Family Planning

by Karan Mahajan

  “How do you know what my penis looks like?”

  “I am your father! Of course I know what every part of you looks like! I gave birth to you—”

  “Mama gave birth to me,” Arjun corrected. “You just watched.”

  “Exactly,” said Rakesh, “but I washed you sometimes also.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this.”

  “Okay, I understand this is a sore topic, but it is also a salient one, and I just want you to know that your penis is perfectly normal. It’s different because—”

  “I know! Papa, everyone can HEAR US!”

  “No, no—no one can hear. We are in the parking lot.”

  “NO, ONLY YOU CAN’T HEAR.”

  “Okay, okay,” said Mr. Ahuja. He decided to retreat. “I just didn’t want you to think that because you are circumcised you are a Muslim or any such thing. These days there are all these movies in which people who are circumcised are mistaken for Muslims and then killed in riots or arrested as terrorists, and I just wanted you to be aware—”

  “What’s circumcised?”

  “You know: your penis.”

  “I hate you,” said Arjun.

  “What?”

  “I hate you,” Arjun said, now nearly in tears. “Is this what a son needs to hear from his father? A judgment of the size of his penis? Hello, son, your penis is not regular-sized or good-sized or normal-sized, but instead, your penis is circumsized?”

  “Arjun, YOU WILL NOT RAISE YOUR VOICE AT ME!”

  Arjun walked off toward the hospital gates.

  Rakesh shouted behind him, “CIR-CUM-CISION MEANS YOU HAVE NO FORESKIN! IT MEANS YOU HAVE NO SKIN!”

  Arjun shot back over his shoulder: “YOU HAVE NO HEART!”

  The repartee hit Rakesh with the force of a tennis ball slamming into a racquet with loosened guts. His entire body vibrated around the shocked, shivering antenna of his spine. What was wrong with him? He could only keep his guilty secret by treading clumsily on his own words, each conversation with his son a disaster in the making.

  The boy stood near the hospital gates with his back to him, arms crossed, hair wet and clumpy with perspiration, and now Mr. Ahuja was angry. First, Arjun’s intrusion last night and now this public shouting match. He couldn’t condone his son’s constant disrespect. He wanted to shock Arjun into submission with the secret. This was not how he’d imagined doing it. This would not be a rehearsed and penitent explanation like talking to the villagers in his constituency about why they wouldn’t have a ready supply of drinking water for another five months. This would not be a dialogue. This would not be an accidental discovery, a slipup by Sangita. This would be shouting: “THAT’S IT, ARJUN. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. CUT IT OUT. YOU WILL NEVER SPEAK TO ME LIKE THIS AGAIN—UNDERSTAND? HOW DARE YOU RAISE YOUR VOICE AT ME. I AM YOUR FATHER AND IF YOU EVER SPEAK TO ME AGAIN LIKE THIS THEN THAT’S IT. DON’T EXPECT HELP FROM ME, DON’T EXPECT LOVE FROM ME, DON’T EXPECT ANYTHING.” Then he slipped into muttering as Arjun drew closer. “You give people love and all they do is disappoint you. I will not tolerate misbehavior from you. Understand?”

  “Sorry, Papa.”

  “Good. Now come. Get into the car. I have something very important to tell you. Something about your mother.”

  But by the time Mr. Ahuja had gotten into the driver’s seat and begun driving, Arjun had recouped some of his insolence. So when Mr. Ahuja said, “You know, I didn’t want to marry your mother,” Arjun replied, “Oh really.”

  Mr. Ahuja couldn’t believe it. His son lacked all empathy. He’d actually raised a child who felt ruthlessly entitled. While his son scowled, Mr. Ahuja’s sense of oppression on Delhi’s roads was total: the hot pedals of the car jimmying tightly; the traffic around him lustrous, garish, blinding with its high beams and swarms of mosquitoes that broke upon the cars like flimsy nets; in his throat the same formulaic desiccation he felt every morning after his snack of coffee and banana; his son at his ornery worst. Then he saw himself in Arjun’s eyes. A man so unapologetic in his pursuit of satisfaction that he’d camouflage his own grunts with the forced wails of his babies—but no. To expect such analysis was to expect too much. There were no eyes to be seen in; his son had turned away. Mr. Ahuja read his son endlessly. Arjun looked bored as he squashed a mosquito against the window. Maybe, Mr. Ahuja thought, he hadn’t given Arjun enough credit. I didn’t want to marry your mother was as self-evident as saying I don’t love her, and Arjun knew that. (The term your mother too was a thorny paradox. He didn’t love Sangita enough to use her real name. So he distanced her by calling her your mother.) Arjun had watched enough TV, in all probability, to know the ins-and-outs of arranged marriages; to know that even painstakingly matched horoscopes produced howling couples; that you could taste man and wife’s indifference in the food that was served up at the table everyday. He’d seen his parents interacting every day. Now Mr. Ahuja had stated the obvious and Arjun would feel insulted rather than feel pity for Mr. Ahuja—and all Mr. Ahuja wanted was to be pitied. He wanted to be pitied for having sex with Sangita. He wanted to prove that he, too, was a victim. That he was living a life he’d had no intention of living. He couldn’t stop himself.

  “You don’t know what your mother did to me,” said Mr. Ahuja. “You have no idea. I was shown a different girl. But on the wedding day, in the tent, there was your mama. I went along because I wasn’t sure. Because I didn’t want to cause a fuss. Then I was sure.”

  Immediately, Mr. Ahuja regretted his confession. He’d sullied the memory of Rashmi with self-pity. He’d given Arjun ammunition against his siblings. He’d shown himself deeply vulnerable, capable of being cheated at life, at marriage, a man who crumbled behind his stoic façade. He was a monster battling a monster.

  “Papa?” said Arjun. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because it’s true,” he said.

  “But that’s impossible. You saw her. You married her. I don’t believe it. How is this possible? It’s impossible.”

  “She’d planned it. You’re confused on your wedding night. I didn’t divorce her because—”

  “Confused?” Arjun sneered.

  “Well—”

  “Papa, she’s still my mother.”

  “No,” said Mr. Ahuja, gratefully knee-jerking, “she’s not.”

  “What?” said Arjun. But the first thing he thought was not I’ve been lied to my whole life, I’ve been betrayed but I can’t believe this is the first time we’ve been alone together in almost a year.

  “Of course she’s my real mother,” Arjun shouted. “Just because you don’t love her—”

  “Enough!” said Mr. Ahuja. “Listen to me. What did I say before?”

  “Sorry, Papa.”

  “Look, Arjun. This was the thing I wanted to tell you. That your Mama—Sangita—is not your real mother. Your real mother was someone else—my first wife. Look, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. I didn’t tell you because your mother died when you were three. You didn’t even remember her, what was the point? I didn’t want to tell you, I thought you would feel bad, I thought you’d feel different. But you’re not different. You know that. Even Sangita treats you the same. Whatever she is, she’s been a good mother. And I’m sorry I had to tell you like this. That’s why you are circumcised—you were born in America. Most babies there are circumcised. I was doing my engineering there when you were born. We came back to India because your mother died.”

  “How did she die?”

  “In a car accident.”

  “In America?”

  “In America.”

  “Was it a love marriage?”

  There was something definitive about the question; all modes of inquiry henceforth for Arjun would be sentimental—What did she like? What did she eat? What was her favorite joke? Even the question Was it a love marriage? was sentimental, but it came cloaked in an institutional reference.

  “Yes,” said Mr. Ahuja, “it was a love marriage.”

  Arjun ground his
teeth and tried to look disbelieving—but failed.

  Now Mr. Ahuja drove and drove and drove. They’d U-turned under the Moolchand Flyover—sped past its crumbling walls and extravagant bushes that swept the road—and had passed Defence Colony in a rash of high-beamed traffic before approaching the old 1982 Jangpura Flyover. Mr. Ahuja hadn’t driven in years; it showed. His body was tense behind the steering wheel of the Qualis. Old pains resurfaced: his back ached, his shoulders ached, his arse ached, his head ached. Sitting in the back seat of his chauffeured car, he’d gotten used to making relaxed, trenchant observations about the city—now you needed to observe simply to live. Beauty be damned. He shook his fist at drivers zigzagging between lanes; he pummeled the accelerator hard to overtake a young man in a suit who’d whizzed through a red light; honked madly at a truck that had broken down in the middle of the road, its back bumper decorated with small green plants to indicate its vegetative state; and then found himself on the Jangpura Flyover, a wide concrete lung that gently breathed the car up to eye level with treetops and flocks of pigeons, his mind aware not of the aestheticism of the crossing that had once so inspired him but rather of the fact that he was crawling to the crest of the flyover. Crawling. This was to be the simultaneous beauty and tragedy of the flyovers: you’d escape the red lights, but the traffic was growing so fast that you’d still be jammed, your only consolation a view of Delhi from a height.

  Rakesh, then, was the great consoler of Delhi. He could bandage the city with concrete, but he couldn’t offer a solution to the growing number of cars or people or even the slums you levitated over in your fancy car.

  And now he was getting off the Jangpura Flyover, and he was about to enter the one part of Delhi he’d not changed at all. It was too green and too beautiful and too old to change. The dry, green belt of the Yamuna Canal lying perpendicular to the road; the bulb of Humayun’s tomb emerging from the tungsten-bright trees; the old Oberoi Hotel; rich colonial Delhi. He wanted to tell Arjun about his romance with Rashmi here, but how could he?

  They couldn’t even face each other in the car. He felt so thirsty now, the way one did after one had finally lain in bed, that thirst that arose because the body was always rolling over toward entropy, a terrible restlessness. So you got up at night, tired, and picked up a glass, took a sip. It was not a slaking sip. It was not a satisfying segue into sleep. It was just a drink to destroy that last leftover ounce of restlessness you carried back to bed.

  And he felt like this was the beginning of a long sleep, this talk, this drive. A paternal hibernation. And all he wanted before this descent into alienation was a drop of encouragement from his son, one motion or sentence or word that said Now that you’ve told me the secret, I will forgive you for having held it so long. But no, that was not how it worked. For every extra year he had kept the secret, Rakesh knew he would have to pay. The words were easy enough to speak, and yes, that was what made it worse, the ease of it, the ease.

  When they were driving past the huge mansions of Golf-Links Colony, Arjun asked, “Papa, do you have a photo of Mama?”

  The crucial thing for Arjun was to have an image. He had caught himself thinking about how he’d dramatically confess his tragic backstory to Aarti, and was appalled by his own opportunism. He knew that if he could see a picture, any picture, he’d be cured, he’d become aware of the gravity of the situation and join his father in mourning.

  Mr. Ahuja said, “Nothing. I have nothing to show.”

  He forgot about the tie with the cricketer pattern—that cherished gift from Rashmi—looped lavishly around his neck. And all of Arjun’s good intentions imploded again.

  Rakesh had been meticulous. He had rid himself of all proof of Rashmi’s existence, taking with it the self-conscious dread he had of becoming the sad widower who garlanded the portrait of his dead wife and spoke to her occasionally about what was happening in his life, how he was waiting to join her, how expensive potatoes were these days, etc. How could he explain to Arjun that this destruction was a safeguard against his own grief, not the purposeful nurturing of a secret? That he had had no choice. That he’d cupped his hands through drawers full of Rashmi’s long and extravagant To Do lists and wept for each item that was left unchecked. Every photograph he had chucked during a trip to Manhattan into the East River. It was worth the two hundred dollars he was fined by a policeman who had caught Rakesh littering. Littering? What was wrong with this country? This country that allowed no grief? This country that fined, two hundred dollars times thirteen rupees, that is, 2600 rupees for a few photographs that had “accidentally fallen into the water due to a strong breeze, officer”?

  Would the policeman have lessened his fine if he had told him the story of his suffering right then? Would his son forgive him if he understood everything?

  Grief didn’t seem to excuse anything. Grief was the cliché of the century. In the centuries past, men had lost wives, women had lost husbands, parents had lost children, children had lost parents. Now you couldn’t bear to lose anyone.

  The clothes had all been donated too—he had been too pennywise to dump them in the dustbin—and he wondered if Rashmi’s saris and salwars had made their way from Goodwill to the shoulders of naïve Orientalists. If Rashmi simply lived on as a piece of exotica in each of these women’s lives. As for the jewelry, he had sold it, and given the cash to Rashmi’s parents in a gesture of generosity. He thought the money would calm them, but no: Rashmi’s parents never forgave Rakesh for denying them their dead daughter’s belongings.

  What could Rakesh tell Arjun about Rashmi?

  He remembered only stupid details. He remembered the way she was before Arjun was born. He remembered the superbly frigid, icicle-sharpened day in New York City when they’d taken the F train to Coney Island on a whim during their first month in America. The train’s magnetic lurch propelled them toward the view as they emerged into sunlight: a giant Ferris wheel perched atop the island of magnanimous trash—a sulking, occasionally turning rotunda that seemed like it could break loose and flatten the crowds ant-hilled below. Far away, the glisten of sand meeting water. The train was nearly empty when they got off at the Aquarium stop, and all Rakesh could remember now was the fragile stem of Rashmi’s wrist in his hand as he gently tugged her out of the train. She was so absentminded. She never knew where to get off. She liked to sit and watch, never afraid to make eye contact with the strangers across from her because, well, she was probably seeing right through them. Yet sometimes she noticed things that even Rakesh’s IIT-honed brain didn’t observe. Such as: the Ferris wheel had two layers of bogies, like a gear with teeth on both sides. Unlike in India.

  I’m afraid of giant wheels, she said.

  We don’t have to go, said Rakesh.

  No let’s.

  Why?

  They went. It was only on top that she answered his question and told him the story. She wasn’t afraid of giant wheels; she was terrified. When she was four, her parents put her in the rickety carriage of a giant wheel at a Diwali fair in Delhi along with her six-year-old cousin, Amit. The giant wheel was manually operated—two emaciated yet muscular men dressed strictly in dhotis climbed up and down the metallic bars of the wheel to keep the mechanism in rotation—and you could feel the hotness of their breaths as they passed by your compartment, their simian feet clenched tight on metal. The whoosh you felt in your stomach was doubled because of the voyeuristic thrill of wondering: Will these men fall and die? What if they fall? But it wasn’t a real concern, because weren’t you paying them for exactly that? To have these poor men take mortal risks so that you could feel a little frightened for your life as you swung fifty feet above the ground?

  Rashmi, poor darling four-year-old Rashmi had huddled with her cousin in the creaky cradle, heard the other children whooping with joy, felt her hands whitening around the protective metal bar, wondered if this is what it felt like to be a bird on a branch in a storm, and did the only thing she could: she screamed. Rashmi’s scream was
the longest scream anyone on the giant wheel had ever heard. Unlike most screams that started and ended, Rashmi’s scream bloomed to a crescendo as if she was trying to blow a balloon. With nothing but fear. Minutes passed. One of the giant wheel operators almost fell off, and Amit was so ashamed of his four-year-old cousin that he nearly leaped from the trolley. Eventually, a particularly confident operator climbed up to her trolley, grabbed her from the perch, and carried her down all the way.

  Down the rolling staircase of metal bars. Down the sickening roll of the wheel. Down with and against gravity.

  It was the most scared I’ve ever been, Rashmi said. You’d think climbing up something is scarier, but climbing down through a jungle of metal with some strange man holding you in one hand and holding on for dear life with the other—I stopped screaming and just held my breath. When I got down it was like I had just taken a dive in a really deep pool and then gotten out after holding my breath for ten minutes.

  Why in the world are we on this thing right now? Rakesh asked.

  Why? she said.

  Yes, why.

  That’s easy, she said. I wanted to remember why I was screaming.

  The scream came to him through layer after layer of time; the grief of losing Rashmi was the grief of having forgotten all the stories she was yet to tell him. The pain of telling Arjun about Rashmi would be that she could never be explained into existence.

  “Does anybody else know about this?” Arjun asked.

  He wanted to know if his betrayal was complete. He understood why his father had confessed to him while driving—you can’t get out of a moving car.

  “Obviously, your Mama—I mean, Sangita—knows.”

  The horizon was a dashboard, and his mind needled through the years with the mathematical energy of the speedometer. Only Mama knew. His betrayal was only one-thirteenth complete. Or two-fourteenth. Or one-seventh. He grew irritated. A brain, like a speedometer, never shut off; it quivered endlessly near 0.1.