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Renu’s twenty-foot version mocked her from above. Cut-Out Renu had her arm firmly around Sudesh’s waist and possessed the kind of confidence and gumption that only photoshop could produce. Cut-Out Renu was, truth be told, also much thinner than the flesh-and-blood version. How the guys at Anand Graphics had done this, while maintaining her baby bump, she had no clue.

She squinted up to see the cut-out again—literally, the poster couple for success in this small dusty village-aspiring-to-be-town off the much-touted Golden Quadrilateral. She did not much care for this—the cut-outs, the reception to announce their victorious life in America, and the innumerable visits to people’s houses. She instinctively touched her growing belly, as if it would protect her. It had become a habit, a pillar against which she leant, an electrical outlet that recharged her.

Not for the first time, she wished this giant monstrosity of a cut-out were not next to the market where she had come to buy some gifts for her friends back home (‘Really?’ she thought suddenly, ‘America is home? Since when?’). Not just because she would be recognized and stopped and questioned every few feet (she was), but because she hated to be the centre of attention.

Never was, never would be.

She was happy blending into the background with her earth-toned salwars and burnt earth-toned skin, the best way to live for girls who cannot tick the three boxes: slim, sanskaari, sundar. Long ago, Renu had reconciled to the fact that she could never attain the first and the last—and the second would be drilled into her anyway. So it was that she half-heartedly pursued a degree in history, half-heartedly went to a fitness centre (“special 3-month wedding package” run by the lady who also ran the beauty parlour, so what the treadmill could not achieve, the make-up and costume would) and half-heartedly said ‘yes’ to the boy whose pencil-moustache she might have been horrified by if she had paid any attention in her history classes.

The then-pencil-moustached-and-now-clean shaven man, Sudesh Saini, was beaming down at her, from at least twenty feet above her, hands on her giant shoulder. Larger-than-life, they said. This was surely it.

She hated it because they were like the sun, these cut-outs touting their success in America: could be seen from anywhere in this small town. People were constantly accosting her, greeting her, talking to her, and getting her phone number, and in a minute, sending her a WhatsApp message.

“But I don’t use WhatsApp much,” never cut any ice with people.

“What do you mean, use WhatsApp? It’s just there,” her sister-in-law Gayatri had said one day. Yes, just there.

“Yeah, but we speak every week,” she had tried, weakly.

Gayatri, older than Renu by a couple of months, never failed to pull rank. “Yeah, yeah, now that you have become foreign, why would you want to send anything to us? Your own bhabhi is asking you, and you say you talk every week! Go, go, go be with your American friends.”
Renu did not respond. Gayatri, who lived in Jaipur, had probably spoken to more Americans than she had. She did not tell her that her weekends were full of pot-lucked food and potbellied men, belting out old Rafi songs while munching on chhole, the Indian recharge to counter the American week ahead.

Since then, every morning, Renu would send a Good Morning message, via text, to Gayatri, who would respond with several bouquets and assorted babies that said Good Morning.

Now, at the market, it was becoming impossible to evade people. She spotted a group of ladies who looked vaguely familiar coming towards her and she quickly entered the nearest jewellery shop.

“Renu!” called out a voice and she turned to see her erstwhile neighbour, Chandan, whose jewellery shop (Silver Gift Articals for Abroad) she had entered.

“Chandan bhaiyya!”

“Come come. Arre why do you need all this? For you, gold and diamonds will only do.”

Renu always thought he had a thing for her, bhaiyya or not. It seemed like he was sizing her up, looking, evaluating her over time, pulling up her teenage image from memory, comparing it with the worth of what he had now, as if she were a company stock.

Satisfied (apparently with his own life and wife), he continued, “So how can I help you?”

“Bhaiyya, I’m looking for some gifts for my friends back in America.”

“Hanh. America. They don’t like too much colour. Grey, grey, grey.” He laughed at his own joke.

Renu realized she had implied that she was shopping for white friends. She was in no hurry to dispel the notion.

“It’s not like that, bhaiyya. They do like. But the weather is such that…”

“Yeah yeah. I see Americans all the time, Renu. I know what they like.”

“Where? Here?”

“Tourists? Here? The cold has made you mad?”

“Then, where do you see Americans?”

“Madam Renuji, you surely know about an invention called the internet? It’s in my palm, you know.” He jiggled his phone, and Renu half-expected an ‘American’ or two to fall out of it.

Renu laughed. Chandan liked making women laugh.

“Accha achha, where in internet have you seen all these grey Americans?”

The smile left his face. He fiddled around the boxes under the glass cases, pulling them out and replacing them furiously.

“Simple you want, no?” He pulled out a tray full of bracelets, silver with a bit of colour in some of them.

These were Indians settled in America, and so, would know everything about the value of a product, and wouldn’t hesitate to point it out. At the very least, the gifts would have to be personalized. She stayed for longer than necessary, finicking over the bracelets, their size, the colour of the gemstones.

“So,” Chandan asked, “you and jeeju are having the Reception on Saturday?”

“Why are we doing all this? You know how his parents are.”

“But it’s a big celebration, no? You have come back after so long, successfully and all.”

“It’s really no big thing—everyone returns like this only.”

“No, no, not everyone becomes a big professor, na.”

“Many people do, actually. He’s not even tenured.”

“Where ten years? Only five years since you left, no?”

“Arre, I mean permanent. He’s not even permanent professor.”

“You don’t respect him? Why you are putting him down?”

He swayed his head side to side, dismayed, and likely sealing his opinion about his inaction of his teenage years. She grabbed a few bracelets and escaped the market place. As she emerged from the narrow street, the cut-out greeted her again.

“Welcome back after conquering the U.S.,” it read, in perky bright fonts (yes, multiple fonts). Renu had a terrible urge to retch. She held her belly, and Renu thought her baby girl’s hard kicks meant that she agreed.

***

There was a lot of shopping and house visits, all organized by her mother and parents-in-law, timetabled according to status, future prospective social and financial utility and social mores, which formed a hierarchy too complex to jump into. These were the people who would come to what was touted as the Reception, but had to be personally convinced of their relative importance.

Renu asked if she could help in any way, and they said, in unison, “Na na. You go take rest.” She felt like she did as a child, when her father would ask her to go play when she hung around the room when they spoke about “important things.”

She ended up dutifully going to each person’s house, with or without her husband (his itinerary was personalized; different). At the end of the day, Sudesh and she simply flopped down and slept. They’d never been great at conversation anyway.

On their wedding night, for instance, without doubt encouraged by self-help books and the internet, Sudesh told her she need not fall at his feet. Told her they need not engage in sex if she didn’t want to (“sambhog” he’d called it, very scholarly, and she had to ask him what it meant). Instead he asked her what she liked and what she didn’t. Their list of likes and dislikes was very short and shallow: a short list of movie stars and food items. His list was just one item: healthy food. After this exchange, as if they were faraway pen pals, they had nothing to say to each other. The adrenaline stopped them from sleeping and they did, in fact, end up sambhoging. In three months, their newly-wed sheen, like the deep red of her cotton salwars she loved so much, faded away. Fights ensued, and they were subsumed into the great Samsaara Chakra, talk becoming largely unnecessary, and unpreferred.

Now, this, six years later. The Reception where their success (and that of her lady parts, she suspected) would be touted. Where her unborn children will, on behalf of their grandmother, slap the faces of those who dared to imply Sudesh was anything less than a man. Her glory will be complete, was the unspoken refrain—with children joining the duo of wealth and status—so her mother-in-law could die in peace. That the mother-in-law was healthier than her husband, Renu, Sudesh, and Gayatri combined did not go unnoticed.

***

Today was the Day.

Renu was dressed in a dark blue salwar suit made specifically for this purpose, sequined like the sky itself. She was supposed to shimmer and shine and work the crowds, even if she felt the depths of darkness pervade her entire being. Sudesh had gone ahead, to help with some of the arrangements. He was expected at the house any time, so they could all arrive at the venue together. Her phone dinged. It was a WhatsApp message from Gayatri: “Bhabhi looking ossum! (five hearts and kisses)”. She looked up to see Gayatri, her phone an extended out-of-body Shiva’s eye!

The Family, all decked up, was waiting in the living room like a scene out of a Barjatya film. A car stopped at the portico and Sudesh got out.

The Family settled into the spacious car (it was a BMW, after all), and there was a silence for a moment, before Renu’s mother-in-law plied Sudesh with a lot of questions: How many people were there? Had so-and-so come? How late is rude? How about the food? Renu switched off. The car moved slowly toward the venue and Renu felt weird. A knot had formed in her stomach and she was sweating profusely.

As they neared the venue, Amrit Vatika, she spied a music band waiting near the entrance. Bored men with misshapen costumes thawed as they sensed the car. A small crowd was milling about outside. The band started playing in such disharmony that Renu wondered whether it was deliberate. The crowd’s attention was, however, diverted towards The Family.

Renu wished, futilely, that the Reception would never happen. Even last night, she prayed the grand aunt who was holding on to life by a thin thread would give up. Many a time in the past two weeks, she had tried to tell her mother and mother-in-law about their life in America; about Sudesh’s unstable professorship; their loans and bad investments piling on the pressure; how it made so much sense for them to have the babies and return home because after all, home was home; but they would not listen. The road was laid, one must travel on it, said her father-in-law, in a rare exchange with her.

The Family got out of the car, one by one, as if they were royalty. Renu descended, and immediately, squinted up at Cut-Out Renu. She looked different now, at night—almost seductive. Their outline was now highlighted by serial lights, twinkling like the stars they were meant to emulate. As her eyebrow and forehead glinted and plunged into darkness—on, off; on, off—she finally realized what she had struggled to put into words: she was a package, like the bracelets she had bought at Chandan’s store: flashy, designed to trick people into believing she was worth far more than she was.

She had kept the bracelets on the table in their room, to add a small card to them, but now, standing in the dark, dry, hot night of Dudhiya, Bhilwara Dt., the futility of it all slapped her hard, like a tyrannical mega-serial mother-in-law.

Meanwhile, parts of the crowd had begun to move closer. She looked down at her salwar suit, up at her giant version, clutched her belly for support, and put on a radiant smile to rival the lights. She felt nothing.