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Delhi effortlessly invites satire in this debut novel

Delhi effortlessly invites satire in this debut novel
Family planning can be perniciously dictatorial think Sanjay Gandhi or unwittingly ridiculous think Ghulam Nabi Azads neat formula of more TV equals less children. Family Planning,the debut novel by Karan Mahajan another 25-year-old who walked out of an American university with a book in hand and got enough mention in the London-Washington press to fill the back jacket is more Azadesque in its humour,but wittingly so.

His is a Delhi that is part-familiar,part-invented to be the centre of delicious satire. A megalopolis populated by flyovers whose looming phallic shadows commuters accept as collateral for development,and 16-year-olds singing Bryan Adams and wanting to blow some amps,man; it is also a Delhi where Rupa Bhallaji is Super Prime Minister after her husband Ashok Bhalla,a former prime minister,is killed by a terrorist driving an advanced harvester during the spring festival in Punjab; and mourning middle-aged women take a procession to the Ministry of Prime-Time after Mohan Bedi is bumped off in the TV serial The Vengeful Daughter-in-Law; and rupee is wondrously 16 to a dollar.

And then there is the hyperfertile Urban Development Minister Rakesh Ahuja,nicknamed The Torn Condoms,the man behind those incomplete overpasses in the city and a brood of 13 children. His squat bungalow in 12 Lodi Estate is jumbled catastrophes,the riots of 1947,… a team of jihadis so bored theyd declared holy war on one another. And then one night,IST 23.35,for exactly 1.67 seconds Child No. 1 Arjun,walks in on his parents doing it on the nursery floor,in the cleft between three cribs and asks the father the morning-after the mother of all questions: Papa why do you and Mama keep having babies? Ever the politician,

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Mr Ahuja comes back with the Yograj Commission findings that clearly say there should be more Hindus,before he unspools the backstory of Arjuns birth.

The plot,however,is incidental. Mahajan effortlessly captures the patois of the family the perpetually pregnant wife who speaks in pronouns and pidgin English,the smart-speak of the Ahuja scions.

When Mahajan moves from oneliners and family rituals and episodic descriptions of Delhi to do some complex mind readings,the narrative slackens. Thankfully,that happens only in the last 50 pages or so after a romp of 150-odd pages. It is like you have been riding on one of Ahujas half-done flyovers their two rising slopes frozen in midair like tongues that failed to touch and you are left staring at a precipice of a plot. Ah! the rubble flying at the end of the road. The pregnant woman has to give birth now. Should the minister remain minister? What would Arjun do now that he knows the secret of his birth? And shouldnt there be one vague moment of pure emotion to tie them all up together?
There is.
But until then you would enjoy the view.