36 AMERICANWAY
MAY 15 2007
ILLUSTRATIONBYEDELRODRIGUEZ
L I T E R A R Y T O U R
To gET To kNoW
a city from top shelf to
bottom and everything between, follow a
cop.Orso thoughtauthorVikramChandra,
who tails Inspector Sartaj Singh through
Mumbai inhis latest novel,
SacredGames
.
At first, Chandra lets Singh and his fel-
low characters lead the reader around the
crowded, teeming city as if throughamaze.
No frame of reference, no ability to deter-
mine just where they stop to eat or reflect
or interrogate. Gradually, though, asChan-
drabuildshisplotanddrawsfinedetail and
shadow into his people, the city’s topogra-
phy emerges.Mumbai rises from the pages
like a three-dimensional paper city in a
pop-upbook.
It’spresentedsorealistically thatopening
SacredGames
to read thenext chapter feels
likesteppingoffanairplaneand intoIndia’s
commercialandentertainmentcapital itself
(only not as hot andhumid). By the end of
the book, Mumbai seems so familiar, you
coulddrive itwithout amap.
Not thatChandrawouldadvise that, giv-
en the traffic. Soweaskedhim to takeuson
avirtual guideofhis favoritehangouts.He’s
hadplenty of time to find them; Chandra’s
familymoved toMumbai (formerly known
asBombay) in themid-1970s, andhe spent
three years there before going off to college
in theUnitedStates. “Bombaywas 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 canfindaplace
for you.”
You could say something similar about
the United States and India: The Indian
subcontinent has already found its place
in the American imagination. Indian fic-
tion ishotter thanaMumbai summer’sday.
True, the fascination began with Salman
Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children
two decades
ago, but just in the past several years, U.S.
readers have caught on to Jhumpa Lahiri
(
Interpreter of Maladies
); Arundhati Roy
(
The God of Small Things
); Vikram Seth
(
A Suitable Boy
); RohintonMistry (
AFine
Balance
); Kiran Desai (2006Man Booker
Prize winner for
The Inheritance of Loss
);
and Chandra, whose first novel,
RedEarth
and Pouring Rain
, caught the attention
of critics and readers alike. But it’s
Sacred
BytheBook
Indian lit is hot, andMumbai fans the flames as a key
character in a newnovel. The author of
SacredGames
revealswhatmakes the city so… cool.
ByTracyStaton
