Karan Mahajan - Family Planning

Rakesh shook his head. “Nice, my foot. You know what they are probably saying right now? I don’t know where Rakesh picked this maid. She can’t even speak good English.”

He seemed to take immense pleasure in the description.

The trouble from the start was sex. She wanted to have sex and she wanted the world to know she was having sex. Denied. Rakesh never touched her again till she was significantly pregnant. He cooed at Arjun and collapsed at night, tired, heatstruck from rallies. His feet and arms twitched while he slept, as if to shake off any contact with Sangita. Sangita quickly exhausted all her techniques: tying her dupatta so it angled deftly past a nipple, wearing a flimsy blouse with the top button broken, cocuddling Arjun with Rakesh.

This last “technique” irritated Rakesh the most, and one night, when he returned from a campaign in Himachal, he turned to Sangita and said, “Put him down.”

Sangita had been holding Arjun up by the armpits to Rakesh and saying, “Say hello to your Papa. Hello, Papa.”

Rakesh repeated, “Put him down. Can’t you see he wants to be put down? This is not a humorous matter. I am going to lose the election. I’ve been wasting my time. You have also been wasting your time. He is not your son. He is not going to be your son. When he can say more words, I’m going to tell him about his mother and then he won’t care for you or thank you for these things you are doing, understand?”

But she didn’t want to be thanked. She had immense affection for the child. She’d spent all day cooking kheer for Arjun and singing him songs and shampooing his gorgeous curly hair, and she’d gladly have done this even without the promise of sex.

I understand your hurt, she wanted to say. But please don’t do this to me. Please understand. I love your son like my own. But how could she? Instead, Sangita watched Rakesh lie bareback on the marble floor, his head spasming against the cold hard surface. Later that night, he slid under the bed and wept, and even from above, half-awake, she could feel the soft thunder of his throat as he tried to control another outburst of tears. His hand poked out from the shadows like a baby’s fist, unreasonably tight. Every so often, his head would hit the boards and there would be silence, as if he had died for a few minutes, acknowledged his own ostrichlike comedy, and gone silent with self-consciousness. And Sangita, who was humped down on the bed with grief, would think then: Why will you not let me see you? Why, why, why?

God granted her this wish to see in the most spiteful way: Rakesh won the election. He became obsessed with himself. Now he couldn’t stop boasting about his success. “I’d never thought a man of my background could be in politics. Funny thing it is, eh? Most of these people are not even Class-10-pass. Did you pass Class-10? Good, good. Sometimes I feel bad that my Hindi is not good. But then I just start saying how America is terrible, and the buggers all listen — because I’ve lived in America! Because I am an outsider they are all more trusting!”

Sangita proudly and dutifully broadcast this information to the two friends she had made in the neighborhood.

What she couldn’t handle or broadcast, however, was Rakesh’s reverence for Rupa Bhalla, the head of the SZP Party. She was his mentor. He was positively lovelorn. “Rupa Bhalla — what an amazing woman she is. Her husband died and one month later she is taking the party to victory. Really. You heard, nah? He was run over by an advanced harvester. What a brilliant lady, I tell you. She is like a second mother to me. You can talk to her about anything. She is so self-aware also. She told me: ‘Rakesh, I am sorry you also have to drink the rosewater I dip my feet in, I feel as if I am the leader of a religious cult.’ And I said: ‘Madam, that is exactly what you should appear like!’”

This last line elicited verbal revenge from Mrs. Ahuja. She said, “I don’t know what is happening — the potty Arjun is making these days is shaped like those cheap bananas which are green. Can you explain, ji?”

If he could talk about his day, she could too.

These descriptions of Arjun’s bowel movements became more and more graphic until one day her own imagery (“Today, Arjun did susu five times, and one time it was white, the other time yellow and smelled like old aalu-ghobi”) made her throw up. They discovered she was pregnant.

Rakesh took full credit for this, as usual. “I can’t believe I did it once with you and—”

But a strange thing happened. Either because he was enamored of his virility, or because he knew Sangita’s mother wasn’t around to dole out maternal comfort, or because her nipples started to darken and her face began to fill out — Rakesh was suddenly attracted to her.

Sangita thought it was her enlarging breasts. She was certain it was the breasts. That’s what he touched and admired first, even before the stomach.

The sexual obsession that followed was financed by a series of power cuts in the muggiest of Octobers, the room so sticky and corrupted by shadows that there was nothing to do but partake in the climate, add to it, steam things up , as it were. Rakesh and Sangita went at it from their respective peaks. Everywhere in the bedroom, clothes fluttered to the ground, lay there in troubled piles, the servant was given free tickets to the movie, outside a shawl seller put the full weight of his body into the doorbell, and still the only sound inside was that of a strange hatching, the stripping of Sangita from sexless to sexy, the shrilling of the doorbell (the power was back) like a kettle you purposely choose to not turn off, the water lost to evaporation, the cool drying after you have made love. She lay on her back, glistening. She lay on her side, watching. His hands around her, a spastic garland for her stomach that she could shrug off any second. Replace with a tantrum. Kick and sob like the baby inside her. But then Rakesh, naked, would stand on the bed to step over her, his head about to be lopped off by the ceiling fan, his foot askance on her rounded stomach, pressing down as if prodding for life — was he going to crush the baby? Was he going to erase the proof of love she carried inside her? Why was he asking for the baby’s name? His foot was a crab on the swept beachhead of her stomach. This suspense sent tingles all the way to the far posts of her body: the Vs of her toes, the reddening tip of her chin, the cove of the back. This suspense was a series of hard twitches leading up Rakesh’s thigh. This suspense always ended (they were back in bed again, his hands on her swollen ankles) in sex.

Arjun was still too young to open the door.

Mrs. Ahuja had never been happier. She soon gave birth.

The pregnancy and birth had been surprisingly painless (no morning sickness, a peculiar craving for grapes), but seeing the baby utterly depressed her: he looked like a jaded movie star that had emerged on a short smoke-break from the womb. He was brown and had a wrinkly forehead. The name Varun she picked because it was the closest she could get to the name Arjun without picking Arun , which was too close.

Her depression was alleviated slightly when people came to greet them from all over Delhi. She took deep pleasure in Rakesh’s praise (“she was so relaxed the whole time, such a good wife”), and in the guests’ compliments, and in the way Rakesh chatted and hooted (“Yograj saahb! How is the good wife!”) with men he’d claimed to hate with all his pent-up vindictiveness (“If you ever read Yograj has been murdered, tell the police to put a warrant out in my name.”). He was incapable of being vicious in person, it seemed. His imagination was violent, that was all, and his constant failure to transform this into a threatening personality is what made him irritable: Sangita finally understood.