Age of Vice

by Deepti Kapoor

It gives him pleasure to please, it gives him pleasure to anticipate every possible need, not just Mummy’s and Daddy’s but everyone’s, the farm workers’, the animals’, the shopkeepers’ pleasure. Not just pleasure, not really, more like the stanching of a wound, more like the holding of a tide, a sacrifice, negating the trauma of his birth.

His body inhabits adulthood though his mind is still somewhere behind, sometimes a child, always looking to be needed more than he really needs anyone.

“Don’t tell us about our culture. We’re not zoo animals for your pleasure, not the smiling native to accessorize your enlightenment. The simplicity and honesty you think you know is simply your eyes deceiving your brain. You see and hear nothing.

True wealth was the accretion of experience.

“These men,” Dean was saying, “are heroes to the people from whom they steal, whose very lives they destroy.”

I knew injustice when I saw it, in a novel, on the news, but I never understood the process of its creation. I never considered complicity, or the obligation to guard against it in yourself.

If you use any of this, just remember, nothing will change, this is Kali Yuga, the losing age, the age of vice. The people on the road will remain dead. The baby will still be unborn. The Gautams of this world will thrive. The Ajays of this world will always take the fall. And Sunny? I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore. The wheel will keep turning toward the dissolution that will swallow us all.

No one ever gets it back. Life just runs away from you. It never comes back, however hard you try, however much you want it to. This is the lesson you should know. You have to adapt or die.