Delhi has long been called the ‘rape
capital’ on India and statistically speaking anyway, perhaps that moniker is
not too far wrong. For years, the people of Delhi have yearned for a
Batman-type vigilante, and Sorabh Pant’s book puts one on offer.
The narrator and protagonist of Under
Delhi, Tanya Bisht, is that vigilante. Traumatised by an incident in her past,
she vows to eradicate perpetrators of crime against women, or rather, make them
pay. And like Batman, Tanya would never kill.
Outwardly, Tanya is a typical Delhi girl.
She loves to drink, she loves to roam around the city and (this is key!) she
loves sex. Her attachment to her boyfriend is a purely sexual one – she feels
no emotional affection for him. In an already enlightened book, this is perhaps
the most enlightened statement of them all. Yes, girls have sex. Yes, girls
like sex. No, having sex doesn’t mean that they are in love with that person.
Come night, however, and she jumps into her
white Omni van, the favoured vehicle of sexual predators worldwide. She
transforms into a destructor of evil, a yuppie Durga if you may, roaming the
city in search for those perpetrators who, due to loopholes in the legal
system, slipped through the cracks. She catches them, beats them up, takes them
to India Gate (where most candle-light vigils take place in the city) and then
dumps hot candle wax on their forehead, leaving the villain bound and tied. Oh,
before she takes off, Tanya, in true Dexter Morgan fashion (her favourite TV
show), also snipes off the baddie’s little finger.
Under Delhi will at times leave you
cracking up. The accurate description of Delhites is excellent – people in
Ambience Mall who always make you feel underdressed; the pretentious lot who
work in Gurgaon; the superrich who blow more cash on one meal than the average
per-capita income of the country; the average, slightly corrupt cop and so on and
on.
Pant also paints the beauty of the city
into his book – the wide, clean roads; the lush and green Lodhi Gardens; the
winters in the city. He also manages to put across the devil-may-care attitude
that the city has – except for a (perhaps vocal) minority, nobody gives a damn
if you drink, smoke, are sexually active or basically do anything that the
morality police frowns upon.
The book shows how the typical urban woman
is not the innocent belle of the way Bollywood likes to portray her. She is
fun-loving, likes to party, likes to get wasted, can smoke, can sleep with
whoever she wants and is still an ethical and principled person. And it’s just
not just young women – in the book, Tanya discovers that her mother is in a
live-in relationship.
However, in my opinion the book lost its
plot along the way. Somewhere along the way, around the last quarter of the
book, the threads of the story start falling apart and the book becomes a far
cry from the tight narrative style of the start of the tale.
I feel that the book ends on a slightly
anti-climatic note and her eventual taking down of the great big villain in the
book could have been better handled.
But the book is a lot of fun, and perhaps
will be even more interesting to read if you are a Delhite – there are certain
subtle gags thrown in that only somebody from the city would get. My only
complaint is that such a book was written by a guy!
--- Kartikeya
