Fiction/Thriller
SACRED GAMES
Vikram Chandra
Language: English
Published: 2006
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Pages: 947, Paperback
Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games is an immensely demanding novel. At nearly a thousand pages, you would be better off picking it up only when you have lots of free time. A fair bit of understanding of politics and various religious practices in India wouldn’t hurt either. If you have all that covered, reading Sacred Games will prove to be a thrilling ride. If not, you will have to take to Google on occasions to understand the references it makes to various places and events because of the author’s blatant refusal to let outsiders completely in on a city that isn’t theirs.Sacred Games, a vivid portrayal of modern India, focusing mostly on Bombay, introduces us to a Sikh policeman named Sartaj Singh who carries the weight of a broken marriage, and can’t seem to climb up the ranks like his more ambitious colleagues. When Singh had an affluent wife, he didn’t take bribes but he no longer has that option. A tip-off leads him into the hideout of a famous gangster, Ganesh Gaitonde. At the impregnable white cube with green windows, which resembles a bunker-like structure and is fitted with security cameras all over, a voice, through the intercom, tells Singh that he will never get through.
It is apparently Gaitonde himself. And that is how Singh begins a conversation with him. After declining to surrender, Gaitonde starts telling Singh his life story. He talks about the first murder that he committed that gave him enough money to build a criminal empire. The narrative is interrupted when a bulldozer arrives and the police force their way in, only to find Gaitonde has shot himself. But Gaitonde’s death isn’t the end of it as Singh is told to further investigate the gangster’s last few days in a top-secret manner. The plot moves forward in parallel narratives that also include Gaitonde’s posthumous confessions.
Seven years in the making and with a seven-figure advance, Sacred Games was indeed an ambitious undertaking that could have gone horribly wrong. But Chandra manages to establish his two main characters and the city, with its many labyrinths, in such a relatable way that you simply won’t be able to get the book out of your head, while you are reading it, and long after you are done. We won’t say reading it is going to be easy but one of the charms of the book lies in the fact that it constantly challenges you to discover new things through a little bit of hard work.
Sacred Games is now an Indian web television series on Netflix starring Saif Ali Khan, Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Radhika Apte.
