Family Planning (6 page)

Individually taken, each flyover was a work of architectural genius (shaped like tigers, elephants, bicycles, and even a rhino), built at such an unusual elevation that beneath it one could create tiny cities—malls and gardens and fairs massively shadowed by concrete.

Reality was the ultimate bulldozer. Political pressures and jokers like Yograj had contorted the plan into a shape that was far from perfect. The paper model in Rakesh’s study at home presented a severely shrunken idea of the problems that awaited Delhi. Yes, traffic would be eased, but too many flyovers were being erected, the city was being randomly suffocated with concrete, the horizon had collapsed under a view of second-floor balconies and clotheslines fluttering with underwear, every politician in Delhi wished to distract his disappointed voters with a giant, noisy, jing-bang of modernity, the flyover. For some reason, no one doubted the sandstone sexiness of an overpass. People believed in them with a preindustrial innocence. They earnestly put up with months of noise and pollution if it meant fast transit in the future.

Only, of course, transit wouldn’t be much faster. It’d just be an uglier city.

Now Rakesh bitterly perused the e-mail. He’d suppressed his disappointment over the Flyover Fast-Track because he knew that idealism itself was a sort of political immaturity. Sending in such a fiery resignation would curtail his chances
of advancement in the party. The SPM would not tolerate such blatant rudeness. She was more goddess than woman. It was a ritual in the party to drink the rosewater she’d used to clean her feet. During cabinet-shuffle-time ministers and MPs pitched tents in her garden to stress their loyalties. So what if the party was at an all-time low. So what if it was losing all the state polls and its popularity rating was dismal. He ought to soften his language. He ought to remember that this e-mail was written
specifically
with Arjun in mind….

What the hell—he pressed
SEND
.

“Darling, I’ve resigned,” he said to Sangita on the phone. “Tell the children I’ll be coming home for lunch. But don’t tell them I’ve resigned, obviously. You know how they become when I tell them. They will want to know everything. Then they’ll cry. You’ve raised true drama queens.”

“Okay, ji.”

Mrs. Ahuja was blasé. She had good reason to be.

Mr. Ahuja put down the phone, his head spinning. There was the question of what he would say to Arjun about Rashmi. For a decade, Rashmi had been receding from his memory. She had become a swirl in the sink, a hot-blue flame that appeared on a gas stove, the smell of a tissue as it took away ribbons of snot, the static in someone else’s cell phone, a pencil of memories sharpened into nothing. Words:
Darling, Kanjeevaram, Tragic Eyes
. But last night, his pajama drawstrings dangling down in a huge comic bow, Rakesh had needed her
body
. He had needed her entire being to be transposed swiftly beside
him—hologrammed over and around Sangita’s pregnant form, a dose of beauty to undo his embarrassment—but she was gone. And it was Arjun’s fault that he had had this revelation. It was Arjun’s unawareness that killed Rashmi once and for all.

A
RJUN WAS SECRETLY PLEASED
to hear from the guard that his father was coming home for lunch. This meant a later meal and more time to organize the concert. He kicked off his shoes and watched the insoles pop on the front verandah of the house. The house—12 Modi Estate—was a squat bungalow that always smelled of the rainy season, its many awnings and verandahs making it a haven for loiterers, right-hand men, chamchas, servants, maids, shawl-sellers, bored bodyguards; Arjun walked past the walkie-talkie wielding lot.

The door of the house opened into a massive wind tunnel of fans and gray floors. The drawing room was congested
with kids—its horrible maroon color scheme gave it the aspect of a dingy beauty parlor. Neither Mama nor Papa had good taste, Arjun realized. They had no interest in decoration. Instead, a flood of giving had besieged the Ahujas since Mr. Ahuja made minister, and the house had been furnished with favors—the mismatched sofas and oddball paintings and the giant statue of a naked British boy in the front saying more about the taste of the givers rather than the takers. Because, as Arjun knew, his Papa took everything. He was blissfully indiscriminate. Eventually, he begged these favor-seekers for fungible essentials, and so baby products and creams and clothes came pouring in like predated dowry. The toys and clothes for the older children Mr. Ahuja made a point to donate to slum-dwellers so his brood could stay clear of being spoiled—
they are at high risk of becoming brats
, he’d told Arjun. Of course, he made his children do the giving; giant feasts were organized in the back garden where local sweepers and workers were ladled food from five giant containers by the Ahuja children—an Ahuja meal on a larger scale, basically.

Arjun wondered if Mr. Ahuja wanted babies only so he could eat away at the endless supply of gifts and sweets and food.

He found the theory highly plausible.

He was humming a song and washing his hands in the bathroom when Mama knocked on the door, peered in, and said, “Have you seen? He died.”

Then she left. Was this her way of apologizing for last
night? Arjun finished swilling the water and watched himself in the mirror as he spat white foam. Everyone always said he looked like his father, but today he was all Sangita, the handsome pimple on his forehead like a bindi, his lips loose and sullen. He was almost amused by the idea of his mother being a sexual being: he’d taken for granted that the number of children his Mama and Papa had was equal to, if not more than, the number of times they’d had sexual intercourse (they had twins). Last night, then, completely shattered the part of him that’d been taught—mainly by America—that sex was the spontaneous transfer of fluids between very attractive, naked, blond people. Clearly, Mama and Papa were (still!) horny for each other. Clearly, their sardonic disinterest in each other was repressed magnetism. Clearly, last night he’d walked in on an act of passion.

This, against all odds, he could learn to respect.

Now the question that remained—the question that could alter completely his idea of how many years it was possible to lead a double life, to lie, to get away with risks that came with a certified
Adult
license—was this: Who was the horny one? Mama or Papa?

He spat out a phlegmy jet into the sink.

Arjun found Sangita sitting glumly in the nursery with a newspaper. She was wearing her stiff gray sari.

“He died,” she said, offering no context. “He was here one minute and then—phut—just like that, gone.”

“Oh no, I’m so sorry, Mama,” said Arjun, looking sad. “I don’t think I knew—him. Who was it?”

“Such a nice man he was. Gave tea-shee to his workers for no reason. Used to donate so much to the charities. All the tires you see the poor boys on the road playing with, he gave them. Such few nice men these days.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Arjun. “When is the cremation?”

She said, “What cremation, bhai, they don’t even give him the honor of that these days, such little time.”

“He was a Muslim?”

“Arre, why so many questions? Are you not watching? How can he be Muslim and going to the temple for charity? Do you know any Muslims who give to charity?”

“No,” Arjun admitted.

“And do you know of a Muslim woman who runs a company?”

“Was he murdered?” asked Arjun. “Usually if the cause of death is unknown then they need the body and do tests to see…”

“He died because of using cell-o-phone in the tub,” she said, sighing. “But it was not his fault, naa. They killed him.”

“
They?
Was this in the papers?”

“Zee-TV, naah, who else.”

Arjun was dumbfounded. He returned to his room.

Rita was giggling in the hallway. “Yaar, it’s Mohan Bedi from
The Vengeful Daughter-in-Law
. I think his contract finished, so they, you know, killed him off. He was everyone’s favorite, so God knows why they killed him.
So
nice,
so
charming,
so
elegant,
so
handsome,
so
fair,
so
talented,
so
husband-y,
chho
chweet…”

A
RJUN SHOULD HAVE KNOWN
this is how he would make peace with Mama—offering condolences for the death of a TV character. Having done the needful, he was ready to ask his siblings for a favor. A favor about the concert. This was no easy task, Arjun knew. Firstly, it was two thirty on a weekday, a time of hunger; Papa would be home soon. Secondly, the house was a calamity in suspension. The house was the riots of 1947, the children massacring one another with a calm disrespect for personal boundaries. Or, at other times, as Mama liked to say, the house was the Agra Mad House. Or as Papa liked to qualify: on fire. No amount of analogizing or eulogizing could suffice, however. A family of
thirteen in modern-day India was a disaster, a game of marbles that had lost its marbles, a giddy
Titanic
aching for its eventual iceberg, a pack of wolves with no Mowgli to raise, a team of jihadis so bored they’d declared holy war on one another.

As Mama had one day said, “What are these Americans constantly complaining about, every day here is a September 11 only!”

She had said, or shouted, this with special reference to a series of kamikaze paper-planes that had struck the warring pixels of the TV screen one bright Sunday morning, disrupting the eight o’clock Bhajans Sangita liked to watch.

Varun, his hands still nimble from wing-folding, screamed from the drawing room, “MAMA, SAHIL CALLED YOU OSAMAMA!”

But Sahil was innocent and sitting silently. On a sofa. In pajamas. With a fried egg on his lap. Which was not supposed to be in his lap but rather on a plate that was now fallen on the ground.

Sahil screamed, “MAMA, I DIDN’T! SHANKAR, GET THE TOWEL! VARUN IS MOCKING ME!”

Tanya put aside her
Harry Potter
and intervened. “Arre, Varun what has Sahil done to you? Why are you bullying him?”

Varun was indignant. “He called Mama a bad name.”

“But he didn’t,” Tanya yawned. “
You
did.”

“You said Mama’s Osama!” said Sahil, furiously dabbing his egg-soaked knee with a piece of toast and slurping up the yolk.

Varun wasn’t impressed. “So? It’s funny, no? When have you ever cracked a joke?”

“But Varun—I mean, bhaiya—” Bhaiya was the respectful term for elder brother.

“You called me
Varun
?” Varun thundered. “Is my name Varun or
Bhaiya
? What, you see this?” This referred to Varun’s balled fist. Of course.

And so Sahil learned. He had not flown the planes but he had to take the blame. The family was run on a system of mafioso respect, a constant tangle of snakes and ladders where the older you were, the longer you could rattle your tail and shake up the kiddies shinnying up the stepping-stool of experience. But being a wily old snake also had its disadvantages. It meant you couldn’t ask for favors without coiling around yourself, tying yourself into a knot that could take years to disentangle.

Arjun understood that asking for a favor would mean years of sibling servitude, a debt that would be paid out in tiny pounds of flesh—flesh that was completely unnecessary since, ostensibly, one had the same flesh as one’s siblings. And that is what made it so much worse. It was flesh for flesh’s sake.

But a family shouldn’t be run on a system of favors,
an earnest voice inside Arjun said.
Everyone should favor everyone.

What a delusion!
The only time such delusions were even remotely true was on Diwali or Holi or Rakhi or Indo-Pak cricket matches, festivals that were contingent on the collective. For a day, each enmity or plot of revenge would be buried and a terrifying fealty would take over. Terrifying because it was so vicious.
You hit my brother with a water balloon? Well, I
hit you with ten thousand! You buy a ten-thousand-explosions firecracker to scare my little sister? I throw a water balloon on it
too
! Plus! Plus I buy a one-trillion firecracker, one that you will hear till the day you die!

Arjun was a part of this family too. He knew how it worked and he knew he would encounter resistance, rubbing the match-head of his request against the rough responses of his siblings. Each one would require a separate strategy of appeasement. For instance, he would have to forgive Varun for his transgressions, his reckless cricketing in the backyard and the gulley behind the house. The austere shape of a cricket ball whizzing through the air would cause a gallop of heartbeats in the Ahuja household. And, occasionally, the cracking of a windshield. But Arjun had caught Varun at his worst, most humbling moment—when he had smashed the ball straight into Shankar the servant’s brand-new Atlas bicycle, rupturing the spokes of its back wheel. The poor servant had wept, not knowing the cause of the damage. He had bought the bicycle with his own money (he had insisted to Rakesh that he wanted to be self-made) and was looking forward to cycling on it with his cell-phone cocked against his ear (this he had accepted from Rakesh on the condition that he would pay off the cost of the phone with cuts from his salary). But now the wheel would crack like a rib each time he perched on the seat. Varun had been characteristically cruel to cover up his misdoing. Each time he saw Shankar’s five-foot frame hunched over the wheel, he would say, “What? You’ve started thinking of yourself as Gandhi-ji spinning the wheel or what?
Are you going to make clothes from it by sitting there only?”

Varun didn’t know that Arjun had witnessed the entire event from the window, that Arjun had given Shankar money for the repair from his own pocket-money. Shankar had refused. “I’ll get the sister-fucker who did this. He thinks he can come outside the minister’s house and smash up his bicycle.”

One morning, at the bus stop, Arjun finally told Varun what he’d seen.

“So what? He’s a servant,” Varun said.

“Yaar, listen to yourself speak before you utter words,” Arjun reprimanded him. “You want me to tell Papa? Or worse, I can tell Shankar, and he’ll enthusiastically fill your school water-bottle every night with liters of his spit. Or cut his nails in your mango milkshake. Just stop hitting the cricket ball blindly around the house, okay? Restrict yourself to straight drives for a week, see how it feels.”

“With all due respect, Mr. Judge, Judge
Bhaiya
, if you will, maybe you are saying all this because you’re, ahem, bad at cricket? What about all the times you made Shankar play badminton with you when he hates doing it?”

“Okay, Varun, that’s it. I’m asking you not to be cruel to a person who has less money than you do, that’s all, but now you leave me with no choice.”

“No—” cowered Varun.

“Yes. From now on—” said Arjun.

“No, you know I—” Varun begged.

But Arjun was adamant. “From now on, you’re going to have to play cricket with a tennis ball instead.”

A tennis ball was for sissies. Thus, Varun had been emasculated. But even that was better than having Papa tell him he couldn’t play cricket at all. That’s how afraid he was of Papa (Papa, who rarely got angry but, when he did, could brainwash the entire household against you), even he, Varun, a man’s man who popped the collar of his Modern School shirt to hide the giant yo-yo of his Adam’s apple.

Now, Arjun knew, Varun would no doubt ask for a revocation of his softball sentence. He would claim he missed the sound of willow on cork, the fantastic wooden vibration of the bat passing through your whole body, stopping your heart for an instant.

Which he did: Arjun relented.

The same was true for the other children, with the exception of Rishi. Rishi’s response to the generally bad-tempered tactics of his siblings had been to strike back with apology. He had been so thoroughly bullied by Varun, Rahul, Tanya, Rita and, yes, even the supposedly benign Arjun, that he sought refuge in the cool English lilt of the word
sorry
.

A typical Rishi sentence went something like this: “Sor-ry. Sorry. Sorry. Swaaareee. Swaaaaari.”

And then, when you thought it was over, he would deploy his masterstroke, the sorry flurry: “I’m sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry.”

“Okay, okay, fine, shut up, shut up!”

“Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry.”

“It’s time for dinner you bloody fool!”

They would head to the table. “Sorry sorry sorry but I’m really sorry, bhaiya, so sorry please pass me a chappati sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry—”

“What are you doing, son?” Rakesh would ask.

“Sorry Papa sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry…”

“Eh? What’s he saying, Arjun?”

“Papa he’s saying sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry—”

“THAT’S THE SAME THING AS WHAT HE’S SAYING. SAY AGAIN?”

“I thought that’s what you wanted to know—what he was saying?”

“Why isn’t he bloody stopping! Son! Eh?”

“Papa, once again, let me repeat, RISHI AHUJA, YOUR SON, is saying: SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY.”

“Arjun, I’m sorry Papa’s making you say what I’m saying. No, listen, I’m really sorry sorry sorry sorry….”

With Rishi, it was call and response, you had to calibrate your tone so you didn’t seem accusatory because if you did, heaven help your ears.

The rules of conversation in the house left little room for Arjun to beat about the bush. This Arjun knew: If you wanted to get a point across, you had to do it emphatically. There was little point in hiding your pain or expecting anyone to sense the subtleties of your personal torture. If you stared at your feet and circumlocuted, then another train of conversation would likely run right over you, flattening your putty resolve. You had to act fast and act quick and pretend, at all times, that the person you were talking to was (a) a person from the Agra Mad House, and (b) had been there for at least ten years, thus surviving electroshock therapy.

With Tanya—his sister who used her dark features to style herself into an emotional thunderbolt—Arjun expected sparks. “Why don’t you ask Rita?” she would likely say. “She has so many friends.” And, sadly, it was true. Rita and Tanya had nearly the same face—a pert button of a mouth set off against equine nostrils and baggy cheeks—yet Rita was fair and therefore pretty by default. Tanya reacted to this unfair favoritism by spending most of her time trapped in a dangerous circuit of personal toilette—applying makeup to cover her pimples even though the makeup only aggravated her pimples and caused her to apply more.

What she really needed
, seven-year-old Sahil had one day
made the mistake of earnestly saying,
what she really needed was Fair and Lovely Cream
.

It was a rather large mistake. The family had felt that day not like a war zone but rather a bunker shaking under a war zone, everyone huddled together in a dense nest of limbs while the calamity happened overhead. A calamity called the perpetual wailing of Tanya.

Thus primed in the passions of Tanya, Arjun proceeded with caution.

“In a band, haan?” Tanya said, chewing gum. “What’s it called?
I Failed Class Eleven?
”

Tanya was just discovering sarcasm, so Arjun let it pass. “It’s called Radiohead,” he said. Arjun didn’t bother explaining that such a band already existed.

“Radiohead?”
squealed Tanya.

“Radiohead!”

“Rahul,” said Tanya, “Bhaiya’s band is called Radiohead!”

“Bhaiya,” said Rahul, dropping the GI Joes he was playing with. “Does this mean you’ll wear a turban. Like a sardar.”

Arjun glared at him.

But Rahul was full of questions. “Bhaiya, does your band have eighteen people?”

“Eighteen? Why?”

“Because you thought that under eighteen was not allowed for a rock show!”

“Good one, yaar,” said Tanya, crushing slightly on Rahul’s effeminate charms.

“I don’t get it,” Arjun said, even though he did.

“I do get it!” said Tanya, even though she didn’t.

“Explain it to me, Tanya,” said Arjun.

“Explain it to him,” repeated Rahul.

“Why don’t you explain it? It was your joke?” Tanya whimpered.

“So?” asked Rahul. “Bhaiya asked
you
first. Plus, I’m older and older wins. Right, bhaiya?”

This was typical, thought Arjun. Everyone was out to screw everyone else.

“Enough jokes! Now listen.”

“Don’t shout, Bhaiya,” said Tanya, feeling ganged-up on, as she often did.

“Well, I want to ask you—and even you, Rahul—for your help. I want to have a concert for my band on next Sunday. I was wondering if you could bring a few friends to the house that day and ask them to watch my band play without laughing or criticizing?”

Arjun had expected the negotiations to temporarily break down at this stage, with Rahul and Tanya using their leverage to threaten inaction, to say “no,” but instead they had just one bewildered response: “Why?”

Why, why, why? Why go to such lengths to court a woman? Exactly? Why not pause the lie where it was, let Aarti think you were in a band, ask her to come home, and not bother with the amateurish formality of actually playing? Why not just persist with the slow cadences of dialogue on the bus, win her with the
tired complaining about school that drew people together on the ride home? Why not one day touch her hair as she thrust her head out of the bus window into the hot oven of the day? Feel a strand of her black shiny mane twanging between your fingers like a guitar string? And then know, gosh, this is nothing like a guitar string, this is not sharp or metallic or callous-inducing, why did I bother with
that
when I could have had
this
all along? Yes, why have a band and a concert and the dire hullabaloo of your brothers and sisters?