Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author: Deepti Kapoor
- Language: English
- Genre: Kidnapping Thrillers
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 6 MB
- Price: Free
NEW DELHI, 2004
Five pavement-dwellers lie dead at the side of Delhi’s Inner Ring Road.
It sounds like the start of a sick joke.
If it is, no one told them.
They die where they slept.
Almost.
Their bodies have been dragged ten meters by the speeding Mercedes that
jumped the curb and cut them down.
It’s February. Three a.m. Six degrees.
Fifteen million souls curl up in sleep.
A pale fog of sulfur lines the streets.
And one of the dead, Ragini, was eighteen years old. She was five months
pregnant at the time. Her husband, Rajesh, twenty-three, was sleeping by her
side. Both belly-up, tucked in with heavy shawls at the crown and feet,
looking like corpses anyway save the telltale signs, the rucksack beneath the
head, the sandals lined up neatly beside the arms.
A cruel twist of fate: this couple arrived in Delhi only yesterday. Taking
refuge with Krishna, Iyaad, and Chotu, three migrant laborers from the same
district in Uttar Pradesh. Each day these men woke before dawn to trek to the
labor mandi at Company Bagh, trying to grab whatever daily wage they
could find—dhaba cook, wedding waiter, construction laborer—sending
money back to their village, paying for a sister’s shaadi, a brother’s
schooling, a father’s nightly medicine.
Living day to day, hour to hour, the
working poor, struggling to survive. Returning to sleep in this barren spot
after dark, beside the Ring Road, close to Nigambodh Ghat. Close to the
demolished slums of the Yamuna Pushta that had been their home.
But the newspapers don’t dwell on these three men. Their names vanish at
dawn with the stars.
—
A police van with four cops inside arrives at the crash site. They climb out
and see the dead bodies, and the wailing, angry crowd that now surrounds
the car. There’s someone still inside! A young man, sitting bolt upright, arms
braced at the wheel, eyes shut tightly. Is he dead? Did he die like that? The
cops push the rabble aside and peer in. “Is he sleeping?” one cop says to his
colleagues. These words cause the driver to turn his head and, like some
monster, open his eyes. The cop looks back and almost jumps in fright.
There’s something grotesque about the driver’s smooth, handsome face. His
eyes are leering and wild, but other than that, there’s not a hair out of place.
The cops pull open the door, wave their lathis thunderously, order him out.
There’s an empty bottle of Black Label at his feet. He’s a lean man, gym
honed, wearing a gray gabardine safari suit, hair parted millimeter fine,
impeccably oiled. Beneath the reek of whisky there’s another scent: Davidoff
Cool Water, not that these cops know.
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