Sometime in late 1996, I began working on a new novel. I had turned in my manuscript for my second book (a collection of short stories titled Love and Longing in Bombay), had taken a holiday from writing for a few months, and now was beset – again – by that restlessness which comes from not working on fiction. So I began; I knew this was going to be a book about organized crime in India. Like everyone else in the country, I’d read the newspaper reports about the transformation of local gangs into large “companies” organized on corporate principles, and I had followed the bloody internecine wars, which included an infamous shootout with the police a few blocks from my home. So the echoing of automatic weapons gunfire was not merely cinematic any more, and the reality came closer and closer to home – I had friends in the Indian film industry who had been the victims of extortion by the companies, who had been threatened and shot at.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.granthika.co/granthika-an-introduction/