Age of Vice

Neda recalls the events which led her to London, beginning with her first meeting with Sunny: In 2003, 22-year-old Neda is a city reporter at the Delhi Post. She investigates cases about land grabs and Delhi’s real-estate mafia, since her editor Dean Saldanha is interested in unravelling the link between the city’s extremes of poverty and wealth. Dean’s current investigative focus is the court-ordered demolition of the Yamuna Pushta, a large slum on the banks of the river Yamuna. Tens of thousands of landless laborers and domestic workers live in these slums. Both the governments of Delhi and UP have recently classified the slums as illegal encroachment, and want to clear them to develop the riverbank into a tourist destination.

Neda is from a family of “cultural elites,” highly educated Indians who have land and cultural capital, though they are no longer wealthy. Neda drives a battered little red car and dresses relatively simple, yet can easily access Delhi’s elite spaces because of her aura of old money and cultural refinement. When Neda hears about Sunny Wadia, the tycoon’s son who wants to use his money to transform urban spaces, she wrangles an introduction. Sunny and Neda are instantly attracted to the other, but leave the evening unresolved. Back at the office of the Delhi Post, Neda wants to write a profile on Sunny. Her boss Dean vetoes the idea as he thinks Sunny’s idealism is a sham.

Neda’s research on Sunny’s family supports Dean’s assessment. Bunty Wadia, Sunny’s father, is seemingly a respectable liquor baron, but has gangster roots. Hailing from Meerut, a large city in Western UP, Bunty was once a smalltime grain merchant and strongman. He muscled Ram Singh, his thuggish associate, into political power as the Chief Minister of UP. After Ram Singh was voted in, Bunty quickly bagged many real estate and other business contracts in a short span of time, suggesting he bribed Ram Singh for the deals. Bunty’s brother Vicky, who looks like a “more brutish version of Sunny” (209), is a dreaded gangster and sugar-mill-owner in Eastern UP, with several criminal cases of attempted murder and extortion against him. Vicky is infamous for something known as the “Kushinagar incident” and some websites refer to him as “Himmatgiri.”

Despite the red flags about the Wadias, Neda continues to feel drawn to Sunny. She and Sunny argue during their second meeting when Sunny tells Neda about his dream of urban transformation. Sunny is excited about the current government drive to develop the Yamuna as a world-class tourist destination. The people who live in the slums on its banks can be resettled and given new jobs. Neda is almost charmed by his idea, but knows that the concept of beautifying a city by removing its poor is dubious. She questions Sunny’s intentions, as well as Bunty Wadia’s unethical business practices. Sunny dismisses Neda abruptly. He does not contact her for weeks, leaving Neda skittish.

Neda runs into Sunny for the third time while covering a press conference at the Park Hyatt. The conference is being held by Dinesh Singh, the scholarly looking and progressive son of UP chief minister Ram Singh. Sunny calls Neda up to his hotel room. He confides in her that he is unsettled by Dinesh, whom his father Bunty openly favors above him. Neda and Sunny make love. They begin a relationship, “a brief golden period” (253). Neda leads a double life, reporting on the land grabs in the city by day and by night being whisked off by Sunny into luxurious restaurants and parties.

Neda and Sunny keep their relationship largely a secret. When Neda asks Sunny about his uncle Vicky, Sunny tells her he used to hero-worship Vicky when he was a child. Vicky visited them often in Meerut till Sunny’s mother was alive. After his mother died by suicide, Vicky moved away, and his relationship with Sunny deteriorated. Sunny explains how his Punjabi family began to use the Parsi name Wadia. Sunny’s grandfather was a Walia who met a successful Parsi trader called Wadia. He adopted the name thinking the trader’s success would rub off him.

The halcyon days of Neda and Sunny’s affair end when Dean asks Neda to immediately report on a demolition happening at Laxmi Camp, a slum in the Yamuna Pushta. At the demolition site, Neda witnesses a bulldozer run over and kill two infant siblings. She cries as TV reporters film her. A traumatized Neda writes up her first-person account and withdraws to her home. Later that night, Sunny comes over and whisks Neda away to his farmhouse so she can recover. However, Sunny’s father interrupts their sojourn. He strides into the farmhouse with Ram Singh, the UP chief minister, and Dinesh Singh, his son, in tow.

Ajay bundles Neda away, but not before she watches Bunty Wadia kick Sunny in the chest. Bunty has learnt of Sunny’s relationship with Neda, and feels Neda may be gathering intel on the slum demolitions through him. The narrative suggests that Bunty stands to benefit from the demolitions. A few days later there is an ad from the Wadia Charitable Foundation in all the papers, announcing a compensation of 10 lakh rupees per child “tragically killed in the Laxmi Camp eviction disturbance” (278). Neda knows Sunny is behind the ad, and made the gesture for her sake.

Sunny goes incommunicado again. Dean sends Neda to investigate the resettlement sites where the residents of the demolished Laxmi Camp have been granted land. Neda learns that preying real estate brokers are already trying to buy the resettlement sites at cheap prices from the former slum-dwellers. Most residents are tempted to sell their land; the resettlement sites are so far from the city the residents have trouble getting jobs. Neda spots a broker on the site and moves to speak with him, but is stopped by a goon.

Neda receives a call, ostensibly from an associate of Sunny’s, telling her Sunny wants to meet her at a farmhouse far from the city. Neda drives to the farmhouse, which is close to the Wadia office. A car runs her off the road; a couple of men get out and begin smashing the windows of her car. One of the goons is the man who stopped her at the resettlement site. Ajay appears on the spot and whips the goons with his pistol and rescues Neda. Ajay drives Neda away to a dingy hotel room where Sunny is waiting for her. Neda tells Sunny that she has seen one of the goons who attacked her at the Wadia house, which suggests that the men who attacked her were sent by his father. Sunny denies the suggestion.

In January 2004, a month before Gautam kills the people sleeping on the pavement, Dean tells Neda that he has been forced to quit the Post. Unknown to everyone else, including Neda, Dean had just finished writing an explosive exposé on the Wadias when an old mentor offered Dean an obscene amount of money from his client to drop the story. To Dean’s horror, the mentor knew every word of Dean’s article, suggesting that Dean’s computer had been hacked. Dean refused the offer. The story was killed anyway by Dean’s managing editor.

Dean shares a printout of the story with Neda. The story appears “straight out of a pulp novel” (314), but it is true. Bunty Wadia has a monopoly over not just the liquor business, but all businesses in UP. For a generous bribe, the UP government, run by Ram Singh, ensures that Wadia gets almost all of the wholesale and retail liquor licenses in the state. Bunty also receives cheaper permits and right of way along popular transport routes to ferry the liquor. He uses the preferential access to the routes to transport other goods as well, including timber and sand. A network of violent goons keeps Bunty’s business running. Neda is surprised the story covers nothing about the Wadia connection to land grabs and slum demolitions. It dismisses Sunny’s dreams of building skyscrapers around the Yamuna as environmentally infeasible.

Sunny pops up in Neda’s life again and asks her to join him and Ajay in Goa. Neda and Sunny have a romantic interlude. Sunny tells Neda he wants to leave his father and the Wadia business behind to elope with her. He tells her about his traumatic childhood. As Bunty’s only son, Sunny was expected to be ruthless and macho, but he was a softer person. When Sunny grew into his teens, Bunty sent him to train with Vicky to learn how to be a man. One day, Vicky and his men barged into Sunny’s room. Vicky read aloud Sunny’s private journal, mocking him. The men brought in three teenaged girls, obviously abducted. Vicky asked Sunny to choose one. It was clear Vicky and his men planned to assault the young girls. Scared and repulsed, Sunny ran out of his room. Later, two of the girls were found hanging dead from a tree. The third girl was never found. This is the Kushinagar incident the newspapers speak about. Sunny was returned to Delhi and sent to London because he had “earned it.”

Neda keeps drafting an email to Dean, which she does not have the courage to send. In the email, she tells Dean the reason she fled from Delhi. Neda witnessed Gautam run over the pavement-dwellers. She saw Sunny deliberately frame Ajay for the crime, and Ajay accept mutely. Despite knowing all this, she has kept quiet.

After Neda and Sunny return from Goa, they meet Gautam at a club to finalize the plans Sunny and Gautam have been discussing. Sunny expects Gautam to finance his new ventures so Sunny can be free of his father’s control. However, Gautam bursts Sunny’s bubble, telling him he never intended to follow through on his promise, and leaves. An enraged Sunny asks Ajay to chase Gautam’s Mercedes. Neda watches as Gautam’s Mercedes veers onto a curb where a group of unhoused people are sleeping in the open, crushing them. Neda goes over to the injured people and asks Sunny to call an ambulance. Instead, Sunny takes out a camera and takes a polaroid of Gautam fainted at the wheel of the Mercedes, the car’s license plate clearly visible. He asks Ajay to pull Gautam out of the car. Sunny gives Ajay whiskey to drink and says something to him. Ajay hands over his gun and enters the Mercedes. Sunny turns to Neda and punches her. She blacks out.

Neda wakes up in a government guest house, next to Bunty Wadia’s associate Chandra. Chandra asks her not to complicate her parents’ life by revealing the incidents of the previous night to anyone. Neda will be given an alibi to clear her presence at the site of the crash. She is to go to London. She will be given money and an apartment. She is to forget about Sunny. Neda accepts. Shortly after Neda arrives in London, she finds out she is four months pregnant. Chandra tells her Sunny wants nothing to do with the pregnancy and helps Neda get an abortion. Neda writes to Dean that she regrets being passive in the face of violence and not behaving ethically. But she cannot take a stand. She never sends the message.