Rakesh was bewildered. No one ever spoke back to him. Lacking anyone else to blame, he blamed Sangita.
“I’m going to tell him,” Rakesh said one day, out of the blue. “I’m going to tell him about his mother.”
He hadn’t brought this up in five years, and Sangita panicked. She thought she could bargain her way out with sex. They now had nine children and zero privacy; they’d reverted from sex to fondling—yes, when was the last time they had made love? It was late at night in the nursery, the children were asleep, and Sangita innovated. She rose from the mat, went from cot to cot and shoved each one with her hips, so that the babies inside swung to wakefulness. They turned on their tiny fleshy backs and began a tirade of shrieking and mewling. One baby screamed, then another opened its eyes, then the whole nursery was screaming, wails rising through the room in perfect nocturnal synchronicity. She knew her older children well: they’d never wake up in the middle of the night to soothe the babies. She waited for Rakesh to reach for her. He stood from her across the room, surveying the scene like he had no role in its creation, like he was there for the first time—and panicking. She returned to the mat near the TV and waited. Slowly he started to make his way through the aisles, treading delicately, as if a false move would, through some inversion of the processes of the universe, put the screaming babies to sleep and ruin the moment. Then he couldn’t hold himself back: he came hurtling toward her.
But the satisfaction of sex—that strange, noisy lovemaking camouflaged by the wails of babies—didn’t change him. Again in the morning he said, “I’m going to tell him.”
This time Sangita took the threat seriously. She backed off from her son. She cut him off from all his baby-watching responsibilities. She followed Rakesh’s orders and untethered twelve-year-old Arjun from the family tree, the distance between Arjun and his family growing like his upwardly-mobile height-markings on the bathroom wall, his afternoons spent in the fluorescent bask of tennis courts or sharing saliva with the general populace in the Gymkhana Club Swimming Pool, his homework hot and ready on his desk when he got home, no time to shower, only the dampness of underarms as he pressed his pen to paper and knew nothing, adjusted his shorts, squeezed his legs, felt a decade-old itch in his pelvis. Of course, he was terrible at tennis and always came back from the pool complaining that someone had accidentally dived onto him while he did a lap, and the only thing good that came out of his free time was the question:
Mama. How do you and Papa have babies? Was Varun in your stomach for four years? Do you have a baby by living with someone for many years?
He’d follow Sangita around asking that question, and she’d say, Why don’t you ask your Papa? But she knew Papa was only good for banalities, for sugar-coated rhetoric, for promises he couldn’t keep (she imagined him saying: I must thank the people—the people!—for making my wife pregnant.), that the relationship between mother and father and children was such that the children learned everything valuable from the mother and pretended to be grown-up and competent before the father.
But she ignored Arjun now. It broke her heart to be short and curt with him when he tried to help, but she felt their relationship would only worsen if he knew she wasn’t even his real mother. After all these years and a dozen children, she still felt unworthy of love.
So she threw herself into the organizational problems of managing her children. She used delegation. Divide and rule. Even terror. She sent the girls on elaborate spying missions (What does the maid eat when I am not looking? Which baby needs new diapers?) payable entirely in TV-viewing-time. She was all but powerless without the Cartoon Network, her favorite mode of bribery. It was almost fun.
Then news came from Dalhousie that Sangita’s mother had passed away.
Sangita was devastated. Lacking love from Rakesh and Arjun—the two people who could most have validated her existence because they actually owed her nothing by blood—she had secretly started obsessing about inviting her mother to marvel at her life. She wanted to show her controlling Mummy what she’d become. Her whole life had been a performance for her mother, and now her mother had skipped out on the show.
Sangita’s domestic routine became utterly pointless. She took pleasure in nothing. She spent days at a stretch watching TV. She saw her brood for what it was: a messy constituency that supported Rakesh endlessly. She became obsessed with the hit series titled The Vengeful Daughter-in-Law. She stopped gorging herself on mangoes, as was her habit during a pregnancy. She submitted to sex in the nursery with a dreary uninterested look on her face; even the risk of being caught didn’t turn her on.
And when Rakesh scolded her about Arjun’s poor marks in school, she simply said, “Please tell him.”
“Tell who?” said Rakesh, smacking a curtain. “Tell the servant to make tea? Tell the postman to get post? Tell the baby to drink milk? Sangita, you are always using pronouns. Tell what? Tell who?”
“Please tell him,” she said. “Tell Arjun about me. About his real mother.”
“No,” he said.
Finally, Rakesh was so frustrated that he took her to the doctor.
The doctor did what he always did. He pleaded that she not have this child, Sangita’s twelfth. The risk of Down syndrome increased with every child, and there was a good chance this baby would be somehow damaged, malformed.
Rakesh said to her in the car, “We can stop this one if you want. I am sorry.”
“No,” she said.
“You’re very brave,” he said, with a sigh.
Yes. She had no shortage of bravery.
Was this why she felt no shame when Arjun walked in on them? Was this why she’d practically let it happen?
They were on the floor of the nursery, late at night. All the children were asleep, and she could hear all the creaky sounds of the evening as Rakesh lay on top of her and undid the strings of her pajamas, as he moved his hand all over her stomach and said, “It’s okay, Sangita, it’s okay,” she could hear everything—the start-stop almost-fake screaming of the babies, newborn larynxes vibrating in newborn bodies, the way the cots always swayed at once, the fan overhead screwing itself off the ceiling, even the soft plop of his erect penis against his stomach after he slipped off his own pants. But this particular night there was another sound: the creaking of a door, footsteps. She could have warned Rakesh, she could have quickly forced him to roll off, but she didn’t, why didn’t she?
He couldn’t hear anything except his own panting.
Then Arjun opened the door and let out a brief exclamation. It was too late. Rakesh rolled off her abruptly, ashamed. He glared into the space above Arjun’s head. Sangita recognized that look instantly—she remembered it from the first night of her marriage, the way his face throbbed uncertainly between pity and revenge, as if there was no difference between the two. She knew that something was about to give for good, just as she had known then. She knew something was coming to an end, and yet she could not get bring herself to panic. Arjun had seen everything, he had retreated into the hollows of the house, and Rakesh was still glaring at the doorway, frozen over her, on his four limbs, head twisted backward terribly, like an animal. But didn’t it have to happen sometime? Hadn’t she told him so many times, for months, we are taking a risk, we can’t keep doing this, someone will find out?
Yes, a part of her wished that she could have shared her husband’s shame, that she could have gathered him up to her bosom and soothed him like a child. But right then, all she could feel was relief. As she saw the exasperation bloom on Rakesh’s face, all she could think was Yes, finally, he has found someone else to blame.
CHAPTER 12
A FLYOVER, FINALLY
IT WAS SIX FORTY-FIVE IN THE EVENING when the four boys began to descend the flyover.
Earlier, they had left the GK Barista and discussed the possibility of finding a new practice space. They cruised along the same route Arjun had traversed in the school bus; the unreeling landscape reminded him of Aarti, he could string
together the succulent sentences of their conversation with every gnarled tree, the traffic lights that flickered neurotically between red and yellow, the large tracts of Chinese restaurants hunched together under large dragon-toting billboards, and when they passed the mysterious, incomplete Godse Nagar Flyover, Arjun asked Ravi to slow down. The two slopes of the flyover ended in midair, never touching. A number of daunting construction machines—grinders, lifters, mixers—dozed under the flyover. The car halted at the red light, and Arjun rolled down his window. “Here,” he shouted.
Ravi killed the car skeptically. The in-progress Godse Nagar Flyover—particularly its exposed underside—was hardly a grand specimen. The structure was held aloft by a series of twin columns and arches shaped like upturned boats. Ugly beards of dust hung from the ceiling, and the entire complex—the orange fence, the small buzzcut palms, the crumbling floor tiles, the scabs of B-movie posters stuck on the columns—was burnished with a thin layer of soot that glowed in the high beams of the capsizing sun. The setting was serene: two beggars lay about on gray mats, a child nursed at a young woman’s breast, an old man stared angrily from a tent, perhaps contemplating the rivulets of water pronging out through the dust and despairing that the daytime sprinkler had been shut off. Barring the noise—the thousands of ballooned souls bursting out of their vehicles with crazed honks—this could have been the reddened surface of Mars.
Arjun cleared the two rusty MEN AT WORK signs at the base of the flyover. He wiped his hands on his jeans. Then he began walking slowly to the very top of the flyover, Ravi breathing very loudly as he followed, now extremely conscious of the bony pedals and shifts that kept one’s body earthbound, Arjun urging him to keep going, their feet gripping the fresh road with a sense of desperation. There were no protective barriers on the side. In a matter of minutes, they were at the top, fifty feet in the air, the road giving way to long rods of steel ahead of them, the lights illuminating a patch of nothingness that hung between the two ends of the incomplete road. Ravi held a girder and gasped. Anurag whooped from behind them.
Arjun tread softly on the fresh tar. “My father built this,” he whispered to Ravi.
“You’re crazy,” said Ravi.
To demonstrate that Ravi was, in fact, correct in his diagnosis, Arjun walked to the very end of the road and stood there, a single inch of road separating the tips of his shoes from total darkness. Then he kicked, he kicked furiously, he didn’t know why, he couldn’t possibly, and there started a rain of rubble from the parapet and Arjun drew back fearfully on his heels, the April air whispering around him with an unexpected coolness, and there was a singular upthrust from the cavity, and he saw it then: a flock of pigeons nesting at the very end of the iron rods had been shoved into sudden flight, the birds were nosediving into the muddy hollow below before floating out from under the flyover, all dust and wings. The rubble had wings! He turned back to the band and faced the boys. They stared back. This was the first time they had viewed him with a measure of awe (it wouldn’t last long).
“Get the guitars out,” he said.
They did, gathering around Arjun in a semicircle while Ravi used a discarded metal board for percussion. And then, immersed in this personal drama, Arjun turned his back to the cavity and sang. He bellowed with exaggerated passion from the top of the flyover; and the pools of individual thoughts—those chambers in his head that vibrated at odds—seemed to connect through the complex system of his vocal pipes, so that at the moment he hit the highest note, he was either all thought or all vacuum (all vacuum, generally), and the note had the quality of the first leak in a massive dam, terrifying because it promised much worse. But it didn’t matter. He couldn’t care what anyone thought at that moment. He was singing, drawing sound from all the silent orifices of his body the way a heart draws blood, physically evoking the melody of “Living on a Prayer” without a lyric sheet or a sense of the original tune, doing it with nothing, no microphone, no electric guitars, just, as he would like to say years later, Arjun Ahuja Unplugged. It was at that moment that he was finally free of Aarti, a mixture of fear and confidence overtaking his body. It was the way he would feel when he had sex for the first time, somehow forgetting the girl, her name, her face—overcome by a drastic implosion of his own senses as he tried to pretend it was all right, this wasn’t the end, he’d be fine.
He turned his back to his band and sang into the gap. Then he stopped abruptly and let the music clang on without him in an endless outro. He had had a vision. For a brief instant, the instant before he stopped midsentence, he had imagined Mr. Ahuja driving up on the opposite slope of the flyover and letting his Toyota Qualis creak menacingly at the precipice, the lights of the vehicle floodlighting the band as the eight children huddled inside screamed with delight—those children that were his audience, his fans, his dire siblings. The family at its most pleasant: watching from a distance while you sank into yourself, you imploded, you were finally alive.
CHAPTER 13
CROWD SURFING
THE FOUR BOYS LEAPED INTO THE CAR with a newfound sense of camaraderie: Ravi giddyupping his Hyundai Santro with abrupt gear shifts; Anurag in the passenger seat with his elbow dangerously V-ed out of the car; and Deepak persisting in looking dopey and bemused beside Arjun. All of them were under age and illegal; driving age was eighteen. They filed into an endless queue of cars, rolled the windows down, joined the slow pilgrimage to lung cancer.
Arjun was in a grand mood now. He tapped Ravi on the shoulder and said, “Yaar—none of this shorts-wearing business when we do a concert, okay? No one wants to see your hairy legs, understood? We’ll wear black. Since we are dark. Let’s all wear black pants. And maybe we can have our pockets pulled out?” He demonstrated. “See? Looks kind of cool, yeah? Every band has to have a specific fashion style. Bono has those fundoo shades. Metallica has leather. Shania Twain has a belly button.”
“She also has a pussy,” Anurag noted. “That I was—”
“You too?” asked Deepak, solicitously. “She has no self-respect or what.”
Arjun shushed them. “Shut up, you idiots. Are you listening? Pockets should be out. It looks like your legs have ears. Or your hips are shitting.”
“Since when have you started protecting Shania, yaar,” asked Anurag in his slow drawl. “What is she to you—a sister?”
“Good job singing Bryan Adams,” Ravi muttered. “Did you know Shania Twain and your lovely Bryan Adams have the same producer? And that Shania is married to that producer? Shania banged by Mutt Lange.”
Such lascivious recounting of rock history was a strange counterpoint to the utterly sexless action unfolding on the other side of Ring Road as they approached the Moolchand Flyover. All four boys turned to look. Three huge flanks of sari and salwar-kameez-clad women—there must have been at least fifty in all—were milling about excitedly as if at a Saturday bazaar; huge spurts of dust jetted up from around their legs into the awfully dry April evening. The concentration of women was particularly dense under the lone laburnum tree by the road side, its yellow flowers burning brightly overhead in some sort of twilight vigil. A slight parting of their bodies revealed a giant portrait of a young rosy-cheeked man. It was propped against the trunk of the laburnum. The women approached one by one, bent their covered heads with respect, and then carefully strung garlands of marigolds around the frame.
The other ladies sang and beat their chests and shed fat tears on the sidewalk.
Anurag rolled down his window and hooted.
“Don’t do that, duffer,” said Deepak.
“Someone important died or what?” said Anurag.
“You’re an idiot man,” said Deepak. “Even if it’s not important. You hoot when someone dies?”
Arjun shrugged. “That TV star died, yaar. Mohan Bedi, yaar. I think it’s him.”
“Who the hell is Mohan Bedi?” Ravi asked.
The answer came in the form of a neck-breakingly sudden lurch of the car, both Ravi and Anurag thrown head-fi
rst (they weren’t wearing seat belts, were too manly for that) into the windscreen while Arjun and Deepak spilled forward into a fetal crouch, the four boys’ heads already aching from what they’d seen: a girl, some girl, hitting the front of the car and literally flying—arms and legs propellered in a blur around her—ten feet from the island on which she’d been standing before she mistakenly stepped out onto the main road. Luckily, as she lay on the ground, her purse and cell phone thud-thud-thudding on the road beyond, no cars sped ahead to finish the job. It was rush hour and miraculously no vehicles were coming her way. Ravi had braked just in time. This had saved him from cracking his skull; ditto Anurag. They got out of the Santro with hands massaging their own necks. The road was hot and bloodless: the girl wasn’t bleeding! She was their age, Arjun noticed as he stepped out of the car. She was lying on her back, her jeans torn, scooterists dodging around her broomlike hair—but she wasn’t bleeding! Everyone, Arjun included, was approaching the girl with the absurd plea of shit shit shit. Hello, dying person, shit shit shit! He didn’t even notice that all the men and women on the other side of the road had rushed over and that he, Arjun, was about to be flattened in a stampede of Jurassic Park proportions. He was jostled out of the way. The girl was surged forward like a crowd-surfer in a concert; a hundred hands off-loaded her onto the sidewalk, two other hands, someone’s charitable hands, laid her purse and cell phone next to her. This was a poor country, but people would astound you again and again with their lack of greed: Arjun and Ravi and Anurag and Deepak, richie-rich, young, so central to the tragedy, had become spectators.
They were standing on Ring Road with five cars honking at them, asking them to move, what are you doing, please move your Santro, do you realize it’s in the middle of the road? In fact, Arjun did, and he was transfixed by the thought that for every second he stood on Ring Road like a fucking stooge, the delay was sending spasms backward all through the city, igniting tempers at traffic lights, so that when a man left work at six o’clock to return to his wife, son, daughter, it would take him an hour longer than usual—an hour in which anything could happen—you could lose someone you loved, vital organs could fail. But the girl wasn’t dead.
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