Sartaj, Again
Spoke to Vikram Chandra for Time Out. The whole thing here.Near the beginning of Vikram Chandra’s new book, someone asks Sartaj Singh, a police officer, whether he believes in God. Sacred Games, Chandra’s third book, is the answer to that question. No wonder it took over seven years to write.
Sartaj Singh is the weary, all too human Sikh police officer who first appeared in Chandra’s short story “Kama” in the collection Love and Longing in Bombay. In that story, Sartaj is tough but also thoughtful and occasionally vulnerable - the rare kind of character who seems to have many stories inside him, and whom one hopes to meet again in another book. In the story, during one of their quarrels, Sartaj’s wife tells him that his face is like that of a terrorist. “I hate the world you live in,” she says before leaving him. Sartaj thinks of replying that it’s her world too, that he lives in the parts she doesn’t see and that he lives there for her sake. But he remains silent.
In “Kama”, the police officer was dealing with the demands of a changing city. “Bombay was never like this,” says Sartaj’s boss at one point in the story. Sartaj shrugs: “It’s a new world.”
In mid-2006, it’s a new world again in Mumbai. On 11 July this year, a series of bomb explosions in the commuter trains at rush hour claimed nearly 200 lives and left the city in shock.
Sacred Games is a contemporary epic of Mumbai, a cocktail of organised crime, politics and religion. Sartaj Singh reappears in this novel. He is now in his forties, his marriage long over, his mind tired as he goes after an underworld gangster, Ganesh Gaitonde. The novel charts the individual journeys of the two men, interweaving their lives.
In this recent interview with the Hindustan Times, I was very intrigued to read that Chandra listens to music while writing. He has extremely good taste in music….
Comment by Dahlia Sen — August 29, 2006 @ 2:03 pm
In this recent interview with the Hindustan Times, I was very intrigued to read that Chandra listens to music while writing. He has extremely good taste in music….
Comment by Dahlia Sen — August 29, 2006 @ 2:05 pm