Tarnished integrity vs. twisted genius

Sacred Games
By Vikram Chandra
HarperCollins, 916 pp., $27.95

Bollywood, if not Hollywood, must surely come calling in the wake of all the ballyhoo preceding and hullabaloo attending the publication of this industrious melodrama, which calls to mind the critical and popular success of Vikram Seth's Tolstoy-sized saga "A Suitable Boy" in 1993 .

Vikram Chandra's second novel (following "Red Earth and Pouring Rain," 1995) and third book appropriates a character from a story in his 1997 collection, "Love and Longing in Bombay," and plants him in the center of a maze-like mystery that reads like a knowledgeable amalgam of Dickens's London-inflected three-deckers, Mario Puzo, E. M. Forster at his most unbuttoned, and an unjustly neglected urban epic currently reissued by Northwestern University Press: Mark Smith's panoramic 1974 thriller "The Death of the Detective."

Chandra's protagonist is Sartaj Singh, the only Sikh police inspector in the vice-ridden metropolis of Mumbai (formerly Bombay), a city eroded by sectarian enmity and bloodshed (primarily, though not exclusively, exchanged by Hindus and Muslims), in thrall to a pragmatic and amoral culture of aggrandizement, collusion, and corruption that reaches from the meanest streets to the most rarefied levels of local and national government.

Sartaj is both a credibly flawed "hero" and a basically good man who knows he's going nowhere: "past forty . . . divorced . . . with middling professional prospects." He means to honor the ideals of his late father (also a police inspector), yet is "quite used to taking money, to being bought " and has, over his years of service, adjusted to the blithe amorality embraced and justified by his prosperous superior officer Parulkar: "We are good men who must be bad to keep the worst men in control."

Sartaj's antagonist and opposite is Hindu crime lord Ganesh Gaitonde, a self-made incarnation of Mumbai's acquisitive energies. His vast "kingdom" is built on such varied enterprises as bootlegging, influence peddling, arms transporting, enlistment by India's government in espionage related to suspicious Pakistani activities, and -- in spite of Ganesh's reservations -- eventually the drug trade.

Their two stories intersect in numerous intriguing and revealing ways, following the novel's literally explosive first episode, in which a small dog is maliciously thrown from a posh apartment building window to its death. It's the first of several seemingly random incidents eventually absorbed into the narrative fabric, like highly concentrated poisons spreading inexorably through its system.

Then, following a tip, Sartaj leads a task force to the cube-like concrete bunker occupied by Ganesh, who chats amiably through the door with Sartaj, declining to surrender, yet quite willing to tell his story. When police enter the structure, Sartaj finds Ganesh and an unknown woman shot to death.

Subsequently, Sartaj and his resourceful colleague Katekar are ordered to discover the dead woman's identity, investigate the presumably unrelated killing of a young Bangladeshi smuggler of stolen goods, and learn why Ganesh had abandoned the safety of exile to return to Mumbai. And Sartaj must decipher a pointed hint from high places that the Ganesh case "involves . . . great danger to national security."

As Sartaj pursues clues linking the aforementioned dead woman to both prostitution and India's thriving film industry, Chandra juxtaposes his progress with the violent story -- told by Ganesh after his death -- of the gangster's rise to the top of his "profession," perpetually hampered and endangered by the machinations of his archenemy and nemesis, Muslim don Suleiman Isa. Simultaneously, extended "inset" narratives show how secondary characters are linked to the major actions.

Disparate elements begin to draw together in a lengthy, fascinating account of Ganesh's 13-month prison stay, during which he consolidates and fine-tunes his increasing power. And when Sartaj is informed that the bunker in which Ganesh died was a "nuclear shelter," the tension rises to a thrilling and absorbing new level.

Chandra pulls strings with a puppeteer's mastery, connecting each disclosure of a concealed affiliation or conspiracy with what has gone before, whetting our appetites for ever more mayhem, depravity, and intrigue .

The combination of an elephantine plot with a clockmaker's precise deployment of its sinister particulars is certainly attention-getting. So is the exotic setting .

Yet it's the characters who haunt us . Sartaj's tarnished integrity and Ganesh's perverted organizational genius hover over the novel like imperil ed twin peaks, and there's something almost Homeric in the fateful intensity of their opposition.

Chandra throws them into high relief against dozens of supporting figures: Money handler Paritosh Shah, Ganesh's sidekick and bodyguard Chotta Badriya, adulteress Kamala Pandey, wheel-greasing politician Bipin Bhonsle, and charismatic Swami Shridhar Shukla (who becomes Ganesh's unlikely spiritual advis er) stand out among a gargantuan cast.

Few readers will be un enthralled, despite a profusion of untranslated Hindi words (a "partial glossary" is provided). Like Dickens before him, Chandra has blended a blood-and-thunder page-turner with an exhaustive and illuminating anatomy of a society. "Every man or woman you arrested . . . was part of some web," Sartaj reminds himself. It's a rare pleasure to be arrested by this novel's thunderous momentum, and caught up in its web.

Bruce Allen reviews classic and contemporary fiction for Kirkus Reviews, the Raleigh News & Observer, and other publications.