Family Planning (16 page)

When they were driving past the huge mansions of Golf-Links Colony, Arjun asked, “Papa, do you have a photo of Mama?”

The crucial thing for Arjun was to have an image. He had caught himself thinking about how he’d dramatically confess his tragic backstory to Aarti, and was appalled by his own opportunism. He knew that if he could see a picture, any picture, he’d be cured, he’d become aware of the gravity of the situation and join his father in mourning.

Mr. Ahuja said, “Nothing. I have nothing to show.”

He forgot about the tie with the cricketer pattern—that
cherished gift from Rashmi—looped lavishly around his neck. And all of Arjun’s good intentions imploded again.

Rakesh had been meticulous. He had rid himself of all proof of Rashmi’s existence, taking with it the self-conscious dread he had of becoming the sad widower who garlanded the portrait of his dead wife and spoke to her occasionally about what was happening in his life, how he was waiting to join her, how expensive potatoes were these days, etc. How could he explain to Arjun that this destruction was a safeguard against his own grief, not the purposeful nurturing of a secret? That he had had no choice. That he’d cupped his hands through drawers full of Rashmi’s long and extravagant
To Do
lists and wept for each item that was left unchecked. Every photograph he had chucked during a trip to Manhattan into the East River. It was worth the two hundred dollars he was fined by a policeman who had caught Rakesh littering. Littering? What was wrong with this country? This country that allowed no grief? This country that fined, two hundred dollars times thirteen rupees, that is, 2600 rupees for a few photographs that had “accidentally fallen into the water due to a strong breeze, officer”?

Would the policeman have lessened his fine if he had told him the story of his suffering right then? Would his son forgive him if he understood everything?

Grief didn’t seem to excuse anything. Grief was the cliché of the century. In the centuries past, men had lost wives, women had lost husbands, parents had lost children, children had lost parents. Now you couldn’t bear to lose anyone.

The clothes had all been donated too—he had been too pennywise to dump them in the dustbin—and he wondered if Rashmi’s saris and salwars had made their way from Goodwill to the shoulders of naïve Orientalists. If Rashmi simply lived on as a piece of exotica in each of these women’s lives. As for the jewelry, he had sold it, and given the cash to Rashmi’s parents in a gesture of generosity. He thought the money would calm them, but no: Rashmi’s parents never forgave Rakesh for denying them their dead daughter’s belongings.

What could Rakesh tell Arjun about Rashmi?

He remembered only stupid details. He remembered the way she was before Arjun was born. He remembered the superbly frigid, icicle-sharpened day in New York City when they’d taken the F train to Coney Island on a whim during their first month in America. The train’s magnetic lurch propelled them toward the view as they emerged into sunlight: a giant Ferris wheel perched atop the island of magnanimous trash—a sulking, occasionally turning rotunda that seemed like it could break loose and flatten the crowds ant-hilled below. Far away, the glisten of sand meeting water. The train was nearly empty when they got off at the Aquarium stop, and all Rakesh could remember now was the fragile stem of Rashmi’s wrist in his hand as he gently tugged her out of the train. She was so absentminded. She never knew where to get off. She liked to sit and watch, never afraid to make eye contact with the strangers across from her because, well, she was probably seeing right through them. Yet sometimes she noticed things that even Rakesh’s IIT-honed brain didn’t observe. Such as: the Ferris
wheel had two layers of bogies, like a gear with teeth on both sides. Unlike in India.

I’m afraid of giant wheels, she said.

We don’t have to go, said Rakesh.

No let’s.

Why?

They went. It was only on top that she answered his question and told him the story. She wasn’t afraid of giant wheels; she was terrified. When she was four, her parents put her in the rickety carriage of a giant wheel at a Diwali fair in Delhi along with her six-year-old cousin, Amit. The giant wheel was manually operated—two emaciated yet muscular men dressed strictly in dhotis climbed up and down the metallic bars of the wheel to keep the mechanism in rotation—and you could feel the hotness of their breaths as they passed by your compartment, their simian feet clenched tight on metal. The whoosh you felt in your stomach was doubled because of the voyeuristic thrill of wondering:
Will these men fall and die? What if they fall?
But it wasn’t a real concern, because weren’t you paying them for exactly that? To have these poor men take mortal risks so that you could feel a little frightened for your life as you swung fifty feet above the ground?

Rashmi, poor darling four-year-old Rashmi had huddled with her cousin in the creaky cradle, heard the other children whooping with joy, felt her hands whitening around the protective metal bar, wondered if this is what it felt like to be a bird on a branch in a storm, and did the only thing she could:
she screamed. Rashmi’s scream was the longest scream anyone on the giant wheel had ever heard. Unlike most screams that started and ended, Rashmi’s scream bloomed to a crescendo as if she was trying to blow a balloon. With nothing but fear. Minutes passed. One of the giant wheel operators almost fell off, and Amit was so ashamed of his four-year-old cousin that he nearly leaped from the trolley. Eventually, a particularly confident operator climbed up to her trolley, grabbed her from the perch, and carried her down all the way.

Down the rolling staircase of metal bars. Down the sickening roll of the wheel. Down with and against gravity.

It was the most scared I’ve ever been, Rashmi said. You’d think climbing up something is scarier, but climbing down through a jungle of metal with some strange man holding you in one hand and holding on for dear life with the other—I stopped screaming and just held my breath. When I got down it was like I had just taken a dive in a really deep pool and then gotten out after holding my breath for ten minutes.

Why in the world are we on this thing right now? Rakesh asked.

Why? she said.

Yes, why.

That’s easy, she said. I wanted to remember why I was screaming.

The scream came to him through layer after layer of time; the grief of losing Rashmi was the grief of having forgotten all the
stories she was yet to tell him. The pain of telling Arjun about Rashmi would be that she could never be explained into existence.

“Does anybody else know about this?” Arjun asked.

He wanted to know if his betrayal was complete. He understood why his father had confessed to him while driving—you can’t get out of a moving car.

“Obviously, your Mama—I mean, Sangita—knows.”

The horizon was a dashboard, and his mind needled through the years with the mathematical energy of the speedometer. Only Mama knew. His betrayal was only one-thirteenth complete. Or two-fourteenth. Or one-seventh. He grew irritated. A brain, like a speedometer, never shut off; it quivered endlessly near 0.1.

“What about Varun, Rishi, Rita—”

“Yes, I told them today. I told them they must never ever treat you differently, and that if they did, I would give them hell.”

“Wonderful. So that’s how they’re going to love me more?” asked Arjun. “As a stepbrother?”

“No, beta. Half-brother.”

“I don’t want to live here anymore,” he said dramatically. “I want to go to America.”

“Beta—”

“No, I want to go,” said Arjun.

“Beta, you have never even been there. You don’t even know how it is, do you? This is just a childish insistence. Life
there is very hard—no servants, no family, no social life—you’re always an outsider, you want that?”

“Papa—”

“And, besides, you have always told me that in Class 12, America will be a backup only, so why do you want to go there now? Is it because you were born there? Firstly, you are not a citizen anymore and you don’t have a visa and visa is hard enough to procure.” Rakesh had made sure to decline Arjun’s American citizenship as part of his elaborate cover up of Rashmi’s existence. “And, beta, what do you think you will feel when you go back? You have no memory of how it was, so what will you gain? And what will you remember? That your—”

“Papa—”

“That your Mama died there?” said Mr. Ahuja. “Listen to me right now. There is nothing in America that there is not here. Don’t think you can just leave all the people you love and go away somewhere else. You can go once you’re old enough to take care of yourself, but you’re not right now and that’s all.”

“I’m old enough. I’m almost as old as everyone else who goes.”

“Beta, that’s not it, you are not grasping my point! Look at me. I returned, right? I saw America and I saw India, and I came back and decided to help the people and how sad will it be if my own children are leaving this country? What’s the point of trying to make this country a better place if all the smart people leave?”

“But you didn’t come back for India. You said you came back because your wife died.”

W
HEN THEY ARRIVED HOME,
Arjun ended their mutual brooding with a loud clang of the passenger door and jogged off toward the house. Mr. Ahuja let it pass. The car was comfortable, its headlights fixating on the cracks in the driveway, the nocturnal chains of ants heave-hoing over hillocks of moss. Mr. Ahuja adjusted his tired eyes to the squat off-white colonial house and his soaked collar to the rapidly-evolving tropical weather in the car. What a screw-up. He was a fool to have waited so long to tell Arjun. To have waited till the point where his son had mastered the means, the vocabulary, to hurt him back. Waited till the brink of his son’s independence, offering this news like a parting shot.

But he had to be objective about himself: He
had been
so bloody tortured. How exactly would he have told him? And hadn’t he assumed that the year-by-year erosion of memory would help him get over Rashmi—make it easier for him to spill the secret? But he hadn’t gotten over Rashmi one bit, and how could he? How could he if he’d married a woman like Sangita?

It was an awful thing to admit, but he was plain ashamed to be seen with Sangita. Marrying her was charity enough. For a man who was a champion of form—a man who shivered like a newborn baby when you whisked him down a flyover, a golfer who’d once spent ten minutes on his knees on a golf course just patting up the evenness of the grass, a spectator who marveled year after year at the symmetry of soldiers during the Republic Day parade, a man for whom form was
religion
—he’d gotten stuck with the least elegant woman possible. Still his mind soldiered on. His body and brain collaborated to ignore her formlessness. Even then, he couldn’t forget Rashmi: when they weren’t having sex, Sangita was the very manifestation of his betrayal—in remarriage, in life. Together they lived in a giant house where the lights were constantly blowing their fuses, and you stood in silence with one hand on a light switch while above the bulb burst into sublunary flames. Then vanished. She was the element of dark irony in his life. She made God’s revenge on him—one dead wife, one switched wife—comical. And now, after Arjun’s intrusion, even the possibility of sex had dried up.

Recoiling from the image, Mr. Ahuja grasped the steering
wheel, inhaled the dead-animal musk of the car, ventilated his senses. Sangita’s face thus forgotten, there remained an overpowering notion in the anterior chamber of his nose. Entering the brain. The understanding that if he ever wanted to have sex again, it would have to be outside the house. The house was the problem, not sex.

He was parked in his own driveway. He could back out at will. He could follow the overhead power lines to a home spasming with light. He’d have an affair. He’d have many affairs. He was one of the most powerful men in Delhi. So what if he was only attracted to pregnant women. He could change, disengage from his fantasies. Or if not change, then arrive at a compromise: proposition bloated women who felt unloved, misshapen, fart-ready. Remind them that it was safe for them, too, to have affairs. That the sex was never better, and they couldn’t get pregnant if they were already pregnant.

But what if he was only attracted to women who carried
his
children? What would he do then? Divorce Sangita? Remarry? Find a younger girl? Repeat the cycle? Father fifty-five children? Father a nation?

Rakesh Ahuja! You fool!

The case thus closed, he loosened his grip on the gearshift and pondered more practical matters.

How would the children respond if Arjun attacked them with this information about the bride-switch? Would they stick to Mr. Ahuja’s instructions, not ostracize him? And Sangita, what would she think? He wished now that his children didn’t have to witness what would transpire with Arjun; he wished, in
fact, that they were all unborn, and his thoughts turned on the baby that was due in September. He focused all his hopes on that child. He’d get that one right. The baby was still a precious lump in Sangita’s stomach, but it would eventually be born, and in its ferocious struggle to escape the womb, Rakesh would witness a celebration of his own power, his howling love for life, his lust, his virility—yet, the baby, when it finally woke to the world and came of age, would know him, Mr. Ahuja, only in the twilight of his life.

If only he could speak to the child now. If only he could tell the child his dreams and fears and ambitions. If only he could lay his head on that smooth surface and whisper…

With a jerk of the hand brake, Mr. Ahuja—lacking both a sturdy alibi and a secret lover—backed the car out of the driveway and drove to the SPM’s residence.