Adecade ago Vikram Chandra was one of the golden boys of Indian lit, his short fiction appearing in The New Yorker, his massive first novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995), published to strong acclaim. Red Earth and Pouring Rain seemed to conform to what Western publishers and readers were craving from India at the time; like one of John Barth's big novels from the 1960s, it was a wild and exotic romp that spanned centuries and continents with a typewriting monkey protagonist. Hailed as a "magic-realist blockbuster," the novel invited the usual comparisons with Salman Rushdie--one critic even suggested Chandra was "leapfrogging Rushdie."

But while Chandra displayed no shortage of talent and imagination, one's vision around this time began to blur amid the proliferation of outsize novels coming from the subcontinent--books that seemed "as big as India," as one writer remarked of Red Earth and Pouring Rain. Another reviewer quipped: "Entire forests have gone to blade in the past decade or so to make way for the current crop of Indian novelists writing in English." Void of the slight note of condescension, these sentiments were echoed by Bengali novelist Amit Chaudhuri, who fretted that the big, bustling novels of Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry and Vikram Seth were overshadowing the equally strong traditions of short story and novella writing in India. The assumption, Chaudhuri argued, "is the tautological idea that since India is a huge baggy monster, the novels that accommodate it have to be baggy monsters as well." Red Earth and Pouring Rain was, for all its pleasures, one of those "baggy monsters," and one craved simplicity and more control.

One found that in abundance in Chandra's next book, Love and Longing in Bombay (1997), a jewel of a short story collection. There his prose cascaded through his beloved city like Christopher Doyle's freewheeling camera in Wong Kar Wai's movies. Chandra seemed more at ease with the long-form short story, which played to his gifts as a storyteller yet held his youthful verbosity in check. Love and Longing in Bombay also succeeded as an enduring portrait of Bombay's naughty '90s, reminiscent of Fitzgerald's interwar tales. There was raw romantic agony and an unbridled sexual hunger in these stories. (The story "Kama" is justly celebrated for its eight-page sex scene, one of the most bittersweet break-up fucks in modern letters.)

Chandra also deftly incorporated elements of Indian popular culture, along with B-genres--romance, mystery, ghost stories, soldier stories, gangster stories--in a manner unique for Indian fiction at the time. It wasn't just his knowledge of popular culture that struck the reader; it was the lack of condescension or Rushdie-style parody. Perhaps the secret of Chandra's success could be explained by his close relationship to the city's film industry. While many Indian writers have Bollywood in their blood, Chandra has it in his bones, too. His mother has written scripts for some of the most popular Hindi movies; his sister Tanuja is an emerging director in the same industry; another sister, Anupama, is a seasoned film journalist; and his brother-in-law is Vidhu Vinod Chopra, whose film Parinda is hands down the most powerful and influential Hindi gangster film of the last two decades, admired and quoted by Bombay's dons for its authenticity. Chandra, too, has dabbled in the industry; he is a co-writer of Chopra's film Mission Kashmir, with Suketu Mehta, whose nonfiction paean to Bombay, Maximum City, raised the bar, too high perhaps, for others writing about this city.

But after Love and Longing Chandra went quiet on us for almost a decade, which is a daring thing for any writer to do these days, especially since the book industry seems to be suffering from long-term memory loss. The world--and India's place in it--has changed greatly since the publication of his story collection: His subject and themes are far more visible globally, and Bombay has undergone a far more intense literary mapping, courtesy of Mehta but also, among others, Gregory David Roberts, author of the international bestseller Shantaram. That new world is, in many respects, Chandra's theme in his epic crime novel Sacred Games, an infernal history of Bombay and India in the last decade.

Like a typical police procedural, Sacred Games begins with a day in the life of a cop named Sartaj Singh, whom readers of Love and Longing will remember as one half of that eight-page coupling in "Kama." Sartaj is a tough guy who has what it takes to work the streets as a detective, but he stands out in his milieu for his chivalry, his religion (Sikh) and, not least, for not being quite as on the take as his colleagues--or as his corrupt and politically influential boss, Parulkar, a protégé of Sartaj's father, who was a legend on the Bombay police force.

As we follow Sartaj on his travels, Chandra's tone is light, ironical, rather like that of Carl Hiaasen. Sartaj is called to mediate a warring upper-middle-class couple's dispute; he finds the wife wielding a knife at hubby after hubby has thrown her prized dog out the window. But as with any noir, the novel's texture soon grows darker. A dead teenager's body is found in a basti, a working-class area full of poor Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh. Someone needs roughing up in the station. And then a late night tip-off, but this time a once-in-your-career tip-off: "Do you want Ganesh Gaitonde?" For Sartaj, a "divorced police inspector with middling professional prospects," this is manna. Gaitonde, long rumored to have been in exile, is the head of one of Bombay's most formidable "companies"--a common euphemism for the city's crime families. In fact, Gaitonde is such a prize that Sartaj's partner, Katekar--who talks of the bhai (mafia don) as if he were a film star--asks when they arrive at his suspected hide-out, "But you're sure you want to make him yours? Why not wait for someone senior to arrive?"

Sartaj, however, perseveres. While he and his partner perspire in extreme heat, trying to talk the notorious bhai out of his redoubt, Gaitonde, basking in his air-conditioned bunker, passes the afternoon by goading them with insult and legend. Eventually a bulldozer is summoned. While the driver musters the courage to destroy the building, Sartaj begins to brood on questions that will ultimately lie at the heart of the novel's mystery: "What was Gaitonde doing back in the city? Who was the informant who had given him to Sartaj?" Sartaj doesn't get any of his answers that afternoon. When he and his men storm the bunker, they find Gaitonde dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound--and, in another room, the corpse of an unknown woman, probably the bhai's last moll, and a stash of new Indian currency. The mystery deepens when shadowy figures from the world of Indian intelligence continue to be intrigued by the dead bhai. Where did all that new currency come from? And why did Gaitonde's final lair turn out to be a nuclear bunker? These questions are given an extra twist when we learn that Gaitonde "was connected to certain very important people, to events at a national level. Whatever brought him back here, that could have an effect on future events." So Sartaj stays on the case, as a proxy for figures from the upper echelons of India's secret state.

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