By Deepti Kapoor, this was published in 2023. I came to it via an AudioFile recommendation, and it's certainly true that Vidish Athavale's outstanding performance as narrator makes this a book to listen to rather than read.

I'm not quite sure what the audio equivalent of page-turner is, but this is definitely it. The narrator sucks you in. You want to keep on listening.

We open, in New Delhi, 2004, with a horrible incident. Five sleeping pavement-dwellers are killed by an out-of-control car. It's the kind of vehicle that could be owned only by a rich person, but in the driver's seat is a young man called Ajay, who is clearly not in that category. You know something is up, and this is a fix.

He is carted off by the police, and held in prison. The book later goes on to paint a bleak picture of Indian jails (which is not to say that the abuses it describes don't take place in many other places), and it's not long before Ajay is set upon by one of the gangs that terrorize the inmates. He makes mincemeat of them. This slight, unassuming guy has obviously had good combat training... And this is where we have our first insight into the bigger picture. He is hauled off to the officers in charge of the jail. You expect him to be punished. Instead, you get this dialogue:

"You should have said something. You should have made it clear. You should have let us know. Why didn’t you let us know?"
Ajay stares at the food, at the cigarette pack.
"Know what?"
The warden smiles.
"That you’re a Wadia man."


New Delhi, 2011

A Wadia man...

From this point Kapoor starts to rewind, bit by bit filling in the story of what it means to be a Wadia man. She alternates among the points of view of the three major characters -- Ajay, Sunny, and Neda. These three are fatally drawn to each other, make devastating mistakes, and have their lives irrevocably changed as a result.

The first Wadia we get to know in any detail is Sunny. He's the son of a spectacularly rich and notoriously shady Big Guy called (somewhat incongruously) Bunty. This character has tentacles everywhere; as Naheed Phiroze Patel puts it, "there is no institution in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh he has left untouched, uncorrupted". He's careful to stay out of the limelight, and lurks like a menacing shadow in the background, pulling strings via proxies and go-betweens.

We learn nothing at all that is good about Bunty. His son, on the other hand, is a mixed bag, and our view of him shifts as we see him through different eyes. For sure, he's a swaggerer and a show-off, the ultimate flamboyant rich kid. But he's keen to be different from his father. He sets out to bankroll various arts projects, and -- later -- development schemes (grand ideas, designed to turn Delhi into something akin to Singapore or Dubai), and there is a measure of genuine sincerity in his motives.

But there are two major cracks in his armour. One is that he is naive: He doesn't initially seem to realize that the repurposing of land involves the displacement of thousands of lives, or that these plans are rarely carried out without coercion and violence. The other is that his father will not let go. Sunny might want to pursue his own dreams, but Bunty is there at every step, determined to do things the old way, determined to keep Sunny (whom he appears to despise) on a tight leash. From a bright if frivolous figure, Sunny gradually descends into a pit of addiction and viciousness.



The story of Ajay is deeply moving. He is sold as a child into what was effectively slavery, in order to pay debts incurred when his carelessness with a goat leads to his father's punishment and subsequent death. He is freed from his bond only when his "employer" dies, and that man's wife moves on. At that point he takes on a variety of low-level jobs in the hospitality industry. As a result of all this, Ajay grows up with a kind of service mentality, keen to please, happy to anticipate every need, willing to be the unseen facilitator of others' pleasure. It is as though he is empty, and therefore can all too easily be imprinted -- co-opted -- by a larger-than-life personality like Sunny Wadia's. Sunny spots him, and offers him work. His role is indeterminate -- somewhere between bar-man, fixer, and bodyguard -- but he is happy to improve his life on the back of Sunny's wealth and favour.

Ajay is wracked by guilt for not saving his sister (who was raped by the goons who terrorized his family at the time of his father's death, and who later -- he is told -- becomes a sex worker). He uses Sunny's contacts to track down his mother and his other sister (unborn when he left home), but they accuse him of failing them, and brutally reject him (he was only a CHILD, you want to shout at them -- what could he possibly have done to stop what happened?) Unfortunately, in trying to get at the people responsible for his family's miseries he becomes further engulfed in violence and intrigue, and draws the gaze of another Wadia. This is Vikram, known as Vicky; he's Bunty's brother, and an even worse villain. Vicky's presence grows in the course of the book to mythic proportions, and by the end you suspect he holds the keys to all the remaining mysteries, plus some we don't even know about yet. But, in the interests of avoiding spoilers, I'll draw a veil over that.

Although he serves Sunny loyally, discreetly, and courageously, Ajay is forced to take the rap for the car accident (part of Sunny's desperate scheme to gain Bunty's approval and respect). In prison, his status as a "Wadia man" protects him to a large degree, but he is also forced to kill again (because his sister is under threat if he doesn't).



The final key character is Neda. She's the daughter of a nice, modest, educated, middle-class family. She has stumbled into a career as a journalist, and of course the antics of Sunny end up appearing on her radar. It is through her eyes that we see Sunny as a human being whom it is possible to fall in love with. Weak and imperfect, yes, but with good intentions hidden in the midst of all the bullshit.

Neda doesn't get much of a chance to enjoy her little idyll, though, and ends up trapped in something much bigger than she is. She starts out fearless, idealistic, and impressionable, and ends up bought out, sold out, and hollowed out, a shadow of her former self. There's the glimmer of the possibility of a new life, but she'll never forget any of what happened to her, and possibly she'll never forgive herself for being what she defines as a coward.

Neda is perhaps the least engaging of the three main characters. But she fulfils an interesting class role. Patel puts it better than I could: "Sunny is in awe of something in Neda, something that all his money and connections cannot buy: a pedigree... Sunny marvels at the fact that Neda can pull up to a five-star hotel in her beat up old Maruti and swan inside knowing that she doesn’t need any outward markers of privilege. 'I’m nothing without my suit,' Sunny tells Neda, 'without my car, without my watch. Without these props, I barely exist.'" So she's the blue blood (modelled, perhaps, on Kapoor's own family; Sunny is the arriviste; and Ajay is the low-caste stooge...

That's a quick summary (without detail, because of that spoilers danger). But it is a genuinely gripping story.



About 80 per cent of the way through, however, the narrative goes slightly off the rails when another character is introduced. This is Sunil Rastogi, and we learn his backstory through a long, slightly awkward-sounding monologue. This is the only section that flags, in my view. Kapoor explains in an interview: "I had the characters of Neda Kapur, the Delhi journalist, and her love interest Sunny Wadia in my head for a long time, but when Ajay’s character (Wadia’s aide) was born, I realised that it could be a bigger novel. It was an inorganic process that kept building and building and building. When the character of Sunil Rastogi came through, I had already finished 3/4th of the project. He wasn’t something I intended to write, but when he came to me, I decided to go ahead." Maybe that late inspiration could have been integrated more gracefully...

The book closes (the year is now 2008) with a lot of ends still not tied up in any detail (although there's lots of heavy hinting about a circumstance that would explain many of the shadowy areas in the story). And the fate of most of the characters is left open. This book is apparently the first in a trilogy, so we can argue that a reasonable amount of openness is forgivable.

Aside from that one structural flaw, I guess my only reservation is that if you asked anyone to dish up a list of stereotypes about India, then he/she would come up with much of what the novel reflects: Grinding poverty, de-facto slavery, blatant inequality, rampant corruption, barely concealed violence... Even the positives fall a little into that basket: The urban sophistication available to the rich; the bucolic tranquility of the seaside in Goa...



My question mark was echoed in this article by Sahana Hegde. She opens: "There is a certain subgenre of books within literary fiction wherein nothing good is allowed to happen, because the author has convinced themselves that that's what Serious Literature looks like. When I saw the title of Deepti Kapoor's Age of Vice (aka Kaliyuga), I was immediately apprehensive that this was one of those. Yes, it already had a few rave reviews from across the Atlantic, but there’s a certain kind of consumer -- let’s call them Slumdog Millionaire enthusiasts -- in the West (and elsewhere) who goes crazy for the kind of grim, dark tragedy porn I’m talking about, because they’ve convinced themselves that’s what authenticity looks like... You could certainly argue that Age of Vice is exactly that kind of book, but it's not actually so clear-cut. Age of Vice follows a wide range of characters, all from different walks of life, all flies caught in a political spiderweb... But to come back to my initial point: the politics of money, property, and elections in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Delhi is probably as gritty as it gets, which is why one can hardly complain when the novel has little lightness... To be explicit, I was right about one thing -- nothing good happens."

All of which is part of an answer.

And yet it is clear that the book is based on both research and experience (Kapoor was herself a journalist in the period the novel depicts). And there is contrast: In the description of the kind of countryside we're less familiar with from tourist images, for example, or of Neda's middle-class home and concerned parents, or of the mall that Ajay gradually learns to navigate once he has some money in his pocket. There are bit-part-players who might not be stunningly good, but are not stunningly bad either. Between the big crash-bang scenes, there's some subtle mood music that Kapoor could perhaps develop further next time round.

I'll definitely be up for the next instalment. I just hope Kapoor's cats continue to do their job (the interviewer asks: "How important are cats for writing?", to which the author replies: "For me, essential"). And I hope Vidish Athavale will be reading the next one too.