When the Khuranas received the news of the pregnancy at the office of their GP in East of Kailash, they fell silent. They’d known this was coming, had known what they were working toward, yet their actions had been suffused with denial, Vikas with his muddled commerce-student’s understanding of science telling himself, “Well, she’s forty; the chances of getting pregnant are lower,” and adding mentally, “We can always get an abortion,” imagining such a conversation would be easy to have given the higher risk of Down syndrome in a child born to an older mother. Deepa was in denial too, convinced they would kill themselves. She had thought that the lovemaking was simply a form of postponement. So it was a surprise to her when she was overcome by such raw, vivid emotion in the doctor’s office.
“This is an interesting situation,” Vikas said in the car on the way home, expecting Deepa to have a similar response. Instead she put her hand in his—cold, light fingers. Delhi even in December was dusty, lurid, sunlit, perplexingly dry, dug up on the megalomaniacal whims of urban planners and chief ministers, and it occurred to Vikas, as he drove, turning with the dips in the road, that Jagmohan, the politician, was the connective tissue between Vikas’s life in Delhi and the violence in Kashmir. Jagmohan, the demolition artist of the Indian state. Working swiftly, tirelessly, without imagination—a true peon—he’d bulldozed the slums of Delhi during the Emergency and knocked the city’s teeth out, what was termed at the time as “beautification.”
Vikas remembered this period of history acutely, the way one can only recall one’s college days. Twenty-one, he was commencing an MA in economics from DSE, already miserable, his future as a CA foaming at his feet while filmmaking was a distant flagless island beyond. His fellow students—especially of economics—knew better than to raise a fuss about politics and kept to themselves, huddled with exam guides and cups of tea. The situation appalled Vikas—who was already developing a social conscience in the apartheid halls of the university, where no two disciplines could debate each other—and one day, he followed the bread crumbs left by a newspaper to watch a demolition.
It led to his first short film. After seeing one demolition, he came back again, with a friend’s camera, a Norelco. The demolition he filmed was somber by Indian standards. Slum dwellers, mostly Muslims, queued up alongside the bulldozer that would render them homeless, watching wide-eyed, intense, waving to the camera. Warned beforehand of the government’s intentions, they’d dismantled their nests of tarpaulin and tin themselves; and now, as the bulldozer climbed upon and tossed aside layers of history—waddling over tarpaulin, crumpling tin, knocking out wooden supports—a surprising thing happened. Someone began to cheer. Party workers, maybe. A man came around dancing madly, his face painted and parodic with holi powders, distributing plastic whistles to the little slum kids that they then blew, cheering on their own demise.
Vikas caught it on camera, gratified by his luck. You always needed this kind of luck as a documentarian. He had told the government workers he was making a film commissioned by the state—and he had, in fact, received tacit permission from Jagdish Chacha, using the family connections he would later decry.
The demolition, of course, was Jagmohan’s doing, and as a reward for his loyalty, Jagmohan would eventually be posted to Kashmir as governor, where, in response to an uprising, he ordered the military to open fire on protesters on a bridge over the Jhelum, inciting years of violence.
“What do you think we should do?” Vikas asked when they came home.
Deepa—walking about the kitchen, hunched, banging cabinet doors, her behind prominent through the salwar—said nothing. She was letting the news grow inside her. Was it possible that one of the boys would be . . . reborn? When Vikas’s mother had died, a puppy appeared at their door every day for five days after the cremation and Vikas had tried to adopt it and she’d mocked him.
“Let’s think about it,” she said. “I should have more tests.”
His sensible wife! “Yes, of course,” he said.