Sacred Games, which comes seven years and a million-dollar advance after the last, was released in Bombay today. It’s due out Sep. 7th in the UK and Jan. 9th in the U.S.:

Sacred Games is thoroughly enjoyable, and Chandra’s protagonists are gripping. Detective Sartaj Singh is still sharp, but he’s older and more cynical than when we met him first. Ganesh Gaitonde’s story starts out being the stereotypical rags-to-tax-free-riches gangster saga, but Gaitonde evolves, suffering depression, inflicting betrayal, reaching for philosophy or the fresh new virgin of day, according to need. But this is still a 900-page-long book, and your stamina might flag around the 400-page mark. [Link]

The plot picks up from the short story ‘Kama’ in the last book:

The novel takes off where Mumbai police officer Sartaj Singh left off… It takes us deeper into Singh’s now-lonely world, and the underworld of India’s most wanted gangster, Ganesh Gaitonde. The setting, once more, is Mumbai. Which doesn’t really come as a surprise considering it is India’s only genuinely exciting city. [Link]

Sartaj’s wife tells him that his face is like that of a terrorist. “I hate the world you live in,” she says before leaving him. Sartaj thinks of replying that it’s her world too, that he lives in the parts she doesn’t see and that he lives there for her sake… He is now in his forties, his marriage long over, his mind tired as he goes after an underworld gangster, Ganesh Gaitonde. [Link]

Chandra is not only a recovering techie:

His mom Kamna Chandra wrote a number of Hindi films (Prem Rog, 1942: A Love Story) among others). One sister Tanuja Chandra is a director and screenwriter (Dushman, Sangharsh, Sur) while the other Anupama Chopra (who is married to Vidhu Vinod) was India Today’s respected film critic for many years. She also wrote Sholay: The Making of a Classic, arguably the best movie book published out of India.

Vikram attended film school at Columbia University in New York, dropped out to write his first novel, and later obtained an Master of Fine Arts at the University of Houston. [Link]

Update: Research is a bitch:

But when he went to meet the hitman, it was “the only time I was really, really scared”, Chandra says. “My journalist friend and I were told to wait in a café in the afternoon for this man to show up. We noticed we were being watched. A young guy walked in and checked out the restaurant–which was fine, because you understand that if you are a hitman, you want to send in the scout first–but when the man himself arrived, he was very aggressive, and I think probably high on something. He couldn’t stop shaking. He didn’t want to be there–he’d been told by his controller to be there–and he scared us. We both wanted to stop the conversation and get the hell out of there…”

“I once asked a very senior policeman in Bombay, ‘Is there such a thing as a clean policeman?’ And he said, ‘If he’s clean, he’s not very efficient.’ All policing is based on a system of exchange, you’ve got to offer value for a person to come to you with information.” [Link]

“The bosses of the bigger ‘companies’–as the gangs are called in Mumbai –actually do function like corporate executives, in that they are keenly aware of their public profiles, and are as eager to spin you as you are to interview them,” says Chandra. “Usually the dons tried to come off as misjudged realists, people who were trying to make their way in a harsh world as best as they could, and help the poor and suffering along the way.” [Link - PDF]

Update 2: Sepia Mutiny links to more reviews.

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