Delhi is a difficult city to live it, with its social norms, power centres and roundabouts. In 2000 — before the Metro that eventually managed to make commuting a comparative breeze — everyone drove everywhere all the time making the crowds, the jams and the routes occasionally brain-numbingly grating. This is the city that Idha, the narrator and protagonist/heroine of Deepti Kapoor’s debut novel, navigates even as she pushes against the walls of her prescribed existence. She drives around in the car that her father gave her; his payoff for leaving her to the mercies of life in India even as he jets off to Singapore to his new world. After her mother dies, she decides to leave Agra for Delhi to live with her maternal aunt. But life there is all about making a good marriage, and her aunt has a groom ready and waiting for her to say the good word. But Idha is not thrilled about hitching her matrimonial wagon to a divorced Indian-American she doesn’t know, however eligible he may be, and rebels against marriage and indeed everything else in her life. She is not happy at college either and wants something more, something that perhaps she herself cannot define.
So Idha takes the route that many young women who feel they don’t fit into their own worlds choose. She starts an affair — vaguely clandestine, vaguely seamy, vaguely unwarranted — with a young man she calls her ‘boyfriend’. In fact, the novel itself begins with her awareness of him as a rather unwanted, unsalubrious type, and her matter-of-fact telling of his death. “My boyfriend died when I was twenty-one,” she says, describing how a policeman that her lover had never met called him ‘a bad character’. And the book goes on to tell the story of how Idha and her boyfriend got together, what they did, what she felt, what happened next, et al. There are, of course, the general societal taboos alcohol, drugs and sex in a small, dark room; all of which and yet none of which give Idha that sense of unbridled freedom that she has always wanted. Her thoughts, like that of any 20-year-old, are random, wandering from where she has come from to where she wants to go, with myriad detours en route. In that, the writer creates a character that is almost astonishingly real, someone you could meet in a club, at college or on the way to a social rally in Jantar Mantar.
The descriptions are also real, but oddly disturbing. Idha is beautiful and ‘unmarked by life’, while her lover is ‘animal-like’, ‘ugly’, with ‘eyes bursting on either side like flares’ and ‘big ears and a fleshy mouth that holds many teeth’. He does not seem to be the vagrant or opportunistic type, but can afford to support himself and his various habits — how is suggested but never directly said. They have sex, also told easily and naturally and without much emotion, and they drive a lot through night-time Delhi. All along the writer shows her keen observations of the city and its problems, from the rising temperatures to the polluted Yamuna to the endless construction that is taking over from nature.
This is not an especially pleasant book, nor one that will endear the characters and their behaviour to its readers, but it is a strangely compelling one.
You may think ‘EW!’ more often than not, but you will read it through to the end.
A Bad Character; Deepti Kapoor, Penguin, Rs. 499.
