Sartaj Singh is a divorced, middle-aged Sikh inspector in the Mumbai police, good at his job but going nowhere. An anonymous call leads him to a bunker-like house where the notorious gang lord Ganesh Gaitonde has holed up, and the confrontation leaves Sartaj with a set of questions that pull him into an investigation spanning intelligence agencies, gurus and terror networks.
Alternating chapters are Gaitonde's own story, narrated in a swaggering voice as he rises from a petty smuggler to a criminal empire builder with links to politicians and Bollywood. Interludes, called Insets, step away to tell unrelated lives across the subcontinent, from Partition refugees to a Kashmiri agent.
At around 900 pages, Vikram Chandra's novel is crime fiction on an epic scale, saturated with Bombay slang and the texture of the city's police stations, slums and film sets. It was adapted as India's first Netflix original series in 2018. Its sheer length is part of the experience.
Book details
| Author | Vikram Chandra |
|---|---|
| First published | 2006 |
| Original language | English |
| Genre | Thriller |
| Type | Fiction |
| Pages (approx.) | 900 |
| Setting | Mumbai, with episodes across India and abroad, 1940s to early 2000s |
Themes
- Organised crime
- Police corruption
- Religious extremism
- Masculinity
- The city
Who should read it
Readers who love sprawling crime epics and want an inside view of Mumbai's underworld.