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 – you 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 protégé 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 – sorry, 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.

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