Description

A Sikh police inspector named Sartaj Singh receives a phone tip in the middle of the night. The voice on the line is that of Ganesh Gaitonde — the most feared gangster in Bombay, on the run for years, in hiding in a sealed concrete bunker in the suburb of Kailashpada. By morning, Gaitonde is dead by his own hand.

What follows is one of the most ambitious Indian novels of the twenty-first century — a 900-page, multi-generational Bombay epic that pulls in policemen, gangsters, film stars, RAW agents, gurus, refugees, double agents, and finally the entire shadow history of post-Independence India. As Sartaj investigates how exactly Gaitonde came to be in that bunker, the novel widens to encompass Partition, the rise of the Bombay underworld, the communal riots of 1992-93, the slow collapse of secular India, and one terrifying nuclear threat closing in beneath the surface of the city.

Vikram Chandra’s masterwork — vast, propulsive, gorgeously written, steeped in the textures of Mumbai street Hindi — is the great Indian crime novel of our time. It later became the first Indian-original series on Netflix, starring Saif Ali Khan and Nawazuddin Siddiqui.

An epic. An education. An obsession.

If you read one Bombay crime novel in your life, read this one.