With Sartaj146;s Eyes

Vikram Chandra explains his continuing obsession with a special character

FOR SOMEONE WHO thrives on struc-tures and forms, Vikram Chandra con-fesses he has never made the Sikh con-nection. 8220;It8217;s true, I had a very good Sikh friend in boarding school8230; Then there was Mission Kashmir, which I co-wrote, and its depiction of a single Sikh character8230; Years after its release, a Sikh gentleman8212;a complete stranger8212;ob-jected to my appointment to the faculty at Berkeley because of my 8216;disgraceful8217; portrayal of a member of the community,8221; he says. And then there8217;s Sartaj Singh. 8220;I really don8217;t know where he came from,8221; Chandra relaxes visibly. 8220;After Love and Longing in Bombay I thought I had finished with all the characters.

But I kept finding myself looking at life through Sartaj8217;s eyes8212;how would he react to this, how would he deal with that situation?8221; For those who haven8217;t dared to take on the bulk of Sacred Games, here8217;s the primer: At its barest, it8217;s a chor-police story; the cop is Sartaj Singh of Kama, a short story in Love and Longing.

Reviewing the collection, critic Vince Benedict wrote in Scope: 8220;Singh is one of those creations that all writers secretly hope to stumble upon: The character who instantly compels with his believability. Reflective, moral, cynical yet filled with hope, Singh 8230; is a modern fictional de-tective who simultaneously doubts and keeps faith in the power of detection to make sense out of life.8221;

For Singh, Chandra may be eternally grate-ful, more so when he realised8212;interestingly, only in retrospect8212;that his protagonist was free of the baggage that the majority or another minority religion might have entailed. 8220;Besi-des,8221; he smiles, 8220;dandyism is a very prominent characteristic with Sartaj. It8217;s something that becomes North Indians so unself-consciously.8221;

It8217;s a trait borrowed from one of Chandra8217;s friends, a Sikh, of course. 8220;My characters are pastiches, composites of real-life people,8221; he admits. 8220;But there8217;s no character who can be conclusively identified.8221;

He goes to some trouble to emphasise the point. After all, brother-in-law Vidhu Vinod Chopra and he had a very public fallout with Maximum City8217;s Suketu Mehta after the latter in-corporated dinner-table conversations at the Chopras into his Mumbai book. Now, with Sa-cred Games being referred to as the book that Maximumwasn8217;t, does revenge taste sweet? Chandra would rather not go there. After months of denying that Sacred Games is a Bombay novel at all, he says, 8220;It feels great that its intended audience identifies with it to the extent of giving it that tag.8221;

But 900 pages! Chandra is suitably abashed. 8220;I had no idea it was going to be so big. In fact, I had each chapter in separate Word files, so I didn8217;t even know how much I8217;d written. I had a clear structure in mind, so I actually started at the beginning and wrote through to the end.8221;

Story continues below this ad

As a teacher of creative writing at Berkeley, structure is bread and butter for Chandra, so he takes it particularly hard critics have sug-gested editing Sacred Games for a neater, lighter work. His eyes light up at a reference to the novel8217;s mandala structure, the same form Sartaj watches a group of Tibetan monks cre-ate in sand. 8220;I8217;m so glad you said that, I8217;ve been biting my tongue, telling myself I must-n8217;t overexplain the book,8221; he says.