Entry tags:

2008, fiction

Sacred Games
By Vikram Chandra

This is book is 900 pages long, and I read all 900 of those pages because I liked the first sentence so much: "A white Pomeranian named Fluffy flew out of a fifth-floor window in Panna, which was a brand-new building with the painter's scaffolding still around it." The second sentence is just as good: "Fluffy screamed in her little lap-dog voice all the way down, like a little white kettle losing steam, bounced off the bonnet of a Cielo, and skidded to a halt near the rank of schoolgirls waiting for the St. Mary's Convent bus." (I love alliteration!)

I'm sorry to say that the 899 pages that follow do not manage to live up to the impossible promise of those sentences, though the delightful formality of the prose is consistently maintained. The going is slowed down a little by Chandra's liberal use of Hindi words and phrases - there's a handy-dandy totally NOT exhaustive glossary in the back, so lots of flipping pages around - but it's stilla pretty speedy read, given its length. And the glossary is undeniably useful. On p. 5, I learned the word "gaandu," or "ass-fucker," as in "Love is a murdering gaandu." On p. 15, I was introduced to the concept of "OBC" – "Other Backward Caste." I happened to finish reading it just as my boyfriend, at the urging of his boss, watched all the Apu films, and thinking back to the Salman Rushdie books I never finished and that one four-hour long Bollywood take on ET that I watched start-to-finish all hopped-up on Chai, I'm starting to think that maybe India's economy is growing as fast as it is because Indians have managed to not totally destroy their national attention span with rapid-cut editing and Twitter. Only a theory.

So, as befitting its length, this is one of those telescope books – moving backwards and forwards in time, through the airspace of a massive city (Mumbai) and into the homes and offices of a huge cast of characters (in addition to the glossary, there's a useful who's-who), and up and down the structures of power through the course of a police investigation into the inexplicable suicide of a flamboyant gangster. There is, as you may assume, a very large and complicated possible conspiracy afoot, and Our Hero, Sartaj Singh, whose unofficial last name is TheonlySikhontheMumbaiPoliceForce, is, uh, Our Hero, charged with suit-wearing government types with Figuring Shit Out. So, basically, we've got a cop story/mystery/life-of-the-city narrative, and it works on all those levels quite well, though not perfectly. There are periodic rather heavy-handed references to the size/character/feel of the city, but they're a bit clumsy and unnecessary. This last sentence of this passage follows up a nice observation and kills the shit out of it:

A shaded walkway led to the cold room...The windows were closed against the heat, against the throbbing of the sun, and the air inside the entryway was engorged with the ripe, round exhalations from the two rows of bodies stacked against the walls, in sheets on double racks. The sheets were damp and the ground below the racks was slimy, slick...
'Arre, saab,' the attendant with the novel said, 'Wait until the air-conditioners break again. Then you'll really smell something.'
'Wait until it rains and the leaks start coming through the walls,' the other one said with large satisfaction. They you'll really have fun.'
There is a certain pleasure we take in thinking about how bad it gets, Sartaj thought, and the imaging how it will inevitably get worse. And still we survive, the city stumbles on.

The story is, as stories of this type tend to be, mostly buildup, and the last-act revelations aren't quite as spectacular as they'd need to be to match the energy of the rising action, but certainly satisfying, and pretty well-played. I read a library copy (great cover) and gave my mom the paperback (different great cover) for her birthday.

p. 17 Majid was stroking his moustache, which was a flamboyant handlebar like his army father's. He maintained it with faithful indulgence, with foreign unguents and delicate pruning, in the face of all mockery.
p. 145 Mutual interest was the lubricating oil that ran the great and small machinery of the world, and Sartaj would use it to send criminals skidding into captivity...It was foolish tho expect success, but Sartaj couldn't help savouring the anticipation. He would find the killers, he would catch them, he would win: the thought of victory sparkled in his chest like a tiny burn, and he took energy from it all day. (This totally reminded me of Homicide.)
p. 225 Evergreen Valley was three massive buildings in a rectangular compound edged by small two-storey houses. The only green Sartaj could see were a few patchy hedges scattered at odd angles between the buildings.
p. 281 'You watch. One heavy rain and trains will stop. This chutiya central line, if ten schoolboys stand in a row and piss on the tracks, bhenchod service is disrupted.'