Family Planning (12 page)

T
HE FOUR BOYS LEAPED INTO THE CAR
with a newfound sense of camaraderie: Ravi giddyupping his Hyundai Santro with abrupt gear shifts; Anurag in the passenger seat with his elbow dangerously V-ed out of the car; and Deepak persisting in looking dopey and bemused beside Arjun. All of them were under age and illegal; driving age was eighteen. They filed into an endless queue of cars, rolled the windows down, joined the slow pilgrimage to lung cancer.

Arjun was in a grand mood now. He tapped Ravi on the shoulder and said, “Yaar—none of this shorts-wearing business when we do a concert, okay? No one wants to see your hairy legs, understood? We’ll wear black. Since we are dark.
Let’s all wear black pants. And maybe we can have our pockets pulled out?” He demonstrated. “See? Looks kind of cool, yeah? Every band has to have a specific fashion style. Bono has those fundoo shades. Metallica has leather. Shania Twain has a belly button.”

“She also has a pussy,” Anurag noted. “That I was—”

“You too?” asked Deepak, solicitously. “She has no self-respect or what.”

Arjun shushed them. “Shut up, you idiots. Are you listening? Pockets should be out. It looks like your legs have ears. Or your hips are shitting.”

“Since when have
you
started protecting Shania, yaar,” asked Anurag in his slow drawl. “What is she to you—a sister?”

“Good job singing Bryan Adams,” Ravi muttered. “Did you know Shania Twain and your lovely Bryan Adams have the same producer? And that Shania is married to that producer? Shania banged by Mutt Lange.”

Such lascivious recounting of rock history was a strange counterpoint to the utterly sexless action unfolding on the other side of Ring Road as they approached the Moolchand Flyover. All four boys turned to look. Three huge flanks of sari and salwar-kameez-clad women—there must have been at least fifty in all—were milling about excitedly as if at a Saturday bazaar; huge spurts of dust jetted up from around their legs into the awfully dry April evening. The concentration of women was particularly dense under the lone laburnum tree by the road side, its yellow flowers burning brightly overhead
in some sort of twilight vigil. A slight parting of their bodies revealed a giant portrait of a young rosy-cheeked man. It was propped against the trunk of the laburnum. The women approached one by one, bent their covered heads with respect, and then carefully strung garlands of marigolds around the frame.

The other ladies sang and beat their chests and shed fat tears on the sidewalk.

Anurag rolled down his window and hooted.

“Don’t do that, duffer,” said Deepak.

“Someone important died or what?” said Anurag.

“You’re an idiot man,” said Deepak. “Even if it’s not important. You hoot when someone dies?”

Arjun shrugged. “That TV star died, yaar. Mohan Bedi, yaar. I think it’s him.”

“Who the hell is Mohan Bedi?” Ravi asked.

The answer came in the form of a neck-breakingly sudden lurch of the car, both Ravi and Anurag thrown head-first (they weren’t wearing seat belts, were too manly for that) into the windscreen while Arjun and Deepak spilled forward into a fetal crouch, the four boys’ heads already aching from what they’d seen: a girl, some girl, hitting the front of the car and literally
flying
—arms and legs propellered in a blur around her—ten feet from the island on which she’d been standing before she mistakenly stepped out onto the main road. Luckily, as she lay on the ground, her purse and cell phone thud-thud-thudding on the road beyond, no cars sped ahead to finish the job. It was rush hour
and miraculously no vehicles were coming her way. Ravi had braked just in time. This had saved him from cracking his skull; ditto Anurag. They got out of the Santro with hands massaging their own necks. The road was hot and bloodless: the girl wasn’t bleeding! She was their age, Arjun noticed as he stepped out of the car. She was lying on her back, her jeans torn, scooterists dodging around her broomlike hair—but she wasn’t bleeding! Everyone, Arjun included, was approaching the girl with the absurd plea of
shit shit shit
. Hello, dying person, shit shit shit! He didn’t even notice that all the men and women on the other side of the road had rushed over and that he, Arjun, was about to be flattened in a stampede of Jurassic Park proportions. He was jostled out of the way. The girl was surged forward like a crowd-surfer in a concert; a hundred hands off-loaded her onto the sidewalk, two other hands, someone’s charitable hands, laid her purse and cell phone next to her. This was a poor country, but people would astound you again and again with their lack of greed: Arjun and Ravi and Anurag and Deepak, richie-rich, young, so central to the tragedy, had become spectators.

They were standing on Ring Road with five cars honking at them, asking them to move,
what are you doing, please move your Santro, do you realize it’s in the middle of the road?
In fact, Arjun
did
, and he was transfixed by the thought that for every second he stood on Ring Road like a fucking stooge, the delay was sending spasms backward all through the city, ignit
ing tempers at traffic lights, so that when a man left work at six o’clock to return to his wife, son, daughter, it would take him an hour longer than usual—an hour in which anything could happen—you could lose someone you loved, vital organs could fail. But the girl wasn’t dead.

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.”

M
R. 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 the 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.