Age of Vice

by Deepti Kapoor

Then tendrils sprout and the night is done, the yolk of a sun cracks over the peaks and the blue death that filled the final hours is cast away.

This summer is made of wonder.

He sits halfway between holy and profane.

And there’s something liberating about leaving, it’s true, about throwing so many years over his shoulder and marching forward to a majestic life.

Running down to the kitchen he’s struck by how quiet it is, how the enormous building sleeps, how the staff sweep around in gilded silence, how desire spills like blood from Sunny’s high life.

Ajay is the beating heart of Sunny’s world. Wordless, faceless, content.

And now a chord connects him to the child he once was. Time and space folded over, as if to erase the life in between.

But what stories would he have to tell of himself? What stories can he tell when he barely knows how to speak?

smuggling into his past, the past inside the present,

He begins, so he thinks, to recognize landmarks, monuments to the embedded memories of exodus.

The husk of a body, meaning chipped away.

Loathing, deflected from the self.

Shelves of books lined almost every wall, their tattered innards releasing noble yellow perfumes.

And there, standing at the head of the table, leaning forward, arms gripping the edge, his eyes blazing with all the possibilities of life, the mysterious, the immaculate Sunny Wadia.

They were inevitable, they were ugly, they induced shame, guilt, in momentary flashes, but their people were submerged in her mind.

she felt a vertiginous tenderness for the tangled complexities of her city.

Could he pull it off? Could she watch him try? Even to watch him fail would be a thrill.

She watched the night city unspool like reams of ink ribbon

“Our dreams let people die.” She turned away from him. “Tomorrow we move on.”

The poor were no longer victims of an incompetent and corrupt state. They were encroachers and thieves. Their misery was not the misery of lives.

They stood side by side, old friends who’d fast become strangers, with no word of the thing that had come between them.

At every step, the Wadias and Singhs skimming off the top, the bottom, the middle.

He is not so much building a brand as a silent, invisible web.

Gravity carried the bike downhill, runaway, the squeak of the suspension felt precarious without the torque of the engine, and she understood in that moment how the sources of strength are illusory.

She couldn’t understand if it was the sun and sea air making her lethargic, or her reluctance to pick at the wounds, to ruin this idyll he had conjured around them, which felt like the end of something.

By the rubble of slums and empires.

She feared the night was already dissolving, the world no longer at bay.

I knew injustice when I saw it, in a novel, on the news, but I never understood the process of its creation.

See, your problem was decency and mine was being afflicted by the toxic compound of curiosity and passivity.

Yeah, I just want to see where the story goes, it’s my privilege to observe the futility of life.

Do you know what it feels like to have power? Real power. To sit all of a sudden inside the wheels of power and speed through the city with your eyes wide, watching everything, making eye contact with everything—it was intoxicating. To roar through the city at speed and have no fear, and to see, to be able to see, the way a man sees, to stare, be able to do it without blinking, my God.

Your fear arises from the things you do, not the things that are denied to you.

Tomorrow I might tell this story differently. I’ll have changed again.

nothing but the roar of their engines, Sunny’s empty vengeful face, Ajay’s vengeful empty face, they look like twins of pain.

The wheel will keep turning toward the dissolution that will swallow us all.

He despised public contact, dust, noise, failure, sorrow. He’d dream of waking in a city of the future, depopulated, full of elevated walkways, paths to nowhere on which no one walked.

If Sunny’s not on the way up, he’s coming down. Lurching from one position to the next, avoiding the horror of an equilibrium that can only reveal his face in the mirror.

I looked at them like I was looking at a painting, then I took that painting into the world. I told myself, these men and women, they have autonomy, they are fully formed, I can look at them, I understand their pain.”

There’s this dream he keeps having. Culled from life.

The pain has made a bed for itself.

No one ever gets it back. Life just runs away from you.

Will knowing close the wound?