Family Planning (8 page)

But what could he do now that he had quit his PhD program?

Rakesh Ahuja crouched in the aisle seat of U.S. Airways Flight 232 and wept.

Thinking of Rashmi, Rakesh felt a flare of warmth shoot through his body. All his sexual instincts were reactivated. He
wanted to make love to this strange, unattractive, gutsy girl lying next to him on the hotel bed. He made her turn away from him, held her breasts, and entered her precisely; she said nothing, though he could feel little tender jabs along the line of her spine. He thought of Rashmi the entire time they made love. Once in a while, he said a soothing word.

The end result of all this—when they lay side by side again, fully clothed, after having washed up, taking turns in the bathroom, having nothing to say—was regret. He hadn’t used a condom, and this was a hideous way to make a girl lose her virginity, what did she think of him? He tried to be tender with her again, but her body reacted with stiffness. She fussily adjusted her pillow. She turned and flounced away as if they had been married for years. Rakesh wondered: Did she see him, as he saw himself now, as a monster? Or was she pleased that they were now stuck—that he couldn’t possibly leave her now. What if she was pregnant? And if they were stuck, did she know what she was in for? The type of person he was?

“I think you’re very pretty,” he said.

Here we go.

“Thank you,” she mumbled.

“Was that okay?”

“Yes.”

“Did you feel good?”

He was sitting up now, arms thrown around his knees.

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

He considered turning her over and kissing her.

“Yes.”

“Good,” he said.

“Good night,” she said.

“Good night.”

Soon she was asleep, curled away from Rakesh. He stayed awake for a few minutes, staring at the spiral striations left by the bangles on her bare arm. He kept thinking with a mixture of excitement and pity:
This is the strangest marriage of all time. We are in for a horrible life together. I will no doubt become worse with age. I’ve probably made her pregnant, and now I’ve lost all power and I will spend all my life trying to regain it. I’ll blame her for everything, as I blamed my parents. And then one day, I’ll no longer be a grieving widower. I’ll just be an awful husband. This girl’s life
, he told himself,
is finished.

He had given himself too much credit. In the morning, when he woke, she was gone.

M
R
.
AHUJA WAS SOON TO LEARN
about his eldest son’s band. It was past normal lunchtime and everyone was starving. He was sitting at the head of a long rectangular teak table that had been reinforced by two smaller tables at the ends. These two tables were at least six inches shorter than the main table, and so, to compensate for the makeshift extension, the taller Ahujas usually sat at the ends, carefully passing steel plates over the wooden drop. Today, however, everyone was concentrated toward Mr. Ahuja’s end. Mrs. Ahuja,
meanwhile, was missing, probably tending to the babies in the nursery. The children chewed boisterously. They stopped for an instant to acknowledge Arjun’s presence as he glided in on his socked feet, the last to arrive. Then they gobbled. That was one feature the family shared: they were a platoon of gobblers, consuming food with a speedy, scavenging relish.

“Hello, Arjun,” Mr. Ahuja said, not looking up from his plate.

“See I told you, Papa!” said Rahul. “He doesn’t have a pocket on his uniform shirt.”

“But it was
there once upon a time
,” argued Varun from across the table.

“Address your elder brother as
Arjun bhaiya
, not
he
,” said Mr. Ahuja.

“Sorry Papa,” said Rahul. Then again: “But I think some goondas must have torn up his pocket. I hear this is what they are doing in stupid schools like St. Columba’s. Everyone knows Modern School is the best school. Right, Varun?”

Varun and Rahul were students at Modern School (the Humayun Road branch).

“At least in Modern we don’t even make pockets for our shirts, ha? So much smarter. Why make something if it is going to be torn off by bullies?” said Varun.

Rahul continued, “I wonder if he went to the principal’s office and said, ‘Father, please, my pocket is torn.’”

“Then Father says—‘I am taking charity on you. Here is some money.’”

“And then what?”

“Then
bhaiya
must have said, ‘But sir, where shall I keep this money without a pocket?’”

The two of them laughed.

But Arjun wasn’t listening. He swiped a plate from the sideboard, lunged through the gap between Rita and Tanya (“Watch out, Arjun!” they shouted) and piloted the saucer from pot to pot (“Watch out, Arjun!” they shouted). The plate now heavy with food, Arjun walked, with a completely unnecessary swagger, to a spot across from his father, intensely aware of his own abrupt theatricality. He sat down. He shoveled food in an unbroken rhythm. He didn’t speak to anyone; no one spoke to him. He wanted to continue the silence until someone noticed the sullen beauty of his motions and initiated conversation, he wanted the crowd of children to see how things were done in real life, with silence and purpose and syncopation, that real men didn’t even consider the crowds swelling around them, they knew women were drawn to haughty sexy silences, that…

He leaned across the table and shouted: “Papa, I am in a rock band.”

Mr. Ahuja said, “Really? Great, if you’re comfortable in it.”

“Thanks, Papa,” said Arjun. He was unable to contain his incredulity. “Thanks a lot for your kind words.”

He speared his spoon through a mound of rice and rose from the table in a huff.

Watching Arjun leave, Mr. Ahuja felt defeated. What had he said now? The commingling of the other children’s voices was
not unlike that of a dying herd of cattle. His tough day found apt regurgitation in the shapeless and tasteless food his wife always served up—and she didn’t even cook! All she had to do was order the servants! The vegetable sellers came right up to their doorstep! Everyone wanted to sell to the Ahuja army! Yet the food—aalu-ghobi, tinda, daal—was a runny yellow mishmash, a marshland of masalas, it offered no visual solace to beaten taste buds. His kids seemed to enjoy it all the same—poor bastards. They didn’t know better, how could they? His wife was the highest index of quality they’d experienced. He’d left them in her clutches. He was an absent busybody father, a gene transmitter, a blur of power in their lives. He hadn’t even informed them that he’d resigned—such news took a huge toll on them, poor things, they had short memories, they cried angrily on their father’s behalf, badmouthed his political rivals, once Varun was hospitalized with a scalding fever.

Thanks to the food, Mr. Ahuja felt a little ill himself; he regretted sending the peremptory message to the SPM—his boss!—the one person who’d done so much for his political career. Still, what was done was done. He was here to talk to Arjun. He splashed his spoon into the yogurt bowl and decided to follow the boy to the nursery through the cramped house.

Arjun was standing before Mrs. Ahuja with one arm furiously rocking Gita’s crib.

Mrs. Ahuja, of course, was knitting.

“Mama,” said Arjun. “I can’t help you with the feeding today. I have to go practice with my band.”

Arjun knew Mr. Ahuja was listening, and so he delivered the statement as forcefully and dramatically as he could.

“Pass me the wool,” she said. “This sweater is to be made with two colors.”

Arjun had a vivid flash of his childhood: a prison with bars made of wool, huge knitted cobwebs blooming around the house. At night, the two rooms—each of which held five children—looked like a sighing coral reef, veins of yarn wrapped around each child. Their mother perpetually in the thrall of morning sickness, moving from pregnancy to pregnancy with such haste that there was almost no spot in the house where she
hadn’t
given birth. Luckily, Arjun only had to share a room with ten-year-old Rishi and twelve-year-old Varun.

“Mama! I cannot stay home today to feed the children,” Arjun shouted.

“Are you listening to your son?” Mrs. Ahuja said. “No sense of family he is having. One day in the week he is to help and even that he cannot do.”

Mr. Ahuja turned to Mrs. Ahuja. “Sangita! He is upset because you are making him wear short pants. Look how he is growing! Maybe you should knit for your elder children, have you ever considered this? He doesn’t have a pocket on his shirt. And he is wearing short pants. The other boys must be mocking him at school. Correct?”

“What?” they both asked.

“Are you not in short pants?” Mr. Ahuja asked.

“Papa, I am in a
rock band
.
A rock band
.”

“See, what animalistic way he is talking in already,” Mrs.
Ahuja said, casting off a stitch. “Soon he will have long hair and be chanting in Rishikesh with some babus.”

How did Mama know about the Beatles? This blew Arjun’s mind.

Mr. Ahuja was less impressed. “Arre! The boy is wanting to do something, so let him?”

“Pass me the wool, Arjun,” she said.

Arjun was upset and did as he was told. But the way he handed his mother the ball of yarn—letting it drop into her lap, unspooling in the air—was his way of saying:
Why can’t you argue more with me? Why can’t you beg me to stay? Why can’t you say to him—I can’t bring up so many children alone, I need Arjun?
After all, in the past, he had been on duty
daily
. He had been the head constable who kept the peace. He loomed over the children while Sangita fell asleep under the smooth spell of the massage-wali; learned to hip-hold a child the right way before he learned to grip a cricket bat; never wore a shirt that wasn’t acid-washed by yellow drool; always agreed to sprawl out on the carpet and roll dinky cars along a distracted baby’s line of vision; taught each of the children to suck their respective thumbs (he’d demonstrate for hours on end, glug-glug-glug, claiming thumbs tasted like chocolate) in order to allow for a little silence in the house; instilled a fear of ghosts to keep them glued to their beds at night; covered up for Sangita when she set fire to one of the (baby-free) cribs with a candle she was carrying to her makeshift shrine; and even made polite conversation with her about her favorite TV shows.

Then, inexplicably, a year ago, he’d been relieved of his post, forced into retirement, replaced by Varun and Rita, and now he missed being in charge. If his Mama wanted him on duty only once a week, she couldn’t have him at all.

Arjun stormed out of the house, the screen door crackling behind him. His parents didn’t even care that he had a secret life. They could never be shocked out of their complacency. He could have become the most famous rock star in the world, he could have had three #1 hits, a Grammy-nominated album that the critics called the “enraged embodiment of Indian teenage life at the outset of the millennium”—he might even have flared through the countryside on a grand tour (at this moment, he paused and imagined himself on a stage with a mountain of amplifiers stacked sky-high behind him, the stage a shiny gray soon to be dulled by a rainstorm of pink panties, the microphone shivering with all the delicacy of a phallus caught in fellatio and the giant sea of heads floating beneath him like hairy algae, among them only one face visible, one beaming almond-shaped face)—Aarti’s face. He was the most famous rock star in the world and Aarti knew it. He imagined Aarti standing in the front row at a concert, both of them staring sweetly at each other.

Keeping the vision before him at all times (he saw her like the afterimage of a light bulb, in purple), he took an auto to Ravi’s place and clutched the guardrail tight. Minutes after he arrived, Anurag and Deepak breezed into the driveway in a Santro, guitars strapped on their backs at diametrically oppo
site angles so as to produce the effect of bad-ass symmetry. They walked into Ravi’s tiny room for a conference.

“You won’t believe what happened today, yaar,” said Ravi.

“What, yaar?”

He narrated an unlikely story involving an ice cream seller, a traffic light, and a hot babe.

“Then?”

“She totally winked at me.”

“Cool. Can we start with ‘Summer of ’69’?” Arjun asked.

“Bryan Adams?” said Deepak. “You’re being a metrosexual now?”

“We are only playing Metallica style tunes here,” echoed Anurag.

“But I am the lead singer!” said Arjun. “I provide the emotion. I cannot provide emotion from a song by people who eat—who eat rust for fun.”

“Oh, that’s a good line for a song. Or title.
Eat Rust for Fun
,” said Ravi, defending Arjun.

“Exactly!” said Anurag. “For a Metallica song!”

They settled on Bon Jovi as an acceptable compromise.

At first that day, the tunes of the band were only fleeting bouts of melody, wisps of song that arose from the (clearly random) intersection of instruments. The beat seemed to throb beneath the guitars, but then when the guitars went awry the beat was all you heard, the song became nothing but Arjun screaming past the pounding of percussion and you had to start all over
again and you’d stop singing and the guitars would stop going, and only the stupid drummer, stupid self-hating Ravi, would keep thrashing away. It was as if he had decided already, obviously, that
he
was the center of the band or, if not the center, then at least the backbone and you know, time and tide and Ravi’s drums waited for none, so you’d just have to kind of sit there till the boy had had his share of showing off. It was his house. They couldn’t say anything.

Instead, they sweated the same sweat and ran afoul of each other; blamed each other for not using enough Ax Spray; at one point Ravi walked in from the bathroom and misted his bedroom with deodorant, leaving a damp residue on the walls which dilated and contracted with the same ominous intensity as monsoon seepage. As for the boys, their eyes stung as they leaned into the PC and tried to swipe tabs and chords off the Internet. What was band-width but the breadth of experience a band could copy-paste off the Internet? What was evolution but homing in on the easiest songs? Clapton was out; so were The Eagles; so was Metallica. Bands like Staind and Oasis and Bryan Adams and Steppenwolf were stripped down to a mere progression of power chords, their song-length magic fissioned into tiny fragments that Deepak bombarded over and over with his Stratocaster, his feet clocking out a number of effects from the amp. In particular, he focused on the whoosh of the
UNDER-WATER
pedal.

Like any real band at its first practice session, about three-fourths of the time was spent fussily tuning the guitars and screwing in the loose plates of the drum kit. This gave Arjun
plenty of time to study the lyrics. He logged onto the Internet for inspiration. He wanted to track down every last bit of Bryan Adams trivia that Google.com could muster. Wrists tensed in parallel, he was disturbed to find that every American site mocked him—firstly, and Arjun thought, rather unfairly, for being Canadian, and secondly, for being “schmaltzy.” A sonata of solidarity sparked into the keyboard from Arjun’s hands. He searched selectively for fan sites. He looked up the meaning of
schmaltzy
. It didn’t exist on WordLocator. (He had misspelled it.) He lost respect for the slangy denigrators. Still the evidence kept accumulating. Bryan Adams figured at #49 in a list of “100 Most Common Reasons Couples Break Up.” There was a site started by a Swede who’d been rescued from the verge of suicide by Bryan’s life-affirming hits album
So Far So Good
(“It cuts like a knife/ oh yeah / but it feels so right” being the operative lines here) but had now, with the accrued knowledge of “so many years, tears, and fears,” realized that perhaps it was better to
commit suicide
than be a Bryan Adams fan. “Certainly, one receives more respect when one undertakes the former rather than the latter,” the final line of the opening page stated.

Distasteful parody, Arjun thought. He posted a few angry comments on the site’s message board.

1stly I don’t belive yr Swedish. Swedes are respectable people, committing suicide with or w/o music. You are American. 2ndly, why commit suicide? Pls give your address/phone and I will
gladly use the reel of my destroyed tape of 18 Til I Die to fish out your intestines via your mouth, okay? Death guaranteed, promise.

 

Further, before you commit suicide to end your “hard knock life” here is a picture of me.