Family Planning (14 page)

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.

“SUNIL! This is hardly a time to do these things. You know I am getting late—does this have to be done today?”

“Sir, forgive me—the wasps were making this their headquarters too. Sometime I had to kill them. I got on a ladder when you were resigned and burned them. So long it has still taken. Can you imagine? The bastards were sitting inside even as it was burning…”

Mr. Ahuja wasn’t listening and couldn’t hear anyway. From the large bay windows of the corridor, he was aware of a sound that had a much lower register than the collective buzzing of wasps. He looked out to the road in front of the ministry.

Nearly two hundred middle-aged women—armed with silver spoons and plates—were chanting something and moving
slowly in the direction of the Ministry of Prime-Time, a massive slab of exposed concrete. Rakesh leaned out of the arched bay window and was assailed by a trade wind’s-worth of coconut hair oil; he felt faint. The woman four stories below walked like Sangita—thumping loosely from side to side, each step like a tree being uprooted, then caught in some kind of environmental debate and thrust back in just a few centimeters ahead. Mr. Ahuja placed his palms on the cool bricks and ran his fingers down the rough crevices between them. To watch a crowd eat away and corrode the city’s infrastructure, to feel—even from a distance—the liters of sweat being lost for a ridiculous cause and to rise several stories above the conical boom-range of the loudspeaker, this seemed to Mr. Ahuja to be the point of living. He always wanted to be this close to mass action. He wanted to join this noncooperation movement. He wanted, for a moment, to tell these women that he—yes,
he
—would be the new Mohan Bedi, that he would negotiate the steps of the ministry and become the first man to join the Aunties, and in truth, he’d only be doing it for the crowd. Perhaps that was why TV had no appeal for him; when he was on TV giving interviews, the masses watching were abstract glitches and sparks on antennas jutting illegally from rooftops all over the country. He couldn’t feel them. So he focused his vision now on the bobbed heads and the sagging banners—and that was when a face turned up at him in a flash and became Sangita. Or he thought he saw Sangita. She had been right there. He leaned farther out of the window, aware of a wasp having snipped at his neck. There, between the woman who was carrying a little
boy on her shoulders and the other one who was talking on her cell phone and winding her dupatta around her fingertip even as the rest of the women screeched insults at the Ministry of Prime-Time. Would Sangita dare come out into this heat and risk a stampede when she was carrying his child? Would she actually forklift and airdrop her large self into the scene of such elbow-to-elbow action?

A thread of mango in his teeth tantalized his tongue; his fingers were striped with the pressure marks of skin against brick. He knew the answer was
no
—Sangita never even visited the vegetable market—but he felt the same unease he felt when he sat up at night with a great twitch in his left leg, the traffic outside a pulmonary roar, and remembered that Sangita could easily betray him and tell Arjun the secret whenever she wanted. At that moment his thoughts would go dense and sticky; he’d look at her half-open mouth and the expanding whorl of a polio injection on her shoulder and remind himself that she owed him everything, that in all these years he’d never sunk into true cruelty, that despite her ugliness he’d never sent her packing off to Dalhousie or confronted her parents or headed out in search of the girl he’d actually been shown on that beautiful and hopeful day in the hills months before the wedding that ruined his life.

A
T THE HOSPITAL ARJUN WATCHED
as Ravi called his father and explained—in quick breaths—what had happened. Arjun was secretly glad
he
hadn’t been driving; he didn’t want to involve his father in this. Fathers were prone to push situations to their natural extremes, undoing any reactionary restraint or compensatory aggression their sons may have learned. Ravi’s father, it turned out, was in the former category: he knew no restraint. His arrival five minutes later spun a fairly controlled situation into a tizzy. He shouted at everyone. He wore glasses that skidded down his shark-fin nose. He made Ravi sit down on a chair in the tiny waiting room and scolded him to the point of tears. He asked Ravi
why he didn’t look when he drove. He was a tense man and he had come expecting a fight, and he was upset to find none. He couldn’t handle the fact that everyone had been awfully
nice
to the boys.

For instance: when they’d arrived, the ward had been full of young women who’d slit their wrists in solidarity with Mohan Bedi, but the nurse had noted Arjun’s hysteria and made extra space for the girl, ushering her into a white cuboid of fluttering curtains. The girl, too, had been relieved. She was strapped down on a stretcher, begging for painkillers. She kept talking between moans, saying again and again it was her fault—the boys were very nice, her cell phone was okay, wasn’t that proof? Doctors went at her bones with flat hammers and found nothing. Tissues were damaged, mitochondria were impaired with asphyxiation, no bones were broken. Tests were summoned. Then the girl’s parents—two globular specimens, slow-moving victims of diabetes and arthritis, people used to being slowly killed, out of place in the spotless clean white-lit accidental aftermath of the fancy emergency room—arrived and started dumbly text messaging their friends and family. They didn’t know quite what to do with themselves; the woman’s salwar swished the floor; the father stroked his chin and sagged on the side with which he carried his briefcase, telling Ravi that there was nothing to worry about. He had no interest in litigation. The girl was okay, that was what mattered. They were decent people.

Now. A smart father would have taken one look at this
propitious situation, gathered up the boys, and dashed through the exit. A smart father would have made sparkling promises to the girl’s parents, gotten down on his knees, and gifted them a dud contact number. A smart father would have avoided the inevitable chitchat with the policeman who would register the accident. Failing this, a smart father would take the policeman aside and thrust a folded one-thousand-rupee note into his grubby hand. A smart father would not argue with authority.

Arjun knew because he
had
a smart father. Genetic impulses propelled him to intervene. “Uncle, the receptionist said the police-wallah is coming. It’s better if we go before. Ravi doesn’t have a license.”

Mr. Mehta stopped scolding Ravi for a second; he pushed his gold-rimmed glasses to their summit. “The person who was
hit
is saying nothing is wrong. What is the problem?”

“Please bribe the police, Dad,” Ravi implored.

“No. Nonsense,” said Mr. Mehta, lifting both palms skyward in rage. “The people you hit don’t want to press charges. You expect me to
bribe
? All my life I have lived in this country.” He paused, rescued his glasses from tipping off his nose. “And not once have I bribed.” (He was lying.) “This everything-goes attitude of yours is no good, Ravi.”

Everything goes, my foot
, thought Arjun. He wished Ravi would be more persuasive.
But, Dad, I don’t have a license. I’ll have to go to jail. I won’t be able to get into college abroad. Please, Dad. These things matter to Harvard and all. Even if I have a 1500
SAT they won’t take me with a criminal record. Please, let’s bribe the police-wallah.

But Ravi was gutless before his father. “Sorry, Dad. But please?”

“This is all part of growing up only,” continued Mr. Mehta, wagging his index finger at Ravi. “When I was ten, my father used to send me on all sorts of errands. I had to even go to the butcher shop and buy meat—have you seen how filthy those shops are? I used to go alone to Garhi. Awful, awful place. Flies everywhere. They also expect you to bribe if you want non-fly meat. I told them go to hell. I’ll eat flies. I was only ten remember. But even then I knew: better to eat flies than to feed money to people. And then I came back home with halal meat, and you know what your grandfather did? He slapped me. Slapped me straight across the face,
chaaapppatt
. Nowadays everyone wants you to be a softie. But I tell you, slaps work best. I never got bloody halal meat again—”

“But, Dad, I started driving because you wanted me to,” said Ravi. “You wanted me to run errands.”

“How is this relevant?”

“Sorry, Dad.”

And that was that.

Arjun—nurtured on arguments, on talking back to his father—felt the full weight of Ravi’s defeat as his friend balanced his head in two shaking palms. The perspective was chastening. Arjun felt bad that he’d been ornery with his own father. The regret was also convenient: Arjun needed to involve Mr. Ahuja
before sanctimonious Mr. Mehta landed them in more trouble. He excused himself to make a phone call and, in doing so, missed out on a conversation between Mr. Mehta and the beat policeman that would have caused him severe palpitations.

The policeman was tapping his case register on his knee in a steady rhythm. He asked to see Ravi’s license.

“I don’t have it,” said Ravi. “It fell down.”

“How old are you?” said the policeman.

Before Ravi could lie, Mr. Mehta said, “Sixteen.”

“Sixteen?”
the policeman wheezed. “Sixteen and driving?”

“Everyone does it,” said Mr. Mehta.

“Yes, yes. Everyone does it. You will have to come to the police station,” he said to Ravi. “You are a minor, you are illegally driving, and you have hit someone. You have almost taken a life. Now please come. Let us go.”

“You want money?” Mr. Mehta griped.

“That’s not how you bribe!” said Ravi.

The policeman paced about the waiting room. He was a hassled man with two glistening velvet pouches of hair around either ear and a handkerchief with which he mopped his umbrage-taking forehead, the eyebrows pulsing upward as if to capture and harvest the sweat pouring down—and right now he was in a philosophical mood. “Whether I want money or not is irrelevant. In the long run, yes, of course, I would like money. Who doesn’t like money? But, at present moment, both of my daughters are married. I do not plan to have more children except by accident. Hence I am not presently needing
money. I am looking for glory. Making arrests is glory. Now, if you resist, I will be even more glorious. So, please, just come quietly. You are in the wrong. I have the law on my side.”

Arjun, still on the cell phone, overhearing this last bit, turned around in horror, and said, “One second—can we wait please? A witness is coming. Please. Please. Please.”