Family Planning Read Online Free Page B

of a man who didn’t care. He did it because he was enraged that his parents could suggest remarriage this soon and because he wanted to spite them by marrying someone absolutely inappropriate. Hedid it for three-year-old Arjun. He did it because he wanted to be a politician, and politicians need wives. He refused to let his parents be the slightest bit involved and decided to go through the motions—the perusal of the classified ads, the screening of the bride-to-be, the uneasy conversations with the girl’s parents, the slightly ashamed call for dowry—purely for personal entertainment. But the girl was pretty, and personal entertainment soon gave way to a more primal lust when he drove to Dalhousie (alone) to see her. It was a traditional upper-class Himachali-landowner household—the food served on shiny silver platters—and he watched the girl carry nothing but her reflection on such a platter as she was ushered into the drawing room by her father. He ogled the tight curve of the girl’s breasts pushing up against the sari, the tautness of her exposed navel, the small coins of her ears.
    To his parents, he only handed a wedding card.
    “You’ve become American,” they said. “You’re only having one function. What will all your relatives think? We have to invite them. Please let us invite them. We’ve never heard of a son who won’t make us meet the bride before he’s married. You haven’t even shown us a picture of Asha. Don’t disgrace us.”
    “Is that all you care about? Your disgrace? You waited only one month after Rashmi died to start telling me I should get remarried. Now I’m getting remarried. Just be happy.”
    All the weeks till the wedding, he’d rise early in the morning to masturbate in the bathroom.
    On the wedding day, though, seated next to him in the tent, minutes before they circled the fire, was a different girl, an uglygirl, a girl whose skin was coarse and whose features seemed to have been molded lazily from a single piece of dough, all flat and asymmetrical and stubborn, a toothy embarrassed smile on her face. He hadn’t noticed her face at first because it was obscured by various danglings of gold; then she quickly lifted her veil and frowned at him. Rakesh was utterly dazed. He thought: What if it is the same girl? But without makeup? How can I hurt her feelings? But no, she clearly wasn’t the same girl. This girl had no breasts. Rakesh knew he could have gotten up then, that moment, and put an end to the whole farce, he could have stood in the middle of the tent and kicked over the flames with the elegance of an enraged filmstar and asked no one in particular: What kind of nonsense is this? But he didn’t. Instead, Rakesh felt the eyes of his parents upon him—the layers of talcum powder shivering hideously on their skin like unlicked salt—and knew immediately that he would have to go through with the marriage.
    After all, wasn’t he getting married to spite them? Would his mother and father really believe this was a different girl? Or would they think Rakesh had simply lost his cool at the last minute, reneging on the only real decision he’d made against their wishes?
    He looked at the girl’s parents for a reaction— Were they her parents? The father was slouched eagerly with a hand massaging his knee; the mother was sitting up straight, her back against a pillar. Rakesh was overwhelmed by curiosity. Who was this new girl, this sudden bride? How did she and her “parents” think they could possibly get away with this? Did theyreally think he’d marry her and stay with her? Did they have a stable of divorce lawyers lined up to suck him dry after the wedding night?
    Were they not aware that the Ahujas were a very powerful clan?
    Now he felt at ease. He could marry this girl and immediately divorce her. He could claim the marriage wasn’t consummated. This was the benefit of a subdued and poorly attended wedding: you could treat it like a brief, perverse