Book Review: A Bad Character

Book: A Bad Character
Author: Deepti Kapoor
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 233
Price: Rs 499

Deepti Kapoor meets me in a cafe in Khan Market, much like the one where Idha, the protagonist of her debut novel, A Bad Character, first encounters her enigmatic lover.
Idha — 20 years old, beautiful and "unmarked by life" — is sitting by herself; and he — "animal-like", "ugly" with "dark skin", "short wiry hair", "large flat nose", "eyes bursting on either side like flares", "big ears and a fleshy mouth that holds many teeth" — is staring at her across the room. It's a Beauty-and-the Beast moment, and the attraction is immediate.

The young man comes over. They get talking, he offers to buy her dinner, and she agrees, heady with the knowledge that she's courting trouble. For Idha, his eyes hold "the promise of "something else", of escape from the drudgery of her life with 'Aunty' in an East Delhi apartment, where she returns every evening to watch soaps on TV with Aunty, or listen to Aunty and her friends gossip about servants, children gone astray, property disputes, and the price of gold.

Idha and the young man begin a passionate love affair. But love is not a beautiful, uplifting emotion in this novel — it's a searing, frenzied, impossible, often debasing, and violent experience. Swept by heady emotion and the thrill of leading a double life, Idha discovers her own sexuality and the drug-induced shifting world her lover inhabits. He introduces her to cigarettes, to the life lurking on the edges of sarkaari Delhi, to little-known lanes and bylanes of Nizamuddin, Old Delhi and Pahargunj, to the finer points of drink in Deepti Kapoor's Caol Ila single malt whisky, of crumbling charas and snorting cocaine, to his Israeli junkie friends for whom he procures the finest quality hash.

Kapoor writes frankly about sex and drug abuse, which is rare for an Indian — especially a debutant female novelist. The sex is graphic in parts, and kinky. Delhi is a character in this novel as much as it is its setting. As a student and later as a journalist who worked in the city, Kapoor, much like Idha, says she would drive everywhere. "I had a car and that was my protective armour." Kapoor began writing the novel after shifting to Goa a few years ago, where she teaches yoga. It was then, she says, drained of the aggressiveness that the city had bred in her, that the idea of a "short, pulpy racy thriller set in Delhi with a boy and girl in the middle of it" took hold. "Delhi's always been the boring, bureaucratic city," she says. But there's so much seething rage and anger on the streets, juxtaposed with a lot of desire, and those beautiful ruins of forts, palaces, mosques and within it, a lot of terror and madness."

Written in first person, Kapoor's tone is confiding, free-flowing, and confessional. "But it's not autobiographical," stresses Kapoor, though she does confess to having used "episodes of my life as a jumping off point".
Kapoor writes a staccato prose that's poetic in its intensity: "The city is close to me now, I think I know it. Millions of lives, hearts, lungs, arms flailing and stabbing, begging, beating, pleading, praying, pushing gums against teeth, teeth against flesh, tongues lolling, bodies rubbing in the dark, drunk, fraying, frayed hems on clothing, loose stitches, goats, chicken, one great cry, the scent of it, the red dust and diesel in my nostrils and my mouth." The sparely elegant phrases pack a wealth of colour, smell and association, evoking the reality of a city straining at the leashes, pulsating with deviant, joyous life. It also gives the prose a breathlessness which, coupled with the fast-paced narrative, makes the novel a fairly compelling read.

In its dark tone and impressionistic style, A Bad Character is reminiscent of the European literature and cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. Its use of the non-linear technique, where the narrative intuitively goes back and forth in time without any signposts to highlight the shifts, leaving the reader to work out the chronology, is very French nouvelle vague. Kapoor acknowledges the European influence, especially writers like Marguerite Duras (scriptwriter of Hiroshima Mon Amour, a film which similarly links love with shame) and Anna Kavan, who struggled with drug addiction all her life and wrote about mental pain, and psychological states. "Desire, violence, what women do to men, what men do to women... these were things I was interested in rather than plot or story."

Commercially, too, it's been an impressive debut for Kapoor, who had sent her manuscript last June to literary agent David Godwin (who represents Arundhati Roy and Vikram Seth) in London. "He liked it a lot and sent it to several publishers," Kapoor says. It led to a "hot auction", to use a term in the media release, and the book was picked up by Penguin in India, Jonathan Cape in the UK and Knopf in USA.