Worse, he worried that his son’s life, Arjun’s life, would also be ruined by his mother’s disastrous ineptitude at child rearing: hadn’t she produced one failure already?
So, when his parents suggested a second marriage and Rakesh said yes, he did it with the irony and bitterness of a man who didn’t care. He did it because he was enraged that his parents could suggest remarriage this soon and because he wanted to spite them by marrying someone absolutely inappropriate. He did it for three-year-old Arjun. He did it because he wanted to be a politician, and politicians need wives. He refused to let his parents be the slightest bit involved and decided to go through the motions—the perusal of the classified ads, the screening of the bride-to-be, the uneasy conversations with the girl’s parents, the slightly ashamed call for dowry—purely for personal entertainment. But the girl was pretty, and personal entertainment soon gave way to a more primal lust when he drove to Dalhousie (alone) to see her. It was a traditional upper-class Himachali-landowner household—the food served on shiny silver platters—and he watched the girl carry nothing but her reflection on such a platter as she was ushered into the drawing room by her father. He ogled the tight curve of the girl’s breasts pushing up against the sari, the tautness of her exposed navel, the small coins of her ears.
To his parents, he only handed a wedding card.
“You’ve become American,” they said. “You’re only having one function. What will all your relatives think? We have to invite them. Please let us invite them. We’ve never heard of a son who won’t make us meet the bride before he’s married. You haven’t even shown us a picture of Asha. Don’t disgrace us.”
“Is that all you care about? Your disgrace? You waited only one month after Rashmi died to start telling me I should get remarried. Now I’m getting remarried. Just be happy.”
All the weeks till the wedding, he’d rise early in the morning to masturbate in the bathroom.
On the wedding day, though, seated next to him in the tent, minutes before they circled the fire, was a different girl, an ugly girl, a girl whose skin was coarse and whose features seemed to have been molded lazily from a single piece of dough, all flat and asymmetrical and stubborn, a toothy embarrassed smile on her face. He hadn’t noticed her face at first because it was obscured by various danglings of gold; then she quickly lifted her veil and frowned at him. Rakesh was utterly dazed. He thought: What if it is the same girl? But without makeup? How can I hurt her feelings? But no, she clearly wasn’t the same girl. This girl had no breasts. Rakesh knew he could have gotten up then, that moment, and put an end to the whole farce, he could have stood in the middle of the tent and kicked over the flames with the elegance of an enraged filmstar and asked no one in particular: What kind of nonsense is this? But he didn’t. Instead, Rakesh felt the eyes of his parents upon him—the layers of talcum powder shivering hideously on their skin like unlicked salt—and knew immediately that he would have to go through with the marriage.
After all, wasn’t he getting married to spite them? Would his mother and father really believe this was a different girl? Or would they think Rakesh had simply lost his cool at the last minute, reneging on the only real decision he’d made against their wishes?
He looked at the girl’s parents for a reaction—Were they her parents? The father was slouched eagerly with a hand massaging his knee; the mother was sitting up straight, her back against a pillar. Rakesh was overwhelmed by curiosity. Who was this new girl, this sudden bride? How did she and her “parents” think they could possibly get away with this? Did they really think he’d marry her and stay with her? Did they have a stable of divorce lawyers lined up to suck him dry after the wedding night?
Were they not aware that the Ahujas were a very powerful clan?
Now he felt at ease. He could marry this girl and immediately divorce her. He could claim the marriage wasn’t consummated. This was the benefit of a subdued and poorly attended wedding: you could treat it like a brief, perverse entertainment and no one else would know. He had felt the same way after Rashmi’s death, when—to escape the smirks of seepage on the walls of his parent’s house—he had taken to strolling through crowded marketplaces for the comfort of anonymity, ducking through a maze of bodies. But soon he realized that his face drew people’s attention. There was something about the pleasant calculus of muscle and gravity and tension accumulated beneath the surface of his skin that attracted both sexes and he began to enjoy their looks, their looks not of envy but a sort of buried awe, an unconscious empathy. He began to long for that empathy. He began to alter his expressions to arouse that empathy. He began to perform for himself. Rakesh and the girl circled the flames and were married.
CHAPTER 4
DEMOCRACY ROCKS
IN SCHOOL, Arjun was mercifully distracted from thinking about his parents’ sex life. He was a rock star; that was his revelation; he shared it with his friend Ravi. The words themselves were somewhat humbler: “Dude yaar, let’s start a band. I’m getting a total feeling yaar. Want to blow some amps, man.”
Ravi said, “Did I tell you what happened to me yesterday?”
This was a typical Ravi response. He was a stooping, sardonic-looking boy with wide shoulders. He was shaped like a coffin. He scratched his atrocious wild stubble when he talked and he liked to talk: something crazy was always happening to Ravi.
Arjun listened as Ravi narrated an unlikely story involving his father’s new Hyundai Santro, a monkey, and a dog.
“Then?” asked Arjun.
“Then I ran over the dog and honked at the monkey.”
Another Ravi theme: emerging victorious.
“Cool. Want to be in a band?”
“Okay,” he said.
“Good. I’m—”
“Let’s clear up some fine points first. Are we going to be an alt-rock, alt-country, indie, electro, electroclash, raprock, hard rock, or metal band?”
Ravi was obsessed with details and planning. He had found a way to turn this to his advantage. For example, he started studying for exams months before they were scheduled, thus ensuring that he was relaxed and could even get in a few games of tennis the week before the exams began; Arjun hated that. He also came first in school, always had; Arjun hated that too. On top of this he was an excellent drummer. He practiced and practiced and practiced till he sounded spontaneous.
“We’ll play rock, man. Fucking rock,” said Arjun.
“Yaar. This fucking rock only exists in your fucking mind.”
“Hard rock yaar. Hard fucking rock.”
Even this was not enough for Ravi. “Okay. Seventies’ hard rock, like Rolling Stones, or eighties’ rock like Springsteen, or nineties’ rock like Oasis—”
“Rock like your mother.”
“That makes no sense,” Ravi said. “Explain that to me.”
“Oye shut up—”
Ravi laughed. “Okay. Let’s do this band thing. I’ll put this on my U.S. college applications. Harvard will eat it up. You know Natalie Portman checks all the applications.”
Together they approached Anurag and Deepak in the break period.
They were far less responsive. “A band? Who’s going to study for the exams? Your dad? We don’t all have connections to get us passed,” said Deepak with a broad grin.
“Oye—listen at least yaar,” said Arjun. “I’m not just starting a band for bloody time-pass. My dad said, if we want, we can perform at the Indraprastha Flyover inauguration. Next month it’s happening. I thought I’d ask you first. If you say no, no problem. I only asked you because you have no other friends except me. I thought, yaar, if you guys aren’t in a band, how will you pick up babes?”
“Interesting,” drawled Deepak. “So now you’re pursuing charitable work, is it? And uncle just happened to say, okay son, I want you in a band? He’s finally realized you’re a duffer in all other departments?”
Anurag said, “Duffer in all other departments!”
Anurag was Deepak’s sidekick.
He helpfully put his right index finger through his left fist in slow, heaving motions. Arjun was used to this. Ravi, Deepak, and Anurag were united in the common goal of taunting Arjun about his massive family. They had nicknamed him Torn Condom—marking him as the first of a long line of contraceptive mishaps. And they thought he had only six siblings.
“No yaar, they are all Arjun’s kids,” said Anurag, slapping Deepak’s back.
“You want me to slap you or what?” Arjun grimaced.
“Why don’t you sing?” said Deepak. “It’ll be the same as slapping.”
Anurag snorted. “It’ll be the same as slapping! Because your voice is like a slap!”
“You’re truly mad, man,” said Deepak to Anurag. “Do you have to say everything you think?”
Anurag shut up.
Arjun was onto bigger things. “We need a name.”
Ravi said, “Three dudes and one duffer Arjun.”
“That’s a good band name.”
“What about the Torn Condoms,” suggested Deepak.
“You want me to slap you or what?” Arjun inquired.
“Best name ever!”
Things went smoothly from there on. Once a band begins debating its name, it is already a band. Of course, as the recess progressed, other, smaller, pettier debates were to follow. They had to. This is all essential if one is to start a band. Tension, violence, must exist on the surface. The band is about sublimation. For instance: at one point in the conversation, as they passed by the water cooler and Ravi explained in great detail the drum fills he had mastered, Arjun rocked on his heels with irritation and declared himself the lead singer.
It was a useful announcement. He didn’t play any instruments.
For the rest of the school day (effecting an intelligent grin while Mr. Nath lectured about “the importance of finishing your class eleven course as soon as possible”), Arjun had flashes of last night—vivid, wondrous, hoary exposures. But what disturbed Arjun were not the flashbacks themselves but the fact that he wanted to imagine his parents, the same way he liked bringing his finger close to the blurred blades of a table-fan on his desk, inches away from understanding pain. This was his arrogance; he didn’t try to forget what he had seen last night—no, he wanted to conjure it up and then defeat it with a vision of his own. If only Aarti would go from being a sexual fantasy to a sexual possibility, one vivid enough to walk with him into the memory-trap of the house, to lay beside him, to drown his parents’ gasps with her own…
The afternoon bus ride exposed the silliness of his ideas. She wasn’t that sort of girl. She was innocent and cute. She had a slight, adorable waddle to her walk as she came down the aisle of the bus. She had long drooping eyelids and an upturned nose that defied the downward gravity of her face. And what hair! Sexed in every direction! Arjun glanced at the hard knobs of her knees, then followed the spiral of scab lines upward, nodding his head as he finished sipping in the warm sheen of her thighs.
He thought she was heading for a seat at the back. Then the knees suddenly backtracked: she sat down next to him. Unbelievable.
“How do you get time to be in a band?” she asked, once the bus had departed. “I have no time for anything. I have the most boring life possible. I’m always studying for FIITJEE.” FIITJEE was a coaching institute for hopeful applicants to the Indian Institute of Technology. “I come home from school in the bus. Then I eat lunch and watch Happy Days in half an hour, using Happy Days’ ending to time the end of lunch. Sometimes I get time to shower, sometimes not. Then I take an auto to FIITJEE. I sit still for four hours. I take an auto home. The time by now is seven thirty. My physics tutor comes usually at seven forty. So I eat Maggi Noodles. Then I sit still for two hours. At ten I watch Friends. I hate my life.”
One finger plucked away at the belt-loop of her skirt as she spoke. She was unconvincing. She seemed to Arjun to be proud of her own hardship and boredom. He responded in kind, and explained at great length how he had shown talent at a young age in singing and so his school principal made special concessions for him, letting him practice in the small auditorium during the morning assembly, saying, Arjun you can skip extra classes; you have done so well in your exams, and how when the principal’s wife had died, he had asked Arjun and the band to play behind the funeral pyre so that the fire was between the principal and the band, and Arjun said that was the only time he couldn’t sing because his throat was full of tears and soot, but he had seen the principal singing his songs through the heat mirage of the pyre, the principal had made their music his (oh, you want to know why a Christian’s wife was having a cremation, er, she was Hindu, yaah), but apart from that, the only time the band met was for three hours two times a week. Otherwise, he was studying, studying, studying, he also wanted to get into IIT. His Papa was an IITian—see there was all this pressure, could she understand?
Apparently she did. She gravely nodded and said, “When is your concert?”
What did he look like to her? he wondered. Was his hair sleekly angled so as to cover his massive forehead? Had she noticed the way his nose was ribbed in the center?
He said, “No set date yet.”
Aarti looked crushed that he hadn’t mentioned a date she could have mulled over, considered, and then denied with an explanation of how busy she was.
Now it was her turn to be silent.
“When are you free?” he asked.
She scrunched up her eyes and thought and thought and thought. “Sundays only.” Then she added, “And even then I am busy sometimes. My Dadi is very religious and we have to go to the mandir and do this puja for three hours. I can’t tell you how boring it is, yaar. First, we sit on the floor and the pandit brings samagri and oil. Then we recite Om Bhur Bhava Swaha fifty-five times. I believe in God, but do I have to say it fifty-five times? So yaah. Even on Sundays sometimes I am with my family.”
“So what?” said Arjun. “You can bring your Dadi and your Mama and your Papa—whoever. The concert will be part of a flyover opening. My dad is a minister.”
“Your dad’s a minister?”
“Not corrupt, I swear. So far, I think I’m the only one taking any kickbacks in the family.”
This was his standard line for girls.
“You mean?”
“Football team,” he said. (He wasn’t on the football team.)
She laughed. “What’s your dad’s name?”
“Rakesh Ahuja. He’s the Minister of Urban Development.” He quickly added, “He wasn’t involved in the Gujarat riots.”
“No, no, I’m sure.”
“Yes. And he hates Yograj. You know? Yograj Commission. The guy who caused the Gujarat riots.”
“Accha,” she said. He could tell she appreciated his openness. She continued. “I hate him too. When the riots happened, I wanted for the first time to be a politician, yaar. I thought this is really too much. In this day and age for this to happen. But everyone makes fun of me for being idealistic. Also, you cannot enter politics without time and connections. I have neither—”
Marry me! thought Arjun. Marry me!
Then the bus braked and he strode past her and stepped off the goddamn bus into the divine and dehydrating afternoon light.
Now all he needed was to organize a concert. On a Sunday. He walked home with growing excitement. He’d talk to his brothers and sisters. He couldn’t tell them what he had seen last night in the nursery, obviously not: firstly, it was disgusting, and secondly, people have sex all the time in this country, doing it in fields and huts and buses and naalis and even in servants’ quarters when your master was shouting “Raamu, please get the chai,” and you ignored him because you were thinking, “Oh! How nice would it be to have one billion and five children in this country as opposed to one billion and four!” and it really wasn’t something he could desc
ribe.
But he could tell them: Listen, I am in a band.
He could gather them in the backyard and say: Okay, it’s a little more complicated: I am in a band with three dudes to impress a girl.
He could run his hands through the thickening tuft of his hair and say: Listen, if I help you with trigonometry homework, will you come watch my band play and bring five of your friends along, preferably female since you go to the co-ed schools and females are the biggest fans of male-made rock music? Remember, five times eight is forty, which is how many people will attend my concert if you help me, and is also proof that I can help with maths! And if you say no, then I will tell Mama and Papa that you (Varun) smashed the window of the Ambassador, and that Rishi broke…
Yes. He’d organize a concert in Aarti’s honor. He walked home through lashings of dust.
CHAPTER 5
MR. AHUJA RESIGNS
MMR. AHUJA, MEANWHILE, was resigning in Arjun’s honor.
Making a decision to resign was easy enough: Mr. Ahuja had done so sixty-two times in his career. He’d learned early on that in a lethargic political system—racked with sluggish subcommittees, idle parliaments, and five-year promises—the fastest way to get one’s own government to take action was to throw a massive tantrum. To hand in one’s “papers.” To complain to the press.
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