Age of Vice

As these opening chapters show, Age of Vice straddles the space between a plot-driven crime thriller and a novel of social realism. While the action is fast-paced and crisply narrated, it also illustrates the imbalance in power structures that informs the novel’s universe. The novel is largely narrated in the third person, switching between the point of view of various characters. The first section is narrated from Ajay’s perspective, thus establishing Ajay as a stand-in for the reader, as well as the moral center of the story. Each point-of-view narration has its distinct style, indicating the intricacies of both the character’s socioeconomic environment and their individual psyche.

The narrative switches between timelines, using flashbacks and flashforwards as a plot device. For instance, Chapter 1 opens in February 2004, while Chapter 2 shifts the story to 1991. Despite the dense action, the plot holds its cards close, revealing crucial details slowly. This heightens suspense, inviting the reader to watch for hidden details and join the dots. The same set of circumstances are often narrated from the point of view of various characters; the full portrait of events emerges only at the end of the book.

Kapoor intersperses her fast-paced narration with descriptions and figurative language, providing narrative relief from tension and violence. For instance, after Ajay’s father Hari is brutally beaten, he is described as falling “into fever, bones purpling in the dusk” (13). The language conflates bruised bones and the darkening sky, and identifies Ajay’s family with nature.

The opening scene highlights the Extremes of Wealth and Poverty. A Mercedes—symbolizing wealth and moral corruption—brutally crushes five pavement-dwellers. The sleepers are described as “sleeping belly-up, tucked in with heavy shawls at the crown and feet, looking like corpses anyway” (3). This suggests how heavily the odds are stacked against the pavement-dwellers individually and the poor at large. The fact that their murder is pinned on a chauffeur, a man only a few rungs up from them on the social ladder, shows how hierarchies persist in society.

Through Ajay, the novel explores Violence as a Means of Control. In prison, he has to use violence to be taken seriously. For weeks, various gang members try to recruit him with offers of “mobile phone, pornography, chicken” (9). Ajay’s neutrality frustrates some gang members and they attack him with razors. Ajay initially “takes the cuts in penance, making no expression of pain” (9). Ultimately, his patience snaps and Ajay pulverizes the men. Thus, violence operates as the only means for Ajay and the powerless to take control.

The text’s violence, in many cases based on real-life events, is the symptom of a society at the point of implosion. The class and caste tensions and the social inequality of the novel’s universe cannot be contained, and are released in a vicious cycle of bloodshed. The description of the prison gangs is based on real life gangs, as is the killing of the pavement-dwellers. In the last few decades, many cases of cars—particularly expensive, foreign brands—running over sleeping unhoused people have widely been reported in the Indian media.

Kapoor uses contrast to illustrate the gap between the wealthy and poor. Ajay’s family hut in an eastern UP village is described as a tenement “patched with dried grass and plastic sheets” (11). In contrast, the Wadia house is five stories of concrete, marble, and teakwood, and filled with “fantastic displays of wealth” (59). When Ajay first enters the house, he wonders if it is a hotel. Moreover, the contrast does not just exist between Ajay’s village and Sunny’s home; it also extends to within the Wadia household. While Bunty and Sunny live in airy, luxurious spaces, the staffers live in “the bowels of the building” (54). Ajay is initially assigned a bunk in a cramped dorm.

Satire, irony, and black humor lace the text. These literary devices are common in novels of social realism, and serve to showcase inequality and hypocrisy in society. With satire, exaggeration is often used to illuminate abuse, such as by those in power. Kapoor uses satire to expose the difference between what the wealthy present as reality and what is actually happening. This is evident in the sequence in which eight-year-old Ajay is inducted in the Manali household. Mummy and Daddy introduce Ajay to his new life as if it is one filled with wonders, giving him huge servings of food and asking: “Isn’t it the best ghee you ever tasted?” (23). Daddy delivers Ajay a speech about how everyone is equal in their household, just before Ajay is assigned the task of preparing dinner, serving it, and washing the dishes after.

In the book’s opening section, Ajay appears a quiet, subdued character, capable of sudden, intense violence. As Ajay travels to Manali, then Delhi, and finally Tihar Jail, the reader is also introduced to these worlds. Ajay thus functions as the archetypical “outsider” character of fiction, through whose eyes the reader can register the details and incongruities of the text’s world. Ajay hardly interacts with others. He has a rich, inner life, and every time he engages in violence he agonizes over his actions. At the same time, he appears almost cut-off from others. Ajay’s isolation can be traced to his severe childhood trauma and his marginalized status.

Ajay fights isolation by seeking an identity through Sunny. Ajay hero-worships and imitates Sunny, and in his employ begins to think of himself as “Ajay Wadia.” Ajay hopes Sunny’s power will rub off him: “For the first time in his life he looks at himself as an object to be improved” (67). Ajay’s desire to improve himself through going to the gym, dressing better, and learning brands foreshadows how Sunny ultimately betrays him. The novel contains many references to luxury brands and consumer goods; the names or expensive perfumes, cars, and clothing labels. Symbols of luxury form an important motif in the text, as they build its themes of class divide and social aspiration.

Neda is the only female character of consequence introduced in the section, and also the book’s sole woman protagonist. As an educated, upper-class, English-speaking professional woman, Neda still has some agency and voice. Other women in the text are often presented as survivors of violence, such as Ragini, the 18-year-old woman crushed to death by Gautam Rathore, and Hema, Ajay’s sister who is sexually abused. The terrible treatment of women and minorities reflects the text’s universe. In the male-dominated culture of political corruption and real-estate grabs, women are often pushed to the corner and/or sexually exploited.