Sacred Games quakes with seismic historical shocks, as if Chandra were intent on blasting open India's historically amnesiac present, a time when India (or at least its media and its political class) is intoxicated by its glorious future. Chandra telescopes the past through the present with a series of historical insets into the narrative, reminding readers, as if he were an adept in palmistry, that "the shape of the future" lies "in the lines of the past." The effect of these insets is intrusive and not always satisfactory--they include the story of Sartaj's mother's experience during partition and an oddly moving narrative about Maoist rebels in the countryside--as they clog the novel's narrative pace. But one of these insets, "The Great Game," is exemplary. "The Great Game"--which ostensibly recounts the attempts of Anjali, Sartaj's handler from Indian intelligence, to prize from her dying mentor the real story of the Indian secret state's associations with Gaitonde--is a journey into the splinters of Indian history, a secret index, one might say, of postcolonial India, the creation of its intelligence wings, its secret and not-so-secret wars with Pakistan, China and itself. What we get here is an occult history worthy of Borges. The dying mentor boasts that Anjali "has no choice but to be a realist. I trained her, I taught her tradecraft, analysis, recognition, action. I drew her into the secret world, into our troubles, into the web of secret causes." Readers may never quite recover from these historical depth charges; when we return to the novel's main thread it's as if we can hear the historical tectonic plates shifting beneath Sartaj's and Gaitonde's feet.

Borges, it could be argued, invented Indian detective fiction in Ficciones, in an imaginary review of an imaginary novel, The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim, whose imaginary publisher declares it "the first detective novel written by a native of Bombay City." Borges's forte was the fantastique: His short stories, even when they followed the rationalist schema of the detective story, were wormholes into an infinite cosmos of parallels, labyrinths and doubles. The traces of the Argentine fabulist's influence in Sacred Games are almost too many to enumerate. Gaitonde's final words to Sartaj, "To win is to lose everything, and the game always wins," have such a haunting, metaphysical resonance that you can imagine them coming from the mouth of Dandy Red Scharlach, the gunman in Borges's "Death and the Compass." But it's not just the Borgesian affinities that leap out at the reader of Sacred Games; it's that seven decades had to go by before someone wrote the novel that Borges prophesied in his seven-page tale.

Perhaps that explains why the novel is more than 100 times longer than Borges's story: It's making up for lost time. While Bollywood has produced some of the finest gangster films in recent memory, as stylish and earthy as their American and Hong Kong counterparts (notably Ram Gopal Varma's films Company and Satya and Vishal Bhardwaj's Maqbool and Omkara), Bombay has suffered an acute shortage of homegrown crime fiction. It's as if (almost all) Bombay's writers have shunned this city of sprawling crime empires, crowded jails and political hucksters of religious and secular stripes. Whatever the reasons, crime fiction with a Bombay or Indian setting was until recently dominated by foreigners like H.R.F. Keating--who didn't visit Bombay until after he wrote the eighth in his delightful series of Inspector Ghote mysteries--and Peter Mann, or the late Bengali director Satyajit Ray, who dabbled in detective fiction for youngsters. Sacred Games, a hulking fusion of gangland epic, roman policier and mystery thriller, involves a massive mobilization of literary talent and ambition, as if to compensate for India's marginal status in the world of crime fiction.

Despite its intimidating length, Sacred Games is not the "baggy monster" that Red Earth and Pouring Rain was. Chandra is a much better writer now. Still, a novel of 916 pages (and 1,001 subplots) can't help but fatigue the reader. Even a wonderful Runyonesque figure like Ganesh Gaitonde can end up sounding like a gasbag. And because Sartaj finds himself retracing Gaitonde's steps, the repetition can be wearying. Sometimes the effect of reading the last third of this often brilliant novel is similar to watching the familiar resolution of a James Bond movie. I found myself wishing Chandra had dared to follow the novel's apocalyptic themes to a more apocalyptic conclusion. But even then Chandra pulls off some extraordinary writing. The last hours of Gaitonde's life--his final dialogue with the murdered woman before their deaths, the last of a series of fabulous exchanges between them--are electrifying, a baroque distillation of all that has gone on before. Sacred Games's legacy might prove similar to that of Chandra's brother-in-law's film Parinda: By extending the territory of Indian literary fiction, it will allow others to tell crime stories of their own. Chandra's ultimate achievement is both as a genre novelist and as a novelist who uses genre elements. Solving the crime is important, but he also hands us the keys to the city and reveals its sordid mysteries.

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