Free Family Planning by Karan Mahajan Page B

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.

BRYAN ADAMS EXPLAINS EVERYTHING (UNFORTUNATELY)
     
    M R . 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