Karan Mahajan - Family Planning

Will you have some chai , they would say.

You are getting away from the point at hand.

But son, have we not been good parents? Did we not take you on the third of every full moon to the Delhi zoo from the special pass entrance?

No, you have given birth to me and led me to sadness, and now the only thing I can say to you is that I need an elephant in my life.

What about another wife?

Another wife?

They are better, no? Can be ridden too. Plus, less dung, less maintenance.

He had woken from his vision to the wailing of two-year-old Arjun — curled up in a tiny crib on the plane — and been ashamed that his vision had made no mention of Arjun and that already he was craving a new wife. He needed to remain single, wedded only to his memory of Rashmi. He had to live for the last surviving vestige of Rashmi — his son. He had to make money for Arjun’s sake and not descend into depression.

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.

MR. 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.