BOMBAY IS IMPORTANT in the book,” Vikram Chandra said a few months ago, “but this is not a Bombay book.” At 900 pages and many intertwined narratives, Sacred Games is too vast in its scope and intuitiveness to be slotted to a certain city. But given the run-ning inspirations in the novel, it will be difficult not to bookshelf it with the recent Bombay books. Or to ask, must the Bombay book—with Shantaram and Maximum City two riveting ad-ditions— be so bulky?

Sacred Games plucks one of the most enig-matic characters from Chandra’s 1997 collec-tion, Love and Longing in Bombay, and makes him so much more of a mystery. Sartaj Singh is a Sikh police inspector on the Mumbai police force. In a narrative that more or less moves along two strands, we hear his back story and learn about his present assignments and we also get a fascinating account of an under- world don, Ganesh Gaitonde.

This is urban noir as has not before been at-tempted in Indian fiction. No one is as whole-some as his job profile would render him to be; and no one is as despicable as his nefarious ac-tivities could portray him to be. Affairs of state and society—in this Bombay-like place where a Gotham City edginess is fuzzying black-and-white divides between good and evil—are in-evitably drawn on a constantly widening canvas. The acknowledgements reveal years of research.

But Chandra resists making great sociological and political points in this novel, which really catches the expanding role of the underworld that is so much a part of a society’s life. If Bombay’s fingerprints can be felt all over this book, it is because Chandra is most devout in locking the many parts of his story with his abiding inspiration: Hindi cinema.

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