Vikram Chandra - Reading January 23, 2007

Vikram Chandra, who teaches creative writing at UC Berkeley, reads from Sacred Games, which has just been published in paperback. This epic novel combines a nineteenth-century literary sensibility with the modern conventions of a detective story. In Mumbai, Sartaj Singh, a skilled Sikh police inspector, receives a tip that the infamous underworld figure Ganesh Gaitonde is holed up in a nearby safehouse. Sartaj’s investigation into Gaitonde’s crimes and subsequent suicide will lead him well beyond the morally ambiguous Mumbai he thinks he knows, as he navigates a complicated labyrinth of racial and religious intolerance, of fringe rebel groups and clandestine terrorist cells, and of an underworld mentality so pervasive that it has profoundly impacted the lives of ordinary Indian citizens.

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