Vikram Chandra | Mumbai | Sartaj Singh | Bombay | energy

By the Book

Indian lit is hot, and Mumbai fans the flames as a key character in a new novel. The author of Sacred Games reveals what makes the city so … cool.


To get to know a city from top shelf to bottom and everything between, follow a cop. Or so thought author Vikram Chandra, who tails Inspector Sartaj Singh through Mumbai in his latest novel, Sacred Games.

At first, Chandra lets Singh and his fellow characters lead the reader around the crowded, teeming city as if through a maze. No frame of reference, no ability to determine just where they stop to eat or reflect or interrogate. Gradually, though, as Chandra builds his plot and draws fine detail and shadow into his people, the city's topography emerges. Mumbai rises from the pages like a three-dimensional paper city in a pop-up book.

It's presented so realistically that opening Sacred Games to read the next chapter feels like stepping off an airplane and into India's commercial and entertainment capital itself (only not as hot and humid). By the end of the book, Mumbai seems so familiar, you could drive it without a map.

Not that Chandra would advise that, given the traffic. So we asked him to take us on a virtual guide of his favorite hangouts. He's had plenty of time to find them; Chandra's family moved to Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay) in the mid-1970s, and he spent three years there before going off to college in the United States. "Bombay was the first city that felt like home to me," Chandra says. "It feels that way to a lot of people; it has that kind of energy. Whoever you are, wherever you come from, it can find a place for you."