At other points, the cultural detail feels like an airing of secrets. Characters are frequently described in terms of their weight, more so than any other feature. Women, especially, are “fat,” “pudgy,” “heavy.” The first few references like this might drift by unnoticed, but by the time we arrive at these sentences, from the story “A Heart Is Such a Heavy Thing,” the fixation is glaring: “She was standing in the kitchen doorway with her sari pulled up to veil her face. She was plump enough that her stomach hung over the waist of her sari.”

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Similarly, there is a recurring motif of self-consciousness, specifically related to scent. In the story “If You Sing Like That for Me,” a newlywed, preparing to have sex with her husband, confides, “I washed my pubis carefully to make sure no smell remained from urinating.” In the title story, a young woman asks her new paramour, as he kneels down to kiss her bare stomach, “Does it smell bad?” Similar moments accumulate throughout the book, and what might seem at first to be a stylistic quirk is illuminated by a scene from the title story: A young Indian couple, both graduate students at N.Y.U., perform an obsessive cleansing routine after lunch every day “because they felt self-conscious about the stereotype of how Indians smell.”

By the final two stories, Sharma’s book feels like a cultural exposé and a lacerating critique of a certain type of male ego. In the almost unbearably sad story “You Are Happy?,” an alcoholic wife is sent from America back to India by her disdainful, philandering husband, where, it is implied, she is murdered by her family “because the shame of having an alcoholic as a daughter or sister is staggering.” As the narrator soberly explains, the eradication of a marriage can be arranged as dispassionately as the marriage itself. In “The Well,” a young accountant insists on unprotected sex with his “first true love,” who eventually becomes pregnant and has an abortion. After a brief, perfunctory phone call with the woman, the narrator focuses his mourning exclusively on the loss that he and his family contend with. Both stories are told from the point of view of the male narrators, and the solipsistic, incurious treatment of the female characters is remarkable.

Many of the collection’s male characters share this trait of childlike narcissism, one that is often suggested through narrative omission. Repeatedly, Sharma makes his point through what isn’t described or investigated. Women are, in many stories, satellites orbiting the men, their actions and choices significant only in how they relate to the lives of the male protagonists. The same can be said of the various calamities that befall other ancillary characters: injury, death, illness, sadness, etc. Sharma says this of the protagonist of “Cosmopolitan,” though it could pertain to any number of the book’s men: “He found that he was not curious about other people’s lives.” In contrast, it’s a testament to the author’s sensitive eye for human foibles that these characters are not only palatable but relatable, and this feat of empathy makes the implicit critique sting even more.

The story “If You Sing Like That for Me” is central to the book both in terms of sequence and thematic resonance. For one story only, in the middle of the book, Sharma writes from a female perspective, in the voice of a woman named Anita. Focusing on the early days of her arranged marriage, Anita comes fully to life on the page, her disappointment, disgust and determined optimism spilling over. The contempt that the male characters have shown for their female companions’ appearance is reciprocated (“His stomach drooped. What an ugly man, I thought”), and the scenes of physical intimacy are largely portrayed as dismal. Anita matter-of-factly notes every slight, every insult, every time her husband talks but doesn’t listen. When the story reaches its conclusion — a scene of sexual and emotional disconnect — one is driven to reconsider each of the surrounding stories in the precise way that the male protagonists can’t.