SACRED GAMES by Vikram Chandra

This book is just too long.  Even if its length were halved, it would still be 450 pages, and I might be OK with that.  It reminds me a lot of Shantaram, another too-long book set in Mumbai.  In this one we have two main characters—a gangster and a policeman.  The gangster is Ganesh Gaitonde, who dies early in the novel, but his first person narration gives his backstory and occupies a large portion of the book.   Sartaj Singh is the policeman who is the heart and soul of the story, however.  He and his fellow officers are unabashedly on the take.  Their illegal earnings constitute a hefty percentage of their income, and everyone involved seems to think that graft is perfectly acceptable.  The poverty and crowded, squalid living conditions described here are not surprising, but the level of corruption is astonishing.  Still, Santaj is doing his best to juggle several cases, knowing that he cannot completely quash the gang violence.  Numerous lengthy chapters are devoted to other tangential characters, such as Santaj’s mother, and sometimes we don’t discover their relationship to other events and/or characters until later.  In other words, the structure of the novel is a little annoying, as is the inclusion of numerous words that need translating.  I found the glossary at the end to be beneficial for reading the first few chapters, but as I got deeper into the novel, the foreign (Hindi?) words were not defined.  I suppose I should have read with my phone handy so that I could look them up, but, honestly, I just wanted to get to the end.