Free Family Planning by Karan Mahajan

to him—was pure revenge on his parents’ expectations.This is why he got the stupid idea into his mind that he should stay with her, that he should make love to her. She wasn’t timid. She was ugly, assertive. Marrying this woman would be a true announcement of his individuality, a statement that he owed nothing to anyone, least of all his parents. He could only imagine the look on his parents’ faces when they asked him tomorrow— Is this the same girl you saw? We thought she was slimmer? What happened to her face?
    Fatness, Mummy! Fatness happened!
    All his rebellions before this had been false, Rakesh realized. He did things his way but always with the subconscious goal of pleasing his parents. He had picked Asha for his second marriage himself, but she was exactly what his parents would have wanted: pretty, from the right caste, no threat to his mother in terms of sophistication. He had only hid her from them because she was so perfect.
    And no one could have been more perfect than Rashmi.
    His mind jetted back to his time in America. The fireside cozy of their suburban home, the two cars in the front drive ready to be ignited. Frost. How Montpelier, Vermont, smelled in the fall, like a freezing blade held up to your nose. And under the tantrum of red leaves, your feet on frostbitten gravel. How you clustered together for warmth, the big hug, the small family.
    Rakesh, Rashmi, and Arjun.
    He opened his eyes in shock at the image, the sensual clearness of it.
    He hadn’t missed America at all till now. Only during his first trip back to India, when he was fresh from the snow-suckled locales of Vermont, had he compared India to America—that, too, subconsciously. Rakesh liked to think of himself as an educated populist— give me a wet armpit, and I’ll give you a B.A.-pass nose to smell it! —but he was also a man whose self-consciousness in America had led to an obsession with smells. Before parties, while Rashmi draped herself in Kanjeevarams, he would perfume his armpits—a blind man would have been forgiven for mistaking those pits for hairy potpourri. Once, the white particles of his solid deodorant had rained down his arms when he gesticulated wildly. “This is not dandruff!” he had explained to shocked Americans. “This is deodoruff!”
    Those soapy-smelling Americans accepted him and laughed away at his lame jokes—only Rashmi would lash out at him with her tragic eyes. He would panic at those moments, forget the punchline, flail, and sink further into party-joke ignominy. He only wanted, after all, to impress his wife; he loved her so much. So, when she died, and he peered into an endless future without her, he wondered: What would he do at gatherings, at parties without Rashmi?
    With whom would he go home and laugh at the foolish naïveté of these friendly Americans?
    One famous question which they had spent all night laughing about, a pillow squeezed tight between them, was this: If you don’t mind my asking, I’ve never been to India, so forgive me, I may be thinking of the wrong animal, but, Mrs. Ahuja, is it common for people to own elephants the way people here own horses?
    And Rashmi had said to the old lady: Why, of course, how else would I get to the airport?
    When he and Arjun were taking the plane back to India for Rashmi’s cremation, that was the one line that appeared to sum up America for him.
    He hated America so much. He hated it for taking Rashmi away from him, plus U.S. Air had just served him a pancake with a little packet of liquid on the side that looked exactly like maple syrup but was actually soy sauce, and soy sauce plus pancake was the perfect recipe for midair barf—he hated America so much that his mind exploded the one inane sentence Do you own an elephant? into a plan to scoff America for a lifetime. He would dedicate his life henceforth to owning an elephant in his Delhi house and riding it shamelessly through Khan Market, GK Market, South Extension, Paranthe Kee