Age of Vice

by Deepti Kapoor

For a moment Ajay thinks he is there. That this, now, is then. The world unstable.

The sun is positively perpendicular. By any civilized metric it is reasonable to expect wine.”

The months of July and August, like this. Burning at both ends, never tired. Gilded hangovers. Iridescent with champagne.

An arm stuck out to bar her from getting any closer. It belonged to a young man with a lazy eye. His face was froggish, fleshy, his hair thick with curls. He reminded her of a venereal boy in a Caravaggio painting. She recoiled.

The weight of these men, the violence of their lives.

So I started work and of course I didn’t have any ethics. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as ethics in journalism. I knew injustice when I saw it, in a novel, on the news, but I never understood the process of its creation.

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.

In a globalized world given over to solitary consumption, his desires found expression in the anonymity of expressways and the suites of luxury hotels, pleasure in their streamlined ease, liberation in their frictionless navigation.

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.