Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
One
Two
Three
Copyright
About the Book
My boyfriend died when I was twenty-one. His body was left lying broken in the highway out of Delhi while the sun rose in the desert to the east. I wasn’t there, I never saw it. But plenty of others saw, in the trucks that passed by without stopping, and from the roadside dhaba where he’d been drinking all night.
Then they wrote about him in the paper. Twelve lines buried in the middle pages, one line standing out, the last one, in which a cop he’d never met said to the reporter, He was known to us, he was a bad character.
This is the story of Idha, a young woman who finds escape from the arranged marriage and security that her middle-class world has to offer through a chance encounter with a charismatic, dangerous young man. She is quickly exposed to the thrilling, often illicit pleasures that both the city, Delhi, and her body can hold. But as the affair continues, and her double life deepens, her lover’s increasingly unstable behaviour carries them past the point of no return, where grief, love and violence threaten to transform his madness into her own.
A stunning novel about female desire, A Bad Character shows us a Delhi we have not seen in fiction before: a city awash with violence, rage and corruption.
About the Author
Deepti Kapoor was born in Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh, and grew up in Bombay, Bahrain and Dehradun. In 1997 she went to the University of Delhi to study journalism and later completed an MA in Social Psychology. She spent the next decade working for various publications, driving around the city, finding stories and learning its streets. She now lives in Goa.
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781448191772
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published by Jonathan Cape 2014
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Copyright © Deepti Kapoor 2014
Deepti Kapoor has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
Jonathan Cape
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
www.vintage-books.co.uk
Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm
The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780224099615
My boyfriend died when I was twenty-one. His body was left lying broken on the highway out of Delhi while the sun rose in the desert to the east. I wasn’t there, I never saw it. But plenty of others saw, in the trucks that passed by without stopping and from the roadside dhaba where he’d been drinking all night.
Then they wrote about him in the paper. Twelve lines buried in the middle pages, one line standing out, the last one, in which a cop he’d never met said to the reporter, He was known to us, he was a bad character.
It’s a phrase they use sometimes, what some people still say. It’s what they’ll say about me too, when they know what I’ve done.
Him and me,
(long dead)
Sitting in the cafe in Khan Market the day we met, in April, when the indestructible heat was rising in the year, sinking in the day, the sun setting very red, sacrificing itself to the squat teeth of buildings stretching back round the stinking Yamuna into Uttar Pradesh.
The city is a furnace on days like these, the aching heart of a cremation ground.
But inside the cafe you wouldn’t know it; inside it’s cool, the AC is on, the windows are politely shuttered, it could be any time of day in here, in here you could forget the city, its ceaseless noise, its endless quarry of people. You could feel safe.
Only he’s staring at me.
Twenty and untouched. It’s a sin. For twenty years I’ve been waiting for this one thing.
Idha.
In the mirror.
I give myself a name, I wear it out. Lunar, serpentine, desirous. A charm that protects me.
By the time I met him he was already gone. I didn’t know it then, but he was gone. Because he never once paced himself, because he was racing forward from the moment of birth and every bridge he crossed he turned round to destroy. Chaos mixed with joy, the joy of Shiva, biting his mother’s breast, madness in the blood.
And I couldn’t have saved him; he wasn’t there to be saved. Instead he picked me up in the cafe and tried to make me in his image. He said, You’re my lump of wet clay. And it’s true in a way, I was.
So now we’re sitting in this cafe in Khan Market the day we met, in April, in the year 2000. In Khan where it’s civilized, where there are bookstores and florists, and the music shop still selling cassettes, all joined together in a horseshoe and no big chain stores yet. Where the grocery shops for the embassy crowd are long and thin, with shelves packed high, full of imported goods, of Nutella and Laughing Cow cheese, Belgian chocolate and Spanish olives. Where the great and the good of Delhi walk upon the cracked pavements, or send their servants at least.
And in this cafe on the first floor, the waitresses are from the north-east, from Manipur and Assam. The tables and chairs are wooden, painted dark green, distressed like Parisian antiques. There are nooks and crannies in here to hide from the day, old posters on the walls, terracotta floors for the feet. They play Brubeck and Dylan on the stereo, brew filter coffee, bake carrot cake and serve toasted brown-bread sandwiches on large white plates.
People are returning to India these days. Money is pouring in from every hole. It’s also rising up out of the ground, conjured from nowhere, a miracle of farmland and ruins, an economic sleight of hand. There’s construction everywhere, in Defence Colony and GK they are building, and out in the satellite wastelands of Gurgaon and Noida they are building cities too.
Laxmi is doing her job, for those who know how to pray.
It’s every man for himself.
India is Shining.
But me, I’ve gone nowhere, done nothing.
I’m in the second year of college, in the care of Aunty. Not in dorms, not in hostels, not with other girls, no, there’s no paying-guest house for me. No mother either any more, and my father, he’s off living in Singapore, abandoned me a long time ago for a new life there, though no one will say it out loud, though everyone still pretends it’s not the case.
No, I’m alone, in college, living in east Delhi over the filthy Yamuna, in the care of Aunty. My mother grew up with this woman, who I can never call by name. She went to school with her too, then was left behind. And Aunty is a proper woman, she will be until the day she dies.
So I go to college and I come back home, I sit with Aunty in front of the soaps or else study and daydream in my room. But sooner or later I’m always called outside to be presented to whichever visitor has dropped by, or else I’m dragged with Aunty on one of her endless visits, to sit in other apartments and living rooms with the other Aunties of this world, their daughters too sometimes, listening to the incessant talk about other lives, their weddings, sons and daughters gone astray, the ones who have failed, the servants who will not do what they’re told, the property disputes, scandals, jewellery, the price of gold. I keep my head down here and my thoughts to myself.
I have my classmates in college of course. Not quite friends but they’re still nice girls. With them I go to the movies sometimes, and sometimes we sneak out to TGIF to get a Long Island iced tea or a beer and sit around the table talking about the films we’ve seen, the clothes we’ve bought, the boys at college we’re supposed to like, the ones we dream of marrying, besides the film stars.
Once or twice I’ve even had dates with these boys, been to coffee shops nearby and listened to them talk. They’re such good bright boys that I should be in awe, but on these dates I’m always left cold. I sit as they talk and feel nothing for them, and the world keeps turning, but no one knows what turns in me.
Then driving home to Aunty in my car, round the monumental grandeur of India Gate, across the black water of the creeping Yamuna, a pain grips my heart. My father bought me this car at the start of college’s second year, out of guilt perhaps, or as a consequence of his new wealth. But driving home only a pain grips my heart and I put my foot down to speed in the sulphurous dark.
There’s another girl in the flat across from me. In the window of the tower block along the void of empty air I see her sometimes looking out. She’s my shadow self, I decide. I keep a watch for her and then write foolish words about hope and love in my diary before I sleep.
And before waking each morning I dream. As the light breathes into the city I am leaving again: instead of the library I make my way north, along the river’s edge towards the Iron Railway bridge, joining the Ring Road and driving up the Grand Trunk Road, leaving the city, going all the way to Chandigarh. Beyond Chandigarh there are the wheat fields of Punjab and the foothills and mountains that rise above. I drive through them to places I’ve never seen, that only live on these maps of mine: Mandi, Kullu, the Rohtang Pass, the east Ladakhi plateau, into the void above where nothing more exists.
But even in dreams I don’t make it. In my dreams I am stuck on the edge of town, with the sun coming up around the Yamuna pipelines, the shredded prayer flags of the Tibetan refugees, the swampland near Model Town, where everyone is shitting and brushing their teeth on the side of the road, running for the buses in the shimmer of exhaust fumes bouncing off the heat of baking stone.
I climb out of bed into the cold of the AC to look at myself in the mirror, my black eyes and my pale cheeks, and I wait for this one thing to happen to me.
I run.
I run a lot in these college days, in the colony below the tower block, in the faded little park where the aunties go for their morning strolls, after the cleaners have swept the rooms and the cooks have been given their work. It’s the same park where the servants sit on the benches during their breaks, trading house gossip and complaints, and where the drivers lie wolf-eyed, waiting to be called in the shade. I run a lot in this park in the mornings, before all this happens, and in the evening before the sun goes down I run too, put on a CD and just run. Going in circles because the park is so small, listening to Moby in the beginning—simple, uplifting, driving my feet forward. And then later listening to the trance my love gives me, hard, dark and hypnotized.
But before all this I listen with bursts of hope, desperation, burning up the energy that has nowhere to go. I want to run in the night, to get up at 4 a.m. and go out into the deserted lanes, charge down the middle past the sleeping dogs, over the potholes. I wake up in the dead of it and listen to the AC and I want just to put my music on and go out there, make my lungs burst, and run. Only Delhi is no place for a woman in the dark unless she has a man and a car or a car and a gun.
*
But now we’re in this cafe, a place I visit often. I drive a little then I come to sit, to read a book, to pretend to think. I chat with this waitress of mine, this Chinky, as Aunty calls her, this woman from the north-east. She’s very beautiful to me, but we only talk between orders, in the time she takes to collect my cup and plate, and even then she lingers with one foot ready to leave, an ear cocked to the rest of the room. In snatches she tells me about her troublesome brother in Manipur, her loving husband who is educated and too proud to take on lesser work. Around her eyes she wears a thick ring of kohl to make them seem larger—she says quite sadly that she has small eyes, that they’re ugly, but I like her eyes, as I like everything about her: alert, mournful, intelligent, but most of all different. And while the kohl around her eyes looks like rebellion, around mine it is a prison.
Once or twice in my green bathroom light have I put kohl around my eyes like hers, thickly, admiring them.
But she’s not here today.
And across the room he is staring at me.
I’ve been stared at a lot of course; it’s what happens here, it’s what men do. Every day from door to door, on the buses, stepping through rubble on the edge of the road, in the car stuck in traffic, at red lights. Stares of incomprehension, lust, rage, sad yearning, so vacant and blank sometimes it’s terrifying, sometimes pitiful. Eyes filling the potholes, bouncing down the street like marbles, no escaping their clank. Eyes in restaurants, in offices, in college, eyes at home. Women’s too, disapprovingly.
But in his eyes there’s the promise of something else.
*
So I’m in this cafe in Khan Market, twenty years old and I’m beautiful, though I only know it now looking back at the photos I have of myself, where it is obvious, painfully so because it’s gone, this beauty, never to return, where the skin is so young and unmarked by life, still with the last traces of puppy fat, but how deep is the hunger in the eyes, the joy right there inside her at the moment she’s being shaped and devoured.
And nobody knows, nobody will. That’s the thrill of it. None of my classmates, no family. They’ll know something is up, that something has changed, but if they knew for certain what it was, if they could see him, they’d be horrified beyond belief, because he’s ugly.
Ugly with dark skin, with short wiry hair, with a large flat nose and eyes bursting either side like flares, with big ears and a fleshy mouth that holds many teeth.
There’s something of the animal in him. Something of the elephant and the monkey. Something of the jackal.
He’s not a typical ‘Delhi boy’, that’s for sure, not only because of his face and skin but also because of the clothes he wears: a faded yellow T-shirt that’s been washed too many times, a pair of too-large brown corduroy pants held up with an old belt. A vagabond who’s been scrubbed clean. But there are also brand-new red Converse sneakers on his feet, with their clownish white rims that tell me he’s not exactly from the street.
He’s nothing like the boys they want me to marry. There’s a new one of those on the horizon, an NRI, twenty years in the US, a full-blooded American now. Aunty is lining him up for a meeting. I sit with her at home on the sofa while she tells me all about him. She leafs through his biodata, his golden resume, and in this apartment high up in the air I cannot breathe. I eat and sleep but I cannot breathe. She’s been arranging these meetings for a year now, without success, but she never tires, and this new one is very promising to her: he’s seen my photo and approved of my looks, and because he’s divorced he’s willing to overlook my own unfortunate situation, the mother dead, the father absent.
Aunty doesn’t imagine I’d ever say no, and after so many rejections, after so many families have turned me down, she’s giddy about this one.
Sitting on the sofa. Listening to her speak. The soap operas on the TV, the thick curtains drawn, the fan spinning dead air. Such heavy furniture in her world, stared at by that dark wood, by those statues of gods, by bronze and dried fruit, by nuts tied in packages with bows, left over from this wedding or that, from Diwali.
Uncle is in his bedroom looking through the accounts, or pretending to at least, drinking his peg of whisky. His world is his own, he doesn’t share it with me—only good morning, how are you, fine, off to college, very good. Never any emotion, no affection for his wife, not in public at least. Only the motions of putting food on the table, only off to the factory or the club and then to sleep.
In front of the TV Aunty looks at me sadly, she sees my stubbornness, my lack of enthusiasm, and suddenly she’s afraid for me.
But I’m actually considering the American, that’s the truth. I’m seriously thinking of saying yes to him. I’ve been toying with the idea for a while now. The neighbour says, But he’s divorced, and Aunty says, So what if he’s divorced, he’s learned his lesson, he makes good money, he’s a good family boy, what more is there? And unlike this one in the cafe, the American is not ugly at all.
It’s the years of conditioning that make me think his dark skin is ugly, poor, wrong. Which makes me think he looks like a servant.
But in the cafe I’m looking up at him.
I am pretty and he is ugly.
And the secret is this turns me on.
*
I tried many times to write this down, and all have failed. Ten years gone by. Words deleted from hard drives, set on fire in ditches, in metal bins on balconies, pages torn up in frustration, scrunched into balls and tossed away. I tried to write this down but went about it the wrong way. How to write while being pursued? When one is not the pen but the page?
*
So, Varanasi, aged eight. Still in pigtails, wearing my tartan dress. Still a little mute and pensive, my lips pursed, looking in the mirror but not quite recognizing myself, not yet comfortable in my own skin. I want to be grown-up more than anything, but for now I’m only aware enough to be embarrassed of myself. I don’t know any other way; I certainly don’t know how to change it. It doesn’t occur to me that it’s within my power to change anything, to make decisions of my own. So I’m stuck in this body and the clothes I’m given to wear. But it’s also true that I like my tartan dress.
Varanasi, my father: the last time I remember you whole. As if you were a thing that could be broken apart, like a chocolate bar.
We went together, the three of us, mother, you and me, a final holiday. You were back from Singapore, the last time before you left for good. We took the train from Agra and stayed with relatives in the old city, near the Ganga, in a house in a tangle of lanes with a courtyard inside that one would never know was there.
This lane is so narrow we have to press ourselves against its sides as the bodies come by. They come as torpedoes wrapped in cloth on the hands of sadness towards the Ganga to burn.
He once told me, he said, Even after burning, the breastbone of men and the pelvis of women remain. That instead of crumbling to ash they are sent down the river to sail, to sink in its bed. One day when the Ganga dries up they’ll find them there. Thirty billion pelvic bones, thirty billion sternums. The history of the world in a watery grave.
And just his presence. Just his hand on my belly as we sleep, when he loves me. It lives forever.
Close your eyes, go to sleep.
It lives forever, the hand on my shoulder in the train on the way, in the compartment, hanging down from the top bunk. I look at them, my mother and my father, and he is stroking her hair. He is holding her in his lap like a little bird.
In the black and yellow of the taxi to the city we sit with our luggage stacked around us on the torn leather seats. Then in the lanes that are too narrow for taxis, a cycle rickshaw, groaning under our weight. They’re carrying the luggage on their heads the last bit of the way—my bag is on my head, I’m mimicking them. Lots of legs, and those sudden processions of the dead coming round each bend.
At the house where we’re staying, the courtyard has water flowing in narrow channels around its edge and creepers in bowls that climb up the walls to the lattice-screen balconies on the first floor. The gates of the courtyard open to the alleyway. When they are closed the city remains in noise coming through a blue square of sky, where toy kites fall and rise. There’s a hospital nearby. You hear the cries of the patients in the morning, the hacking of phlegm in the throat that is the song of India.
Then one evening the wind changes and a thin layer of grey falls on the courtyard floor. It’s the ash, someone tells me, coming from the burning ghat, the ghat of the dead.
*
In the cafe I get up to go to the bathroom, and in the cramped bathroom away from the AC, I feel the city crawling over me—as soon as I’m through the door it crawls through the window in squashed and malodorous heat. In thousands of horns and voices, in red dust. Night is falling, so the people are moving back out to the streets, bulbs are being switched on in the stalls, in the doorways. The retreating sun releases fragrance, incense, sewer smells, frying food, exhaust fumes. The minarets give their call to prayer, the rising swarm of their devotion telling us that God is great.
*
Early next morning I left to see the dead. Alone, no one knew I’d gone, snuck out through the alleyways, I was drawn to the river, somehow I knew where it would be. Coming round a corner on the cobbles to a slope running north-east, long like the slopes that boats are pushed down, but at the bottom before the water it’s the inferno of Dashashwamedh.
There are two pyres in my head, maybe three. The third might be lower down, out of focus, but these two are raised up, clear in my mind, on abutments of concrete. Behind there is a wooden tower and around this many piles of wood, many different kinds, each more expensive than the last, each more fragrant, to mask the smell of burning flesh.
There’s already a body roasting there, almost done, its family quietly accepting now.
This girl would have looked wide-eyed to anyone watching her. Transfixed, standing without words. The smoke changing direction without warning, billowing across her, pieces of ash running into her dress, sticking in her hair.
Bluest of blue skies, not a cloud within it, and already hot at 7 a.m., even without the raging fires whose ripples in the daylight are a thing to behold.
After a lull, a new procession begins, the body wrapped in bandages as in the alleyways, the pyre cleared, the ash and logs swept away, the last bone set to sail as the soul drifts up past the crows on the rooftops and the new pyre is laid. They are sobbing, the women, a group of women holding on to one another. One in the middle cannot be contained. At any moment she might break away, fall forward to embrace the dead man’s face.
It has a moustache, a balding head. It is laid on the crisscrossed wood, the fire is lowered on a stick, pressed in underneath. It takes hold and quickly begins to spread. The hysteria of the widow stops and it seems as if the whole universe has held its breath.
I feel the heat of the flames against my skin, I cannot take my eyes away, I think that he’ll jump out at any moment and run. But nothing happens like this. Instead the moustache zips out of existence like a magic trick, the eyes melt, the yellow layer of fat beneath his skin becomes exposed, it starts to sizzle and pop. Soon the bright white bone shows through. He is burning away; he’s dead and he is disappearing again. The widow: I watch her watching this, not removing her eyes, and there’s no mistaking that nothing exists in time.