Vikram Chandra leads a literary life to which most other novelists can only aspire. It's almost too ideal to be true.

Some history: Chandra, 47, was born in Delhi, India. After briefly attending St. Xavier's College in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), he immigrated to the United States in 1984 and enrolled in Pomona College in Southern California. He graduated magna cum laude with an English degree, with emphasis on creative writing.

Some of his family and friends in India had careers in filmmaking - "I lived on the edge of the industry for years" - so it seemed natural for him to attend film school. He chose Columbia University in New York City.

Thensomething dramatic happened: Oneevening in the university library, Chandracame across Col. James "Sikander" Skinner's autobiography and was so inspired that he quit film school to spend the next few years writing his first book, "Red Earth and Pouring Rain." Skinner was a 19th century soldier with a British father and an Indian mother.

"I became obsessed," Chandra recalled. "I've always loved cinema and thought that (filmmaking) was the way to make a living, but I had to do what I felt compelled to do and worry about the making-a-living part later."

Clearly, he made the right choice.

After the critically acclaimed debut of "Red Earth," he wrote another hit, "Love and Longing in Bombay." Next came "Sacred Games," a sensation in India a year before it become a hardback sensation in the United States. The megabook - in more ways than one, at 928 pages for the newly released paperback - claimed seven years of Chandra's writing life. The epic novel (HarperCollins, $16.95) is The Bee Book Club's choice for September.

The multi-award-winning tale was one of the most anticipated titles of 2007 and the object of an international bidding war among publishers. Harper- Collins won, reportedly paying Chandra $1 million.

On the surface, "Sacred Games" is the story of India's most-wanted master criminal, Ganesh Gaitonde, and his relationship with corrupt Sikh police inspector Sartaj Singh, who has made a career of busting his nemesis.

But this is no simple Holmes- Moriarty adventure. It works on numerous levels, the most vibrant of which paints a landscape of contemporary India and explores its sociological and political machinery. It addresses crime, politics, religion, the caste system, history, business, the psychology of power, the juxtaposition of good and evil, and the effects of merging cultures - to name a few of its topics.

The hub of the book's action is Mumbai, a port metropolis of 18 million people - from corporate moguls to slum dwellers. Mumbai is the center of India's entertainment (Bollywood) and business industries, and is one of the world's most ethnically diverse cities. Opportunity and intrigue rule. So do graft, bribery and various strata of other corruption.

I talked with Chandra on the phone from his home in Oakland. He and his wife, Melanie Abrams (author of the erotic novel "Playing"), teach creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley.

"We had a baby girl on May 5 - Leela - so things are kind of surreal right now," he said, sounding a bit sleepdeprived. Forgive my ignorance, but why does Chandra call Mumbai by its former name, Bombay?

"Depending on what language you're speaking, you call it by different names," he explained.

" 'Mumbai' comes from right-wing nativist politics." In a conversation with the media last year, Chandra said "Sacred Games" was the fulfillment of his effort to write "an anti-thriller and overturn the classic copdetective structure."

It appears he succeeded.

"In crime fiction, there has always been the notion of the detective and the criminal being reverse mirror images of each other," he said. "They're often played as independent protagonists. Welike to see ourselves as protagonists, but maybe we're not.

"What I became increasingly aware of as I talked with more and more people (in Mumbai) was that each person was a small part of a much larger game. Even a gangster who has achieved the power to shut down a city becomes a pawn in something that is much larger than him.