Skip to main content

Age of Vice

Title: Age of Vice 

Author: Deepti Kapoor

Publisher: Juggernaut, 2003

Pages: 548


If you want to meet some of the vilest characters in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, Deepti Kapoor’s Age of Vice is just the novel for you. The novel opens on Delhi’s Inner Ring Road in the year 2004. Five pavement-dwellers have been run over by a Mercedes car at 3 o’clock in a cold February night. The man found in the driver’s seat, Ajay, is not the real killer. He is a convenient proxy for carrying a rich man’s sins.

Ajay is originally from Eastern Uttar Pradesh, the crime-hub of India. Back in 1991, when Ajay was only an eight-year-old boy, his father was killed by the goons of the upper-class landlords who rule the roost in the villages. Ajay was sold by his mother as a slave. The boy reaches Himachal Pradesh. A few years later, he finds himself in Goa from where Sunny Wadia takes him to Delhi as his right-hand man. Delhi – the city of “con men, criminals … ugly and dirty … no good, (where) only rich people do well, everyone else suffers.”

Sunny is a playboy who has everything that most Indians cannot even dream of: chic cars, silken girls, posh mansions, exotic foods and drinks and the whole-hearted support of con men, criminals as well as politicians. His father, Bunty Wadia, is the lord of a whole kingdom of those con men, criminals and politicians. And a whole business empire as well. Bunty’s brother, Vicky, is a dreaded criminal in UP. Vicky is no ordinary criminal. He is like God: nothing escapes his eyes. He is omniscient, and omnipotent too.

The Wadias are the real winners in India where the game is inescapably rigged and the rules are stacked. These winners make the rules and the politicians ratify them in the state assemblies or the central parliament. The rules are not for ensuring the welfare of all Indians; they ensure the welfare of a few select Indians. These select Indians will do some good too in order to look good in public.

“I was never a goonda,” Vicky says.

“I forget,” Bunty smiles. “You were a God-man.”

The author has panache. She carries everything with elegant ease: crime, irony, style, philosophy, plot, suspense, drama, punch dialogues Рyou name it. This novel is as gripping as a Shah Rukh Khan movie. Sunny Wadia possesses all the charms and elegance and apparent innocence and not-so-apparent cleverness of SRK. He can adopt a simple Ajay as his prot̩g̩ and gunman at one time and then make Ajay a scapegoat when that is convenient for him and still continue to the hero of the movie Рsorry, the novel.

This is Delhi. Only a few privileged ones can be real winners. The rest are lucky if they can break even; the majority are losers.

In the end you are not sure who the real winner is, however.

In a world that does not have even a single good character, there cannot be any real winner. There is a character who initially promises to be a good heroine: Neda Kapur, a Delhi-based journalist. But she gets caught in the shifty charms of Sunny Wadia and eventually leaves the bad world of the Wadias and reaches London, funded by Sunny Wadia.

You read this novel as if you are watching a mega-hit Bollywood movie. You move from action to action with a lot of anxiety about what is going to happen next. Deepti Kapoor can keep you hooked to her story. What a style too! Sample this:

Ajay’s mother, Rupa, is pregnant again.

His elder sister, Hema, tends to their goat.

This is Eastern Uttar Pradesh. Nineteen ninety-one.

The foothills of Nepal rise in the north.

The moon is visible long after dawn.

Before Ajay took a breath he was already mourned.

Staccato.

I loved this book and I hated everything in it. It is written in a seductive and gripping style. It is almost unputdownable. It shows the dirty side of India clearly, too clearly.

Too clearly – perhaps therein lies its fault. This is a thriller. So that’s not a fault really. It’s just that I would have loved to get deeper insights into the heads and hearts of those three Wadias.

PS. This post is a part of Blogchatter Blog Hop

  





Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Veiled Women

One of the controversies that has been raging in Kerala for quite some time now is about a girl student’s decision to wear the hijab to school. The school run by Christian nuns did not appreciate the girl’s choice of religious identity over the school uniform and punished her by making her stand outside the classroom. The matter was taken up immediately by a fundamentalist Muslim organisation (SDPI) which created the usual sound and fury on the campus as well as outside. Kerala is a liberal state in which Hindus (55%), Muslims (27%), and Christians (18%) have been living in fair though superficial harmony even after Modi’s BJP with its cantankerous exclusivism assumed power in Delhi. Maybe, Modi created much insecurity feeling among the Muslims in Kerala too resulting in some reactionary moves like the hijab mentioned above. The school could have handled it diplomatically given the general nature of Muslims which is not quite amenable to sense and sensibility. From the time I shi...
13 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more

Insecurity and Exclusivism

“ Hindu khatare mein hai.” This was one of the first slogans that accompanied the emergence of Narendra Modi on the national scene. It means Hindus are in Danger . It reveals a deep-rooted feeling of insecurity. Hindus constitute an overwhelming majority in India – 80%. All the high positions in governance, judiciary, academics, any significant place, are occupied by Hindus. Yet the slogan was born. Strange? It will be facile to argue that Modi used this slogan and its concomitant hatred of Muslims and Christians as a political weapon for winning votes. True, he was successful in that; he rose to the highest political post in the country using minority-bashing. But the hatred did not end with that achievement; rather it spread outward and became more exclusive. Muslim and European rulers of India were booted out from the country’s history books and wherever else possible like the names of roads and institutions. With vengeance. Now there is a concerted effort going on to place In...
30 comments
Read more