Family Planning Read online

  And with Sangita—perpetually pregnant, constantly fertile Sangita?

  Sangita with her still-peculiar odor of mothballs and Tiger Balm? With her body oiled from the constant attentions of the massage-wali? With her thick left hand always pressed against the small of her back? Her old-person groans? Her almond-milk breath? Her chin acne? Her belly button upturned proudly? Her stomach fabulous and fragile, all at once?

  Yes. That was the problem. With Sangita, you couldn’t get past the details.

  Worse, Mr. Ahuja had never really tried. But thinking of Sangita had turned him on, and in a sudden rejuvenation of passion, he exited the study, walked to the nursery, knocked on the door, and entered.

  The nursery was a large whitewashed room with ten cots—three of which were full at present (Vikram: two months, Gita and Sonali: eleven months)—and the permanent fixture of Mrs. Ahuja sitting in the center on a stool, knitting. She was forty years old—the type of forty that led people to comment “You look too young to be sixty.” Her head was covered with a dupatta and she looked up for a brief instant. She was tall and had an imposing bun of black hair. She always wore gray saris during the day. The matronly cloth revealed a sideways curve of stomach cleavage. Streaks of silver hair fell across her face; her mouth was tightened into a hyphen in the manner of a woman who is terrified of her own luscious lips (only she had tiny, thin lips). A fan creaked overhead; the actor Amitabh Bachan muttered imprecations from the TV.

  The TV was placed in front of the window, an alternative natural light. Mrs. Ahuja hated natural light. The room smelled of saliva and Johnson & Johnson baby powder.

  Immediately Mr. Ahuja started bellowing. “What was Arjun doing here last night? Why was he coming here, tell me? I thought I told you he doesn’t need to look after the babies. He’s a grown man now—he shouldn’t be jumping from his bed the minute a baby makes a noise, correct? Are you listening?”

  He hadn’t initially intended to bellow. He’d meant to get on his knees before her and whisper inanities into the smooth rotunda of her stomach. But being back in the nursery, he’d been struck afresh by how perfectly horrible it must have been for his son to stumble upon his parents sprawled out on the floor, and his thoughts sputtered into puffs of irritation. He was his dark, bitter self again. He saw the reality of the situation in the form of a newspaper headline: MINISTER AHUJA PRO-POSES NEW BILL FOR SEX EDUCATION ON THE FLOOR OF THE HOUSE; BABIES TO BE EXPOSED AT YOUNGEST AGE POSSIBLE.

  “I am listening, ji,” said Mrs. Ahuja.

  Mrs. Ahuja did not raise her voice, partly out of habit, partly out of resignation, mostly on purpose.

  Mr. Ahuja, not hearing, continued. “Accha. Also, tell Shanti I want her to make me khichdi to take to office. I need to eat light food for lunch. Everyday these buggers at functions make me eat bloody heavy Kashmiri-type food.”

  “Ji, Shanti has left.”

  “Where has she gone?” Mr. Ahuja scowled. Then, in a graceful arc from irritation to affection, he lifted up baby Vikram and started cooing.

  “Home, where else?” said Mrs. Ahuja, casting off a stitch from her needles.

  “Why did she leave so suddenly?”

  Mrs. Ahuja mumbled, “She threw away the towels.”

  “So she was fired?”

  “Yes, ji.”

  Mr. Ahuja sighed. He put Vikram back in his crib and tickled his stomach. Then he turned to Mrs. Ahuja. “Darling, what is this you’ve done? Please explain this to me. What crime has she committed against you? Sangita, it is because of women like you that the servant-types will one day have a union. Whenever you feel like you fire them. Then you make my son do the work instead. You’ve made Arjun into a maid.”

  “The maid is not listening,” Mrs. Ahuja offered. “Today she tried to throw the towels I keep in the almirah.”

  “Arjun did this?”

  “She, ji.”

  “She who?” Mr. Ahuja threw up both hands.

  “The maid.”

  “You and your pronouns. Which one is this now?”

  “Shanti.”

  “I thought she was fired.”

  “She is,” said Mrs. Ahuja. “Because of towels—”

  “Hai Ram, Sangita. I’ve seen those towels. They’re completely ruined. They’re moth-eaten. They’re rough. They should be thrown away.”

  “Okay, ji,” said Mrs. Ahuja, rocking a little on her bamboo stool. “I was only trying to maintain the hygiene. You only said we needed the hygiene.”

  “HYGIENE?” coughed Mr. Ahuja.

  “Ji, when I am going to do toilet, after I have used mug sometimes there is still some cleaning required on buttocks. For that I am using towels. Hygienic it is—”

  “How many times have I told you: you don’t DO THE TOILET? You GO TO THE BATHROOM!”

  “Sorry—”

  “What sorry, Sangita?” said Mr. Ahuja. “My children are all speaking like you now. Please. Firstly, either speak Hindi or speak English. This in-between thing is stupid. None of this nonsense. Get rid of the towels. Bring the maid back. I don’t have time for this. And I thought I told you to throw these away,” he said, pointing to the oranges that sat on the windowsill. “These oranges—look at them, Sangita—they are all green. That is mold. That is bad for these babies breathing. Do you know that? Already all of them have asthma? Please, no more trying to save on these things.”

  “Okay, ji,” she said. She wiped her hands on a napkin. A pyramid of scrunched napkins lay on the plate behind her. “I’ll give them to Shankar’s family.”

  Shankar was their servant. Miraculously, he’d been their servant for a decade. All the other servants—and as a minister, Mr. Ahuja could have had an entourage of domestics—were dismissed within days of their hiring.

  Mr. Ahuja intervened. “Do no such thing. And please—I don’t want Arjun to do anything today. No diaper changing, no massage, no baby exercises. I need to talk to him today.”

  “Okay, ji,” she said.

  Then, hesitating, she gestured toward the household deity—the TV—and said, “He died.”

  “ENH?”

  “He died,” she said in Hindi. “Wo mar gaya.”

  “Tomorrow, kya? Eh?” he said. “Sangita, why would I say tomorrow when I am saying today? I want to talk to him today!”

  Mrs. Ahuja gave up.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE SUDDEN BRIDE

  WHAT COULD HE TELL HIS SON? Mr. Rakesh Ahuja wondered.

  Son, these things are normal in a family? Your mother loves babies and wants more and more? People have sex in this manner all the time—how else is it done in villages? Ahem, what exactly is a condom?

  He reclined in the back seat of his official Ambassador car, hypnotized by the driver’s constant and incoherent grumblings about a recent cricket match. He was on his way to work. His sense of sudden well-being was reinforced, no doubt, by the serenity of Delhi at 7:50 A.M. before 10 million people woke up, had their morning tea, and decided, in a mind-boggling coincidence, that today they would put their all into bringing the city within inches of utter ruin. The city’s roads at this hour—actually about the same temperature as just-burnt toast—looked cool and shady through the tinted glass. On the central island on the main road was an array of red pots with saplings that he hoped would bloom the year Rita—his second favorite after Arjun—turned seventeen, and he followed the island with his eyes till it disappeared under the largest permanent shadow in Delhi, the underside of the Secretariat Flyover, the most beautiful, complex sandstone monument this side of Rashtrapati Bhavan—its four arms and blossoming ventricles of greenery and the general curvature of the roads designed to look like a giant lotus from the air, so that when Mr. Ahuja rolled down the window he could feel in his dry throat the concentration and densification of life that the flyover would bring to the area when it opened three months from now.

  He secretly relished the fact that the space under flyovers provided housing for shanties and beggars and runaway children and the
homeless; he liked that you could grab the yellow railing and walk alongside the traffic, a thing unheard of in India; he saw the bowed columns and arches that held the entire structure aloft and was conscious of having recolonized the city.

  He was glad he had a city to save him from his personal embarrassment.

  No—he was glad the city hadn’t yet collapsed.

  He needed to discuss Rashmi with Arjun before he himself was subsumed by political problems. He’d been postponing the inevitable discussion for years, but today he’d almost barked the secret out at his son. This wouldn’t do: a proper father-son talk was needed.

  Mr. Ahuja closed his eyes as the car varoomed under the overpass, its belly sculpted like the chassis of a 747. Two wings of foliage dropped on either side; cool, corrosive dampness fumigated the car. Then they were out, and Mr. Ahuja was looking up and over his shoulder. A banner attached to the front of the flyover was fluttering precariously in the wind and asking a poignant question about AIDS, which actually turned out to be a poignant way of advertising the quiz-show Who Will Win One Crore Rupees?

  Everything about that first marriage to Rashmi had been plagued by contradictions—his initial wise-assed refusal to have an arranged marriage (he had shaggy hair and razor-sharp sideburns and an IIT degree in those days), his parents’ coy compromise (“Well, see some girls, you don’t have to marry them”) and his final defeat (marriage). He had chosen defeat. Rashmi was beautiful, a wispy Punjabi girl with cheeks that seemed curiously drawn in, and a nose that cast a perfect shadow on her upper lip. He saw her in his own house, both sets of parents looking on sheepishly as the boy and girl interacted mechanically and formally. After they left, he told his parents: “No, there’s no way I am going to have this nonsense arranged marriage.” He knew he was breaking their hearts; they were ailing, they wanted to see him settled. But he had pledged revenge on his parents and he couldn’t remember why—wasn’t it because they themselves had had an awful married life, because they had sent him away to boarding school, because their constant fighting had made him feel so insignificant, so ignored as a child?

  Later that day, however, he stooped over the gray, unwieldy phone in the verandah and listened for footsteps. Then he circled the phone. He cut wide arcs, then smaller arcs. Momentarily, he leaned against the bookshelf, whistling. Finally he swooped down on the damn thing and called Rashmi and asked her on a date and they went on a date and they went on many dates thereafter (all unknown to the four sheepish parents)—Rakesh gingerly holding her hand during the screening of Sharaabi; Rashmi leading him to a secret spot in Humayun’s tomb where they kissed over the musty coffin of a dead Mughal courtier; both ducking into the old communist haunts of Connaught Place and smoking cigarettes. He loved her for her indignation, her anger at the way New Delhi’s colonial airs distracted from the actuality of its massive slums—and her unwillingness to let that make her bitter or sad. She was the most earnest person he knew, and something of that earnestness played against his own sense of tragic irony, of rejection, and bloomed into romance.

  No one knew of this romance, least of all his parents who had given up hope for their son. To them, Rakesh appeared to be losing his mind. He had just finished his four years at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, earned a bachelor of science degree (with distinction!) in civil engineering—the most marriageable and marketable degree of his time—and now he wanted to do what? He wanted to enter the Indian Administrative Service, the IAS. The unimaginable: he wanted to shed the world of logical remuneration that had been planned for him, play the intellectual lottery of the civil service, become a babu. He wanted to shape cities, be a servant of the Public Works Department. Rakesh’s parents thought they had lost everything, and the exhaustion of keeping their only child on track as he veered away from them would have killed them if he hadn’t come in one day and said: “MamaPapa. I want to marry Rashmi.”

  He told them everything. His own revenge had failed him.

  Rashmi and Rakesh were married. The marriage had many highlights, yet nothing filled Rakesh with greater elation than sitting on the faux-throne during his wedding reception and having relative after relative come and pay obeisance (and cash, of course) to the stunning married couple. He liked sitting on the dais and hooking visitors with his eyes and then watching them proceed to greet him. It was a benign, harmless science, and yet—it required skill, to maneuver people, to engineer their fates in a way that was best for everyone. That was true engineering. Days later, he entered the room for the Administrative Service exam like a conqueror, smirking at the invigilator. But sitting at the desk, a married man, no longer a virgin, all he had were dreams of grandeur, images of gaunt architects poring over drafts of New Delhi and Chandigarh—his feet pattering alongside Rashmi’s through the perfect city. He was so in love that he failed the exam.

  Now, academically thwarted, he sent last-minute, desperate applications to American colleges. He was accepted by the BR Institute in Vermont for a PhD in civil engineering. It wasn’t the best program but he went anyway. Rashmi enrolled in a journalism program at the same school and Rakesh acquainted himself with the vast boredom of suburbia and the glimmering perfection of American design. He disliked America; he felt self-conscious being the only Indian in a hundred-mile radius; he wished he could be back among Delhi’s teeming millions. Even Rashmi, comfortable in any setting, felt lonely. And then, deep into their first white winter, their longing for India exaggerated, both unable to handle the desiccation of central heating, Rakesh joked, “It’s too cold in this country to do it with a condom.”

  Nine months later they had Arjun.

  Arjun changed everything. If before Rakesh had felt obligated to stay in America (he wanted to prove to his father that he was responsible), in Arjun he found the perfect reason to return home—didn’t they want their son to be Indian? Didn’t his grandparents want a part in bringing him up? How would Rashmi cope on her own? But, surprisingly, Rashmi was the one who wanted to stay. She wanted clean air for her son (Delhi had made her asthmatic), safe roads, crisp winters, an idyllic American childhood. Rakesh told her there was no such thing—that she enjoyed being an exotic foreigner too much. Immediately he felt bad. Immediately she reminded him that if it weren’t for him, they’d never have moved.

  “I’m going for a drive,” she added.

  They’d been arguing all day.

  “Look, I’m sorry.”

  “There’s no point being sorry,” Rashmi said. “You’ve ruined the day. It’s the one beautiful Sunday we’ve had in months and it’s ruined. You want complete control. If you don’t get it, you’re like a child. You start snapping.”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. You’re not exotic at all. You’re a homely convent educated girl with B.A. and fair and lovely skin.”

  “Rakesh!”

  “I’m only joking, darling!”

  “I’m only going for a drive.”

  Rakesh held her playfully at the door. “Look. The babysitter’s here. What will I do? What is a man to do in such a situation? How should a man in the twentieth century keep himself busy while his baby is sat?”

  She laughed. “You should propose to her and take her back to India. She’s fairer than I am. Your mom and dad will be pleased.”

  Eventually, after much cajoling, he made a deal with her that he be allowed to sit in the car as well, and Rashmi agreed on the condition that they wouldn’t exchange a word the entire time—if she went shopping in the mall, he’d shiver and quake in the parking lot with his hands thrust into his pockets; if she pulled into a gas station, he’d not be the least bit chivalrous and would in no situation offer to fill up the car and would instead fiddle with the knobs of the stereo like a distracted boy. Rakesh agreed to all these ridiculous terms because he’d always feared the worst from Rashmi’s angry solitary drives (she was willful but absentminded), and he felt better, as the object of her rage, being by her side.

  “You’re
too much, Rakesh,” she said. They’d been silent for a good twenty minutes and were slowing down by the mall.

  “I know. I know,” he said. Then he grinned. “So are you.”

  He also knew this was the end of the argument: she lay her hand on his; she had forgiven him; they were quits. Then Rashmi parallel-parked the car in a tight space on the narrow road with breathtaking skill and stepped out of the vehicle on the side of traffic and in doing so found herself in the direct path of a motorcyclist who had careened the wrong way down a one-way street; and with that, Rakesh’s time in America was over. The motorcyclist slammed straight into her and carried off in a whirling agglomeration not only Rashmi and three-fourths of the open door and a stack of magazines crammed into the driver-pouch but also managed to tilt (in the manner of water pushing open a sluice) the parked car away from the pavement so that Rakesh, who was stepping out from the passenger’s side at that very moment, was whooshed onto the ground, his head stunned by debris, his left eardrum punctured by a flake of glass, his palms bloodied by savage, cold concrete. The sun overhead was gorgeous and blinding and Rakesh sat up on the pavement and waited for someone or something to strike him down as well. Nothing happened; no one came for him. He was already struck down. The sun was maddening. For two hours he could make out nothing in the left ear, then the doctors worked a minor miracle and left him tolerably deaf. About Rashmi, though, nothing could be done. She had died on the spot.

  It would be incorrect to say Rakesh stopped functioning: if anything, relatives said he took the death very well, as best he could have—what else could the poor boy do? He disavowed America and all the promise it supposedly represented (the motorcyclist had died, too, a month later, never waking from his coma) and flew back to India with his son. He started living with his parents again in their cavernous Greater Kailash house, Arjun left to the devices of his grandmother while Rakesh brimmed with rage and hurled himself into politics with a newfound fervor. He knew it wasn’t his parents’ fault that he had fallen in love with Rashmi, even if they had introduced them—but he blamed them nevertheless. He blamed them for his disastrous temperament. He blamed them for the sharp tongue that sent Rashmi shooting out the door and into the car. He blamed them for their inhospitality and bad cooking, for not keeping a home in India that would have tempted Rashmi to return. He blamed them for their legacy of bad luck that wasn’t bad enough: Why else had he survived?