Vikram Chandra at the Calcutta launch of his Sacred Games. Picture by Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya

Arguably the biggest fiction title of the year, Vikram Chandra’s epic page-turner Sacred Games was launched in the city on Saturday evening by Penguin. Ravi Singh, editor-in-chief of Penguin, introduced the book as “a sprawling epic dealing with the complex realities of modern India”.

Chandra, a diminutive man, did not have any idea that he would be writing so heavy a tome, all of 999 pages. “It started off as a small project. But when writing about the Mumbai underworld, what with one incident interconnecting with the other, the book turned out to be huge,” he said.

The 45-minute book-reading session that followed the launch at Taj Bengal had snatches of the violence, crime, drama, family, friendship, loyalty and love squeezed into Sacred Games in almost equal measures. “Miracles happen in every page of this urban thriller that packs in a lot of social realism,” said Singh.

The protagonist of Sacred Games comes from one of his stories in Love and Longing in Bombay, the Sardar policeman Sartaj Singh who is pitted against Ganesh Gaitonde, the underworld don. “A fascinating character, this Gaitonde with his shades of dark and grey, epitomises the Mumbai crimelord,” said Singh.

It is indeed surprising how the soft-spoken, genteel author who doubles as literature teacher at the University of California, Berkeley, describes with such clarity the character and contradictions in a man as violent and complex as Gaitonde.

“Yes, I did some research, not because I would be writing this book, but only because I had friends among police and got to meet a lot of these people through them,” said the author.

Incidentally, Chandra met Arun Gawli in person and interviewed him at length, as he did Hussain Ustra, popularly known as Hussain the Razor, another dreaded name in the Mumbai underworld.

Sacred Games seems set to be a big seller, given its fast-paced narrative and its intriguing story line. With the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best First Book and subsequently the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best Book under his belt, Chandra, who also pens film scripts, is set for bigger things with Sacred Games. It is already being translated into a number of languages and talks are on to turn it into a film script.