Family Planning

by Karan Mahajan

  Nor was she okay. She was a terrifying in-between: conscious, half-sitting up, palms dusty, still sobbing, she had a puffed-up face. Death or serious injury to the girl would have meant bodily harm for the boys; the crowd, poor and understandably resentful to begin with, would have played out some form of street justice, berating them, lynching them from the parapet of a flyover (or so Arjun imagined). But the women who were cradling the girl in their arms were mothers. They were fans of The Vengeful Daughter-in-Law, the TV show. They felt a mixture of maternal warmth and anger toward the girl: What were you thinking crossing the road like this, are you okay, don’t cry darling, promise you’ll never do anything like this again? They understood that she needed a doctor immediately. They agreed to let the four boys take her to Moolchand Hospital five minutes away.

  Arjun had never held a crying girl before—not one of this age. She lay in a zigzag of limbs across Anurag’s and Arjun’s laps in the car, weeping, dripping snot. Arjun shushed and soothed her like she was a baby.

  Ravi, in the front, kept talking. “Shit, we’re finished. Shit. I can’t tell my dad. He’ll kill me. I don’t want to go to jail. Shit.”

  “Shut up, man,” said Arjun. “You have to call him. She’s crying. We’ll worry later.” He looked at the girl. “Are you okay?”

  “You okay, sweety?” Anurag asked.

  “Sweety? Shut up, Anu.”

  CHAPTER 14

  DIWAAN-E-KHAAS

  MR. AHUJA STOOD in the Super Prime Minister’s drawing room—still hot and smoky from a religious ceremony—and carefully studied Rupa Bhalla’s body language as she signaled him into an uncomfortable cane chair with a swish of her saffron dupatta. She was shaped like one of those rolled mattresses you saw people resting on at railway stations—highly unstable, giving, when she walked, the general impression of being pushed—and she sat down on a maroon chair with a palpable sense of relief. Then, without pause, she commanded him to drink a lassi, asked him what type of lassi he liked, shouted for the servant, said she knew he liked namkeen from the wedding they’d been to—what did Rakesh think, had she planned the wedding well?—but right now the type of lassi escaped her, it was namkeen, was it not?

  Rakesh was immediately on guard. He told her the wedding was corrupt, ostentatious, theatrical.

  She laughed and said, “Thank you.”

  Still, she was being formal, distant. She’d not once asked him about his family—as was her habit—and now she was pretending to forget what type of lassi he liked.

  This was absurd. The whole country knew he drank kesar.

  “I’d like namkeen, yes, you’re right,” demurred Rakesh. “So, ji, I’ve come to explain my letter—”

  Rupa looked relieved. “I’m so glad,” she said, slapping her forehead theatrically. “I thought you had also come to resign!”

  He protested, “Rupa-ji, but I am already resigned. I came to talk about that only.”

  “Resigned?” she said, practically sneezing the word. “Oh yes! Quite right.” She tapped her head. “Rohini told me there was an e-mail from you. How was I to know it was a resignation? If she had told me, I would have seen first thing, baba. But e-mail otherwise is just e-mail. These days even I am getting so much spam. Do you know how to get rid of this spam?”

  Her mouth a nest of baby sparrows, her voice was that of a schoolgirl. Her large red bindi—that all-knowing dot—had today been replaced by an oily tilak. She leaned across the table for a silver napkin holder, pushing in the yellow triangular fins of paper so they didn’t crackle in the fan blast. She talked to people as if their faces were the receivers on a phone apparatus, keeping you so close that you could smell the soft ticking of supari in her mouth, her wicked smile dripping from the corners of her lips like a retired comedian’s, eyes nosed so far apart you couldn’t look her in both at once.

  Rakesh was grateful for the table separating them.

  “You said you thought I had come to resign also, ji,” he said, crossing his legs and rocking the shell of the white cane chair around him. “Who else has resigned?”

  “Well,” said Rupa, snaking her head from side to side. “A wonderful question! A timely one!”

  “Yes?”

  “Everyone in our dear party! Except you,” she said, clapping her hands for the servant.

  “But, ji—that is what I am saying—I am resigned also!”

  They had a hearty laugh about this.

  “Quite right, quite right,” said Rupa, looking distractedly at the door to the kitchen. “Krishan! Bring saahb the lassi! Hen-ji. Sorry. Why are you resigning again?”

  “Beg pardon? Find them? Find whom?”

  “Eh?”

  “Eh?”

  This misunderstanding afforded a five-second cliffhanger of silence. Both Rupa and Rakesh sat up erect. Rakesh was still coming to terms with the news of this mass resignation and, worse, with the fact that Rupa’s state of agitation wasn’t simply a result of his visit. To be a minister, after all, was to be the center of a universe frothy with favors and flattery—everywhere you turned were Black Cat Guards, lackeys, peons, CEOs, special interests, undercover journalists—but with Rakesh the feeling of centrality had become particularly acute, nerve-wracking. Indeed, since last night the universe seemed to have telescoped down to a point in his head; a third marble of sadness rolled behind his eyes. Everywhere he looked were signs of his own impending doom—signs he’d first noticed when he and Arjun drove out at twelve at night on Arjun’s sixteenth birthday, Rakesh in the driver’s seat, Arjun beside him, their Toyota Qualis flying through the carbon-dioxide exhaling green belt of Delhi past the convoyed trucks and the shivering beggars to the first grand site of a flyover, a piece of cordoned road filled simply with Roman-looking columns of concrete and jutting steel, and between the columns coal-faced men carrying bucket after bucket of stone to dump into the foundational pit, a huge chugging grinder behind the men belching gray fumes against the black night, and then rain, rain outlining the shape of the city with its sound, father and son sitting in the car ten feet away, Rakesh trying to tell Arjun, Always think of the little people behind the grand things, why was this his message of choice? How had he mistakenly imagined this was Arjun’s seventeenth birthday? But what he really wanted to say was, Think of me, I love you, and then Arjun had opened the window and diagonal after diagonal of rain came splashing into their laps, and Rakesh knew: Arjun wasn’t listening. Arjun was a child in an adult world. Arjun didn’t care for his father’s political or philosophical tracts; they only had the instinctive bond that parent and child shared.

  So Rakesh had no choice but to keep everything at arm’s length to protect his son, to take the world by its axis and stab it into his own heart. And when Arjun had walked in on him last night, he’d given up the one secret besides Rashmi he’d managed to keep.

  The world’s axis turned another notch into his chest. The pressure in his sinuses was immense.

  “My resignation of course is a different subject—” sniffed Rakesh.

  “Of course your resignation is different!” said Rupa, embargoing a yawn with her hand. “That’s because you are educated and from a good family and all that, and you wouldn’t resign over something so foolish. You know, none of these menfolk who are so happily resigning today have even watched the show. If you ask me: very stupid, it is. Firstly, no one would care if a virtuous woman on TV died, isn’t it? Maybe Tulsi, but no one else. You know how this sexism-vexism is. Secondly, what makes me more angry, actually, is that all these women are asking that he be brought back! Otherwise, there will be a strike today! All over India! The three and a half cheeks of it!”

  A show? Rakesh thought. A TV show?

  The three and a half cheeks of it?

  “Did you know,” Rupa continued, “that the resignation letters I have in my possession at the present moment were written by the wives of our good MPs and ministers? What is wrong with these menfolk, tell me? And because their wives—not them—have written th
e letters, they are all saying, if you don’t make Mohan Bedi return to the show, we will seek your resignation! Imagine! Super Prime Minister isn’t even a real post, and they want to kill it.”

  Rupa chortled and Rakesh winced. He still had no idea what Rupa was talking about. If he had listened to his wife even once when they went about their rare joint tasks—containing a mushroom cloud of shit blooming in a two-year-old’s diaper, floating side-by-side the soft pontoons of the babies in a bathing bucket, carefully labeling each milk bottle in the fridge—he would have known not only the name of the TV show The Vengeful Daughter-in-Law but also the life-story, dental history, constipation woes, and general meal-size of the fictitious Bedi family.

  But he never listened to her; he hated her mindless entertainments; all he carried in his mind was the first hint of familiarity. Mohan Bedi was a known name and an unknown quantity.

  Even that was okay: what truly annoyed Mr. Ahuja was that no one in his party had bothered informing him about the mass resignation. Yes: why hadn’t anyone told him? He felt abandoned, sidelined, out of the loop, betrayed. He did think of his colleagues as family—so intensely in fact that his alienation was that of an adolescent. Overfamiliarity was the only way Rakesh knew to make friends; he was as deeply personal in friendship as he was in revenge. It had begun when he had told the SPM: Look, my children don’t have anyone except their parents. My whole family is gone. I was an only child. My father was an only child. No grandparents on either side. They love you. They want you to be their Dadi. Over time, the children had become a cult; Rakesh’s party had become a family. Governors and chief ministers and party secretaries and freedom fighters and judges were known not by name but by their prefixes: Mama, Mami, Dada, Dadi, Chacha, Chachi, Taiji, so on. They appeared at the children’s birthdays, liquored up, twisting their cake-drenched paper plates into half-moons, kicking up divots of grass with their sharp-heeled slippers, sweating till they were desiccated into shadows. They made fools of themselves with baby-talk. You saw in their eyes their own loneliness—how they had come all the way to Delhi to rule the country and left behind their families, their people in distant villages.

  How many times had he stormed a stuffy politician with the light brigade of his children, their hands all falling at the respected elder’s feet in veneration? How many times had he left in the middle of an embarrassing meeting, citing the outbreak of a minor epidemic in his house? How many times had his children smuggled in chocolates for a politician on a hunger strike?

  He’d fix them. He’d make a grab for power.

  “Rupa-ji, I would never resign over something so petty, as you know. I think this is absurd. I have stood apart from the party with a very pointed purpose. However, I too have needs. I too have one request: suspend Yograj. He has been interfering with the Flyover Fast-Track on all levels. Please consider my letter and suspend him.”

  “Arre, Ahuja. I can’t simply accept Vineet’s resignation at the moment,” Rupa said. “He’s holding this entire stupid opposition to me together.”

  “Very well then, Rupa-ji. I respect your decision even as I disagree with it. I hope you know I am hundred percent behind you on the issue of the mass resignation. We can talk about Vineet when things calm down.”

  It was only when Rakesh walked out, waved to his driver, watched a renegade wind slap up a curtain of dust that then went sailing right into his beleaguered nostrils, that he took a sneeze out of his day to congratulate himself. He had Rupa in his pocket. All he had to do now was confront his party members.

  CHAPTER 15

  BACKHANDED COMPLIMENTS

  TTHUS, AT THE MEETING OF PAY SCALES—where thirteen “resigned” Members of Parliament were in attendance around a beveled table—Rakesh made his displeasure clear. “Why did the news of this so-called mass resignation come to me so late, please tell me? I know there is this impression I am personally building each flyover by hand and that all thirteen of my children are operating the machinery and that I must not be disturbed, but you know, even an artist like me must be fully immersed in the real world. There are a thousand ways for me to be reached. One can try one of the twelve cell phones my staff has. Even buggers, low-ranked IAS buggers can reach me. Then there are a thousand pigeons that migrate between my office and my house. One can tie a locket around one of their green necks. One can e-mail me. You can even call up and tell my children. So?”

  The enormous difficulty of delivering such a speech was best highlighted by the number of times cell phones rang and were answered during its delivery: nine.

  Unfortunately, the first person to respond was none other than Rakesh’s famed nemesis and favored resignation subject, Vineet Yograj. “Where were you at five o’clock? Yesterday?” Yograj asked in his eager, friendly, gruff manner. He was a man with a teak-dark face and an onion-shaped white goatee who was renowned for grilling anyone he met. “You are very busy with Flyover Fast-Track correct? Working overtime? No time for us these days, Rakesh-ji?”

  Rakesh puffed out his chest and said, “Vineet-saahb has thrown open the proceedings with his trademark interrogation. Anyone else?”

  “But Rakesh-ji, why were you not at the cabinet meeting?” said Vineet, unfazed. He was sitting two seats to Rakesh’s right. He opened his clenched fists. “Before I forget! I have brought cardamom for all of you. Please take some. I’ve bought it fresh from Kerela. It has great medicinal value.”

  Vineet’s ploy paid off. The female MPs across the table leaned toward him, thus affording him a better view of their bloused breasts as he rolled the green pods of cardamom into their outstretched hands. The transaction thus completed, the pods were passed around the table. Only Rakesh pulled back stiffly into his seat and said with a smirk, “No thank you, ji. This is exactly why I don’t attend cabinet meetings. God knows what poison Vineet-saahb you will feed us.”

  “The reason Vineet-ji is asking,” said an MP, “is that we reached a consensus after the cabinet meeting only.”

  “What at the cabinet meeting?” said Rakesh, putting a hand beside his ear. “The bill?”

  “No. Consensus, ji.”

  Rakesh slapped the table. “But you weren’t even there, Iyenger-saahb.”

  Iyenger was not a cabinet minister.

  “But we met outside the room. After Madam Rupa-ji left. After Madam was out of sight.”

  “Out of sight, out of mind, isn’t it?” said Rakesh. “Apparently, the same thing happened to me. I could not attend the cabinet meeting because I had to talk to a delegation of American planners—what can one do? Such commitments are always there. Now. I have offered my excuse. What about you? Why didn’t I hear?”

  He looked threateningly around the room at the junior MPs, eyebrows grossly bunched, left hand turning a spoon in his cup of tea so that it sounded like the ringing of a school bell. The sandstone building let in a slice of sun and gust after gust of air. The light—low-density, orange—filled the spaces between men and women, expanded, flamed against the contours of the room so that the Savarkar Room felt to Mr. Ahuja like a dirigible plunged by accident of speed and latitude into perpetual afternoon. Not surprising, then, that Mr. Ahuja—having had a sleepless night—felt tired, jet-lagged, and not at all in the mood for the flattery the junior MPs began dishing out.

  One MP said, “According to me, Rakesh-ji, there are two reasons. One is that I thought you would hear eventually—which it seems you did. And two, ji—this is the highest compliment I can give—I think you are above politics. That is why I did not call.”

  “He is right,” said Iyenger. “Nowadays I see you more on STARNews than in Parliament. I thought you will laugh on my face if I said we are resigning for such a silly reason.”

  “You have become a pukka CEO!” added another. “A technocrat!”

  “We are very inspired by your efforts with your ministry.”

  Rakesh was irritated. To say he was “above politics” was to essentially say he wasn’t a good politician. Yes, this was ridiculou
s: he was being punished now for being an efficient worker? For sweating over infrastructure rather than cultivating contacts? Trembling with anger, he got up and reached to draw the blinds—but as he did, his papers fluttered from the table and an MP whipped her dupatta over her shoulder. He turned around, felt the tubes of his shirtsleeves flute with turbulence. The MPs were holding their cups of tea to their noses; on the table below, ring after ring of condensation startled into a blinding orange, then eclipsed into an even teak. All eyes turned from the wooden tabletop. To him. A familiar and delirious rhythm of saliva and silence percolated in his throat. His hands flattened on the paper; he leaned in to the crowd of gray heads—the perfect posture for a lambasting session. “I wasn’t at the cabinet meeting, but I am here now, naah?” said Rakesh, holding his palm up. “You people talk such nonsense. Luckily, I am as foolish as all of you people. I have also resigned.”

  The round of repartees was jovial. Again, he felt triumphant. They’d accused him of not being enough of a politician, and he’d hit back with a fantastic backhand, a googly, a double play. Now they thought he’d joined their ranks for the cause of Mohan Bedi, and Rupa Bhalla thought he was 100 percent behind her. He’d covered both bases.

  “Okay,” said Rakesh, snorting, “let us get down to business.”