New York Times’ profiles of authors are following a particular pattern of late: take a big money deal (preferably seven figures), add a six-figure marketing plan and several easy-to-digest hooks, a youngish author who’s attractive, accessible or available, and voila! No disrespect to Vikram Chandra, whose new novel SACRED GAMES is getting mostly favorable reviews, but all this attention was pre-ordained and designed to save face. Because – repeat after me – this book ain’t making back the money invested.
With that out of the way, let’s turn to Patricia Leigh Brown’s profile of Chandra, who impressed with several years of research in Mumbai (though he lives in Berkeley now) where he met odd characters like a yoga-practicing vegetarian hitman. “They have the kind of power that can shut down a city, but they’re living in constant fear,” Chandra said. “So they construct a comprehensible moral universe for themselves. I asked one of these guys, ‘How can you justify murder?’ And he said, ‘Look, their death is already written,’ pointing upwards. Murder in their view is part of the divine play of the Lord.” And somehow, I’m not surprised to hear that Chandra, like so many authors, started out with a love of science-fiction and other forms of geekery. “I was a nerd, to put it bluntly,” he said. “I would walk around in circles bouncing a ball in a trance and making up stories in installments in my head.”