It was a trick question. They answered accordingly.
“Papa you will never die,” said Sahil. A tear rolled down his cheek.
Then everyone started crying. Soft silent tears. Fake tears.
“Papa don’t die. We love you more.”
“Yes Papa. We listen to you, not Mama.”
“I love you Papa.”
“I love you Papa.”
“I love you more than Mama.”
Mr. Ahuja hugged them one by one, accepting the compliments gracefully. “No, no bacha. Don’t be like this. I was only saying. I will live for many many years. I’ll make sure Mama is not mean.”
It was such an easy victory—he was an emotional blackmailer, they were drama queens—and yet he felt ecstatic. That was all he wanted from life: A vote of confidence. Proof that even at the rate of an hour a day he could outperform Sangita in popularity, that no matter what he did in his political life, they’d love him. They were the reason he stayed in politics—they sanctified his corruption and confirmed his charisma. Even his youngest children, those who hadn’t learned the deceptions of language, who couldn’t speak at all and hence couldn’t fall for his gregarious sentences, trusted him utterly and completely. He was shaped to be trusted (his head hunched forward kindly). He was an upturned trumpet of honesty (his hands were always thrown up in glee). He had such brutish powers of telepathy (he misheard the way one should). His incisors sank so wonderfully into meat (he taught them to love tandoori chicken). He could tell they loved him when he held them up with a mythical straightening of the elbows; when they gnawed at his knees; when they confided in him; when they replied to the long e-mails he sent them from the road, each one jittery and show-offy with Mr. Ahuja’s memory for details.
Yes, thought Mr. Ahuja: If they resented Arjun for his closeness with their Papa, they also probably valued him for it. Mr. Ahuja relaxed. All he had to do now was talk to Arjun. “One final thing,” he said. “You all have to promise you will not ever—I am saying ever—tell Arjun anything I have said today. You will never call him a stepbrother or a half-brother or anything. You will behave just like you all have been acting, okay? Understood? Otherwise I’ll send you all to a hostel. If even one of you tells Arjun anything I will send all of you to a hostel, understand? I’m serious. I’m very, very serious.”
CHAPTER 11
THE BITTER HALF
A HEADSTART MEANS NOTHING if you have no wish to escape, and Sangita—Mrs. Ahuja, heavens—hadn’t wished to escape. She was twenty-six and too bewildered by her sudden initiation into sex the night before to go much further than the hotel gate. There she stood in bright sunlight and tossed her gold veil and swirled her monstrous dupatta to ventilate her fevered skin. Growing up, Sangita had thought herself so hideous that she was certain she’d never touch a man in her life, let alone sleep with him, and so sex for her had become a clinical obsession, a phenomenon to be chased in booklets and movies and gossip, her physical awareness of the act as flimsy as the wings of a butterfly you catch between your fingers for a second before it sputters away. On her wedding night, she’d felt as if she were hovering above herself, wafting, praying. Her mother had told her nothing about the formalities of intercourse. She didn’t bring any sexual dowry into the marriage. She complied readily when Rakesh said Let’s at least have sex, because, well, Why not?
How else would she know?
The pleasure had been momentary—an island marooned in a night of awfulness—but pleasure it was. She awoke to a drooling man and urgent practicalities. She was married and sexed and disgraced, and a heap of trouble lay in store for her unless she alerted her family, frazzled them onto a train with their terrific rolls of bedding thumping behind them, and disappeared into the mist-guzzling elevations of Dalhousie forever. There, she’d give birth to Rakesh’s child—which she was no doubt carrying (Sangita’s rampant superstitions about sex and pregnancy were to be outdone only by her fertility)—and here was the tragedy: Rakesh would never know about it. Her mother, the famous Mummy, would never allow the child to reunite with its father. Instead it’d be reared by the entire sad-sack group of Mummy Papa Sangita Asha Raghav. A family together forever, the fruition of her Mummy’s plan.
Everything she’d told Rakesh the previous night about her family had been true.
Unfortunately, as soon as Sangita was cast out into the vista-flattening heat of the hotel parking lot, she realized: Delhi was a foreign city. There was nowhere to go. She’d told him the truth, and now she was at his mercy.
Also, she wanted to have sex again.
So she waited around, rehearsing a look of desperation on the drivers mopping their fancy cars. They responded with puzzled looks—as did Rakesh, who had jogged up behind her in a blast of sandy wind.
“What are you doing?” he said.
He was panting. She was standing. She admitted as much. “I am standing only. I did not want to bother you in morning-time—”
“Okay, okay.” He looked slightly irritated but was quick to swat it away with a gaze of fierce earnestness. “Look,” he said, “I’m sorry about last night. I hope you don’t think I am that sort of person. I was very surprised obviously. But I think we should stay married. This may sound strange, but I liked what you said. I liked that you were honest with me. You were very brave.”
There was nothing to say to this. She could not understand it. His stubble was dark and velvety and sweaty on the cheeks, and sparse around his mouth. It was as if he’d been beaten up and then bandaged in black gauze.
“I think we should stay married,” he repeated. “I believe in fate.”
Fate! Ha! Sangita could have died laughing.
Her fate, after all, was to be exposed. Not knowing what else to do, she went with him to his parents’ house.
The parents said, “It’s very nice to meet you Asha.”
“You also, naah, Mama, you are so confused,” clucked Rakesh. “Her name’s not Asha. It’s—” He didn’t know her name. Unbelievable.
“Sangita, ji,” said Sangita. “Asha was my pet-name.”
They were aghast, the poor parents. They kept apologizing. They looked so embarrassed they were about to die.
“They are very nice,” Sangita said, when they got in the car. “Such sweet people they are.”
She wondered: Was I good in bed? Is he taking me home? Is this really Arjun sitting in my lap? Is it possible Rakesh finds me attractive?
Rakesh shook his head. “Nice, my foot. You know what they are probably saying right now? I don’t know where Rakesh picked this maid. She can’t even speak good English.”
He seemed to take immense pleasure in the description.
The trouble from the start was sex. She wanted to have sex and she wanted the world to know she was having sex. Denied. Rakesh never touched her again till she was significantly pregnant. He cooed at Arjun and collapsed at night, tired, heatstruck from rallies. His feet and arms twitched while he slept, as if to shake off any contact with Sangita. Sangita quickly exhausted all her techniques: tying her dupatta so it angled deftly past a nipple, wearing a flimsy blouse with the top button broken, cocuddling Arjun with Rakesh.
This last “technique” irritated Rakesh the most, and one night, when he returned from a campaign in Himachal, he turned to Sangita and said, “Put him down.”
Sangita had been holding Arjun up by the armpits to Rakesh and saying, “Say hello to your Papa. Hello, Papa.”
Rakesh repeated, “Put him down. Can’t you see he wants to be put down? This is not a humorous matter. I am going to lose the election. I’ve been wasting my time. You have also been wasting your time. He is not your son. He is not going to be your son. When he can say more words, I’m going to tell him about his mother and then he won’t care for you or thank you for these things you are doing, understand?”
But she didn’t want to be thanked. She had immense affection for the child. She’d spent all day cooking kheer for Arjun and singing him songs and shampooing
his gorgeous curly hair, and she’d gladly have done this even without the promise of sex.
I understand your hurt, she wanted to say. But please don’t do this to me. Please understand. I love your son like my own. But how could she? Instead, Sangita watched Rakesh lie bareback on the marble floor, his head spasming against the cold hard surface. Later that night, he slid under the bed and wept, and even from above, half-awake, she could feel the soft thunder of his throat as he tried to control another outburst of tears. His hand poked out from the shadows like a baby’s fist, unreasonably tight. Every so often, his head would hit the boards and there would be silence, as if he had died for a few minutes, acknowledged his own ostrichlike comedy, and gone silent with self-consciousness. And Sangita, who was humped down on the bed with grief, would think then: Why will you not let me see you? Why, why, why?
God granted her this wish to see in the most spiteful way: Rakesh won the election. He became obsessed with himself. Now he couldn’t stop boasting about his success. “I’d never thought a man of my background could be in politics. Funny thing it is, eh? Most of these people are not even Class-10-pass. Did you pass Class-10? Good, good. Sometimes I feel bad that my Hindi is not good. But then I just start saying how America is terrible, and the buggers all listen—because I’ve lived in America! Because I am an outsider they are all more trusting!”
Sangita proudly and dutifully broadcast this information to the two friends she had made in the neighborhood.
What she couldn’t handle or broadcast, however, was Rakesh’s reverence for Rupa Bhalla, the head of the SZP Party. She was his mentor. He was positively lovelorn. “Rupa Bhalla—what an amazing woman she is. Her husband died and one month later she is taking the party to victory. Really. You heard, nah? He was run over by an advanced harvester. What a brilliant lady, I tell you. She is like a second mother to me. You can talk to her about anything. She is so self-aware also. She told me: ‘Rakesh, I am sorry you also have to drink the rosewater I dip my feet in, I feel as if I am the leader of a religious cult.’ And I said: ‘Madam, that is exactly what you should appear like!’”
This last line elicited verbal revenge from Mrs. Ahuja. She said, “I don’t know what is happening—the potty Arjun is making these days is shaped like those cheap bananas which are green. Can you explain, ji?”
If he could talk about his day, she could too.
These descriptions of Arjun’s bowel movements became more and more graphic until one day her own imagery (“Today, Arjun did susu five times, and one time it was white, the other time yellow and smelled like old aalu-ghobi”) made her throw up. They discovered she was pregnant.
Rakesh took full credit for this, as usual. “I can’t believe I did it once with you and—”
But a strange thing happened. Either because he was enamored of his virility, or because he knew Sangita’s mother wasn’t around to dole out maternal comfort, or because her nipples started to darken and her face began to fill out—Rakesh was suddenly attracted to her.
Sangita thought it was her enlarging breasts. She was certain it was the breasts. That’s what he touched and admired first, even before the stomach.
The sexual obsession that followed was financed by a series of power cuts in the muggiest of Octobers, the room so sticky and corrupted by shadows that there was nothing to do but partake in the climate, add to it, steam things up, as it were. Rakesh and Sangita went at it from their respective peaks. Everywhere in the bedroom, clothes fluttered to the ground, lay there in troubled piles, the servant was given free tickets to the movie, outside a shawl seller put the full weight of his body into the doorbell, and still the only sound inside was that of a strange hatching, the stripping of Sangita from sexless to sexy, the shrilling of the doorbell (the power was back) like a kettle you purposely choose to not turn off, the water lost to evaporation, the cool drying after you have made love. She lay on her back, glistening. She lay on her side, watching. His hands around her, a spastic garland for her stomach that she could shrug off any second. Replace with a tantrum. Kick and sob like the baby inside her. But then Rakesh, naked, would stand on the bed to step over her, his head about to be lopped off by the ceiling fan, his foot askance on her rounded stomach, pressing down as if prodding for life—was he going to crush the baby? Was he going to erase the proof of love she carried inside her? Why was he asking for the baby’s name? His foot was a crab on the swept beachhead of her stomach. This suspense sent tingles all the way to the far posts of her body: the Vs of her toes, the reddening tip of her chin, the cove of the back. This suspense was a series of hard twitches leading up Rakesh’s thigh. This suspense always ended (they were back in bed again, his hands on her swollen ankles) in sex.
Arjun was still too young to open the door.
Mrs. Ahuja had never been happier. She soon gave birth.
The pregnancy and birth had been surprisingly painless (no morning sickness, a peculiar craving for grapes), but seeing the baby utterly depressed her: he looked like a jaded movie star that had emerged on a short smoke-break from the womb. He was brown and had a wrinkly forehead. The name Varun she picked because it was the closest she could get to the name Arjun without picking Arun, which was too close.
Her depression was alleviated slightly when people came to greet them from all over Delhi. She took deep pleasure in Rakesh’s praise (“she was so relaxed the whole time, such a good wife”), and in the guests’ compliments, and in the way Rakesh chatted and hooted (“Yograj saahb! How is the good wife!”) with men he’d claimed to hate with all his pent-up vindictiveness (“If you ever read Yograj has been murdered, tell the police to put a warrant out in my name.”). He was incapable of being vicious in person, it seemed. His imagination was violent, that was all, and his constant failure to transform this into a threatening personality is what made him irritable: Sangita finally understood.
After all the people had left, Rakesh said, “I have a surprise for you, darling. Just wait.”
Sangita hoped it was her mother. She hadn’t heard from her parents since her marriage and had finally broken down and written them a heartbreaking letter describing how she was a maid in the house and then scrunched up that letter and posted another one that stated she was “very happy.”
Now she wished nothing more than for her mother to see the truth in this statement.
Rakesh led an elderly lady into the bedroom. “This is Rashmi’s mother,” he said.
An awful deal was then foisted upon Sangita. She was to call Rashmi’s mother “Mama,” and allow her to be the children’s grandmother, their Nani. What would Sangita get out of it? A kind foster mother and support in bringing up the children.
Rakesh seemed to see the cruelty of this arrangement because that night in bed he started sharing with her for the first time his feelings for Rashmi. “Sangita, it was very sad. I loved her very much, and then one morning I woke up and she wasn’t there anymore. For many months I thought: If we had parked the car differently, if I had not been arguing with her on that day, it would not have happened. You understand? Thank you for being in my life.”
Apparently, he didn’t see the cruelty of talking about Rashmi.
This was when Sangita decided it wasn’t worth her time to chase after her husband’s affection; he’d never stopped grieving, and maybe he never would. She focused instead on Arjun. She needed to win Arjun’s love before he found out she was a stepmother. They were already so close. He was her chief adviser, her calm Rasputin, her deputy prime minister, her ardent bureaucrat—already a mature six while Varun bamboozled his way through his twos. Arjun helped her so much. Together, they tackled crucial questions: How to watch a lot of TV and not get sick and not have the house overrun by hordes of infants trying to teethe their way into every corner? How to keep the house compartmentalized into air-conditioned pockets, the doors hammered tight, no baby’s screams lost in the moats of hot air stagnating between rooms? And when Rakesh requested his children to roam the garden outside during on
e of his large political functions, introducing them to every dignitary, how would she keep them from dropping Cola bombs on the grass below, having their suits laundered with grime, plowing the lawn to fallowness with their heels?
But Rakesh, who only saw his children on their best behavior, a few hours in the day, didn’t want Arjun to be a wetnurse. He didn’t understand the sheer necessity. “He is eleven now; he should be playing sports with the other children in the colony,” he’d say, producing a cricket bat from behind his back.
But Arjun had no talent for sports; he always ended up being the umpire.
“Here, Arjun, here are some novels.”
But the Wodehouses and Christies went unread, their pages improvised as bibs.
“Arjun, why don’t you come with me to a party?”
But Arjun wouldn’t be comfortable until he had at least three younger siblings to order around and collectively corner the waiters who never otherwise served snacks or drinks to children.
Sangita felt proud that she knew her eldest son—her son!—and his obsession with crowds so well, so much so that she didn’t mind when Rakesh scolded her for “turning him into a maid” and “teaching him nothing” and certainly didn’t care that Arjun was far more spoiled than the other children, given more food, given better birthday presents, he was the oldest by four years—how could he not be spoiled?
There was another upshot to this excess attention from Mr. Ahuja: Arjun became a brat. He started standing up to his father. When Mr. Ahuja commanded him to do his homework, Arjun would snap back at him and sulk. When Mr. Ahuja asked Arjun to meet an important guest on the verandah, Arjun would settle in front of the TV and play video-games. There was no telling what Arjun would get away with next.
Family Planning Page 9
