Sacred Games
Here’s Vir Sanghvi in the HT writing about Vikram Chandra’s Bombay novel:
The Sartaj story has its own fascination. Nobody has ever quite captured the complexities of policing Bombay. As hero, Sartaj is meant to be the good cop. But he’s not your archetypal honest inspector. He takes money. He helps his corrupt superior despatch his own bribes to Swiss bank accounts. He is fond of random violence. He assaults suspects and witnesses. And he owes loyalty to a senior cop who is a Suleiman Isa stooge (until he switches allegiance to the Rakshaks).I loved Sacred Games. Almost all 900 pages of it. I’ve written about it here.The strength of the book — at least, from my perspective — is that it is set in a vastness of grey. There are no black and whites in Bombay. There is no simple right and wrong.
If you want moral certitude, find yourself another city.
Was it always like this?
I suspect that in the 1960s and 1970s when we were growing up, Bombay may have been a different city…
