Family Planning - Hardcover

Mr Ahuja, Minister of Urban Development, is beset by problems: thirteen children and another on the way, not to mention the daily struggles over whether to resign for the sixty-third time; his wife, Sangita, adrift on a sea of knitting and nappies, is mourning the loss of her favourite TV soap star; son Rishi drives everyone mad with his serial apologies; and finally there's Arjun, the oldest and perhaps the wisest of the sprawling, noisy crew.

For once, though, Arjun is confounded: how to tell the girl on the school bus that he's crazy about her? (Serenading her with cover versions of Bryan Adams' greatest hits perhaps isn't the answer.) And Arjun's father must not only confront the roots of his strange and disturbing marriage but do so in the troubled landscape of modern-day New Delhi that he himself has built. Following father and son as they blunder their way over and under the flyovers of the megalopolis, Karan Mahajan brilliantly juggles the cultural and political worlds of India's capital city to create a moving – and fast-moving – portrait of modern family life.