“Vikram Chandra does it again: weaving an intricate tongue-in-cheek tapestry of life in Bombay - the fuckups, the apathy, the peculiar morality, the bonhomie. Make no mistake, this is a filmi book for that most filmi-est of Indian cities, and the plot and the characters are alternately grandiose and utterly human: pure and holy and maaderchod all at once. This book will take you a while to get through, but by the time you encounter one of Chandra's classic literary manoeuvres - Ganesh Gaitonde continues speaking to Sartaj Singh even after he kills himself - you're hooked. This is not Chandra's best work - for that, you must look to "Red Earth, Pouring Rain" - but as a snapshot of contemporary India it has few parallels. Highly recommended, especially for the Indian diaspora. I chuckled in glee often.
The plot, briefly: Sartaj Singh, a simple unassuming police inspector (our hero) crosses paths with Ganesh Gaitonde (also our hero), notorious Mumbai don, dead in his nuclear bunker by his own hand, with a young woman dead beside him. The authorities from Delhi find counterfeit money in the bunker, and poor inconsequential Sartaj is launched on a quest to get to the bottom of all this. Along the way he encounters rumours of a mad Swami, mysterious intelligence officials, actress-whores and corrupt politicians and ordinary murderers and adulterous airhostesses and, of course, unexpected love.
If you have watched the Bollywood movie 'Company' from a few years ago, this book will begin where that movie left off, and goes deeper into the psyche of the Mumbai underworld than almost everyone would like to pretend they are comfortable with (unless, of course, you have read "Shantaram").
A word of warning: you really have to have grown up in North India to properly understand the language and the characters (Chandra draws richly on Bollywood and Indian soap opera tradition). The glossary helps, but as one reviewer pointed out, switching back and forth is a bit tedious. Non-Indians are advised to either take in the novel without attempting to understand the Bombay slang words (they really aren't all that essential to understanding the text), read Suketu Mehta's "Maximum City" first, or watch a lot of Bollywood movies before attempting to read this book. There are, unfortunately, no shortcuts to cultural understanding.”
Arvind wrote this review Friday, August 29 2008.
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