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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.
About the author
Deepti Kapoor was born in Moradabad, UP, and grew up in Bombay and Bahrain. In 1997 she went to the University of Delhi to study journalism and later completed an MA in Social Psychology. From 2004 to 2006 she worked as the trends correspondent of The Week, driving round Delhi, finding stories, learning the city and its streets. In 2006 she left journalism and moved to Goa, where she now teaches yoga.
Report
"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." Catherine Lacey New York Times
