Age of Vice

by Deepti Kapoor

Before Ajay took a breath he was already mourned.

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.

He sleeps curled up on the beach, spooning the beach dogs that are drawn to his gentleness and the scent of mutual need.

“Don’t tell us about our culture. We’re not zoo animals for your pleasure, not the smiling native to accessorize your enlightenment.

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.

You think India is poor? Go and travel around America. I couldn’t believe it. Meanwhile some backpacker in Paharganj wanders around crying about our poverty, shaking his head, taking pity on us, taking photos for the people back home. Take a look at your own backyard.

Study your history, man. You people looted us, took everything, stole our treasures. Now you look at us and say, ‘You’re so spiritual, you have so much wisdom, you’re so wise, you’re so . . . simple.’

“I’ll bring back the Koh-i-noor!” he cried. “Right after I shove it up Prince Charles’s ass!”

She felt anxious and skittish all morning at work, worrying about what she might have said and done, the regular hangover traumas, amplifying all those underlying fears. She was terrified of being irrelevant, of being found out, of being left behind. All those people there last night, they’d seen her. She’d thought she was being cool, but what if she’d been plain ridiculous? And now in the morning they were thinking how pathetic she was.

She came back and lit a cigarette and lay on her belly with her legs in the air like she’d seen girls do in movies.

She was lost in him and him alone. She wanted his scent. She wore his shirts in bed.

There’s nothing we could have done, there’s everything we could have done. We’re all guilty. We’re all the same. Even if you care, you can’t get away. Especially if you care. How can you sleep at night? You have to be a saint. You have to wear a hair shirt and beat yourself with birch, give up all your belongings, go barefoot, sleep on the street, just to atone, and that won’t be enough, it won’t change anything. Or you just have to go on.”

The weight of these men, the violence of their lives. It had been on top of her for days, weeks, months. For as long as she could remember, for what now seemed like years, years and years, hundreds of kilometers of black road.

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 let herself float and drift, and the only thing she could hear was the gentle slap of water against her skin. Every time her brain tried to ask necessary questions, the ocean intervened. She felt as if her memory were being wiped clean.

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.

The very thought of it is thrilling. He says no. He says: no. It’s like the dreams of a blind person who has sight. It’s a deaf person dreaming they can hear. A mute dreaming they can speak. Everything is turned up loud, in color. No.

Held together by shoestrings of misery, dark energy, expensive suits.

“No one gets their life back.” 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.