A Bad Character by Deepti Kapoor
My rating: 3/5 cats
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.
this is a very brief, sparely written novel that nonetheless packs a pretty powerful punch. part of it is very familiar – a twenty-year-old girl’s sexual awakening that becomes all-consuming, a little dangerous, ends badly, and sets her on a self-destructive path of personal freedom, studded with casual sex and drug use.
the hook is that this takes place in new delhi in the early 2000’s, where to be a woman is to be sheltered – prepared and preserved for marriage, and where violence against women is a frequent occurrence:
Under the cover of celebration a fistful of colour can smash against bone. Swarm upon a girl in an alleyway.
I’m remembering Holi in Delhi now. In the first year, a stubborn refusal to go outside as the men drink bhang and whip each other into a frenzy. The way trouble can start real fast. Semen dyed a dozen ways. All under the cover of colour. In the marketplace, hunting for prey, the spurned lover, the jilted heart. All under the cover of fun.
and a woman on her own is subjected to scrutiny and speculation:
But parking does attract attention. It has its own problems. What is she doing there? What does she want? Is she a whore? Is she waiting for a man? At traffic lights, in the middle of a jam. Stuck behind cages of chicken stacked in the backs of tempos, waiting to be killed. They do notice me, these eyes, discovering I’m all alone in this city of meat and men.
and where a little girl is given good advice about self-protection, but in a way that villainizes sexuality:
She liked to bathe me in the old days, took great care with it, and one day she sat me down on the cold metal stool, opened my legs, and pointed between them, then said, If a man ever tries to touch you there, an uncle or a servant or a cousin, anyone at all, you fight him off and you scream. You run. You don’t let anybody touch you down there. That is the worst place in the world.
this is not a climate where sexual experimentation is permitted, or even wise. and yet idha (named only once, and may or may not be her given name) has a restless spirit, and is unsatisfied with her prospects as a woman.
But the history of women is the history of migration. Men hold the line and they remain. They go to war, they go for work, they travel over the land, but they remain. Their name remains, their land remains, their pride and honour remain. You can trace their line back into the dark, you can lean against their foundations and take shelter within. How to trace the line of women, to take shelter there? How to find from where we came? Every generation stripped away. Passed to another household. Gone the line, gone the name. It never belonged to us anyway. The earth does not belong to us anyway. We vanish, we do not remain.
she has grown into a loner. her mother is dead, her father absconded to singapore and she lives with her aunty, who is doing her best to keep her in a protective bubble until she can be married off to one of the suitors she has arranged.
but idha has other plans.
Twenty and untouched. It’s a sin. For twenty years I’ve been waiting for this one thing.
she meets an unnamed man in a cafe, slightly older, dark and ugly, who is nonetheless compelling, charismatic. she is drawn to him because of his feral ugliness, his experiences in the world, the power of his attractive instability. her discontent crashes against his lust for her beauty, and the two begin a passionate affair, where she surrenders herself to him willingly, allows herself to be as he sees her, a lump of wet clay, but is only really playacting at being submissive. she remains clear-eyed throughout their relationship, despite how it appears from the outside.
He talks it to me, he fucks me slowly with his words, takes his pain out on me from the city he’s consumed, merging limbs and lips, doing it to me again and again. I beg him. He wraps his hands around my throat and sinks inside. He wants to be with me everywhere, wants to follow me through the streets. I’d walk for him and he’d obliterate me, take everything but my eyes. I’d cover myself, in devotion, and know that I was owned.
in the end, she is the one who has the last word – the narrative is told ten years after the affair, jumping around in time and tense, from first to third person, long after “he” has died. (it’s the first sentence, so is in no way a spoiler, people) and through all the debasement that follows her through her life, there is a sort of heroism to her path, a joyful embracing of shiva in his aspect of destroyer. hers is a willing surrender to experience, and not something that has been arranged for her.
i have a crappy track record with these kinds of sexual initiation books. the gleeful sexual abandonment arcs never really resonate with me because i have never felt constrained, and reading about the act of intercourse is pretty boring. but this story, her situation, seems to be staying with me more than i expected. and while there are parts that are kind of draggy, the parts that are really strong make up for it, particularly in her descriptions of the city:
Now Dirty Delhi. Ice cream in metal carts. Grapefruit, watermelon, cut open, surrounded by flies, packed in ice packed full of amoebic dysentery, held in the hands of boys with stunted nails at bus stops, holding them up to the window for a grubby note of exchange. Chunks of melting ice and the rind of fruit eaten by cows, dogs, rats, monkeys, rats the size of dogs. Exhaust fumes from the buses and the autos and the cars. From Indrapastha Power Station. Battered nimbu-pani carts, books on sale at the stop lights: Mein Kampf, Harry Potter, Who Moved My Cheese? Hijras with stubble flashing their comely eyes on the Ring Road near Raj Ghat, crows above the latticed balconies of Daryaganj, where they sell books on the pavements on Sundays and battered magazines, where they make juice in bright displays. Delhi, yes. Black bilgewater from every orifice.
so, yeah, it’s a tiny little book that is occasionally unfocused, but for all that, and despite it not being my usual kind of thing, i’m finding myself thinking about it more favorably in retrospect than i was while reading it. we call this “gerry syndrome.” so i would definitely recommend it to people interested in strong character voices, female sexuality, and world literature. it’s a 3.5 star cat that is still rising in my estimation the more i think about it.
a creeper 4, if you will.
