Vikram Chandra’s only request for our lunch date is that we go somewhere that serves good steaks. We meet at The Gaucho Grill in Swallow Street, off Piccadilly, which is part of a chain of Argentine restaurants in London and seems to fit the brief. Even to hardy carnivores, however, the decor - cow skins stretched over dark wooden panelling and draped over the backs of chairs - might seem excessive. “Not the kind of place I’d bring my mother to,” Chandra says, glancing around.
He looks tired, having arrived from India only a couple of days earlier and travelled straight to the Edinburgh Festival for the launch of his third book, Sacred Games (Faber, £17.99). Chandra is surprisingly unassuming for a man who has just written one of the greatest Indian novels of his age. He wears a neatly pressed shirt and trousers. His face is boyish and round, his dark tousled curls slightly flecked with white.
The menu is promising. Fish ceviches look appetising as starters. Chandra decides to stick to a main course (I follow suit), but he does agree to share a palm salad. The bife de lomo, a tender fillet cut, is the house speciality, so the choice is easy. He asks for it medium done (it’s medium-rare for me). The Gaucho Grill boasts a wide range of fine Argentine wines, which Chandra declines. “I’m a teetotaller,” he says, asking instead for a diet Coke. “I’m a slave to Coca-Cola. They got me when I was young.”
The food formalities out of the way, we talk about his family. Grilled steaks notwithstanding, Delhi-born Chandra considers himself a religious person, brought up in a traditional Hindu home. His father was a businessman, so the family moved around a lot, and young Vikram boarded at Mayo College (often referred to as the Eton of India), in the Rajasthani city of Ajmer. He completed his schooling at St Xavier’s College in Mumbai. It was the classic educational schedule for members of India’s gilded youth.
It is not long before we are discussing the 900-page whopper that is Sacred Games. Reading it, I tell him, left me both excited and exhausted, dazed and disturbed. Most foreign visitors to India will have experienced the overwhelming sense that humanity in its entirety, and in its infinite variety, can be observed parading past any given street corner. The book makes you feel the same way.
At its core, Sacred Games is a detective story. Its hero, Sartaj Singh, is a principled but jaded officer in the Mumbai police force. The single Sikh inspector in the city, widely recognised by his turban, his moustache and his impeccable tailor-made clothes, Sartaj has reached an impasse in his career. Until, that is, an anonymous tip-off leads him to the hideout of Mumbai’s most notorious criminal mastermind, Ganesh Gaitonde.
If Sartaj is set to become one of the world’s memorable literary detectives, Gaitonde deserves a place in the pantheon of history’s outstanding anti-heroes. Running parallel to Sartaj’s investigation is Gaitonde’s first-person account of his violent rise through the ranks of Mumbai’s criminal underworld and his enthronement as the city’s great Hindu bhai. Looming as large as Mario Puzo’s Vito Corleone, Gaitonde steals the show.
Like the best writing about crime syndicates (or “companies”, as they are known in India), Sacred Games is less about delinquency than about family, friendship, loyalty and love. Money is the thread connecting slum dwellers, smugglers, policemen, informants, film producers, sadhus, religious zealots, local politicians and foreign hit-men, holding the city’s chaotic fabric together.
The novel pays loving homage to classic Indian movies, a topic close to Chandra’s heart. His mother is a successful screenwriter for Hindi movies. One of his sisters is a film director and the other is a film critic. He himself once co-wrote an action feature film, Mission Kashmir. Gangsters and policemen in Sacred Games are united in their appreciation of the films of Hindi film legend Dev Anand. His prison inmates debate the merits of imitating the various masters of Bollywood musical playback singing when seducing a girl.
It is Mumbai itself, however, that constitutes the book’s ultimate subject. “Bombay is an overwhelming city,” says Chandra, a slight American accent occasionally surfacing. “So many smells and colours and sounds, 18 million people packed into a very small place. Just walking out on to the street you find yourself surrounded by that energy, which is exhilarating. But it can also crush you, so getting away for a few months can be restful.”
He now divides his time between Mumbai and Berkeley, where he teaches creative writing at the University of California. He is never away from India for long. “Or else you find yourself alienated. India has changed so fast in the last 20 years. Every time I return it feels like a new place, physically different. New constructions, new ads. People dress differently, they speak differently. But you only notice it when you’ve been away from it. Otherwise the process engulfs you.”
Now 45, Chandra first settled in the US in the early 1980s when he enrolled in a creative writing programme at Kenyon College, Ohio. “I had always been a big fan of Isaac Asimov, and was writing sci-fi stories by 11. I knew I wanted to be a writer, but in India, at the time, there was no framework for someone with those aspirations.” Ohio took some getting used to. “If you’re Indian, you grow up watching American movies. I had read Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Wharton. You have the impression that you know something about the country. Then you get there and find you know nothing at all. The college was in the middle of a cornfield. I felt very isolated. So I went to California.”
He finished his degree in Los Angeles, and went on to attend film school at Columbia University. “There was the big question of how to make a living. I thought I’d try my luck in the film business, because there would always be a job in India’s film industry.” But while browsing in the university library he stumbled across the biography of Colonel James Skinner, a half-Indian, half-British Victorian soldier. His attempt to dramatise the cultural dilemmas embodied by Skinner led to the writing of his first novel.
“His story offered fascinating material and some very interesting metaphors for the Indian history that was to follow. I wanted to rescue some of the old-Indian narrative styles, stories within stories. I knew it couldn’t be a film.” Tutored by American short-story maestros John Barth and Donald Barthelme, Chandra wrote Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995), a bold blend of Indian mythology and exuberant storytelling, greeted as one of the most original works of Indian fiction since Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.
Our food arrives: substantial steaks, ungarnished and grilled to perfection. Chandra seems pleased and tucks away contentedly.
I am curious about his award-winning collection of short stories, Love and Longing in Bombay (1997), in which he gives classic literary genres - drawing-room drama, the ghost story, the detective story - an Indian twist. It was in this book that Sartaj Singh first appeared. The acknowledgements to Love and Longing include several police detectives. “I became friends with a couple of them. I then met a crime journalist who knows the crime world inside out, and who remains one of my closest friends. Through this small set of people I learned about the Bombay crime scene, about organised crime and its connections to national politics and sectarian movements.”
For Sacred Games Chandra’s list of sources grew to include many of the gunmen and criminals he was trying to depict. “The shocking thing is not that people like Gaitonde are different from us. The shocking thing is how similar we are. They have their own histories, their very particular moral systems. Drinking with some of those guys, talking about their families, you begin to like them.” One of the happiest moments in the writing of the book, he says, came when Melanie, his American wife, first read his typescript. “I hate how you’ve made me love this Gaitonde guy,” she told him.
Sacred Games was seven years in the making - “I’m a pretty slow writer,” Chandra says. When he finished it, the book was the object of a heavy bidding war among publishers (he is rumoured to have been paid a million dollars). “I’m contractually forbidden from giving out numbers, but, yes, it was unexpected and quite surreal.”
Did his time in the US, I ask, plant in him the urge to write the Indian equivalent of the ever-elusive Great American Novel? “I didn’t set out to write the Great Indian Novel. I didn’t even set out to write a big novel. It grew in size because I wanted to leave the mundane in it. I needed the characters to have those moments of daily domesticity so that it wouldn’t just be about cops ‘n’ robbers.” But there is, he admits, an inclination towards largeness in Indian writing. “Unlike the western narrative tradition, which favours a clear climax, Indian epics can go on and on. The only equivalent genre in the west would be soap operas.”
It has been suggested by some literary critics that the most interesting works of Indian fiction in English now spring from the pens of Indians living abroad - Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Vikram Seth, Kiran Desai. Does he, I ask him, feel part of a literary diaspora? “My outlook is definitely that of an Indian. But I’m now emotionally attached to two countries. This sense of belonging in two places, or not quite belonging in either, can be a good thing for a writer.”
He refuses dessert reluctantly (”I really shouldn’t,” he protests), and over coffee we discuss cultural hybridity. “I don’t believe in cultural purity. It’s a dangerous idea. It’s very attractive to very many people, but dangerous.” Then, striking a lighter note, he continues: “That’s why Indian films are wonderful. They borrow from all styles and genres, add some Indian flavour and then set the action against the most unlikely backdrops. They’re so promiscuous.”
As we leave he asks for the restaurant’s card. “I must come back to this place,” he says, shaking my hand and adding: “I’m sure we’ll meet again.”
The Gaucho Grill, London W1
2 x bife de lomo
1 x palmito salad
chimichurri sauce and bread
2 x sparkling mineral water
2 x diet Coke
1 x latte
1 x double espresso
Total: œ59.65