Karan Mahajan - Family Planning

Arjun had expected the negotiations to temporarily break down at this stage, with Rahul and Tanya using their leverage to threaten inaction, to say “no,” but instead they had just one bewildered response: “Why?”

Why, why, why? Why go to such lengths to court a woman? Exactly? Why not pause the lie where it was, let Aarti think you were in a band, ask her to come home, and not bother with the amateurish formality of actually playing? Why not just persist with the slow cadences of dialogue on the bus, win her with the tired complaining about school that drew people together on the ride home? Why not one day touch her hair as she thrust her head out of the bus window into the hot oven of the day? Feel a strand of her black shiny mane twanging between your fingers like a guitar string? And then know, gosh, this is nothing like a guitar string, this is not sharp or metallic or callous-inducing, why did I bother with that when I could have had this all along? Yes, why have a band and a concert and the dire hullabaloo of your brothers and sisters?

Was it because you were ashamed. Was it because the more you talked with the girl the more you were exposing yourself to scrutiny. You didn’t want the girl to know that you were concentrating all your energies on the magnetic whirl of her eyes. You didn’t want the girl to feel so special that she would then be superior to you, and therefore not want you at all. Even though she was superior to you: you who were just a liar praying not to be found out, a boy who invented a band to be special — for your sake, not Aarti’s, if you had wanted her purely you would have leaped after her like an exposed wire, willing to face the risk of emotional electrocution. Not padded with the plastic of prevarication. These selfish lies.

“Don’t tell anyone? Promise? I’m only telling you two. Don’t tell anyone, okay? No, yaar, seriously? You swear on Mama? Okay. I want to impress a girl on my bus,” Arjun told Rahul and Tanya. It wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the whole truth either. He wanted to be the center of attention, that was it, and it would be a huge added bonus if this attention included Aarti’s rapt stare.

Arjun was shocked at the results. All his siblings obliged readily, making phone calls to their friends. The only other thing the children were so united in was their awe and admiration for their Papa, builder of flyovers, savior of constituents, handshaker of prime ministers and presidents, all of whom visited the house occasionally. Each child thought (and this would last only a short while, Arjun knew) that he or she was the only one who knew why Arjun bhaiya was having a concert. Each was touched that a person in a position of such power (the oldest! by four years!) would risk such vulnerability. After all, the prospect of girlfriends and boyfriends was usually treated with bouts of teasing in the Ahuja household. The teasing was a Newtonian phenomenon, an equal and opposite reaction to the taciturn way the children dealt with members of the other sex. If you didn’t tell you had a girlfriend, and someone found out, well, then you deserved to be teased till you broke up with her, goddamn it!

Arjun’s admission was different, though — more thoughtful, more mature, an unblemished secret worth sharing.

RAKESH NEVER SHARED with anyone what happened on the night of his second marriage.

They had circled the fire, and then Rakesh had led the girl away and almost thrown her into the back of the waiting nuptial car. In the back seat, he stared at her angrily.

“I’m sorry. There’s been a mistake,” she said. “I should get out. I’m sorry, I was forced only. She forced me.”

He interrupted, “Who the hell are you?”

She had a stirupped posture and a moon-shaped face and a muddy complexion and full cheeks and eyebrows that looked permanently raised and plucked. She looked like a black cat, in other words. Later, he realized this formulation was all wrong. There was nothing at all sly about her.

“Sorry, ji, I should leave,” she said. “Sorry. Please. Let me leave only. Sorry.” She was weeping now. The driver continued staring straight ahead, but Rakesh could see the muscles at the back of his neck throbbing; his brain was busy stenographing the gossip.

“Don’t be dramatic,” he shushed. “We are now married. You are my good wife. I am your good husband.”

She understood. She smiled fakely and turned her head away and held up both arms and let the giant slinkies of her bangles slide down to her elbows. When they arrived at the hotel, she continued holding her arms up, as if Rakesh were prodding her forward with a gun.

In the hotel room he screamed at her. “Who the fuck are you?”

Her entire moon-face flinched and fluctuated, as if she expected him to slap her. “Ji, I am Asha’s sister only,” she said. “I am very sorry, truly. Please kick me out. I was forced. She forced me. Divorce me. I’ll fall at your feet.”

She fell at Rakesh’s feet in a great din of gold.

“Don’t be hysterical,” he said. “Sit.”

She sat down on the bed, cross-legged. She looked like a pagoda.

“You: What were you doing there?” he snarled. “Did you think—?” Then he started rattling off a long list of disgraces he would hurl upon her family. He’d divorce her. He’d spread rumors in Delhi high society. He had contacts in the newspaper. He’d sell the scandal to the Times of India . Of course they’d be biased toward him.

He realized that he himself was hysterical. To cover up, he said again, “Don’t be hysterical.”

“Sorry,” she said. She looked bored. She bit her nails. Her eyebrows blessed her with a permanent look of condescension. This irked Rakesh, and she must have read this because she added, “Ji, please forgive. I didn’t think that you — that you would finish the marriage only. I thought you would—”

“Never mind that,” he snapped. “First you tell me. What the fuck were you doing there?”

She was silent.

“Okay fine. Do it your way—” He was pleased at how American he sounded. “Then let’s at least have sex.”

He thought this would get her to tell the story, but instead she complied. What type of trap was this? he wondered. What type of good Indian virgin complied so easily? Or maybe she was desperate to get rid of the heavy decorations of gold that she’d been sweating beneath? Regardless, he couldn’t believe the nerve of the woman. Within seconds she sat naked, cross-legged before him. Only her impressive bangles remained bunched at her elbows.

He admired nothing. There was nothing in her body to admire.

He took off his clothes in a careless choreography: an uninterested, you-leave-me-no-choice sort of way. His pants he kicked aside; the Nehru jacket slipped off with a flex of his shoulders.

But as he sat cross-legged before her, awkwardly, he couldn’t achieve an erection. The girl and he looked like two naked people doing naked yoga; you could see it in the side mirror. The view of his failure made Rakesh doubly mad. If a woman was going to trick him, he thought, she might as well be attractive.

That was when Rakesh slapped her.

She started to cry again: he felt brutal, ugly, awful.

She was sobbing now in great malarial spasms; her jewelry was rustling and grinding like ancient machinery; she raised the back of her right hand to her eyes but the hand itself was trembling, ineffectual, and Rakesh watched with perverse fascination as her tongue shot out to divert the goo of tears and makeup and snot dripping down her face. Then he rescued her. He reached for her and pulled her down by her bare shoulders onto the bed. He lay next to her, stroking her hair. Both of them stared at the ceiling. In the side mirror it looked like Rakesh was dusting a jacket rather than stroking the black hair of his sudden bride.