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it to me, Tanya,” said Arjun.
    “Explain it to him,” repeated Rahul.
    “Why don’t you explain it? It was your joke?” Tanya whimpered.
    “So?” asked Rahul. “Bhaiya asked you first. Plus, I’m older and older wins. Right, bhaiya?”
    This was typical, thought Arjun. Everyone was out to screw everyone else.
    “Enough jokes! Now listen.”
    “Don’t shout, Bhaiya,” said Tanya, feeling ganged-up on, as she often did.
    “Well, I want to ask you—and even you, Rahul—for your help. I want to have a concert for my band on next Sunday. I was wondering if you could bring a few friends to the house that day and ask them to watch my band play without laughing or criticizing?”
    Arjun had expected the negotiations to temporarily break down at this stage, with Rahul and Tanya using their leverage to threaten inaction, to say “no,” but instead they had just one bewildered response: “Why?”
     
     
    Why, why, why? Why go to such lengths to court a woman? Exactly? Why not pause the lie where it was, let Aarti think you were in a band, ask her to come home, and not bother with the amateurish formality of actually playing? Why not just persist with the slow cadences of dialogue on the bus, win her with thetired complaining about school that drew people together on the ride home? Why not one day touch her hair as she thrust her head out of the bus window into the hot oven of the day? Feel a strand of her black shiny mane twanging between your fingers like a guitar string? And then know, gosh, this is nothing like a guitar string, this is not sharp or metallic or callous-inducing, why did I bother with that when I could have had this all along? Yes, why have a band and a concert and the dire hullabaloo of your brothers and sisters?
    Was it because you were ashamed. Was it because the more you talked with the girl the more you were exposing yourself to scrutiny. You didn’t want the girl to know that you were concentrating all your energies on the magnetic whirl of her eyes. You didn’t want the girl to feel so special that she would then be superior to you, and therefore not want you at all. Even though she was superior to you: you who were just a liar praying not to be found out, a boy who invented a band to be special—for your sake, not Aarti’s, if you had wanted her purely you would have leaped after her like an exposed wire, willing to face the risk of emotional electrocution. Not padded with the plastic of prevarication. These selfish lies.
    “Don’t tell anyone? Promise? I’m only telling you two. Don’t tell anyone, okay? No, yaar, seriously? You swear on Mama? Okay. I want to impress a girl on my bus,” Arjun told Rahul and Tanya. It wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the whole truth either. He wanted to be the center of attention, that was it, and it would be a huge added bonus if this attention included Aarti’s rapt stare.
     
     
    Arjun was shocked at the results. All his siblings obliged readily, making phone calls to their friends. The only other thing the children were so united in was their awe and admiration for their Papa, builder of flyovers, savior of constituents, handshaker of prime ministers and presidents, all of whom visited the house occasionally. Each child thought (and this would last only a short while, Arjun knew) that he or she was the only one who knew why Arjun bhaiya was having a concert. Each was touched that a person in a position of such power (the oldest! by four years!) would risk such vulnerability. After all, the prospect of girlfriends and boyfriends was usually treated with bouts of teasing in the Ahuja household. The teasing was a Newtonian phenomenon, an equal and opposite reaction to the taciturn way the children dealt with members of the other sex. If you didn’t tell you had a girlfriend, and someone found out, well, then you deserved to be teased till you broke up with her, goddamn it!
    Arjun’s admission was different, though—more thoughtful, more