Deepti Kapoor’s Age of Vice is a terrific novel about crime, capitalism and what we understand as New India and how it came into being over the last three decades since economic liberalisation in 1991. With that declaration out of the way, let’s dive straight into the 546-page novel’s deep, dark heart because words are precious. And Kapoor understands that, which one might initially doubt, seeing the novel’s thickness.
Kapoor is on a mission to simultaneously entertain with genre thrills and impress with the requisite A-B-C-Ds of great literature that is not middlebrow lit-fic––three-dimensional characters, explosive drama, and terrific detail in location and its history (North India, Goa, etc.), which comes from Kapoor’s experience as a journalist.
Having to critique Age of Vice is a question of choosing which angle to penetrate the novel through. Let’s start with its structure. Largely set in the 2000s, and part of a planned trilogy, the book has three sections. The first, tracking the journey of Dalit protagonist Ajay, offers a shadow of the plot. Ajay is looking at the Wadias, a super-rich and influential Delhi family, from the outside.
There are gaps in Ajay’s perspective that are filled in section two, which tracks Delhi journalist Neda, and her relationship with the Wadias. The final section is where all the plot strands and characters come together for an explosive finale, at the end of which the future seems to rest in the hands of the novel’s third protagonist Sunny.
The rise of the Wadias, who once ran a liquor business in Uttar Pradesh, and have since moved into real estate via a complex web of crime is possibly inspired by the life of a real-life liquor baron-turned-tycoon who was shot dead in 2012. One of two glaring themes in the novel is the gangster capitalism that swiftly transformed Delhi and the National Capital Region in the early 2000s.In fact, a good companion book to check out for Age of Vice would be Rana Dasgupta’s Capital: The Eruption of Delhi, which provides supplementary material to understand how families like Wadias emerge and terraform entire villages, districts, and states, all within the larger vision of creating a new India of skyscrapers, highway networks and bullet trains.
The second obvious theme in the book is melodramatic but executed with panache––the atonement for fathers’ sins. Something has gone wrong with India’s post-Independence history, with which the history of the Wadias is inextricably tied.
Ajay, Neda and Sunny are all in search of salvation, wanting to right wrongs, but finding it difficult, caught in an ageless chakra of atavistic feudalism and hyper-capitalism.
The sinister, subterranean theme in Age of Vice is “adapt or die”, something Sunny says early on in the novel. The book begins with two epigraphs.
One was about the 1954 Kumbh Mela stampede at Allahabad that left over 500 dead and thousands injured. The second is from the Mahabharata. Both converge to tell us that violence is the beating heart of civilisation, and that is because we live for only a short while, during which the struggle to survive robs us of perspective and wisdom. What can one do then? Adapt or die?
Kapoor’s biggest triumph is very simple. She has rolled out a blockbuster page-turner of relentless momentum, hard-boiled philosophies, and, yet, curiosity and empathy. What, indeed, happened to India since our independence, when there was hope? Is it still there? That’s a rhetorical question. But one that still requires an answer, which the author marvellously attempts to provide.
Kapoor is single-mindedly determined to keep every sentence and paragraph engaging, without going for shortcuts, except for one instance of eye-roll-inducing prison suicide. She is least bothered about making the prose beautiful. She is perfectly fine with writing, “says in a mocking tone”. Having been a journalist, she is trained to not fuss about attempting pretty prose.
Most interestingly, the author plays with the potential of the page itself. In the final section, as things appear to be drawing towards a fast-paced showdown, a page might have two sentences on it. Or five. The chapters become shorter. Action is similar to that of a screenplay. Kapoor is replicating the fast cuts in a thriller film nearing a climax. Thankfully, Age of Vice is just foreplay and there are two more books left in the series.