A Bad Character

A stunning debut about Delhi, desire and how much we are prepared to risk for our freedom Shortlisted for the 2015 Prix Medicis Shortlisted for the 2015 Prix Medicis 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.

About the Author :
Deepti Kapoor was born in Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh, and grew up in Bombay, Bahrain and Dehradun. In 1997 she went to the University of Delhi to study journalism and later completed an MA in Social Psychology. She spent the next decade working for various publications, driving around the city, finding stories and learning its streets. She now lives in Goa.

Review :
The title character of Deepti Kapoor’s searing debut is dead by Line 1, but I still read A Bad Character in one frantic sitting... Intoxicating. A stylishly written, powerfully moving love story, set against the bleak beauty and baroque decay of 21st century Delhi - its rubble, construction sites, wastelands, and the poisoned ooze of its dead river. What Twilight in Delhi is to the twentieth-century Indian novel, A Bad Character is to the twenty-first: the essence of India’s corrupt capital, brilliantly and darkly distilled. This is a remarkable debut from a major new talent. Twenty-first-century Delhi needed a voice, and here it is, in all its dark majesty. A Bad Character comes as if from nowhere: it is an alchemical marvel, a novel of stunning beauty and originality. A Bad Character…captures [Delhi] in such perfect detail that I felt I could smell the food stalls, feel the crush of people and the heat rising from the pavements... As well as her transcendent eye for detail, the love story at the heart of this book is honest and deeply unsettling, making it a compelling read. A fiery, incandescent debut, A Bad Character artfully captures the fragmented psyche and perilous desires of a woman alone in New Delhi... [Kapoor's] writing has the flexible, lyrical cadence of a prose poem... A Bad Character is a powerful, psychologically acute, elegantly crafted debut that promises great things to come from Kapoor. The characters are interesting and the story grips, but the heart of this book is Delhi: filthy, challenging, destructive and thrillingly alive. A powerful read. A poignant and impressionistic portrait of the end of adolescence and a changing world. Annihilating desire laps at the edges of Deepti Kapoor's A Bad Character...offers vivid insights into what it means to be a middle-class woman in 21st-century Delhi. Dark, sexy, magnetic, this is a grown-up coming of age story. Beautifully describes every scent, sight and sound of Delhi… A love letter to India, while fully acknowledging its flaws... the country’s dangers and restrictions, especially for women.