Deepti Kapoor - A Bad Character

I never find out about his fiancée, I never see his parents again, I never discover what happens to them, I never learn the reasons why he lied. I never know if his actions were planned or out of his hands. I let the question live with me a long time. But I’m beyond that; it makes no difference to me now. These words are his cremation, I’ve already watched him burn.

What’s left is this: I went to the dhaba one night to see for myself, Ali told me where it was. I set off alone at 3 a.m. I drove slowly through the streets on to the highway. The silence was the kind felt at the end of a long journey, when all language has been exhausted and the mind is left alone with the things it has seen.

Around five in the morning I reached the place just as the sky was beginning to turn, pulling up alongside the trucks and the coaches and the flashing neon sign. I sat in my car for what seemed like an age, but in the end I didn’t go in. I watched the entrance instead, saw the men asleep on the charpoys outside, a few still drinking at the tables within, who in the blue light of dawn looked so lonely and frail. Out in the desert where the sun should have been, the horizon was disfigured by the new cities. I drove off again.

Deepti Kapoor grew up in Northern India and attended university in New Delhi, where she worked for several years as a journalist. A Bad Character is her first novel. She lives in Goa.