Vikram Chandra is amused at my opening question. I’ve asked him about the whereabouts of one of his protagonists from his 2006 Bombay Noir novel, Sacred Games – a somewhere-in-his-40s mildly successful divorced police officer with a grand sounding name – Sartaj Singh. Chandra bubbles over with laughter, “I tried very hard not to think of what he was trying to do. A lot of readers [love Sartaj] and especially women have a special relationship with Mr Singh. He has plagued me in that way,” he replies with dancing eyes and an indulgent look.
Singh is all set to play out in the streaming universe with actor Saif Ali Khan essaying the sardar inspector this Friday. Khan along with Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Radhika Apte headline the first original Netflix show to come out of India which is adapted from Chandra’s novel. The book, drenched in Mumbai’s politics – gangsters, the police and the film world – has an epic scale, neat storylines, is driven by plot and is replete with endearing characters – primary among whom is Singh and the gangster Ganesh Gaitonde (Siddiqui). I recently re-read the book, in anticipation of watching the show and feel possessive of its vast, well-researched material, its inside gaze on a city we all love to hate. How will it translate onto screen with integrity, I ask Chandra with some concern. He responds with surprising detachment, “I decided very early that [I] have to let go of the book. When [you] translate from one medium to another, if you do a literal translation you’ll leave all the poetry behind. It’s got to be a recreation. Even that is a bad word – it’s a transcreation for something like [Sacred Games] where [the Netflix show] exists in its own universe in its own right. They have done a fantastic job of achieving that. It’s quite compelling,” he says convincingly. I’m reminded of Chandra’s description of a Buddhist mandala being drawn by Tibetan monks, keenly observed by Singh in the book. The mandala, representative of the universe is meticulously drawn out and then later destroyed.
Room for ambition
Chandra moved to Mumbai after a longish stint at Mayo College, Ajmer, “I was sick of boarding school, the discipline and the tightness,” he shares. He spent three years studying at St Xavier’s College and fell in love with the city. “It felt like home. Thousands of people come everyday from all over the country of various classes and statuses and everyone finds a place. Then they develop this weird hate/love attachment [to Mumbai]. There’s an energy, that is very compelling and you thrive on that. There’s room for ambition – all of [which] make for a very heady mix,” shares Chandra while emphasising why Mumbai feels like home. At one time, he would come to Mumbai several times in a year, now reduced to two annual trips owing to school and teaching schedules. Both Chandra and his wife, writer Melanie Abrams teach at the University of California, Berkeley and have two children ages eight and ten. Chandra is also busy with his software business, Granthika that is in its beta stage. The software connects text with the knowledge created in it — born from the need of an author like Chandra writing a novel, like say Sacred Games – has potential to be applied to legal writing, journalism, corporate documentation and scientific publishing.
Writing an epic
So where did the spark for Sacred Games come from? “I had this very strange persistent image of Sartaj talking to a gangster on an intercom. I had no idea who that guy inside was,” he says. The image was recalled from a visit to a gangster’s den during the close-to-ten years of research that Chandra undertook for the book. “He had CCTVs up and down the street and this bank of monitors. He had been able to see us walking up the street from half a mile away. He had an armoured door and an intercom. That is where it started,” he says while describing the writing process. “I start asking questions about characters – who is the guy inside? Why is he there? It [was a] very slow process of discovery.” A discovery that was helped by friends like journalist Hussain Zaidi and police officers, several of whom have been acknowledged in the book.
Chandra had watched — like everyone else in the city during the 80s and 90s — the growth of organised crime, the increasing levels of violence. “That [in]famous (1991) shootout at Lokhandwala?We were living [in Lokhandwalathen] and my father and I were driving home one day. Suddenly, there was this automatic weapons fire echoing off the buildings. It was about three blocks down from our house and we had no idea what was going on.” Chandra has strong links to the film industry, which was under extortion threats at the time. “I had colleagues and friends who were targets. I knew people who had paid up, I knew people who had been shot at. I was curious about why it was happening. I asked my friends, Hussain Zaidi and a couple of cops that I was friends with to introduce me to people so that I could understand what [was] going on.” The intense research led to a sprawling novel that crisscrossed the country (and sometimes the globe) in its narrative and yet tied up all its loose ends in Mumbai. As he says, “It’s not like [I was] making a documentary but [I did] want to convey the feeling of texture of someone’s life.”
Pivotal to narrative
The show is being made 12 years after Sacred Games was published. So is it still relevant? Chandra’s response is quick, “Crime and corruption is ongoing, the use of religion and modern media in politics – all of which are as alive as ever. [The writers and directors] have done a wonderful job of integrating all of that in a re-visioning of [Sacred Games]. As stated before Chandra wasn’t a part of the writing of the series, but attached as a consultant to the show. “They’ve got a wonderful, hugely talented team of writers [Varun Grover, Vasant Nath and Smita Singh] and they would send me ideas and I would react to it. I think long-form television is the proper medium for [Sacred Games] – we are living in golden age of television. Chandra credits this kind of long-form content with doing what Victorian novels did, which is exploring an entire culture but cinematically. He’s also delighted by how the series has turned out to be a multilingual one. “There are entire scenes in Marathi and Punjabi. It’s the way that we Indians actually live and talk. The writers have done that effectively.” And what about the casting? Chandra’s approval is swift, “The performances from everyone, all the characters [are] just brilliant. I am very pleased and happy.”
Mumbai as a character
Did he ever think of the city of Mumbai as a character in the book? “Not consciously but I was aware how much the characters had a relationship with the city. Especially Ganesh [Gaitonde] in that he comes from outside as an orphan and tries to use this karmbhoomi make his way forward.” While Singh is the son of Partition refugees, another pivotal character Zoya Mirza is from Lucknow. “Then the local inhabitants have a very particular relationship with the city. Katekar is an old-time Maharashtrian guy, I was trying to get at their understanding of the city and in that – that inadvertently created Bombay as a character.” For Chandra, the beauty of the city lay in its details, “If Sartaj has spent his day on his motorcycle driving from one end of the city to the other then what does that feel like? When you do that naturally the city enters,” he states.
***
On nationalism and popular discourse: “It’s like a manthan. You cannot produce amrit without producing poison. That is what it feels to me. As you go into the future and you explore the past, you are releasing these tremendous energies which you can’t quite understand or control.” He recalls the time of the European Renaissance – a time of learning to also a time of “tremendous destructive energy”.
Favourite Mumbai books: Ravan and Eddie by Kiran Nagarkar and Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Last seen Hindi film: Newton (thought it was brilliant)