By Vikram Chandra. HarperCollins Publishers, 900 pp, $37.95, hardcover.

In a novel this huge, you expect a wealth of details about the subject at hand—here, the inner workings of Mumbai’s criminal underworld. What’s most pleasing about Vikram Chandra’s wrist-spraining third novel, though, is the complexity all those details give rise to. For instance, it’s not enough to glimpse the day-to-day life of a low-ranking city police inspector; Chandra has the space and talent to build a rich portrait of the world of Sartaj Singh, a good-looking secular Sikh who’s trying to navigate the ethical morass of modern-day India with something approaching the rigour of his deceased cop father.

Singh is as close to good as we’re likely to get. But he can’t afford to be all innocence: in a world where bribes pay the salary, he has to bend rules, turn a blind eye just to get through the day. Balanced against him is Ganesh Gaitonde, the self-made Hindu crime don who may be a little less bad than he seems. Gaitonde is the principal crook in the novel—a curiously high-literature thriller—and though he’s dead within the first pages, his life and accomplishments, recounted first-person in chapters alternating with Singh’s, continue to haunt the policeman until the final scene.

Gaitonde and Singh are only two of the scores of characters who pass across Chandra’s enormous stage. We travel back to Partition to witness the religious violence firsthand, and forward to a not-distant time when a nuclear device could be assembled to finish what the killings did not. We come to care deeply for the author’s foul-mouthed polyglot characters, who struggle for a toehold in a place that is as intricately portrayed as the pragmatism they require for survival. “If you want to live in the city,” one character advises, “you have to think ahead three turns, and look behind a lie to see the truth and then behind that truth to see the lie.” It’s good advice to all Chandra’s villagers flooding into Mumbai, intent on reinvention, and it’s good advice for readers as the story dekes through the details to its surprising and satisfying resolution.