Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra

Edition Details:
Format  : Paperback
Page Count : 947
Publisher : Penguin

First Sentence :
A white Pomeranian named Fluffy flew out of a fifth-floor window in Panna, which was a brand-new building with the painter’s scaffolding still around it.

Inspector Sartaj singh had made peace with his mediocre career. He knew  he was  a mediocre police inspector and had no ambition to push his career. But every thing changes when he gets  an anonymous tip about the whereabouts of  notorious underworld don Ganesh Gaitonde.
Sartaj Singh as usual follows the lead and finds it to be true. This ends up in Ganesh committing suicide. For all the investigation must have  ended there. But for Sartaj the work had just begun.

Now the question was what  was Ganesh doing in the city when he could be safely ensconced in his yacht? Why he had created a nuclear resistant bunker in the city?
And why is RAW interested in the fate of Ganesh Gaitonde?  Sartaj Singh meets Anjali Mathur, a raw operative, who believes  a major conspiracy is in play and Ganesh was related to it. Is something going to happen or it’s just a fantasy of  a paranoid agent? Will Sartaj Singh be able to uncover the mystery.

I got to know about Sacred Games while i was reading Love and Longing in Bombay, which was  a short story collection by the same author. The book featured  story about Sartaj Singh which i loved. So when i came know that the writer had written a full fledged novel with Sartaj Singh as the protagonist then i had to read it. And what a great read this book has turned out to be.

The book is about two main characters : Ganesh Gaitonde, the dreaded Bhai and Sartaj Singh, an average police wallah.

The story progresses in  two time frames. The present where Sartaj Singh follows the lead to Ganesh which ends up in Ganesh committing suicide. Sartaj Singh gets accolades for his work but he also gets the unofficial responsibility from Anjali Mathur, a raw agent, to find about what Ganesh was doing in kailashpada and that too in nuclear resistant bunker .
The other main thread of the story is about Ganesh Gaitonde, that is, how he came to be what he was. The reader sees the series of events from Ganesh’s perspective and eventually how the destiny of these two protagonists coincides.
I loved the book. It’s my one of my best reads in this year. The story is great, the characterizations is awesome and the research of the author can be seen in it. There are many tracks in the book apart from the two main tracks that i have mentioned above and they were equally interesting.
There were not really any bad parts in the book. Yes, at 947 pages, it may seem a  lot but believe me you’ll not be able to put this book down. I had to force my self to keep stopping because i wanted to stretch the time that i would spend in this world created by Mr Vikram Chandra.
Although, there were moments in the book when i felt like it would have made more impact if it would have been written in Hindi. There is a Hindi translation available so i’ll definitely read that too.
At the end i’ll just say that if you want a crime fiction that would blow your mind then this is what i’ll recommend. Do read it and don’t hesitate to tell me what you think about it:

Amazon(For english edition)
Amazon (hindi edition)