Family Planning

by Karan Mahajan

  It was a solemn meal. Mr. Ahuja tried to concentrate on the mechanics of eating—the rippled plain of daal across his plate, the symmetrical mounds of aalu and gobi he lined up before blasting them away with powerful scoops of his chappati, the dollops of yogurt he used to neutralize the burned spices—but it didn’t work. He ate indiscriminately and rapidly and in semipanic. He was aware of Arjun’s actions on the next chair: his slow, sulking marionetted movements. As for the other children, he couldn’t gauge any change in their behavior. Nor in Sangita’s. Apparently there hadn’t yet been a massive confrontation between Arjun and his siblings and stepmother. She in particular was as placid and contented as ever. She was eating massive quantities of daal. Mr. Ahuja remembered how, early in the marriage, he’d tried to send her on a slimming diet and had failed. Later, he’d brought up the issue in a highly erotic moment: Darling, yes, I feel so good, I like to get you pregnant because then at least you are eating so much for a good cause!

  Good cause, indeed! Thirteen bloody good causes!

  “I have news for all of you,” he said.

  “What, Papa?”

  “I have resigned.”

  The children’s jaws hung low with gobs of daal. In musical progression, hands fell on quivering laps. This was exactly the effect he’d intended to generate. Only Tanya had the courage to ask, “Why, Papa?”

  Mr. Ahuja sat back in his chair and stared at the whirling fan above him; his body snapped instinctively into his favored posture for gravitas—shoulders relaxing backward, legs spread carelessly, arms dangling, and head and neck bent forward in hard earnest concentration. He scratched his stubble and explained the situation with Yograj’s corruption and the flyovers. He became animated as he spoke; he picked up his fork and jiggled it around; the table grew dense as everyone leaned in. The children were thrilled by this insider information. They salivated like journalists at an exclusive press conference. Even Arjun listened closely, slowly jabbing his butter knife between the quadrants of his outstretched hand. Despite himself, he felt proud of his father for his reasoning, and even prouder that he could present his father’s morally charged resignation to Aarti, who, no doubt, would be impressed. He’d even act as ponderous as his Papa when he told her the news. Unconsciously and silently he began repeating under his breath everything his Papa was saying.

  He was clicked out of the trance when his father said, rather abruptly, “Also. I have been thinking about the way all of you behave. We are all used to talking back to our elders in this house—enough of this. From today it is going to stop. Everyone will listen to their elders, okay? Do exactly as you are told. If your elder does something bad to you, then write me a letter of complaint. I will fix the problem. But no talking back.”

  Orders were orders, especially in a time of such tragedy. The children bent their heads especially low and chewed, for once, with their mouths closed. Only Sangita’s cucumber crunching proceeded at its usual volume, but even this Mr. Ahuja didn’t bother to correct. He still needed to tell her what had happened with Arjun.

  But first he went to his study and placed a phone call to Vineet Yograj.

  “Vineet saahb?” he said.

  “Ah, Rakesh-ji,” said Yograj. He sounded tired and expectant. As if he, too, had bad news to share.

  Mr. Ahuja launched forth, “Look, ji, I am sure you have received the letter. Before you say anything, I want you to know I did not write it. I hundred percent did not write it. This is Rupa-ji’s doing, I am certain. She has written it to promote infighting. The good woman has lost her mind, as you know. I am just now coming from seeing her. She has lost her mind. This is her—”

  Mr. Ahuja cut himself off, not because he was finished but because he was surprised by the placidity of Yograj’s attitude at the other end of the line, his patience, his lack of aggressive interruption.

  “Yograji-ji?”

  “Rupa-ji has done it, no?” Yograj said. “Why is she doing this? What is her problem? Does she not have better things to do? This is what I also thought.” He shouted to his wife, off the phone, “Rekha! It is as I said. He did not write it. Why would he write it? Yes, exactly, Rakesh-ji, that is also what I thought. Why would you write it?”

  Rakesh braced himself. “Yes.”

  He heard the wife utter a few shrill remarks but couldn’t make them out.

  “Sorry-ji,” said Yograj. “That was my good wife. Please ignore. You understand, she is disturbed? But, yes, I also thought, Rakesh-ji is such a technocrat, how could he write this? Why would he write this? For what purpose? For what need? Why so much anger?”

  “Yes,” Rakesh mumbled.

  He hadn’t expected Yograj to believe him. He hadn’t expected it to be so easy.

  In fact, it wasn’t. Because after a few notes of desultory conversation, Yograj said, “Will you do one thing for me, Rakesh-ji?” His voice was now commanding and smooth, not the gruff rattly voice he used for questions. “Will you please write a letter to the party as a whole and say you did not write the letter, and that it is the work of Rupa-ji? Just so they know? So my good name is not blemished?”

  Yograj’s good name. It came as a great surprise to Mr. Ahuja (though it shouldn’t have) that Yograj cared less about their mutual enmity and more about what others in the party thought of him. Mr. Ahuja’s comments had actually hurt him because they were so close to the truth. Immediately, the warm kindly feeling he’d started experiencing—the same feeling of forgiveness that overcame him after he slapped one of his children—was replaced by a sense of power. The slap had been necessary, and he was ready to deliver another.

  Mr. Ahuja grinned broadly. “Okay, ji, whatever you desire,” he said.

  Then he hung up the phone, switched on his computer in the study, wrote out a note to Yograj, and told him, in so many words, to go screw himself and his good name.

  CHAPTER 22

  LOVE-SHOVE

  MR. AHUJA’S CAREER with the KJSZP (H202) was now emphatically over—he had no allies to speak of—but he was in an exuberant mood as he walked to the nursery. Behind him were the Flyover Fast-Track and its failures. The flyovers could look bombed and ruined, the ramparts of a city abandoned after a pillage, and he wouldn’t care. Years from now, he imagined, when archaeologists unearthed Delhi’s ruins, they’d find inexplicable bridges. We have several hypotheses, they’d say. People climbed up here to experience ritual hallucinations of tar…There is some proof that this is where salvos were fired at the Muslim invaders approaching from the Aravalli Mountain range…These were their temples, austere. If Delhi, as people loved to say, was a city of ruins, then at least his ruins towered over the rest.

  “Everything is okay?” he asked, opening the door into Sangita’s den. His manner was courtly, servile, his hands fanned in front of him like the mascot for Air India.

  Mrs. Ahuja was noncommittal as she strung all the smelly nappies on a cord that stretched across the room. “All the babies are crying,” she said. Then, by way of explanation: “Doing latrine.”

  The magic of marriage. Mr. Ahuja hadn’t changed diapers in several months, but he was so grateful to see that Sangita was watching a soap opera and not NDTV—which no doubt would carry news of the latest developments—that he blitzkrieged through the nursery, turning the babies on their stomachs and sliding out the safety pins with panache. He mollified the infants with his old trick—a clicking of fingernails near their ears. Sangita watched the minister, fascinated. Mr. Ahuja felt at ease. His cell phone was vibrating in his pocket, a situation that only exacerbated his growing sexual frustration by alerting the nerves leading up to his penis. What attracted him about his wife right now as she cradled one of the twins in her lap was this: she was so available. He could suffer through the worst misfortunes in the world, and she’d be forced to stay with him. He could quit politics and still she’d be subordinate to him. He could lose the SPM’s patronage and be instantly axed from the party for his irreverent letter, and she’d still shyly fan the dupatta
near her face when he asked her questions. He, too, would stand up to his antagonizers like a man—he wouldn’t make it easy for them. If they issued him a Show Cause Notice, he’d file a Breach of Privilege Motion in Parliament. He’d make such inflammatory remarks in the press that the Communist Party would back him in the creation of a Third Front. He’d explain everything to the press. The English-speaking press would like his good English. The Hindi-speaking press would like his good Hindi. They’d carry photographs of him with a fresh red tilak on his forehead, his showered bulk wrapped in a fancy kurta…

  “Why are you watching MTV?” he asked. “Don’t you know your age?”

  “I have declared ban on StarPlus,” she explained. “Because of—”

  “Mohan Bedi?”

  “Mohan Bedi.”

  “Well, stop worrying—your Mohan Bedi is going to live,” he said to Sangita.

  Sangita had now put the baby down and was sitting on a stool with a hot-water bottle flopped across her lap, one hand pressed on the side table for support, so that even the act of relaxation looked grueling.

  “But he is dead,” she said.

  “Yes, yes, but he will be alive tomorrow.”

  “How will he be alive? He died in tub. Body was shown. Cell-o-phone was shown.”

  “Tcch. What is the problem? His twin died. The twin was in the tub,” he bullshitted, “instead of Mohan. Twist of fate.”

  “He had no twin, ji.”

  “What do you mean—how did he get in? You have not seen two people in a tub? Brothers were bathing together, Mohan went outside to get soap, left the phone in the tub.”

  “But, ji—”

  “Sangita,” he said, suddenly, “I’ve told him.”

  Sangita tried not to blink. When Arjun had asked last night if she had “tricked” Mr. Ahuja, she’d consoled herself by thinking: At least he still thinks I am his real mother. Now that consolation was lost. She was confident that Arjun hated her.

  Normally she’d have cried, but she felt she owed Mr. Ahuja nothing. She stalled. “Ji, told who? Told Shankar to make tea? Told postman to send post?”

  “Sangita! I’ve told Arjun. About his mother,” Mr. Ahuya said. Then, stroking her hair, “Sorry.”

  “Thank you,” she said. Then she began knitting again.

  Mr. Ahuja sputtered, “I did it for you. I told him you had been a very good mother. I told him nothing will be different. I told him he had to know, but the past is the past. I hope that is okay. I am sorry. But you only wanted me to tell him—”

  Sangita nodded. “Yes, ji. Thank you.” She smiled. That was the end.

  “Has he told you anything?”

  She shook her head.

  Mr. Ahuja was understandably abashed as he made for the door. Sangita had taken the news so well that he felt even more guilty about having concealed from her the fact that he’d told Arjun about the “switch.” He’d acted as if he’d done her a favor when, in fact, he’d cheated her. He ought to have sunk to his knees and apologized. He ought to make it up to her—but how? He knew nothing about this woman, this wife of fifteen-odd years. Vague details, yes—the tough jackfruits of her elbows, the sullen hump of her jaw, the bulbous nose she had proudly passed on to each child except for Arjun, TV, clean clothes, T-series cassettes, a fierce protection of her Right to Eat at the table—but nothing more. He twisted and turned in his head the Rubik’s cube of domestic details and arrived at no sustainable patterns. His mind was a drawer rummaged of all its contents. He remembered what Rashmi always told him, I used to be really afraid of dying until I was in love, I thought who will have known me if die, those oddly prescient words, though of course a person’s entire life became an arrow of prophecies once they passed, he knew that, and Sangita had probably never loved anyone in her life and she would die as vaguely as she had lived. Sangita was a symbol, a darkness. When she died, she would be dead, completely gone. As Rashmi tended to zero in his mind, so did Sangita. One day they would both explode into nothingness, and Mr. Ahuja pictured himself an old man bathed in fog, surrounded only by his children. But no, here he was—at the threshold of the nursery—years before the event.

  Like a true slave of marriage, he would have to go down on his knees and ask his children what his wife truly loved.

  Mr. Ahuja shuddered as he heard Sangita transmitting thicker and thicker strands of dissatisfaction between the twin antennae of her needles. He was back in the hotel room the morning after his wedding, waking to an empty bed, the bride gone, his illusion of complete control utterly zapped, his misogynies exploded, the sheets on the bed crinkled with newborn peaks and valleys: He was deeply despicable, awful, self-centered. He was thinking: I deserve no better than this woman. If I find her outside, I will marry her. I will marry her and treat her kindly.

  But still he was thinking only of himself.

  “I love you,” Mr. Ahuja said, ludicrously, turning around. He walked confidently toward Sangita, arms swinging.

  Sangita now was truly shocked. She bent down from the stool and picked up a ball of yarn and stuck a needle through it. She blew her nose loudly on a napkin.

  Mr. Ahuja got down on his knees before her stool and said it again, “I love you.”

  She brought a fold of her nighty up to her face and soaked it in tears.

  Mr. Ahuja loomed over her with his nostrils quivering. “I love you darling. We have been through very difficult times together. You have been a good wife. Come. Let me take you to a film today. We’ll go to the movies. Anything you want.”

  Mr. Ahuja made at least ten more promises he wouldn’t keep, but it worked: she got up and stood in his arms. She let Mr. Ahuja do what he wanted. She limply put her head on his shoulder. She let him grope her fetching protuberance. She let him go erect against the overhang of her stomach. She knew he was lying and that she’d be disappointed—these were tears of loss, not joy—but she had waited so many years to hear these words that she didn’t care. She let him stand there and be a man. Mr. Ahuja was grateful for her cooperation, for her warmth; he held her tighter and tighter. Soon the gratefulness became pride. He felt proud that he’d stood his ground, that he hadn’t stormed off, that he’d told Arjun the secret, that he was holding his wife amidst the mewls of his offspring, lying to her for her sake. Let Arjun walk in on him now, he thought. Let Arjun gawk at him now. He was in a compromising position, but at least it resembled affection.

  CHAPTER 23

  THE WRONG BUS STOP

  THE AHUJA EARLY MORNING Waking Undertaking was a fragile hierarchy. This is how it worked: Rakesh woke the oldest child; and then the oldest child woke the next; and so on until there was a huge queue forming outside the two bathrooms for a speedy brush-bath-shit-and-breakfast, a rowdy routine marred by toothbrush duels and the sound of slippers thwacking angrily against doors that were locked too long. Everyone got five minutes; and you bathed on alternate days, substituting the snow of talcum powder for soap, and heaven forbid if you tried to break the rules, there’d be shouting and the rehearsed revenge of your siblings to pay, they’d radar your movements through the day and prevent you from using the bathroom even if you were caught in the dire throes of shit, and then what? You’d have to run out into the street and make a beeline for the bushes.

  Sangita’s role in the organization was that of first pisser (special quota for pregnant ladies!) and final checker (once a week). She’d stand at the door, examine each sleepy tie, brush the lint off the children’s shoulders (even if it meant standing on her toes for the boys), hand them their hotfoiled-parathas, and finally put her chubby hand to the small of their backs and shove them out of the house one by one, Rakesh included. So, Sangita might have been at the bottom of the chain, but she was the one who gave the go-ahead, the all-clear, the Sayonara baby, and if she noticed that anything was amiss or that one of the kids was dripping snot onto his or her white uniform she could choke the entire convoy, bring all progress to a halt, and mop the nosey crowd with a giant hanky.

&
nbsp; But progress had been halted much earlier today. Mr. Ahuja hadn’t woken up.

  It was just his luck, thought Arjun, that he couldn’t even go to school. Through no fault of his own he had missed the bus and, by association, Aarti—the only vision that could possibly comfort him, the only pair of eyes that could tell him, in the Morse code of fluttering eyelashes, It’ll be okay. He wanted to see her to be convinced that he wouldn’t be disgusted by the thought of sex for the rest of his life; that Mama and Papa wouldn’t pop up hideously in his mind like a Hallmark Card (paradoxically wholesome) whenever he tried to seduce a woman.

  He checked his e-mail. There was no word from her.

  So six hours after waking, having played the Metallica album Master of Puppets that Ravi had lent him yesterday—Arjun crept out of the teeming house. He wore his school uniform, took an auto all the way to St. Columba’s and lurked on the other side of the road as the 1:45 P.M. bell went off. Then, whistling, hands in his pockets, Arjun boarded bus #21.

  He sat in the back of the bus, in the middle of the wide seat that afforded him a view down the aisle. He watched as a gaggle of seniors from the Convent of Jesus and Mary and St. Columba’s made magnetically for the back—no Aarti. The junior school students all huddled in the front of the bus, shooting sharp glances backward every so often, trying to imagine what it would feel like to sit at the back, far from the driver and the teachers, playing Harry Potter and WWF trump cards with real money or flirting on the footboard, the rumble of traffic only inches from your feet. Arjun ruffled his hair, nervously waved to a boy from his class who said, Oh so you were bunking class all day, good job, yaar. The floor under him suddenly ignited, the engine roaring to life—and it was only then that Aarti climbed aboard, her dark mane of hair flustered around her neck, the satchel slung low on her waist like she could barely carry it. Oh, the sweaty beauty of it all. Arjun clutched his empty bag, now confident that his idea to reserve the seat next to him had paid off. That was the only spot left at the back, and Aarti would have to sit there.