More Love and Longing in Mumbai

A conversation through a scratchy intercom between a police inspector and a crime lord in his custom-made bomb shelter seems an unlikely catalyst for a swarming sequence of stories worthy of “The Thousand and One Nights.” The policeman is the dogged and dapper Sartaj Singh, one of the few Sikh officers on the Mumbai police force. The gangster is the thuggish but seductive Ganesh Gaitonde, who has clawed and bludgeoned his way from the utmost poverty to a peak of sinister eminence. But the true protagonist of Vikram Chandra’s new novel, “Sacred Games” (HarperCollins, 928 pages, $27.95), is the teeming and (sometimes literally) explosive city of Mumbai. One of the fastest growing and certainly the most ungovernable city on our planet, Mr. Chandra’s Mumbai is not so much labyrinthine as tentacular.The relentless spread of the city creates a new, particularly Indian form of dislocation. All the old divisions of religion and language, and caste and class, remain in place but are now under threat, like ancient structures on suddenly shifting foundations. To capture this megalopolis, as slippery as it is vast, Mr. Chandra resorts to the oldest of devices: He tells tales.Story-telling is as old as India. The anonymous animal fables of the “Panchatantra,” committed to writing in the sixth century, come from much earlier sources. Even the sophisticated Somadeva, court poet to Queen Suryamati in 11th-century Kashmir, compiled his colossal “Ocean of Rivers of Stories” (the English translation of which occupies 10 thick volumes) on the basis of tales whose origins are lost in time. Most of these narratives, set within a suspenseful frame story and cunningly interlaced, have spread in subterranean fashion throughout the world; carried by merchants and travellers, they resurfaced later, far from their Sanskrit originals, in the fables of Boccaccio and LaFontaine. Like proverbs, the tales represented a narrative currency negotiable at every frontier.Mr. Chandra uses such ancient devices to bind his ultramodern narrative together. The novel opens with the spiteful killing of a white Pomeranian named Fluffy. This is perhaps Mr. Chandra’s sly way of alerting us to the entanglements that follow. His novel is one of the most brilliant shaggy dog tales I’ve read in recent years. Ostensibly a detective novel, in which a lurid panoply of murders unfurls in gruesome detail, “Sacred Games,” despite its length, is compulsively readable. Clever as the plot and subplots are, the characters carry the narrative. Sartaj Singh, the detective who figured in Mr. Chandra’s last book, “Love and Longing in Bombay” (2006), is wonderfully realized, as is his gangster antagonist. But the other personages, from Parulkar, Singh’s corrupt superior, to Zoya Mirza, the rising Bollywood star, to the sinister swami Shridhar Shukla, along with a dozen others, change and deepen as the novel unwinds. Even the side stories, such as the passing anecdote of Talpade, a policeman who falls chastely in love with a saloon dancer named Kukoo and comes to grief, linger in the memory.Mr. Chandra makes no concessions to the non-Indian reader, but this somehow strengthens his novel. He sprinkles phrases in Hindi, Gujarati, Urdu, and Marathi throughout his dialogue. There’s no glossary, but it doesn’t matter. When someone begins by saying “arrhe” (“hey”) or calls a buddy “bhai” (“brother”), you get it; and the frequent obscenities, most in Mumbai slang, come through loud and clear. When one character says, “Bunky was thokoed by two freelance shooters,” you don’t need a dictionary. In fact, to have translated words like “gaandu” or “bhenchod” literally — which I cannot do in these pages — would have skewed the narrative; in fact, they function as a form of spoken punctuation, like certain four-letter words in English.Mr. Chandra often has his characters humming Hindi popular songs or quoting poems, which he also leaves untranslated. Despite initial puzzlement, this too works. It gives the creeping impression for non-Indian readers that we’re eavesdropping on uncensored conversations (translations are given on Scribner’s Web site, if you really want to know). Among other things, “Sacred Games” is a celebration of Indian popular culture, and Mr. Chandra lovingly evokes everything from food to street slang to pop songs and cinema.This is a novel of voices, each of which is unmistakable. For while stories link the characters, from the poor in their hovels to the rich in their high-rises, the smutty aura of Mumbai arises from the prose itself. To re-create a city Mr. Chandra has fashioned a language equal to it, a promiscuous English open to all comers, as greedy and as vivid as Mumbai itself.eormsby@nysun.com

More Love and Longing in Mumbai

More Love and Longing in Mumbai

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