But when the agenda was being passed around, Vineet asked Rakesh, “Accha, ji. Where did you buy this stylish shirt from?”
“Gift,” said Rakesh.
“The tie?”
“Inherited.”
“Jacket?”
“Borrowed.”
(The other MPs watched this volleying, extremely amused.)
“Borrowed? From whom?” inquired Yograj, politeness itself.
“What did you just say? Anyway. Please let us get on with business.”
“But you didn’t tell,” said Vineet. “How did you hear of the resignation?”
“You’ll have to speak up.”
“HOW DID YOU HEAR?”
“Well. You are shouting! That is how.”
“You are pulling my leg. How did you hear about the resignation?”
“Sources.”
Vineet said. “I hear you visited Madam today?”
“To resign, why else?”
“Look,” said Vineet, turning to the other MPs, “I told you Rakesh-ji is having great inner strength. He must be having the flaxseeds I gave last time. None of us others resigned in person.”
“Yes. How was she?” they asked. “What did she say?”
“Come again?”
“HOW WAS SHE?”
“Angry,” Rakesh snorted. “She said she was going to suspend most of you. I had to convince her not to, even as I myself was resigning! I think madam realized that I was the final nail in the coffin. How many people can she suspend?” Then he added, “You people should be happy I was there at the right moment.”
Well done, Ahuja!
However. The exhilaration of his extemporaneous turncoat lasted only so long: back in the car, on the way to the ministry, the gaps in his teeth nicely irrigated by tea, he was again bothered that no one had updated him about the resignations. Maybe he should have put the buggers in their place—minced no words about how he wanted no part in this TV farce, shown that he was furious that they’d mock his commitment to the flyovers rather than praising it. Then again, that would only make him more unpopular in the party. But what if he already was unpopular in the party—and then Rupa Bhalla found out about his false promise of support? Who would he have on his side then?
There were no easy answers. All the way to the ministry, every cow he saw was a personal affront to him—a shit-covered hurdle for traffic. The street by now—so pristine in the morning—was a study in chaos. The setting sun offered its own ferocious interpretation of events: light shot between the flat metal hoardings on either side like gunfire in an alley; a man loaded five children mass-suicidally onto the back of his scooter; under a crinkled blue tarpaulin a fat policeman hydrated himself with a glass of the filthiest lemon juice, wiping his mustache just as Mr. Ahuja passed.
Closer, the reflection of Mr. Ahuja’s wristwatch—its perfect sphere of heat and light—described a parabolic path over the gray-padded ceiling of the car. The streetlights were straight poles with branched lights that looked like the simplistic V-shaped birds his children made in their first crayonic paintings—he would never let his children drive. This much he was clear about. Never mind that Arjun was approaching eighteen. Never mind that Arjun would never respect him. Never mind that Arjun traveled in a DTC bus every day just like the one that was overtaking Mr. Ahuja’s official, white, Government Lion Embossed License Plate, Hindustan Motors Millennium-Edition, Leather-Seat Ambassador at a speed sanctioned only by the movie Speed and was now breaking every single rule of inertia in order to suddenly halt behind the five-person scooter—the smallest child on the scooter dropping her ice-cream bar and turning around to wipe her fingers on the dirty grille of the bus as it rocked up and down on its shock absorbers.
Mr. Ahuja asked his driver, Mathur, to slap the red official siren atop the car.
“Important meeting, sir?” Mathur asked, leaning out of the car.
“No, yaar, I’m thinking in terms of your sons. Do you want to see them grow up into young men? If this traffic continues, this car will be a coffin by the time you get home.”
“Yes, sir, but they will be short—like me,” said Mathur, adjusting the pillow he sat on to reach the dashboard. “That is the only thing.”
Then the car extruded a massive honk and they were off. Rakesh held his breath.
He tried to see himself through the jaundiced eyes of his colleagues. After all, he’d become what he hated: a complainer, a problem finder. He’d always pooh-poohed Indians who complained about traffic, taking a certain nationalist pride in the open show of might and opportunism, but ever since Rashmi’s accident, he’d begun to palpitate over the risks drivers took to slice into the smallest gap, to overtake blindly from the left, the number of dents on even the newest cars, the way a pedestrian was expected to write a fresh will before crossing the road.
The traffic had been the same level of terrible when he and Rashmi came home for their first holiday from Vermont nearly twenty years ago. What had changed was Rashmi. She’d imbibed the straight magical lines of the West, its fetish for sanity. She asked the driver not to run red lights. Rakesh pointed out that this was his Masi’s driver, and that we people from USA should not order him around and that if we don’t run this bloody red light we’ll be flattened by the angry-looking truck approaching from the right, do you see it? Rashmi prayed calmly to the driver not to kill the poor man on the rickshaw in front of them. The driver didn’t listen. Rashmi said, What is wrong with us Indians? Rakesh took offense, and said, Firstly, speak for yourself, darling, and also, What is wrong with the British that they conquered India and then left us poor and with bad laws and a corrupt civil service and then created schools where we educated people to be engineers and journalists only so that they could leave the country and then live abroad and come back for a few days in the year and say: Oh, look how trickly and toxic the shower is, if I get naked a thousand flies will feast on my body, everybody I touch is like a beggar only—
(He was in a bad mood because he’d argued with his parents.)
She said, You’ve done it again.
He said, I’m sorry.
You can’t just say sorry and think it’s over.
I’m so sorry, he said.
The driver heard their argument and laughed. This made Rakesh doubly mad. He said, Let me drive.
Rashmi said, You don’t have an Indian license.
Soon Rashmi and Rakesh were sitting in the front. Rakesh was hunched over the steering wheel.
Rashmi said, We Indians believe in fate. Look at these people driving like maniacs. We Indians. Believe in. Fate.
Rakesh said, What fate.
Look at this cow you’re about to hit.
Cows believe in fate.
He hit the cow.
Now Rakesh had damaged his Masi’s brand-new Contessa (a big cow-shaped dent had formed on its bonnet) and had to bribe the driver.
The driver said, Sir, money you will give me, but what about my job?
We’ll say it wasn’t your fault, Rashmi said in her sweetest voice.
They sat shamefaced in front of Rakesh’s Masi. Already their family relations were strained—Rakesh’s mother and Masi were involved in a property dispute—and now Rakesh was going to admit that he’d wrecked her car.
Rashmi said, I did it.
What happened, beta? asked the Masi.
Because I was driving like an American, she said.
Then she gave Rakesh the most short-lived piercing glare possible. She knew how to handle him. She’d won by suddenly making a sacrifice. She was so stunning—with her erect posture and the teasing lilt of her voice, and her hands that sprayed out every which way as she talked—that even his terrifying auntie was charmed. Rakesh, too, could never say anything to Rashmi on the subject of Indian-style driving ever again, and long afterward, in Vermont, he couldn’t explain to himself why every mistake a driver made in America felt for him like a minor (guilty) victory; why on the day John the neighbor reversed into their mai
lbox, he mowed the lawn three times; why when the morning news came in of a nonfatal pileup on the highway, he was strangely ecstatic and cooked rajma like he was a master chef; why on the day Rashmi died, he was aware that if he and Rashmi had been mere spectators of the accident—if it hadn’t, in other words, been the day she died—he’d have thrust his hands under the waterfall of her hair, cradled her neck in the confluence of his fingers, and finally told her why he was so happy: she was alive and he had won the argument she’d set into motion on the cow-killing Delhi day two years before. He’d proved that Americans were as prone to bad driving as Indians, that the only difference was that America had police officers and bureaucrats that enforced rules, and Indians had officers with titles like District Magistrate of Jats, Joint Secretary for Tribal Welfare Scheme Attached to the Ministry of Welfare, Inspector of Mining, Collector for the Sub District Falling Between Chhatisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, Director Sub) of Special Preservation of Languages whose job was to simply figure out the purpose of these titles.
But he would never have said this. Someone had been run over by a motorcycle and a door was flying. But even if he had said this, who would he have said it to? There was no one to argue with ever again. No one to crumple into at a moment’s notice.
Only people to blame.
So when Rakesh returned to India and found himself once again in the country’s royal mess, he blamed everything on the administrative service, the police force, the babus, that bureaucratic mess that had rejected him and made him flee to the US; that made him fill out ten pages of paperwork in order to transfer Rashmi’s ashes to India; that lost the papers; that fined him ten thousand rupees at customs for his “imported Tourister Funeral Urn.” And that finally extracted three bribes from him at the airport—bribes Rakesh paid because he didn’t want to be late for his wife’s fourth-day rites and because he was rich, because he could. You could smell it on him—his American cologne.
But he could also turn his riches against these tormentors: he vowed to track down the two customs officials who’d given him hell, to use every connection at his disposal to end their careers, and that was how he found himself at the doorstep of Rupa Bhalla, a family friend who was a Member of Parliament and the president of the SZP Party. She too was recently widowed: her husband, Ashok Bhalla, a former Prime Minister, had been sown into a field by a terrorist driving an advanced harvester during the spring festival in Punjab.
She and Rakesh talked for a while and she was impressed by his political views and intelligence and his firsthand anti-Americanism. As Rakesh told her the story about the customs officials, she hobbled about madly in front of the rectangular painting that spanned the entire wall of her drawing room. Over time, with smoke and moisture, the painting had blurred into a constant saffron horizon for the befuddled visitor, its human figures—highly impressionistic to begin with—looking more and more like a series of rotten cauliflowers planted in a desert. The painting was horrible, vomit-inducing, and she said she’d painted it herself.
She was standing in front of the painting, and as Rakesh looked, it seemed as if Rupa Bhalla’s face was sprouting a hundred nodes on either side, a gallery of self-portraits that were only a little more hideous than the woman before him. He thought then, with a gasp of terror: here was a mannequin of lost sexuality and beauty. You could tell she had been something in her youth; he had seen pictures of her next to her late husband—vivacious, head-up, kissable—the sort of girl who, if she had been from Delhi or Bombay, not Haryana, might have smoked ahead of her time. Who might have walked into a hall of men with brash elegance, bangles clinking a bit too much, a splash of cognac perfuming her bare navel. Who made awful paintings. But she carried her loss of energy like a lesson learned, and now the young Rakesh realized that losing sexuality was to finally be forced into a sort of asceticism, to transcend the pettiness of life, a politician who was driven by nothing but a will to remain alive, then to die in public view. To be seen by all—and had by no one. This idea seemed unbearably romantic to him. He still thought he would never remarry. He wanted badly to become a politician as well.
That was when Rupa Bhalla said that she knew the painting was horrible.
Rakesh had said, No, no, it wasn’t.
She laughed and said, It’s okay. Just listen.
He said it wasn’t horrible at all.
She said, You’ve passed the test. This is my test. Any new party member who is honest with me, I immediately dismiss, anyone who keeps flattering no matter what—them I keep.
You want me in the party? Rakesh said.
Of course, Rupa said. That is the only way I can help you.
And that was fourteen years ago, Rakesh mused, arriving at the office. Fourteen years of being in and out of power, of having made sure those two customs officials had been posted in a caste violence-ridden sector of Bihar. And still his ambition was unchanged. His entire drive in becoming a minister—when he wasn’t making anti-American speeches and protesting against multinationals—was to sit atop the vast, damaged machinery of the Indian civil service and use his powers to hammer their cogs back into their service roles. It was as if he’d touched down in Indira Gandhi Airport all those years before and in passing through the X-ray mutated from a Master of Civil Engineering to a Master of Mass Feeling.
And now, when he’d finally achieved that dream by overseeing every single detail of the bloody Flyover Fast-Track he was being accused of not being enough of a politician?
Even though he was the only one with the slightest iota of idealism? Who actually did anything? Who took the smallest bribes?
There was no credence in his party members’ views. They were full of shit, cow dung, specifically.
From his office, he promptly called Sankalp Malik, the one minister who’d sat quietly through the Meeting of Pay Scales.
“Look Sankalp,” he said, “I am serious. I didn’t say anything at the meeting because why should I cause a big scene? I am a low-key sort of person. I keep in shadows. I am the dark horse. But let me tell you this much. I am thinking about withdrawing support and taking a good chunk of this party with me. I am being repeatedly insulted. This is hardly the way to treat a coalition partner.”
“Ahuja-ji. I completely understand—”
“But how, HAND-IN-HAND?” said Mr. Ahuja, cracking his wrists on the table.
Sankalp was adamant. “No, no, no. You are mis-understand-ing. It is definitely bad you were not cc-ed on the mass e-mail that was sent to all ministers.”
“Vineet sent it, correct? I know what is happening. Believe me, I know. Personal rivalry is being allowed to interfere with daily functioning.”
“Look, Ahuja-ji,” said Sankalp, clearing his throat. “If you will allow me to say. I think this is a terrible business that has been meted out. But Vineet did not send the e-mail. Subhash-ji did. And he explained to me why you were not included. I think there is a perception you are too close to the SPM. That anything you are told, you will tell the SPM—”
Rakesh said, “Yes, of course. I am the SPM’s lover. I forgot that aspect.”
“No. I scolded Subhash-ji! On your behalf!”
“She has given birth to my children.”
“Ji, it is not my perception but the perception of others.”
“Punning like a poet now?” Rakesh said. He’d heard perception of others as the conception of mothers.
“Han-ji?” asked Sankalp.
“Never mind. Thanks for your help.”
Shit. He put the phone down. So there was no doubt whatsoever. He’d made a terrible mistake by handing Rupa the deranged resignation letter (with the Riot Stock Exchange Bill enclosed!), promising her his support over the Mohan Bedi fiasco, then double-crossing her. She was probably tearing up the insulting letter right now. Then Rakesh remembered his career-long mantra: Anyone who keeps flattering no matter what—them I keep. Yes, that was the key: he needed to find a way to flatter the SPM. He needed to undo all the damage he’d inflicted on
himself. He needed to win back the SPM’s sympathies. But how?
Should he name his next child after her? That was the sort of thing that flattered Rupa no end. It would bother Mrs. Ahuja too: she had always wanted a baby named, inexplicably, Chintoo—why, she screamed it out during each delivery—and now she’d have to wait. Let her wait. Rakesh was not looking forward to his upcoming term of cohabitual celibacy with her either. The next six months he would have to watch Sangita’s body dome into a temple of Ahuja worship, the breasts suspended like twin bells that you ring upon entering a shrine, but he would be stopped at the threshold, shamed by Arjun. He’d sit outside on the bed, begging for arms—just to be held. Sangita would look away, cold, while his children discussed their father’s lust between bouts of homework. In his abdomen he felt the tug of a dead muscle.
“Sir!” said Sunil Kumar.
“Yes? What is the matter? What happened? What happened?”
“I told you I am burning that wasp’s nest!”
So that was the smell that had been keeping him awake. So that was the vague directive Sunil Kumar had issued minutes before, gesticulating out of the window. Mr. Ahuja had assumed it was something to do with the wiper-slashes of pigeon shit on his window, a problem Mr. Ahuja always solved by simply leaving the window open, which in turn sent Sunil into geometrical raptures about the exact angle at which a bird would have to excrete in order to hit Mr. Ahuja’s ministerial desk dead-center.
Now a huge gust of orange buzzed through the window: wasps tornadoed around curls of smoke. Mr. Ahuja shielded his head in panic—close the window!—and Sunil Kumar freed a square of fluorescent light onto the ceiling by flinging open the top of the photocopier. The wasps (moving always in regressive spirals, as if pushing against wind) descended hungrily on the flashing plasma of the photocopier and were instantly squashed as Sunil Kumar clapped the white flap down on their bodies. Seconds later, a white sheet of paper speckled with crushed exoskeletons emerged with a satisfying whirr from the machine. Sunil Kumar grabbed the evidence, made for the door, held it open for Mr. Ahuja, and both of them panted into the corridor—unharmed.
Family Planning Page 12
