There is a more relaxed air to him now. “Right now, I have given myself the permission to read what I want and watch a lot of films and television,” begins Vikram Chandra. “I recently finished reading a superb novel called The Hummingbird’s Daughter, by Luis Alberto Urrea based on the true-life story of his great-Aunt Teresa, who was born out of wedlock to a 14-year-old Indian girl and a rich rancher.” And well, that too “evokes the turbulent, violent decades of the late 19th century in Mexico” just as Sacred Games mirrors Mumbai’s turbulent bloody date with the underworld in the recent past.

Among the reviews was an enthusiastic Kevin Rushby writing in The Guardian: “I was grateful (to Chandra) for my full-blooded lesson in Hindi curses. All are brilliantly embedded so that every meaning is clear, a remarkable achievement.” Says Chandra of the excercise in unadulterated abuse: “It was great fun doing it.” He adds: “Isn’t it true that while learning a foreign language or visiting some foreign place, the first words that you learn are the bad words?” Chandra had resisted the limited glossary that accompanies the book’s US version (it’s not in the UK and Indian versions) after his American publishers insisted on it.

But the wooing period with the readers gets into an overdrive as his 900-page novel gets ready to reach new readers through at least 15 language translations lined up. “It’s nice to see its lead characters like inspector Sartaj Singh and don Gaitonde, who in spite of springing from a particular socio-cultural context can still evoke sympathy in readers from far-off places,” says Chandra, pausing to add that the more specific a character is to a time and place, paradoxically the more universal it becomes. “Some of Dickens’ characters for instance have nothing to do with a reader like me and yet when I read his books, that person becomes entirely alive to me. That’s the beauty of epics, which even after centuries find a human voice speaking to us here.”

Chandra is quite keen on the book’s Hindi and Marathi versions. Perhaps those could get a reaction from the bhais whose world he has so colourfully portrayed in his book. “While one of the most interesting reactions was from a police inspector from another part of the country who emailed me that he could see the truth in my work of fiction, nobody from the underworld has called yet,” he chuckles, “I don’t imagine they are big novel readers, so unless it is translated into their language or somebody from the press brings their attention…”

Maybe they would get to know if it’s turned into a film. “My brother-in-law (Vidhu Vinod Chopra) keeps teasing me that you only write for an audience in thousands while my films are watched by millions,” says Chandra. The book’s first two readers, Chandra’s wife Melanie and his agent, had reacted saying that “it was great movie material”, he had never been quite sold to the idea for the sheer volume and characters in his book. “But watching Atul Kulkarni as Gaitonde at the enactment of excerpts from the book at the Crossword Book Awards was great fun. Atul too could make a lively Gaitonde.” The “too” is because Chandra’s first choice for the role is Aamir Khan “and that’s as far as I have gone with the casting”, he says. “And though a lot of talk is happening, but as it happens in the film world, you cannot be sure of anything till the first shot is canned.”

Now that he’s thinking of Sacred Games in terms of a film, he recalls some of his favourite gangster flicks. Besides bro-in-law Chopra’s Parinda, he singles out Satya for praise. “It had well fleshed out characters and a narrative velocity that led you forward in the film and made you empathise with people you would normally think as very different. It was very succesful in its vision of the urban landscape.”

The Berkeley-based writer is sure of coming back to Mumbai to find his stories. “Just walk down its streets and talk to five people and you have five different stories… The other day I was travelling in a cab and the song Aye dil hai mushqil jeena yahan was playing in the background and I thought, ‘Perhaps this is the only city where we make an anthem of a song that actually says how hard it is to live here…’”