Karan Mahajan - Family Planning

Ravi said, “Did I tell you what happened to me yesterday?”

This was a typical Ravi response. He was a stooping, sardonic-looking boy with wide shoulders. He was shaped like a coffin. He scratched his atrocious wild stubble when he talked and he liked to talk: something crazy was always happening to Ravi.

Arjun listened as Ravi narrated an unlikely story involving his father’s new Hyundai Santro, a monkey, and a dog.

“Then?” asked Arjun.

“Then I ran over the dog and honked at the monkey.”

Another Ravi theme: emerging victorious.

“Cool. Want to be in a band?”

“Okay,” he said.

“Good. I’m—”

“Let’s clear up some fine points first. Are we going to be an alt-rock, alt-country, indie, electro, electroclash, raprock, hard rock, or metal band?”

Ravi was obsessed with details and planning. He had found a way to turn this to his advantage. For example, he started studying for exams months before they were scheduled, thus ensuring that he was relaxed and could even get in a few games of tennis the week before the exams began; Arjun hated that. He also came first in school, always had; Arjun hated that too. On top of this he was an excellent drummer. He practiced and practiced and practiced till he sounded spontaneous.

“We’ll play rock, man. Fucking rock,” said Arjun.

“Yaar. This fucking rock only exists in your fucking mind.”

“Hard rock yaar. Hard fucking rock.”

Even this was not enough for Ravi. “Okay. Seventies’ hard rock, like Rolling Stones, or eighties’ rock like Springsteen, or nineties’ rock like Oasis—”

“Rock like your mother.”

“That makes no sense,” Ravi said. “Explain that to me.”

“Oye shut up—”

Ravi laughed. “Okay. Let’s do this band thing. I’ll put this on my U.S. college applications. Harvard will eat it up. You know Natalie Portman checks all the applications.”

Together they approached Anurag and Deepak in the break period.

They were far less responsive. “A band? Who’s going to study for the exams? Your dad? We don’t all have connections to get us passed,” said Deepak with a broad grin.

“Oye — listen at least yaar,” said Arjun. “I’m not just starting a band for bloody time-pass. My dad said, if we want, we can perform at the Indraprastha Flyover inauguration. Next month it’s happening. I thought I’d ask you first. If you say no, no problem. I only asked you because you have no other friends except me. I thought, yaar, if you guys aren’t in a band, how will you pick up babes?”

“Interesting,” drawled Deepak. “So now you’re pursuing charitable work, is it? And uncle just happened to say, okay son, I want you in a band? He’s finally realized you’re a duffer in all other departments?”

Anurag said, “Duffer in all other departments!”

Anurag was Deepak’s sidekick.

Deepak said, “Also, tell me, is your Ministerji Papa still milking your Mama’s you-know-what for Parliament? Is he trying to be the father of the nation , ho-ho?”

He helpfully put his right index finger through his left fist in slow, heaving motions. Arjun was used to this. Ravi, Deepak, and Anurag were united in the common goal of taunting Arjun about his massive family. They had nicknamed him Torn Condom — marking him as the first of a long line of contraceptive mishaps. And they thought he had only six siblings.

“No yaar, they are all Arjun’s kids,” said Anurag, slapping Deepak’s back.

“You want me to slap you or what?” Arjun grimaced.

“Why don’t you sing?” said Deepak. “It’ll be the same as slapping.”

Anurag snorted. “It’ll be the same as slapping! Because your voice is like a slap!”

“You’re truly mad, man,” said Deepak to Anurag. “Do you have to say everything you think?”

Anurag shut up.

Arjun was onto bigger things. “We need a name.”

Ravi said, “Three dudes and one duffer Arjun.”

“That’s a good band name.”

“What about the Torn Condoms,” suggested Deepak.

“You want me to slap you or what?” Arjun inquired.

“Best name ever!”

Things went smoothly from there on. Once a band begins debating its name, it is already a band. Of course, as the recess progressed, other, smaller, pettier debates were to follow. They had to. This is all essential if one is to start a band. Tension, violence, must exist on the surface. The band is about sublimation. For instance: at one point in the conversation, as they passed by the water cooler and Ravi explained in great detail the drum fills he had mastered, Arjun rocked on his heels with irritation and declared himself the lead singer.

It was a useful announcement. He didn’t play any instruments.

For the rest of the school day (effecting an intelligent grin while Mr. Nath lectured about “the importance of finishing your class eleven course as soon as possible”), Arjun had flashes of last night — vivid, wondrous, hoary exposures. But what disturbed Arjun were not the flashbacks themselves but the fact that he wanted to imagine his parents, the same way he liked bringing his finger close to the blurred blades of a table-fan on his desk, inches away from understanding pain. This was his arrogance; he didn’t try to forget what he had seen last night — no, he wanted to conjure it up and then defeat it with a vision of his own. If only Aarti would go from being a sexual fantasy to a sexual possibility, one vivid enough to walk with him into the memory-trap of the house, to lay beside him, to drown his parents’ gasps with her own…

The afternoon bus ride exposed the silliness of his ideas. She wasn’t that sort of girl. She was innocent and cute. She had a slight, adorable waddle to her walk as she came down the aisle of the bus. She had long drooping eyelids and an upturned nose that defied the downward gravity of her face. And what hair! Sexed in every direction! Arjun glanced at the hard knobs of her knees, then followed the spiral of scab lines upward, nodding his head as he finished sipping in the warm sheen of her thighs.

He thought she was heading for a seat at the back. Then the knees suddenly backtracked: she sat down next to him. Unbelievable.

“How do you get time to be in a band?” she asked, once the bus had departed. “I have no time for anything. I have the most boring life possible. I’m always studying for FIITJEE.” FIITJEE was a coaching institute for hopeful applicants to the Indian Institute of Technology. “I come home from school in the bus. Then I eat lunch and watch Happy Days in half an hour, using Happy Days ’ ending to time the end of lunch. Sometimes I get time to shower, sometimes not. Then I take an auto to FIITJEE. I sit still for four hours. I take an auto home. The time by now is seven thirty. My physics tutor comes usually at seven forty. So I eat Maggi Noodles. Then I sit still for two hours. At ten I watch Friends . I hate my life.”

One finger plucked away at the belt-loop of her skirt as she spoke. She was unconvincing. She seemed to Arjun to be proud of her own hardship and boredom. He responded in kind, and explained at great length how he had shown talent at a young age in singing and so his school principal made special concessions for him, letting him practice in the small auditorium during the morning assembly, saying, Arjun you can skip extra classes; you have done so well in your exams , and how when the principal’s wife had died, he had asked Arjun and the band to play behind the funeral pyre so that the fire was between the principal and the band, and Arjun said that was the only time he couldn’t sing because his throat was full of tears and soot, but he had seen the principal singing his songs through the heat mirage of the pyre, the principal had made their music his (oh, you want to know why a Christian’s wife was having a cremation, er, she was Hindu, yaah), but apart from that, the only time the band met was for three hours two times a week. Otherwise, he was studying, studying, studying, he also wanted to get into IIT. His Papa was an IITian — see there was all this pressure, could she understand?