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"A face floated above the staggered roofs, huge, luminous brown eyes that went and came from behind the parapets, larger than any of the windows, and there was a gleaming brown touched by blue light, half-open lips and swirling hair, all of it somehow completely weightless and paradisiacal. Sartaj knew that she was only a cunningly lit model on a vast billboard across the main road, but it was distracting to be watched so intently by her. He turned his eyes down and went on."

That's a surreal image from Vikram Chandra's new novel, Sacred Games. The book is a supercharged detective story set in Bombay, India, painting a sprawling mural of 21st century life with pulp fiction watercolors.

Popular culture is like another character in the novel: advertisements loom ominously, murderers hide in Bombay Hindi language movie sets (or Bollywood, for short), and the ghost of the American private detective haunts this Indian mystery. 

Today, Chandra teaches us how to weave popular culture into our own fiction, part of my deceptively simple feature: Five Easy Questions.  In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing.

Jason Boog:
How did Bollywood get so wrapped up in your book? How did you use popular culture in Sacred Games? 

Vikram Chandra:
Bollywood uses a variety of modes, and it can be confusing to the foreign eye. Continue reading...

 Here, you don’t expect the movie to move from one mode to a next, you have to get used to that, and know that’s part of the whole experience.

It has its own aesthetic, just like opera in the West. You’re experiencing a kind of magical realism.

I’ve grown up with it. I think for post-independence India, it’s been one of the few common links between the diverse communities in India. You hear it on the streets all the time, it operates in our lives like a soundtrack, just like rock and roll here.

It’s very much part of the texture of existence. The form comes from very old roots. In the late 19th century, two years after the demo of moving pictures in Paris, they started making films in Bombay.

The first talkie-film in India had 18 songs in it. Came directly from street theater of the time. That comes from medieval and classical Indian theater that uses music and song as an integral part of a theater experience.  

Bollywood takes that and mixes it in with sounds from all over the world. It moves quite seamlessly between the kind of fantasy mode and reality, you can move from people singing in cast of thousands to a fight in a slum.

Amazon asked me for a list of Bollywood movies. You can find that on the site. They are: ‘Pyaasa (Thirst, 1957); Kaagaz ke Phool ("Paper Flowers," 1959); Mughal-e-Azam ("The Great Mughal," 1960); Sholay ("Embers," 1975); Parinda ("Bird," 1989); Satya (1998); Lagaan ("Land Tax," 2001); Lage Raho Munnabha ("Keep at it, Munnabhai," 2006).'

I tried to think about books to read, but the trouble with the books is that they tend to be densely academic or star-obsessed.