Bird in Search of a Cage

Delhi is the bad character in this debut novel about a young woman in the city.

Book: A Bad Character
Author: Deepti Kapoor
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
Pages: 240
Price: Rs 499

The lover of Deepti Kapoor’s protagonist is dead in the first line of her debut novel. Before he meets his pitiful end on the Delhi-Rajasthan highway, he swoops down into Idha’s life like a bird of prey and changes it forever. It is 2001, 9/11 is being talked about on the news and at kitty parties in the capital. The protagonist spends her afternoons in a rich businessman’s hotel room; coke-fuelled sex keeps her mind busy and her heart numb. She has changed so much — a year ago, she was sitting in south Delhi cafes to kill time before driving across the river, to east Delhi where the air is fetid and where Aunty waits for her to behave like a suitable girl as she lines up suitable boys. With her mother dead and her father absent, the 20-year-old finds herself at the charity of her mother’s college friend. Exhausted by her innocence and ignorance of the world outside college and home, she is waiting for something or someone to happen. Then, one evening, he finds her in a cafe she frequents, he sees “a blank slate, a lump of wet clay.” She is beautiful and he is ugly. She knows she will love him even though he is mad, bad and dangerous to know.

Their love story unfolds in Delhi, as they drive around the capital’s wide, open roads and in the cramped side lanes, drinking, smoking and talking like lovers and flâneurs in a French film, caught in a web they’ve woven around themselves, entranced by the other’s je ne sais quoi. Kapoor’s prose is visual and lyrical as she writes about how they make their way from Lutyen’s Delhi, going north beyond Mori Gate to the Old City, throwing themselves into the throng of bodies meshed together, moving, shopping, breathing. The pages are heavy, yet unburdened, with metaphors, as their wheels take them to the wasteland that is Gurgaon, where they stand amidst glass, concrete and stone. They eat most of their meals in the circles of Connaught Place before heading to his one-bedroom apartment in Nizamuddin West to drink, smoke joints, make love and talk some more. With its brutal and unrelenting apathy, its shameless show of wealth and poverty, the hotels and dens and hovels where the drugs that promise freedom entrap you, the city is a “bad character” — not him — who wants to tear them both away from the pretence of living in society. It surprises nobody when their love turns toxic, choking them till she breaks away and returns home.

Kapoor paints a vast and detailed landscape of Delhi, canvassing the city and its people, its smells and stories, its ability to harbour hope and heartbreak in the same breath. With remarkable candour, she crafts sentences that stand out for their elegance and brevity; they linger in your memory long after the last page has been turned. However, this coming-of-age tale is familiar to any outsider who has struggled to find their place in the city before they could call it home. It only offers slivers of perspicacity that awaken memories of a time when one discovered the beast that is Delhi, and that it cannot be tamed. So we build cages for ourselves lest we are hunted by the police, the politicians, the men on the streets, the neighbours and, sometimes, even by the ones we love.

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