"You’re like your uncle. What a sorry excuse for a husband I got. He was so skinny he ended up breaking like the lead in a pencil. The girls like a good rounded man, they always have.' I stared at my aunt’s appallingly satisfied smile and wondered if my uncle Jyoti really had died by snapping in two. It might have been his only answer to his wife’s taunting disparagement: a single-minded hunger strike whittling him down to the dryness of a stick, until one day....