A Bad Character
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3.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Shortlisted for the 2015 Prix Médicis
My boyfriend died when I was twenty-one. His body was left lying broken in 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.
This is the story of Idha, a young woman who finds escape from the arranged marriage and security that her middle-class world has to offer through a chance encounter with a charismatic, dangerous young man. She is quickly exposed to the thrilling, often illicit pleasures that both the city, Delhi, and her body can hold. But as the affair continues, and her double life deepens, her lover’s increasingly unstable behaviour carries them past the point of no return, where grief, love and violence threaten to transform his madness into her own.
A novel about female desire, A Bad Character shows us a Delhi we have not seen in fiction before: a city awash with violence, rage and corruption.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The debut novel from Indian journalist Kapoor is a tightly rendered story of a young woman's awakening in contemporary India. The unnamed female narrator, "twenty and untouched" when her mother dies, is sent by her absentee father to be raised by an aunt. Living with her relative in a modest Delhi apartment, the girl begins to feel cramped by her boring university classes and her Aunty's endless attempts to arrange a marriage. One day she meets a rich, rebellious, darker-skinned young man from a different social class. She finds him "ugly," yet realizes "there's something of the animal in him," and subsequently begins a torrid affair with him. In clipped, haunting paragraphs, the girl tells of her discovery of whiskey, sex, and a gritty, thrilling India that she never knew existed. The tension that the affair will be exposed becomes almost unbearable; however, instead of delivering this impending confrontation with Aunty, Kapoor takes the story in darker and tragic directions. As the novel becomes more about the young woman wrestling with the effects of her relationships, the prose becomes more ruminative and elliptical. The story and the style are reminiscent of Marguerite Duras's The Lover, but when fused with the vivid Delhi scenes, Kapoor's novel ventures into exciting and original territory.
