Unfortunately, he had told her already about his father. There was no element of surprise left.
So when the car arrived, he refused to get in. The driver, Balwant, had rolled down the window and said, “Oye, Handsome,” and he hated that. He hated being called handsome or hero.
“I have to buy another plant,” he explained to Aarti as she got in the back. “For my science project. I don’t know why I put it down.”
“Maybe it’s here still?” she said, half out of the car.
“It’s gone,” Arjun said, ruefully.
She didn’t believe him, didn’t believe he needed to buy a plant; he could tell. She mussed her hair with both her hands, then dropped one hand to adjust her stockings—economizing on the action by bending down and doing a graceful half-turned wave—the other hand still coiling strands around the fingers, releasing shiny ring after ring of hair.
Arjun turned to the driver. “Balwant, please drop madam to Defence Colony.”
Then he slammed the door and watched the car rev away. A blizzard of dust caped after the car and covered his tongue with soot. He was stranded in a flickering daytime slot of Delhi, a soap opera that no one wanted to watch. Cars and cows and scooters passed him by. They didn’t even honk. How peculiar to be pandering to an audience of one. How tiring, draining, terrifying. He parked himself before a keekar tree and took a piss that lasted several generations, his legs splayed out in a broad V. He felt pleasantly crushed; his bladder pistoned with relief; his old optimism returned. What had happened today was private. Mama would never find out what he’d said about her, and to cancel his sins, he’d go home and prove to her that she was more than an enforced intermission in his increasingly-cinematic life. He’d be a good son. He’d do something special for her. Offer a free massage. Or buy her VCDs. Or better still, take her to watch a movie.
As a result of this altruistic scheming, he wasn’t quite ready for the news that awaited him at home.
CHAPTER 24
THE NEWS AT HOME
THE HOUSE WAS UNDER SIEGE: dozens of men and women had settled in the driveway and were squatting on either side of the phalanx of dozing ministerial cars, newspapers twisted over their heads against the relentless sun. They were either constituents (they wore the hassled expressions of people who’ve asked their minister to install water pumps in their villages one too many times) or money men (hassled in general). The garden, meanwhile, was surrounded by a rampart of speakers. Into its denuded pliant mud had been plunged wooden posts, and from the wooden posts was hung a massive, gaudy, maroon tent. It was the same brand of tent one saw at weddings; some macabre dusty sheet patterned with arabesques, and it was beneath this tent, in awesome shade, that Mr. Ahuja sat on a chair in a white kurta getting his hair cut. He was old-fashioned that way. He kept his eyes closed and smacked his lips as the barber snipped at his hair with exaggerated karate-style chops. His hair looked wrong and jagged, but even more disconcerting was the red rose Mr. Ahuja held daintily in his hand between thumb and forefinger, sniffing it every time his barber came to the end of a sequence of chops. The barber was not much older than Arjun and so stopped respectfully when he saw him approaching.
Mr. Ahuja opened his eyes; they were bloodshot in a regal, Mughal way.
“What is all this, Papa?” Arjun said.
Even as he asked, he thought: a concert. He is making up for yesterday by organizing a concert.
Mr. Ahuja said, “Beta, I understand this is very sudden. But we are going to have to move in one month’s time from this house. So I wanted to have a party at the earliest. Tomorrow night.”
“We’re going to move? What do you mean?”
Mr. Ahuja sat upright. “Look. As you know, I have resigned—”
“But, Papa—”
“And not only have I resigned. But, for once, my resignation has been accepted!” Mr. Ahuja chuckled unconvincingly. “And thus we will move.”
They were living in a government-sanctioned home, a VIP accommodation.
“But, Papa, I thought you said the government will also fall. If the government falls, then can’t you keep the house till the next election?”
“Come again?”
“I THOUGHT YOU SAID THE GOVERNMENT WILL ALSO FALL.”
“Who says the government is falling? There is a Sixth Front being formed between Rupa Bhalla and the CPI. I thought Yograj was also going to withdraw and so the government would collapse. But this is not happening. And I have decided to stand by my decision. Sometimes one must do the thing that is morally right.”
“You’ll still be a Member of Parliament I thought. Even if you are not in the government you’re an MP, right? As an MP you can keep the house.”
Mr. Ahuja was impressed by his son’s interrogation. He said so. “Very sharp you’ve become, eh? Look, the situation is this. I will be frank. This house we are living in is bigger and better, more spacious than the house of any other MP. Do you know why? Because we are staying in the house that was allotted for Rupa Auntie. I am only leasing the house from her. So now that she and I are no longer on talking terms, she will cancel the lease. I know her too well. We will have to move. We have no choice.”
Arjun dug his hands into his pockets. How to explain to Papa that Rupa Auntie could have taken away the house (the sacred birth place of nearly half his siblings), the garden (the burial ground of soiled diapers), and the guards, and it would all have been fine, if only there was a way to preserve the bus route that came bowtied to this prime location? He’d have to change buses if he changed neighborhoods, and then there’d be no Aarti to unwrap every morning or to festoon with offerings of wit. To think he’d only been moody with her today because he knew he could remedy it tomorrow with sniveling kindness and a Bryan Adams reference. What if there was no tomorrow. What if this was the end. Hello, Good-bye. His massive, smooth forehead contorted with suppressed speech; Mr. Ahuja could sense it.
“Look, beta,” he continued, “I know this is very difficult to swallow. It is very difficult for me also. Put yourself in my shoes. But we will get over this. In fact, you must play an active role at this party tomorrow. I will introduce you around. And you can even perform with your band if you like. We can turn the party into a concert.”
“No. We’re not good. The band’s not good.”
“Of course you are.”
“You don’t know what good music is.”
“That is not your concern,” said Mr. Ahuja. He brushed off a few darts of hair that were poking out of his shoulder. “I will arrange that.”
“How is it not my concern if I am playing?”
“Arjun, please. Why would you pay? You asked me if I had provided food and booze, and I said yes.”
“Ah, Papa! I said, You have no idea WHAT GOOD MUSIC IS.”
Mr. Ahuja laughed at himself. “Yes, you’re right. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry too.”
Arjun looked away from his father and scratched his cheek. He was surprised by his stubble and scratched some more.
Mr. Ahuja persisted. “Arjun, have the concert. You can even invite the girl you like. The one who goes on your bus?”
Arjun wanted to hand it to the man—he had a marvelous sense of timing and an unlimited number of informants, how could he possibly know about an insignificant bus romance?—but then the source of the information came to him in a thunderclap of consciousness: his siblings. They’d betrayed him, the bastards. They’d pay for this.
“There are many girls who go on the bus, Papa,” he said. “They are all my girlfriends. When the right time is there, I will invite all of them. You can help me choose even.”
“But your brothers and sisters told me—”
“Forgot what they say, Papa. They’re all liars. They have nothing better to do but tell lies about me. They’re stepbrothers and stepsisters, and they want to have a stepsister-in-law. This is the sort of thing I have to deal with all the time. Maybe I should also resign. Will you accept my resignation? I r
esign.”
Arjun had intended to sound joke-y, but the last two lines were spat out; his tongue hissed and flickered between his teeth.
Mr. Ahuja said, “Very funny, let me consider it,” and tittered uneasily. He was not a man much given to tittering.
After Arjun stomped his way back to the house, Mr. Ahuja sat in the chair under the tent and massaged his head. He beckoned the barber over and had him point a giant industrial fan at his face. The brutal surge of wind was suffocating, but the trick was done: the shorn hair was sucked off his face and shoulders and nose and into a minor jetstream that plummeted and scattered into the camouflaging greenery of the garden. Still he prickled from his recent snipping; he had sensitive skin; he felt the full weight of Arjun’s immaturity. It appeared to Mr. Ahuja that Arjun was setting himself dangerously against the family. Already he considered them step-relations. He wasn’t doing well at school or at home or with his band. He needed to be distracted away from this zoo, or more trouble was in store. There was only one place for him, Mr. Ahuja decided with a sigh, there was no point denying it, and so when he entered the house, he took Arjun aside from the dining table where he sat peering dumbly into a notebook—a rare scene of homework-in-progress—and said, “I have thought about your proposition.”
“I’m sorry, Papa” said Arjun. “I was only joking.”
“No, no, it’s okay. You will not resign or any such thing, but you have to help me with the next campaign. What do you say? You will be one of my political advisers. Tonight you’ll come with me to a function. You’ll be my right-hand man. What do you say?”
Looks of pure thrill are rare: Arjun’s face became a singularity, a thing invented solely to fulfill the promise of the moment, all of the self and its self-consciousness and history obliterated by the delicate dance of muscles that signify wonder. He forgot all about helping Mama as he’d planned; he forgot even, for a moment, about Aarti and his siblings and his homework. He looked like a baby, he was a baby. He’s not cynical, he’ll have to be taught everything from scratch, thought Mr. Ahuja, and even though he knew he was inviting disaster—even though he knew that the two of them could never get along—he felt glad. He’d done the right thing.
“Are you serious, Papa?”
“What do you say?”
“Yes, Papa,” gasped Arjun. “Of course, yes, Papa.”
Then the disasters began.
EPILOGUE
THE DISASTER
THE DISASTERS IN THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED were too numerous to mention; like the sputterings of a dying engine or the jarring contractions of pregnancy, they varied in duration and heat and oomph and involved fistfights, property deals, disownings, rekindlings, namecallings, many many babies, and the occasional furious riot; and they continued till the very day Mr. Ahuja retired twenty years later from the Congress (I) Party (to which he had uneasily defected), willing his constituency and collected clout to Arjun.
But the most lasting disaster was the very first one. It occurred shortly after the Ahujas moved, and it was such a disaster that, like the popular election of an autocrat or the slippage of a cruel clause into a civil law, it didn’t even seem like one.
As Mr. Ahuja had promised, there was indeed a final party at the residence on Modi Estate Road. Politicians of all stripes were invited home. In the heat of April they ran amok on the bronzed grass of the backyard garden, undeterred: bottle-brushes bobbing overhead; gravity pulling the devalued gold currency of leaves from the seemingly infinite treasury of trees; cool cloud shadows appearing and then scudding away. The men and women mingled in ferocious patterns around snack servers and stopped dead as the hydra of Arjun’s siblings approached and swallowed them in a ritual of foot-touching and uncle-how-are-yous and auntie-will-you-have-another-whiskeys. Giant five-foot industrial fans blew hair back in gorgeous candy-floss swirls. The garden sounded like a helipad: the people, shouting in compensation, looked their natural extremes. Bald men got windy combovers, lone strands wipering their shiny pates, and women who had spent hours dyeing themselves a stylish salt-and-pepper found white buffs foaming up without warning.
It was through this scene that Mr. Ahuja pranced with a drink in either hand, enacting a new level of aggression, speaking freely, being boisterous and gruff, sharking after the chicken tikkas and kathi rolls and mushrooms and whatnots. It was as if he’d forgotten he was the host. He was enjoying politics again.
Arjun, too, was enjoying politics. He drank too much and shook hands with an army general who gripped his right hand so tight that he couldn’t turn a tap for days (or masturbate) and flirted with a woman twice his age and then puked into a bed of salvias in the garden.
But none of this was disastrous. Nor was the fact that Aarti grew increasingly tired on the morning ride, escaping from Arjun daily on the checkerboard of seats on the bus; that he got used to thinking of her not as a girl he liked but as a flickering Polaroid that was destined to fade till it was no more and he boarded a new bus in a new life in an era of utter darkness; or that the band, the Flyover Yaars, met two times in a cavernous auditorium to practice and came to the simultaneous conclusion that they sounded like a chorus of eunuchs demanding money at a marriage; or even that Ravi called Arjun up one morning and said, “You won’t believe what happened,” and Arjun said, “What?” and Ravi said, “That girl we hit in the car died. Complications, yaar,” and Arjun sobbed like a baby for a minute—What are friends for if you can’t sob in front of them?—until Ravi told him he was only joking, man, and did he want to go with him to give flowers to that babe?
“My Dad wants me to do it,” he explained.
Arjun refused and was more than a little sharp with Ravi. And still nothing bad happened. Ravi just cackled and cackled and told him another story. The friendship was sustained. The band became for a while a complex in-joke, mentioned with smoky guffaws when they stood in a secret alcove behind the basketball court during games period and traded cigarettes.
None of this was disastrous.
Then the ministerial lease on the house expired, and one obscenely sunlit July morning—after what had seemed like a month of textile milling (Sangita, do we really need to keep all fifty sweaters?), and shocking discoveries (the house shed carrom tokens like lice), and a protracted study of the graying polka dots running up and down the formerly white walls (What were these? Remnants of the days when Arjun and Varun played cricket inside the house and smacked the ball against the wall?)—the Ahujas were back in Rakesh’s family home in Greater Kailash.
Here, things began to go sour. There wasn’t enough space, it was a house made for four. It was a house as pressure cooker. The twin girls, Gita and Sonali, made a debut into the world of walking; they developed a fixation with the corked jar of mango preserves that sat in the storage room with a big rubber band tied around its glass top, and had to be shooed away from all the sharp corners by a team of bossy brothers. Mrs. Ahuja, meanwhile, was exiled to the lower-level of the two-storied house, where she lived a somewhat solitary existence, surrounded by servants whom she couldn’t stand. The reason for the exile was that there were no bathrooms on the second floor, and her trips to the toilet were, as a side effect of her pregnancy, extremely frequent.
As for sex, there was none on either level. And there would be none.
Arjun and Mr. Ahuja were mostly absent. But most of their time was spent not on productive real-world tasks—in Mr. Ahuja’s case, drinking with his financiers and moneymen or dashing off enraged letters to newfound nemeses; in Arjun’s case, sweetly failing a math exam, making a botched but sincere attempt to impress girls with the story of his flyover follies, or daydreaming his way onto the new bus with eyes trained instinctively toward Aarti, who was missing, being troubled now no doubt by some other boy in an alternative cuboidal universe on wheels—but in a car together, fretting, fuming, getting nowhere.
Mr. Ahuja missed the simple pleasure of the red emergency siren on his official car—a siren he’d misused gloriously to par
t the civilian seas of the city. The traffic in Delhi had in the last few months gone from awful to horrendous. The first phase of the Flyover Fast-Track was over, but the flyovers were yet to be opened. They’d been built and painted and even tousled with greenery; what they lacked was inauguration.
It was a problem of protocol, then. A flyover could not be officially opened unless a minister came with an army of cronies and a coconut, and then had one of the cronies smash the coconut on the tarred ramp of the overpass. Easy enough, except there were no free ministers to speak of. The Mohan Bedi–Rupa Bhalla Government, or the Sixth Front, collapsed soon after Vineet Yograj realized that Prime Minister Mohan Bedi, despite his childishness, could not be bought or manhandled—he was rich and burly—and so decided to withdraw support, which was why the ministers had better things to do than throw coconuts at concrete.
In the weeks of confusion and electoral horse-trading that ensued, the citizens of Delhi grew tired of driving, waiting, crashing, honking, screaming, and generally drumming their fingers on the boiling dashboards of their dented cars.
Then, one day, a few vigilantes, aided by an activist TV channel, arrived at the Godse Nagar Flyover, removed—with great and exaggerated heaving-and-hoeing—the yellow police barriers blocking the ramp, and drove their scooters and motorcycles up and down the ridged road.
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