And so, after seven years, fans of author Vikram Chandra will finally have something new to keep them up in the early hours.
Early copies of his latest novel Sacred Games have begun to trickle in.
Winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book in 1995 (Red Earth and Pouring Rain) and Best Book in 1997 (Love and Longing in Bombay), Chandra certainly took his time working on this one. And even a casual glance will tell you why.
At 900 pages long -- and heavy enough to hurt your foot rather badly if you are clumsy -- Sacred Games(Penguin Books, Rs 650) really does seem like an epic, at least in terms of proportion.
The novel takes off where Mumbai police officer Sartaj Singh left off, in the short story Kama from Love and Longing in Bombay. It takes us deeper into Singh's now-lonely world, and the underworld of India's most wanted gangster, Ganesh Gaitonde.
The setting, once more, is Mumbai. Which doesn't really come as a surprise considering it is India's only genuinely exciting city.
What is surprising is Chandra's choice of setting after not-so-recent forays in the same area by Suketu Mehta (Maximum City) and Gregory David Roberts (Shantaram).
Vikram and Suketu collaborated on the Mission Kashmir script along with Chandra's brother-in-law Vidhu Vinod Chopra. Suketu's subsequent candour about the director in Maximum City has, we hear, not made him very popular with the Chandra family.
Vidhu Vinod is, of course, not Vikram's only Bollywood connection.
His mom Kamna Chandra wrote a number of Hindi films (Prem Rog, 1942: A Love Story) among others). One sister Tanuja Chandra is a director and screenwriter (Dushman, Sangharsh, Sur) while the other Anupama Chopra (who is married to Vidhu Vinod) was India Today's respected film critic for many years. She also wrote Sholay: The Making of a Classic, arguably the best movie book published out of India.
Vikram attended film school at Columbia University in New York, dropped out to write his first novel, and later obtained an Master of Fine Arts at the University of Houston.
The dedication on the first page of Sacred Games is to writer Anuradha Tandon and Mumbai Mirror reporter S Hussain Zaidi, whose non fiction book on the March 12, 1993 bomb blasts was the basis for Anurag Kashyap's yet-to-be-released film, Black Friday.
For 'aid, information and hospitality,' Chandra has also thanked, among others, several Mumbai police officers like Arup Patnaik, now the city's joint commissioner or police (law and order), and Inspector General of Police Rakesh Maria (reportedly the basis for the Ajay character in Suketu Mehta's book), Olive restaurant's co-owner A D Singh, even India's candidate for the post of United Nations General Secretary Shashi Tharoor!
What will Vikram give us that Suketu hasn't? We'll let you know the minute we get through the 900 pages.
