Family Planning by Karan Mahajan Page A

cause of the damage. He had bought the bicycle with his own money (he had insisted to Rakesh that he wanted to be self-made) and was looking forward to cycling on it with his cell-phone cocked against his ear (this he had accepted from Rakesh on the condition that he would pay off the cost of the phone with cuts from his salary). But now the wheel would crack like a rib each time he perched on the seat. Varun had been characteristically cruel to cover up his misdoing. Each time he saw Shankar’s five-foot frame hunched over the wheel, he would say, “What? You’ve started thinking of yourself as Gandhi-ji spinning the wheel or what?Are you going to make clothes from it by sitting there only?”
    Varun didn’t know that Arjun had witnessed the entire event from the window, that Arjun had given Shankar money for the repair from his own pocket-money. Shankar had refused. “I’ll get the sister-fucker who did this. He thinks he can come outside the minister’s house and smash up his bicycle.”
    One morning, at the bus stop, Arjun finally told Varun what he’d seen.
    “So what? He’s a servant,” Varun said.
    “Yaar, listen to yourself speak before you utter words,” Arjun reprimanded him. “You want me to tell Papa? Or worse, I can tell Shankar, and he’ll enthusiastically fill your school water-bottle every night with liters of his spit. Or cut his nails in your mango milkshake. Just stop hitting the cricket ball blindly around the house, okay? Restrict yourself to straight drives for a week, see how it feels.”
    “With all due respect, Mr. Judge, Judge Bhaiya , if you will, maybe you are saying all this because you’re, ahem, bad at cricket? What about all the times you made Shankar play badminton with you when he hates doing it?”
    “Okay, Varun, that’s it. I’m asking you not to be cruel to a person who has less money than you do, that’s all, but now you leave me with no choice.”
    “No—” cowered Varun.
    “Yes. From now on—” said Arjun.
    “No, you know I—” Varun begged.
    But Arjun was adamant. “From now on, you’re going to have to play cricket with a tennis ball instead.”
    A tennis ball was for sissies. Thus, Varun had been emasculated. But even that was better than having Papa tell him he couldn’t play cricket at all. That’s how afraid he was of Papa (Papa, who rarely got angry but, when he did, could brainwash the entire household against you), even he, Varun, a man’s man who popped the collar of his Modern School shirt to hide the giant yo-yo of his Adam’s apple.
    Now, Arjun knew, Varun would no doubt ask for a revocation of his softball sentence. He would claim he missed the sound of willow on cork, the fantastic wooden vibration of the bat passing through your whole body, stopping your heart for an instant.
    Which he did: Arjun relented.
     
     
    The same was true for the other children, with the exception of Rishi. Rishi’s response to the generally bad-tempered tactics of his siblings had been to strike back with apology. He had been so thoroughly bullied by Varun, Rahul, Tanya, Rita and, yes, even the supposedly benign Arjun, that he sought refuge in the cool English lilt of the word sorry .
    A typical Rishi sentence went something like this: “Sor-ry. Sorry. Sorry. Swaaareee. Swaaaaari.”
    And then, when you thought it was over, he would deploy his masterstroke, the sorry flurry: “I’m sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry.”
    “Okay, okay, fine, shut up, shut up!”
    “Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry