When I picked up A Bad Character by Deepti Kapoor, I looked forward to hearing the story of a young woman in Delhi told in the voice of a young woman from Delhi. This was important to me especially after so much attention from the West had been turned on the city following a recent string of sexual assaults, including the brutal gang rape of Jyoti Singh, a twenty-three year old woman on a bus in December 2012, which left her dead. At the time, as an Indian American woman, I felt a strange disembodying sense that the whole incident was both far away and yet too close. I wrote about this for The Rumpus in a piece called Tramp. But I hadn’t expected A Bad Character to bring back that strange sensation, the comingling of foreignness and familiarity.
A Bad Character echoes Nabokov’s Lolita with a story about the sexual initiation of a young woman, but offers a female perspective, one that doesn’t pull any punches. The narrator is a middle-class, twenty-year-old woman who burns with a longing that comes from being abandoned by her past and yet unclaimed by her future – a future whose only possibility seems to hinge on her marriageability.
It’s in this desperate life of preservation that death is held. Holding on to life only to die unblemished, to make it to the end, untouched by sin. And for what? What then? The girl sees this, and yet there’s nothing to be done, nowhere to go. Nothing for her to do but grit her teeth, calm the voices inside.
That’s where he, the “Bad Character,” finds her – waiting desperately for someone to bring her into the world, into the present. He stares at her across a café and she comes alive in his gaze, having been “starved of this look for so long.” Even though we learn intimate details of their lives, the contours of their minds and their bodies, we never learn their names. And yet this book is filled with names – the names and vivid descriptions of Delhi’s streets and sights. The city is a character in this love story, and in my opinion, the main character.
As someone who hasn’t spent much time in Delhi but has formed a distinct impression of it, I related to Kapoor’s depiction of this city of extremes. I’ve been scalded by its summer and frozen by its winter. I remain equally astounded by its suburban sprawl as by its narrow passageways. All of this in one city, how is it possible?
Like the narrator, I had been a twenty-year-old girl in Delhi, although she was a resident and I was merely a visitor. While I grew up in the Northeast United States and have lived in the Midwest, I’ve never been as cold as I was during a winter in Delhi, wearing my college sweatshirt and shawl over my Indian tunic top and developing a taste for tea just so I could savor the warmth of the cup in my hands and its contents running down my throat. Like the narrator, I stayed with an aunty and took in the stunning sights: Red Fort, Qutub Minar, and Taj Mahal in Agra. But I also remember that I got my period during my stay and didn’t’ know what the local protocol was for disposing of feminine hygiene products. Aunty told me to keep them in a plastic bag and we would dispose of them later. At the end of the week, I tried not to register my shock when she instructed me to fling the bag onto a heap of garbage on the side of the road.
Kapoor vividly captures both Delhi’s guts and its glories.
Crepuscular. Delhi creeps as we go, the sun sinks behind the earth once more, bathes in the rotten Yamuna, drowns there. The temples erupt, the mosques, the droning of men’s voices, the keening of every faith, the desperate plea for the sun to rise again, the bats and the birds, the great tambourine shake, a bedsheet shook over the balcony to the street.
The affair starts with a bargain: he will be her tour guide through Delhi, transforming it in her mind from a sterile prison to a wonderland, with endless corners to explore. They embark on long drives to the ever-expanding edges of Delhi’s hinterlands and navigate the old city’s mazes and gulleys by foot. He introduces her to the seedy underground scene and its characters.
We drive and we drive and he talks. He wants to show me every inch of the city, wants to exhaust me, fill my body with it, he want me to know. To know the Ridge, the tail end of the Aravalli Hills stretching all the way from Gujarat, bursting up through the city like a dinosaur’s back, one hundred and fifty million years old, older than the Himalaya itself, cutting across Delhi…
It’s not entirely clear if she is seduced more by him or the tantalizing vision of Delhi he offers, but he soon becomes not just her tour guide but her sexual guide, opening the door to new pleasures and experiences and closing the door forever on her previous way of life.
He held me in his arms afterwards, held me round my waist, pressed his teeth to the back of my neck, whispered in my ear, and he asked me what it was I wanted from the world, what it was I feared. I said I feared everything, and I only wanted to be free.
Kapoor has a bold, lyrical style. Her best descriptions are saved for the city rather than its star-crossed lovers, which sometimes means that the setting overtakes the narrative. I found Kapoor’s language captivating enough that I was willing to go wherever she took me. With her unabashedly nonlinear storytelling, she tells us how this story ends in the very first words of the book:
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… 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.
He lived a wild life with little reverence for anything except pushing limits. Ultimately he doomed both himself and her. Fittingly, the only God he worshipped was Siva, the God of Destruction. In grief, she stumbles into mindless sexual encounters and drug addiction, but you’re never quite sure if she believes his dark love damned her, or saved her from the doldrums of a life of rigid expectations.
A Bad Character, like Delhi itself, haunts you and leaves you changed because in such places love and hate, life and death, salvation and destruction are thrown so close together so as to be indistinguishable.
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Postscript: A few weeks after I finished reading and reviewing A Bad Character, a BBC documentary, India’s Daughter, examining the December 2012 gang rape was on the cusp of being released in India and worldwide. Instead, controversy broke out and the Indian government banned the screening of the film in India and online. The Indian government justified the ban by alternately claiming that the film was inciting, alarming, and that the filmmaker didn’t get the appropriate clearance to speak to the imprisoned rapist, who made statements in the film blaming the victim and women, in general, for inviting rape. A great debate ensued among those who had seen the film (and even those who had not) before it was pulled down from BBC’s own web site: Is it airing India’s dirty laundry and unnecessarily inciting alarm? Does it give the rapists murderers too much of a voice? Does it give enough of a voice to the late rape victim, Jyoti Singh, and her parents? Is it the product of a culturally insensitive “white savior,” who portrays rape as a problem unique to India?
I was able to see India’s Daughter in its entirety thanks to a progressive Asian web site that posted the documentary, even after it was no longer available on BBC. The film was hard to watch — the lack of remorse and heinous misogynistic remarks made by not only the rapist but also his well-educated lawyers were jarring and disturbing, and the raw grief of Jyoti’s parents was deeply upsetting.
A Bad Character sheds light on the profound and mundane ways that sexual violence circumscribes the lives of women.
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.
After watching India’s Daughter, I am left with many thoughts, one of them being that literary voices like Deepti Kapoor’s and books like A Bad Character, are now more crucial than ever.
