Like a sculptor making small, delicate chips in stone, Chandra moves things along at a measured pace, building his characters, finding glorious little details in the minutiae of everyday Bombay life, yet remaining sharply focused on the main thrust of his detective story. Perhaps what is so compelling about the first third of Sacred Games is the way Chandra opens up the guts of the Bombay police department. Whole sections of the force seem subcontracted by the very gangsters from whom they are sworn to protect the public; class, caste and confessional resentments play out bitterly; and everyone in uniform, it seems, takes kickbacks and bribes, some, like Parulkar, for personal enrichment. Those who still take pride in the job, in a good day's detective work, reinvest the ill-gotten gains in their poorly funded department.

This milieu has been portrayed vividly and unsparingly in Maximum City, where Mehta had a ringside seat at beatings meted out by Bombay's finest, and in S. Hussain Zaidi's true-crime Black Friday, a pioneering look at the massive police investigation into the March 12, 1993, bombings in Bombay. (Sacred Games is dedicated to Zaidi.) But Chandra's is a first for Indian fiction, and in its realism, its torrents of cop banter and casual slurs, and moments of poignant ordinariness--Sartaj's restless, lonely nights--one is reminded of Bertrand Tavernier's gritty movie L.627, John Burdett's Bangkok thrillers and even the world-weary law-enforcement heroes in the novels of Joseph Wambaugh and Richard Price.

Gaitonde's story runs through all this like an expressway, a counterpoint to Sartaj's attempt to piece together the mystery of Gaitonde's life. Gaitonde's voice has a ghostly inflection--"So, Sardar-ji, are you listening still? Are you somewhere in this world with me?"--and you wonder if this is coming from beyond the grave or from the demented last hours before he shot himself. (I'll admit: I'm still not sure.) Just as Sartaj's detective story follows obvious generic convention--he loses his buddy-partner and falls for the dead woman's sister--so Gaitonde is a Hindi hybrid of Jay Gatsby and Scarface's Tony Montana, whose motto, "The world is yours," could be his own. Gaitonde's story is the familiar one of the small-time hood who carves out enough territory to become a don with strong international connections, unassailable political contacts and film-star girlfriends. What breathes new life into this story is the pungently metaphorical voice Chandra gives Gaitonde, an alliterative and lyrical English blended with basti Hindi that makes him as engaging a narrator as Martin Amis's John Self in Money.

Gaitonde is a nimble and accomplished gangster and, when need be, a cold-blooded killer; but he's plagued by mortal thoughts and the discovery that not everything can be solved with a payoff or a hit. He may be able to steal an election or liquidate an adversary, but he cannot reverse the box-office failure of the first Hindi blockbuster film he produces, or even truly know the heart of his actress girlfriend, Zoya Mirza, whose career he bankrolled. Does Zoya fuck him because she loves him or because she fears him? As she tells Sartaj, "He played the part of Ganesh Gaitonde even when he was alone with himself.... He was a short man trying to act like some big hero." The struggle of Ganesh Gaitonde is often his interior struggle with his Bollywood legend.

Gaitonde's mortal questions are compounded by the city itself, a caldron of financial corruption, ethno-religious fanaticism and relentless globalization where the shots are called by hoodlums more than by politicians (when they can be distinguished). Time really is out of joint here. The movies aren't the same anymore, the political giants of the golden age of Indian nationalism have been replaced by "small men" who have renamed the city Mumbai. The city, as Sartaj complains to himself, is "too vast...impossible to know, or escape." (Even the crafty Parulkar looks like he's about to be outpaced by the city's new right-wing masters.) "If you want to live in the city," someone tells Gaitonde, "you have to think ahead three turns." Gaitonde embraces Bombay's modernity; the sacred and the retrospective are mere artifice. Once, when asked where he's from, he says it doesn't matter--he's cut his past "with a scalpel." He's rather like any of the other thousands who try to reinvent themselves in Bombay's City of Gold. But the life of a hard-living "secular don" creates a void that makes Gaitonde easy prey to the Gothic political forces scything through Bombay and India.

When the local Hindi fascists enlist Gaitonde's services in stealing an election, he helps them out for the cash, but when they proceed to address him as a fellow Hindu, he resists their blandishments. A pseudo-Robin Hood figure, he takes pride in the multifaith basti he rules and the company he commands (a classic Hindi gangster film trope). And even when he helps to drive Muslim families from his territory during the 1992 riots, his incentives are "purely" financial rather than confessional. But in the atmosphere of post-riot Bombay, where communal tensions run high and the gangs start to fragment along religious lines, he is anointed (and takes advantage of becoming) a "true Hindu leader." And like his mother country, he moves from the secular to the postsecular and becomes entangled in a nuclear nightmare. Gaitonde is never quite at home with this new identity: "becoming Ganesh Gaitonde the Hindu bhai was itself an act of murder," he laments, "it was the murder of a thousand and one other selves." But it is for him a necessary death. His embrace of a Hindu identity propels him into the arms of a religious zealot, Guru-ji--who becomes the novel's swami Moriarty--and into cosmic violence and mass murder, which culminates in the ultimate act of purification, the assassination of Bombay.

In Maximum City Suketu Mehta remembers the exact moment when he discovered that the romantic city of his youth had become a place of scam and violence. "This fucking city," he writes (channeling, perhaps, Travis Bickle). "The sea should rush in over these islands in one great tidal wave and obliterate it, cover it underwater. It should be bombed from the air." This is a common, visceral response. Many of the characters in Sacred Games fantasize the destruction of their own city, as if governed by a collective death wish. "Maybe one day it'll all just fall apart," Sartaj muses, "and there was a certain gratification in that thought too. Let the maderchod"--motherfucker--"blow."

But this death wish reaches truly phantasmagoric proportions when Guru-ji plans to unleash nuclear fire on Bombay. And it is this prospect of nuclear annihilation that restores Sartaj's affection for his city--as well as Chandra's love and longing for it; Bombay, from now on, emerges more strongly as a metaphysical presence. Sartaj rages, "What do these bastards have against Bombay? They don't mention any other cities?" Gaitonde, too, is shaken by the thought of Bombay being reduced to a million "stinking corpses," to the point of breaking with Guru-ji. Thus the two parallel narrative lines that Gaitonde and Sartaj inhabit become fused; across the thick of time and space the cop and the gangster become, in a sense, allies in their attempt to save Bombay from annihilation.

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