A Bad Character Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2014 by Deepti Kapoor

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A.

  Knopf, a division of Random House, LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies. Originally published in slightly different form in India by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books India, New Delhi, and subsequently in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of the Random House Group Limited, London, in 2014.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kapoor, Deepti.

  A bad character : a novel / Deepti Kapoor. — First United States edition.

  pages cm

  “Originally published in India by Hamish Hamilton / Penguin Books India in 2014 and in Great Britain by Jonathan

  Cape in 2014”—Title page verso.

  ISBN 978-0-385-35274-1 (hardcover) —

  ISBN 978-0-385-35275-8 (Ebook)

  1. Teenage girls—Fiction. 2. Delhi (India)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9499.4.K3763B33 2015

  823′.92—dc23

  2014020809

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Front-of-jacket photograph © Marco Giardini/Millennium Images, UK

  Jacket design by Janet Hansen

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  A Note About the Author

  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. I wasn’t there, I never saw it. But plenty of others saw, in the trucks that passed by without stopping and from the roadside dhaba where he’d been drinking all night.

  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.

  It’s a phrase they use sometimes, what some people still say. It’s what they’ll say about me too, when they know what I’ve done.

  Him and me

  (long dead).

  Sitting in the café in Khan Market the day we met, in April, when the indestructible heat was rising in the year, sinking in the day, the sun setting very red, sacrificing itself to the squat teeth of buildings stretching back round the stinking Yamuna into Uttar Pradesh.

  The city is a furnace on days like these, the aching heart of a cremation ground.

  But inside the café you wouldn’t know it; inside it’s cool, the AC is on, the windows are politely shuttered, it could be any time of day in here; in here you could forget the city, its ceaseless noise, its endless quarry of people. You could feel safe.

  Only he’s staring at me.

  Twenty and untouched. It’s a sin. For twenty years I’ve been waiting for this one thing.

  Idha.

  In the mirror.

  I give myself a name, I wear it out. Lunar, serpentine, desirous. A charm that protects me.

  ONE

  By the time I met him he was already gone. I didn’t know it then, but he was gone. Because he never once paced himself, because he was racing forward from the moment of birth and every bridge he crossed he turned round to destroy. Chaos mixed with joy, the joy of Shiva, biting his mother’s breast, madness in the blood.

  And I couldn’t have saved him; he wasn’t there to be saved. Instead he picked me up in the café and tried to make me in his image. He said, You’re my lump of wet clay. And it’s true in a way, I was.

  So now we’re sitting in this café in Khan Market the day we met, in April, in the year 2000. In Khan where it’s civilized, where there are bookstores and florists, and the music shop still selling cassettes, all joined together in a horseshoe and no big chain stores yet. Where the grocery shops for the embassy crowd are long and thin, with shelves packed high, full of imported goods, of Nutella and Laughing Cow cheese, Belgian chocolate and Spanish olives. Where the great and the good of Delhi walk upon the cracked pavements, or send their servants at least.

  And in this café on the first floor, the waitresses are from the north-east, from Manipur and Assam. The tables and chairs are wooden, painted dark green, distressed like Parisian antiques. There are nooks and crannies in here to hide from the day, old posters on the walls, terracotta floors for the feet. They play Brubeck and Dylan on the stereo, brew filter coffee, bake carrot cake and serve toasted brown-bread sandwiches on large white plates.

  People are returning to India these days. Money is pouring in from every hole. It’s also rising up out of the ground, conjured from nowhere, a miracle of farmland and ruins, an economic sleight of hand. There’s construction everywhere, in Defence Colony and GK they are building, and out in the satellite wastelands of Gurgaon and Noida they are building cities too.

  Laxmi is doing her job, for those who know how to pray.

  It’s every man for himself.

  India is Shining.

  But me, I’ve gone nowhere, done nothing.

  I’m in the second year of college, in the care of Aunty. Not in dorms, not in hostels, not with other girls, no, there’s no paying-guest house for me. No mother either any more, and my father, he’s off living in Singapore, abandoned me a long time ago for a new life there, though no one will say it out loud, though everyone still pretends it’s not the case.

  No, I’m alone, in college, living in east Delhi over the filthy Yamuna, in the care of Aunty. My mother grew up with this woman, who I can never call by name. She went to school with her too, and then was left behind. Aunty is a proper woman, she will be until the day she dies.

  So I go to college and I come back home, I sit with Aunty in front of the soaps or else study and daydream in my room. But sooner or later I’m always called outside to be presented to whichever visitor has dropped by, or else I’m dragged with Aunty on one of her endless visits, to sit in other apartments and living rooms with the other aunties of this world, their daughters too sometimes, listening to the incessant talk about other lives, their weddings, sons and daughters gone astray, the ones who have failed, the servants who will not do what they’re told, the property disputes, scandals, jewellery, the price of gold. I keep my head down here and my thoughts to myself.

  I have my classmates in college of course. Not quite friends but they’re still nice girls. With them I go to the movies sometimes, and sometimes we sneak out to TGIF to get a Long Island iced tea or a beer and sit around the table talking about the films we’ve seen, the clothes we’ve bought, the boys at college we’re supposed to like, the ones we dream of marrying, besides the film stars.

  Once or twice I’ve even had dates with these boys, been to coffee shops nearby and listened to them talk. They’re such good bright boys that I should be in awe, but on these dates I’m always left cold. I sit as they talk and feel nothing for them, and the world keeps turning, but no one knows what turns in me.

  Then, driving home to Aunty in my car, round the monumental grandeur of India Gate, across the black water of the creeping Yamuna, a pain grips my heart. My father bought me this car at the start of college’s second year, out of guilt perhaps, or as a consequence of his new wealth. But driving home a pain grips my heart and I put my foot
down to speed in the sulphurous dark.

  There’s another girl in the flat across from me. In the window of the tower block along the void of empty air I see her sometimes looking out. She’s my shadow self, I decide. I keep a watch for her and then write foolish words about hope and love in my diary before I sleep.

  And before waking each morning I dream. As the light breathes into the city I am leaving again: instead of the library I make my way north, along the river’s edge towards the iron railway bridge, joining the Ring Road and driving up the Grand Trunk Road, leaving the city, going all the way to Chandigarh. Beyond Chandigarh there are the wheat fields of Punjab and the foothills and mountains that rise above. I drive through them to places I’ve never seen, that only live on these maps of mine: Mandi, Kullu, the Rohtang Pass, the east Ladakhi plateau, into the void above where nothing more exists.

  But even in dreams I don’t make it. In my dreams I am stuck on the edge of town, with the sun coming up around the Yamuna pipelines, the shredded prayer flags of the Tibetan refugees, the swampland near Model Town, where everyone is shitting and brushing their teeth on the side of the road, running for the buses in the shimmer of exhaust fumes bouncing off the heat of baking stone.

  I climb out of bed into the cold of the AC to look at myself in the mirror, my black eyes and my pale cheeks, and I wait for this one thing to happen to me.

  I run.

  I run a lot in these college days, in the colony below the tower block, in the faded little park where the aunties go for their morning strolls, after the cleaners have swept the rooms and the cooks have been given their work. It’s the same park where the servants sit on the benches during their breaks, trading house gossip and complaints, and where the drivers lie wolf-eyed, waiting to be called in the shade. I run a lot in this park in the mornings, before all this happens, and in the evening before the sun goes down I run too, put on a CD and just run. Going in circles because the park is so small, listening to Moby in the beginning—simple, uplifting, driving my feet forward. And then later listening to the trance my love gives me, hard, dark and hypnotized.

  But before all this I listen with bursts of hope, desperation, burning up the energy that has nowhere to go. I want to run in the night, to get up at 4 a.m. and go out into the deserted lanes, charge down the middle past the sleeping dogs, over the potholes. I wake up in the dead of it and listen to the AC and 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.

  But now we’re in this café, a place I visit often. I drive a little, then I come to sit, to read a book, to pretend to think. I chat with this waitress of mine, this Chinky, as Aunty calls her, this woman from the north-east. She’s very beautiful to me, but we only talk between orders, in the time she takes to collect my cup and plate, and even then she lingers with one foot ready to leave, an ear cocked to the rest of the room. In snatches she tells me about her troublesome brother in Manipur, her loving husband who is educated and too proud to take on lesser work. Around her eyes she wears a thick ring of kohl to make them seem larger—she says quite sadly that she has small eyes, that they’re ugly, but I like her eyes, as I like everything about her: alert, mournful, intelligent, but most of all different. And while the kohl around her eyes looks like rebellion, around mine it is a prison.

  Once or twice in my green bathroom light have I put kohl around my eyes like hers, thickly, admiring them.

  But she’s not here today.

  And across the room he is staring at me.

  I’ve been stared at a lot, of course; it’s what happens here, it’s what men do. Every day, from door to door, on the buses, stepping through rubble on the edge of the road, in the car stuck in traffic, at red lights. Stares of incomprehension, lust, rage, sad yearning, so vacant and blank sometimes it’s terrifying, sometimes pitiful. Eyes filling the potholes, bouncing down the street like marbles, no escaping their clank. Eyes in restaurants, in offices, in college, eyes at home. Women’s too, disapprovingly.

  But in his eyes there’s the promise of something else.

  So I’m in this café in Khan Market, twenty years old and I’m beautiful, though I only know it now looking back at the photos I have of myself, where it’s obvious, painfully so because it’s gone, this beauty, never to return, where the skin is so young and unmarked by life, still with the last traces of puppy fat, but how deep is the hunger in the eyes, the joy right there inside her at the moment she’s being shaped and devoured.

  And nobody knows, nobody will. That’s the thrill of it. None of my classmates, no family. They’ll know something is up, that something has changed, but if they knew for certain what it was, if they could see him, they’d be horrified beyond belief, because he’s ugly.

  Ugly with dark skin, with short wiry hair, with a large flat nose and eyes bursting out on either side like flares, with big ears and a fleshy mouth that holds many teeth.

  There’s something of the animal in him. Something of the elephant and the monkey. Something of the jackal.

  He’s not a typical “Delhi boy,” that’s for sure, not only because of his face and skin but also because of the clothes he wears: a faded yellow T-shirt that’s been washed too many times, a pair of too-large brown corduroy pants held up with an old belt. A vagabond who’s been scrubbed clean. But there are also brand-new red Converse sneakers on his feet, with their clownish white rims that tell me he’s not exactly from the street.

  He’s nothing like the boys they want me to marry. There’s a new one of those on the horizon, a non-resident Indian, twenty years in the U.S., a full-blooded American now. Aunty is lining him up for a meeting. I sit with her at home on the sofa while she tells me all about him. She leafs through his biodata, his golden résumé, and in this apartment high up in the air I cannot breathe. I eat and sleep but I cannot breathe. She’s been arranging these meetings for a year now, without success, but she never tires, and this new one is very promising to her: he’s seen my photo and approved of my looks, and because he’s divorced he’s willing to overlook my own unfortunate situation, the mother dead, the father absent.

  Aunty doesn’t imagine I’d ever say no, and after so many rejections, after so many families have turned me down, she’s giddy about this one.

  Sitting on the sofa. Listening to her speak. The soap operas on the TV, the thick curtains drawn, the fan spinning dead air. Such heavy furniture in her world, stared at by that dark wood, by those statues of gods, by bronze and dried fruit, by nuts tied in packages with bows, left over from this wedding or that, from Diwali.

  Uncle is in his bedroom looking through the accounts, or pretending to at least, drinking his peg of whisky. His world is his own, he doesn’t share it with me—only good morning, how are you, fine, off to college, very good. Never any emotion, no affection for his wife, not in public at least. Only the motions of putting food on the table, only off to the factory or the club and then to sleep.

  In front of the TV Aunty looks at me sadly. She sees my stubbornness, my lack of enthusiasm, and suddenly she’s afraid for me.

  But I’m actually considering the American, that’s the truth. I’m seriously thinking of saying yes to him. I’ve been toying with the idea for a while now. The neighbour says, But he’s divorced, and Aunty says, So what if he’s divorced, he’s learned his lesson, he makes good money, he’s a good family boy, what more is there? And unlike this one in the café, the American is not ugly at all.

  It’s the years of conditioning that make me think his dark skin is ugly, poor, wrong. That make me think he looks like a servant.

  But in the café I’m looking up at him.

  I am pretty and he is ugly.

  And the secret is this turns me on.

  I tried many times to write this down, and all have failed. Ten years gone by. Words deleted from hard drives, set on fire in ditches, in metal bins on balconies, pages torn up in frustration, scrunched int
o balls and tossed away. I tried to write this down but went about it the wrong way. How to write while being pursued? When one is not the pen but the page?

  So, Varanasi, aged eight. Still in pigtails, wearing my tartan dress. Still a little mute and pensive, my lips pursed, looking in the mirror but not quite recognizing myself, not yet comfortable in my own skin. I want to be grown-up more than anything, but for now I’m only aware enough to be embarrassed of myself. I don’t know any other way; I certainly don’t know how to change it. It doesn’t occur to me that it’s within my power to change anything, to make decisions of my own. So I’m stuck in this body and the clothes I’m given to wear. But it’s also true that I like my tartan dress.

  Varanasi, my father: the last time I remember you whole. As if you were a thing that could be broken apart, like a chocolate bar.

  We went together, the three of us, mother, you and me, a final holiday. You were back from Singapore, the last time before you left for good. We took the train from Agra and stayed with relatives in the old city, near the Ganga, in a house in a tangle of lanes with a courtyard inside that one would never know was there.

  This lane is so narrow we have to press ourselves against its sides as the bodies come by. They come as torpedoes wrapped in cloth on the hands of sadness towards the Ganga to burn.

  He once told me, he said, Even after burning, the breastbones of men and the pelvises of women remain. That instead of crumbling to ash 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. Thirty billion pelvic bones, thirty billion sternums. The history of the world in a watery grave.