Family Planning [Kindle Edition]

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a 16-year old with a crush on a girl on the school bus, must be in want of a less embarrassing family.

In the case of Arjun, his family is so personally embarrassing to him that not even his best friends know that in addition to the 6 siblings he admits to (the ones he can't deny since they go to his school) there are another 6 making up the total brood at home. As if that wasn't embarrassing enough, his mother's about to add another to the collection. Arjun's father Rakesh Ahuja is a politician - the Minister for Urban Development - and he has two great passions; his lust for pregnant women which leads him to keep his wife almost permanently in a state of pregnancy and lactation and his determination to improve the city infrastructure for which he is responsible by building lots of flyovers.

At 16 years of age, nobody wants to be confronted with evidence of parental sexual activity, so when Arjun walks in on his parents 'at it' on the floor of the nursery, he's forced to readdress his teen perceptions about his parents. Arjun's enjoyment of American media has led him to believe that sex is "the spontaneous transfer of fluid between very attractive, naked, blond people" and finding two old unattractive brown people on the floor of the nursery has shattered his illusions. Arjun's father Rakesh is torn between sorting out his problems at home and writing up his 63rd resignation email which he assumes will not be accepted by his egotistical and power-crazed lady boss.

I have struggled with contemporary Indian humour in fiction. I'm not 100% sure how to classify this but it's not 'literary' fiction and not an all out belly-busting laugh a minute comedy. It's more a wry observational style of human-centred humour than any kind of knock-about. A lot of modern Indian novels only work if you know the setting. Since Delhi is a city I know pretty well, I generally have strong mental images when reading any book set there and I suspect I get more out of those books than people who don't know the location. However, in the case of Family Planning, I don't think you need to know the city or the ways of life to get a good giggle out of the family traumas of the Ahujas. The city may play a large part in the events, but in reality, they could be almost anywhere and still the book would be just as funny and moving. However if you do know a little bit about Indian lifestyles and behaviour, you will get a bit more out of the book if only for being able to recognize the uncomfortable truths hidden in some of the passages.

The author is a good looking and ridiculously young man who was born in the USA but brought up in Delhi and then headed back to the USA to graduate from Stanford University. I'm jealous! He wasn't even born until 1984 and already he's got a cracking good first novel on the market and his book is carrying cover endorsements by the likes of the great and ever-trendy Jay McInerney and fantastic Indian writer Manil Suri (author of 'The Death of Vishnu' and the even better 'Age of Shiva'). I wanted to hate Mahajan for his early success and to find lots of the normal idiocies that fill such first novels but I couldn't help myself, I loved it. Almost every page gave me passages that made me laugh out loud and tempted me to bore my husband silly by reading bits out to him.