Bombay, Frame by Frame

Cinema and sociology fuse in Vikram Chandra8217;s thriller about the city8217;s cops and robbers

BOMBAY IS IMPORTANT in the book,8221; Vikram Chandra said a few months ago, 8220;but this is not a Bombay book.8221; At 900 pages and many intertwined narratives, Sacred Games is too vast in its scope and intuitiveness to be slotted to a certain city. But given the run-ning inspirations in the novel, it will be difficult not to bookshelf it with the recent Bombay books. Or to ask, must the Bombay book8212;with Shantaram and Maximum City two riveting ad-ditions8212; be so bulky?

Sacred Games plucks one of the most enig-matic characters from Chandra8217;s 1997 collec-tion, Love and Longing in Bombay, and makes him so much more of a mystery. Sartaj Singh is a Sikh police inspector on the Mumbai police force. In a narrative that more or less moves along two strands, we hear his back story and learn about his present assignments and we also get a fascinating account of an under- world don, Ganesh Gaitonde.

This is urban noir as has not before been at-tempted in Indian fiction. No one is as whole-some as his job profile would render him to be; and no one is as despicable as his nefarious ac-tivities could portray him to be. Affairs of state and society8212;in this Bombay-like place where a Gotham City edginess is fuzzying black-and-white divides between good and evil8212;are in-evitably drawn on a constantly widening canvas. The acknowledgements reveal years of research.

But Chandra resists making great sociological and political points in this novel, which really catches the expanding role of the underworld that is so much a part of a society8217;s life. If Bombay8217;s fingerprints can be felt all over this book, it is because Chandra is most devout in locking the many parts of his story with his abiding inspiration: Hindi cinema.

Mumbai8212;especially the underworld8212;has greatly influenced depictions on the big screen and its people have, in turn, modeled themselves on those depictions. For instance, take this passage from Gaitonde8217;s recollec-tions: 8220;8216;If it happens in a film, it won8217;t happen in life,8217; Jojo had said to me. When I8217;d told her about my fear of radiation and bombs and buildings being swept down by a roaring wind, she8217;d said, 8216;It8217;s too filmi.8217; But I knew better, I knew more. I had seen scenes from my own life in two dozen films, sometimes exaggerated and sometimes reduced, but still true. I was filmi, and I was real.8221;

This notion that they are made by cinema and also influence cinema imbues Chandra8217;s people with an exaggerated sense of purpose. They view every moment as being part of a grand narrative, each one8217;s mind8217;s eye watches reality projected on a giant screen.

But what of the cops? Sartaj, son of an upright police officer himself, knows that to be ef-fective, he must operate by the rules of a new matrix. The enemy is often in the detail, and the game must be improvised at every stage. The end often justifies the means. As the 8220;bad guys8221; acquire a larger than life prominence, the 8220;good guys8221; get past neat theories of morality.

Story continues below this ad

To get the job done, they must play a dimly lit match: 8220;Sartaj knew now that he wasn8217;t going to be the hero of any film, even the film of his own life8230; But this was Sartaj8217;s life, stretching for-ward and inescapable. There was nowhere to go but here, to this daily trial, to this untidy mess of a nation. Still, there was work.8221; In the games being played out in Chandra8217;s urban chessboard, there is just the one conso-lation: To have gotten through yet another day.

Much fun will be had by readers striving to put real-life inspirations to Chandra8217;s cast of characters. But those clues are misleading. They indicate a grounding in reality. But Vikram Chandra8217;s novel has a futuristic drift. It takes the present and flights off to extreme co-ordinates. And that8217;s always been the recipe for a great thriller.