Resumo de Sacred Games - VIKRAM CHANDRA

Set mostly in contemporary Mumbai, where Chandra and his wife, novelist
Melanie Abrams, spend half the year, Sacred Games is, on the surface, a
police procedural novel. In alternating chapters the lives of Sartaj Singh, a
Sikh police inspector, and Ganesh Gaitonde, a Hindu crime lord, converge and
diverge as a story of international criminal intrigue unfolds. But, as any
suspecting reader would surely conclude after hefting its door-stopper bulk, Sacred
Games is about much more than its attractively polished surfaces.

Soon after beginning the novel eight years ago, however, Chandra's research
among Indian policemen, crime reporters and even Indian gangsters and mob
bosses led him to conclude that what seemed like a local crime -had all these
connections to politics and religion and the ongoing struggles between
nation-states in the region. I got this sense of this huge web of events,
people, organizations and forces at work that were affecting people's lives and
linking them together. Then the structure of the book became more and more clear
to me, and it started to grow in size and thematic concerns. At some point I
realized, damn, this is going to be big.

Big it is. And rollicking and provocative and frightening and moving . . .
and more. Chandra, who says British Victorian novelists are among his favorite
writers, displays a Dickensian verve for character and event, with a decidedly
Indian twist, of course. The small bribes and favors that come Inspector
Singh's way, for example, induce no cynicism and hold no real corrupting power over
the redoubtable policeman and are often the hinges for small, comic turns in
the plot. And the murderous Ganesh Gaitonde runs one of the biggest crime
cartels in the country and at the same time tries to both produce popular
movies and pursue a serious, if deluded, religious quest as a follower of the
elusive Swami Shridhar Shukla.

This yoking of seeming opposites within a single person creates an
often-unexpected empathy for the novel's characters that Chandra says is one of
his main goals here. It became very important to me that Ganesh Gaitonde, for
instance, be somebody that the reader really engages with, that if you don't
feel, and in some sense participate, in his desire, then the book didn't work.
So when the book was finished, Melanie was the first to read it. After she'd
been reading it for a couple of days, she marched out of her study and told me
she hated how much I made her like this guy. That was a very happy moment.

Still, Sacred Games seethes with the racial and ethnic conflicts that
have repeatedly brought death and destruction in India and throughout the
subcontinent over the past half century. I wanted very much to treat those
events, Chandra says, because . . . things that happened 50 years ago in a
sense wrote divisions physically into the geography of the region, but also
into people's bodies and minds. Those events continue to have very clear
impacts on our lives today. And I wanted to get at least the feeling of that
and not shy away from its ugliness. The propensity for violence that coexists
with all those other feelings was something I wanted to deal with.

If the terrifying brutality of the violence in some sections of Sacred
Games is not exactly redeemed, it is a least sensibly situated within
Chandra's vivid portrait of the clash and jangle and excitement of modern-day
Mumbai?and India,
in general?and within the flavorful hybrid of English he uses to tell his tale.
Chandra, who reads Hindi and some Punjabi and understands several other
regional languages, purposefully spices his tale with linguistic borrowings.

Bombay is
full of immigrants, Chandra explains. The language that people actually use on
the street tends to be sprinkled with all these words from different regions.
If I was sitting in a bar in Bombay
telling these stories to my friends, I would use Enall of these
words from other tongues in it. It is so much a part of the texture of life in India now and of Bombay in particular that I just wanted to
get that on paper as fluidly as I could.

Not surprisingly, that hybrid language reflects the technological powerhouse
that India
is becoming. It also reflects an unexpected part of Chandra's own personality.
While studying fiction writing in graduate school in Houston, he earned a living as a computer
programmer. He thinks computer programming and fiction writing are not so very
different, since both require constructing a sort of self-contained world in
which various components must interact with each other. In conversation Chandra
refers to himself as a computer geek and admits that his writing studio is
filled with gear and gadgets, screens and speakers, whereas Abrams' studio next
door is a much calmer place.

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