Sacred Games, the novel, has led a long and varied life since it was first conceived in 1996. To begin with, it was never intended to be a 900-page journey into the grisly underbelly of Mumbai, where the line between politician and criminal is as hazy as the view from your window on a rainy day. It was meant to be a straight-cut murder mystery, says Vikram Chandra, its author, on a visit to the city. "I had no idea it was going to be that big when I started. I had thought that I'd use a typical crime structure where there's a mystery on the first page and by page number 222, you know who's committed the murder and what had happened," he reveals.

But the architecture of the book gradually started expanding to something bigger than the 1BHK that the initial novella seemed to represent. Chandra kept adding to his foundation as he went about the process of writing the novel, opening a wider window into the troubled '90s, when gang wars in the city were as commonplace as potholes in the monsoon. "I remember clearly that my father and I — we lived in Lokhandwala at the time — were coming home from town and suddenly there was gunfire from automatic weapons echoing in our building, and that was the famous shootout that they later made into a film," he says, adding that since his family was in the business of Bollywood, he knew people who were in the radar of the underworld, which milked the movies back then to keep its coffers brimming. "I even know someone who was shot at. So, suddenly it all seemed really close to home. [The book] was no longer living in the realm of fiction. And my impulse was to try and figure out what that involved."