A Bad Character

Shortlisted for the 2015 Prix Médicis
My boyfriend died when I was twenty-one. His body was left lying broken in the highway out of Delhi while the sun rose in the desert to the east. I wasn’t there, I never saw it. But plenty of others saw, in the trucks that passed by without stopping, and from the roadside dhaba where he’d been drinking all night.
Then they wrote about him in the paper. Twelve lines buried in the middle pages, one line standing out, the last on