Delhi effortlessly invites satire in this debut novel
Family planning can be perniciously dictatorial — think Sanjay Gandhi — or unwittingly ridiculous — think Ghulam Nabi Azad’s 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 they’d 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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