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It's her way or no way, in Delhi

Kapoor captures a certain version of Delhi - fetid, fast and ashy...
Last Updated 21 February 2015, 16:23 IST

The title character of Deepti Kapoor’s searing debut is dead by Line 1, but I still read A Bad Character in one frantic sitting. I wasn’t desperate for details about his mysterious death or his relationship with the narrator; it was Idha, a woman ready to defy societal conventions, who kept me on the line.

In a voice that flits between excess and restraint, Idha recounts her brief affair with a “wild animal dressed in human clothes,” a hideous but irresistible drug dealer. “I am pretty and he is ugly.

And the secret is this turns me on.” She finds him in Delhi, “no place for a woman in the dark unless she has a man and a car or a car and a gun.” But Idha does drive through Delhi nights without a man or a gun, and she doesn’t pursue her nameless lover for protection. The relationship merely bolsters an extant self-possession. Her well-to-do family desperately wants her to marry; she seeks a life on her own terms.

Kapoor captures a certain version of Delhi — fetid, fast and ashy — but the city provides the ink, not the language, of the story. Instead, A Bad Character tackles a more universal theme of female desire — inclusive of but not restricted to the erotic; here is the story of a young woman’s hunger to be free. But for any woman to possess and understand herself in a conservative society, expectations and traditions must die. Fittingly, bodies are set aflame.

“Even after burning, the breastbones of men and the pelvises of women remain,” Idha remembers her lover saying. “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.” He is older and more experienced at living in Delhi’s fringe, but he isn’t the only bad character in the story. “It’s what they’ll say about me too, when they know what I’ve done.”

I read in deep expectancy of learning what Idha had done, but in the end her badness was most felt in her language and associative leaps. The story of first meeting her lover is braided with a childhood recollection of witnessing a cremation in Varanasi.

Alone, 8-year-old Idha watches as a dead man’s “mustache 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.” A few sentences later a naked ascetic smeared in ash pulls a corpse from the river and eats “the sodden and putrid flesh raw,” a memory that reminds Idha of “the final face of the man I love.” Typical romance this is not.

So it was a disappointment to find passages that read like stock scenes of the damaged romance genre: “She examines his scars... She’s fascinated by their texture, by their memory of pain... She brings her mouth close, kisses them, touches them with her tongue, moves her tongue along their ridges.” The scene is so unlike the rest of the book that Kapoor drops into the third person for a couple of paragraphs, a decision I still cannot decipher.

A Bad Character is intoxicating, but I was left with the sense that something in Idha remains unrealised, that she is capable of more disobedience than appears on the page. Sure, she does drugs and has unmarried sex, but those choices are only wrong by traditional standards, not hers.

Late in the book there is one possible answer: The worst thing she does is have the final word on a man she knows she doesn’t fully comprehend. “But I’m beyond that; it makes no difference to me,” she reasons. “These words are his cremation, I’ve already watched him burn.”

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(Published 21 February 2015, 16:23 IST)

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