Sacred Games

Here's my Sacred Games review from the Oregonian

Story sweeps reader deep into gangland Mumbai
Sunday, January 28, 2007

By MIRIAM WOLF
Once in a while you find a book that sucks you so thoroughly into the world it creates that each time you slip your bookmark between the pages and close the cover, you come up blinking, surprised to find yourself in your own skin again.

Vikram Chandra's intricate "Sacred Games" is just such a novel.

Set in Mumbai, India, the book opens as famous gangland leader Ganesh Gaitonde commits suicide inside an impenetrable bunker. Sikh police inspector Sartaj Singh has been mysteriously summoned to the bunker and bears witness to Gaitonde's last words.

Instead of closing a chapter in Mumbai crime, Gaitonde's suicide sets in motion an increasingly desperate hunt for answers: Why would an extremely successful (not to mention handsome and respected) man take his own life? Who was the woman found dead in the bunker with him? How does Gaitonde's guru fit into the puzzle. In alternating chapters, Singh and Gaitonde tell their stories.

Through them, Chandra weaves a dense tale, filled with intersecting characters. Singh is a moral man who must immerse himself in the bribery and corruption that fuel the police department to get anything done. Like any noir hero worth his salt, he's world weary: "Time had visited him with its depredations, and worn him down, but he liked the feeling of being dilapidated. It was restful."

But unlike Philip Marlowe, Singh's crime-fighting tools include a form of meditation:

"He began to breathe deeply, in a rhythm he had developed in a thousand stakeouts. If he could get it just right, heat and sweat would recede, and time would turn inward on itself until it whirlpooled into stillness, and he was relieved of the world while he was still in it."

Gaitonde, meanwhile, is the very picture of an international criminal, consorting with movie stars and amassing fortunes, even when he's commanding his gang from inside prison. But a powerful spiritual guru comes into his life, asking nothing from Gaitonde but his devotion -- and some light gun-running duties.

With mounting horror, both characters begin to discover the true dimensions of the guru's plans: Singh discovers that the bunker in which Gaitonde ended his life is a bomb shelter, while men who Gaitonde send on a secret smuggling errand for his guru begin to die of radiation poisoning.

"Sacred Games" can be read and enjoyed as an edge-of-your-seat thriller. It has plenty of action, violence and blood -- and if you can't curse fluently in Hindi when you're done with it, then you weren't paying attention. But Chandra's sure-handed writing injects the novel with layers of depth and meaning; he captures history, politics, current events race, class and religion. He clearly loves Mumbai and evokes it in dazzling detail: You can smell the streets, taste the foods and hear the cacophony of the big, chaotic city on every page. And through his evocation of the Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims and Christians who interact with each other in this crowded nation, we see how old wounds and new hurts can spark into sudden violence.

In the 928 pages of "Sacred Games," Chandra has a lot of space to stretch out. He uses it to show how the strands of people bound together through family, loyalty or simple geography weave a web that is as interconnected as it is inescapable.

Chandra reads from "Sacred Games" at 7:30 p.m. Monday at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside St.

Miriam Wolf is a Portland writer. She last reviewed "Ines of My Soul" by Isabel Allende for The Oregonian.