A Bad Character

Book excerpt: Kapoor gives us piercing glimpses of slums, roadside restaurants, Sufi shrines, heroin dens hidden in the backpacker district, desert outskirts where luxury apartments are being erected, and the noisy, thronging bazaar in the old city . . . She writes with a keening, furious sorrow that rang in my ears well after I finished the book' Wall Street Journal // She is twenty, restless in Delhi. He is a few years older, and has travelled the world. They meet in a café and they fall in love. In a dark, cool flat they have sex and do drugs. And then they travel the city. From the drug dens of Paharganj to the building sites of Noida; through the wastelands of Mehrauli and the dargah in Nizamuddin charged with plaintive song, the two play out their love story to its black end. // 'Charged with the energy of a racy page-turner, and visceral in its treatment of female desire and sexuality' Mint 'Intoxicating' New York Times