Read The Weight of Heaven Online
Authors: Thrity Umrigar
Tags: #Americans - India, #Murder, #Psychological Fiction, #Married People, #India, #Family Life, #Crime, #Psychological, #Family & Relationships, #General, #Americans, #Bereavement, #Death; Grief; Bereavement, #Adoption, #Fiction
Imagine. I’d lusted after this woman for weeks, and I’m finally in
her apartment and I’m snoring soundly on her couch, like a good
altar boy.”
“So now we don’t drink to excess,” Ellie said happily. “Now we
just get high to excess. Moral of the story.”
“So,” Frank said. “How did you and Shashi meet?”
Shashi spoke before Nandita could. “I saw her picture in the
newspaper once. And fell in love with her. Small black-and-white
picture it was.” He turned to Nandita, who was looking at him
openmouthed. “I never told you this. Anyway, I made some inquiries. Found out who her friend circle was, wormed my way into it.”
“And I thought I was the only investigative reporter in the
family,” Nandita muttered.
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“Shashi, you’re a sly one,” Ellie said. “And romantic. Such a romantic.”
“Withstood years of her ignoring me,” Shashi continued, as if
speaking to himself. “When she did notice me, it was only to ask me
for money for some cause or the other. I had almost given up.” He
suddenly looked up at them. “But then, one day, she said yes.” He
sounded delighted, as if Nandita had said yes to him yesterday.
Ellie had the strangest feeling that as Shashi spoke, the physical
space that separated him from her disappeared. She felt that she was
entering the body of this man who had always felt a little aloof to
her, so that she could relive his long-ago anticipation at having finally met a woman whose picture he’d fallen in love with, his crushing disappointment at her rejection of him, his steady doggedness at
hovering at the periphery of her life, his triumph at having won her
over at last. She suddenly knew what it felt like to be Shashi from
the inside—his sadness at the knowledge that he would always love
Nandita a little more than she loved him, his delight at having a brilliant, beautiful woman as his wife, his ambivalence, that mixture of
pride and bashfulness at the way she barged ahead in life, shaming
and chastising his rich relatives and business associates into donating money to whatever cause she was championing. Ellie felt she
had a glimpse of what it meant to be a man who was married to
a cloud—ever-shifting, hard to pin down, filtering light but also
holding rain.
Something was shifting, the mellow happiness of earlier making
way for a sweet sadness. But before the melancholy could descend
on her any further, she felt Frank’s arm around her. “Hey, baby,” he
said softly. “You okay?”
Ellie wished suddenly that someone would invent an album for
filing moments, just as you could photographs. If so, she would file
the imprint of Frank’s warm hand against her sleeveless arm, the
quizzical smile that played on his lips, the breath-stopping expression of curiosity and love that she saw on his face.
Th e We i g h t o f H e av e n
6 3
“Beyond okay,” she said, snuggling closer to him.
It was almost one o’clock when they got up to leave. At the front
door, Nandita gave each of them a hug. “You come and see us soon,
okay?” she said to Frank. And then, with her voice lowered, “And
you know you can always ask Shashi for advice, right? He’ll help
you in any way he can.”
“Thanks, Nan,” Frank said lightly. Ellie noticed that even the
reference to work didn’t yank Frank out of the languid, mellow
mood he was in. Weed therapy, she said to herself. I’m going to ask
Nandita for some.
“And you should start coming to the clinic,” Nandita said to
Ellie, loud enough that Frank could hear. “You’ll be absolutely safe,
I promise.” Both women waited for Frank to react. He didn’t. “I’ll
come pick you up at eleven tomorrow,” Nandita said.
Satish had brought the Camry to pick them up, and they rode in
the back seat together with Ellie cradled in Frank’s arms. They rode
quietly in the dark, and after a few moments, Ellie heard the sound.
At first she thought it was Frank humming, but then she realized
what it was. Frank was snoring lightly, rhythmically, even while he
kept his arms wrapped around his wife.
Prakash glanced at the big clock in the kitchen again. It was only
ten thirty in the morning, too early to sneak into his shack and have
a drink. Edna was in a foul mood this morning, and it was making
him jittery. He could tell by the way she was sweeping the floor
around where he was standing in front of the stove. Usually, she
would wait respectfully for him to lower the flame and move away
from the stove before sweeping near him. But today she sat on her
haunches and hit his bare feet with the thick end of the
jaaro
, grunted
an abrupt, “Move.” He resisted the urge to strike her on the head,
aware of the fact that Ellie memsahib was still in the house, rushing from the living room to the bedroom as she got dressed. But he
stood his ground, even though his hands shook. “No eyes to see I’m
cooking?” he muttered to her. “So-so much in a hurry you are. Late
to meet a boyfriend or something?”
She looked up at him, her eyes barely hiding her disdain. “After
you, I swear off men. Even a rat would be better than you.”
As usual, he looked away first. It hurt when she talked to him
like this, brought back memories of his childhood when he used to
wander from house to house, exposing himself to whatever mood
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6 5
a particular resident was in. Never knowing whether the women
would chase him away with a curse or welcome him in with a sweet.
And the worst part was, the children themselves picked up on the
moods of the adults, so that one day they would invite him to play
kabaddi
or hopscotch with them and the next day they would chase
him around the village calling him names—Orphan Boy, Long
Face, Cursed One.
“Move, men,” Edna said. “You deaf or what?”
“You deaf or what?” he imitated but heard the feebleness of his
counterattack and got no satisfaction from it. He went and stood in
the doorway.
There was a time when Edna would’ve killed herself before talking so rudely to him. She had been only twenty-three when they’d
met; he, almost ten years older. Enthralled by a Bollywood movie
shot in Goa, he had impulsively asked his boss at the auto shop for
two weeks’ leave, borrowed a motorcycle from one of his clients,
and taken off for Goa.
He met Edna on his second day there. She was working as a maid
at the run-down, ten-room motel where he was staying. He was immediately smitten, although in those days he spoke little English,
and he thought her Goanese Hindi was hilarious. She told him of
cheap places to eat and what beaches to visit. On the third day of
his visit, she had the day off and airily proposed that she show him
around. By the fourth day, he was sure that she was the woman he
had to marry. They eloped two weeks later, after Edna had convinced him that her Catholic father would never give his blessings to
her marrying a Hindu. She was right—neither her parents nor her
older sister ever saw her again.
“Are you wanting me to convert?” she had asked him after they’d
been married for about six months. “Will that make you happy?”
“Why for?” he’d replied, in the broken English he’d started learning soon after meeting her. “I marry knowing you are Christian.”
6 6 Th r i t y U m r i g a r
She flung her arms around him. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“You Hindu fellows have so-so many gods, it would make me giddy,
trying to decide which one to worship.”
In the early days, he would come home from the auto shop, go
for a swim in the sea, and then help Edna with the evening meal. He
discovered an aptitude for cooking, and Edna delighted in teaching
him the Goanese and continental dishes that her mother had spent
a lifetime making for the British babu who had visited Goa forty
years ago and never left. Sometimes they would go for a night show
at the village’s only cinema and ride home on Prakash’s bicycle, him
pedaling standing up and Edna perched on the seat. If they overheard the tsk-tsking of the neighbors, saw someone looking at them
askance, they ignored it, accepting the villagers’ judgment at their
intermarriage as the price of their happiness.
The first time he had made her
bebinca
, the Goanese pancake
made from coconut milk, she had wept with gratitude, told him
it tasted better than her mother’s even. He had last made the dessert for her two months ago. This time, Edna had chastised him for
trying to add fat to her hips, ignored him when he protested that she
was as beautiful as ever, accused him of stealing her family recipe,
and told him it didn’t taste as good as her mother’s, anyway.
Standing in the doorway, eyeing his wife, Prakash thought he
knew exactly when things had begun to sour between them—it
was after Ramesh’s birth. Edna had not informed her parents of
her pregnancy, as she had wanted to surprise them after the birth
of their first grandchild. For nine months she had pictured the
reconciliation—her teary parents cradling the infant in their arms,
welcoming Prakash into their family, her mother covering Edna’s
face in kisses, telling her how much she’d missed her. But the telegram she had sent them announcing Ramesh’s birth was answered by
one that said, “We have no grandson. Stop. Because we have no
daughter.”
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6 7
Prakash had held her in his arms for hours that day, a wailing
infant on one side and a sobbing wife on the other. “They will
change,
na
, Edna,” he said. “We have one miracle, our Ramu.
Second miracle take time.”
She had shaken her head. “You not knowing how stubborn my
papa is.” She picked up Ramesh and held him to her breast. “It is
decided—my son will pay for my sins.”
Something had turned cold inside him then. Sins? Edna thought
of her marriage to him as a sin? The old childhood names—Cursed
One, Bad Luck—came back into his mind. He saw himself clearly
at that moment—a skinny, ungainly man with a third-grade education, who had few prospects and little to offer his son and young
wife.
“Sorry,” he said, rising to his feet. “Your father right. You marry
trouble.”
“Prakash,” she cried. “I’m not meaning anything bad.” She set
the baby down and cradled his face with her hands. “You—you
never my trouble. You are my joy. You make me so happy.”
He shook his head. “I have nothing to give this boy. Nothing
more than my hands.”
“Is enough, Prakash,” she said fiercely. “We will love our son
enough for everybody.”
But it hadn’t been. It was the great source of sorrow in Edna’s life,
that Ramesh was growing up without knowing his elders. Maybe
that was why she had seemed so pleased when Frank had first taken
an interest in Ramesh. And Prakash had not minded either, when, a
few months after the Americans had moved into the beautiful bungalow with the pink stucco walls and the bougainvillea growing up
those walls, Frank had offered to pay Ramesh’s tuition so that he
could attend the missionary school in Kanbar. But now Ramesh was
spending more time at the main house than with his own parents.
When he’d mentioned this to Edna last month, she had turned on
6 8 Th r i t y U m r i g a r
him. “Stupid idiot,” she’d said. “Jealous of your own son. Should
be glad someone so powerful paying him attention but no, jealous
instead.”
“Let him mind his own business. His son dead, so he’s trying to
buy my son.”
“Shameless, shameless man,” Edna had replied. “The devil is
talking from your lips.”
Some days Prakash found himself missing his old boss, Olaf. He
was the first pink man that Prakash had ever seen, much less spoken
to. Olaf spoke little English and no Hindi and took absolutely no
interest in Ramesh. Every few days the German would go to the
market to shop for fresh fish and vegetables—a task that he refused
to hand over to Edna after he’d hired her—and that was the extent
of his communication with the local people. The village children
followed him at arm’s length, giggling and nudging each other, as
he bought his okra and eggplant and pomfrets. The vendors quoted
him absurd prices that would’ve drawn a sharp rebuke from Edna if
she’d been allowed to accompany him, but he didn’t seem to notice.
He just drove back to the house, set the bags on the kitchen counter
without a word, and then withdrew to his typewriter and resumed
his
click-click-click
. Over time, Edna had figured out that Olaf wrote
books, but that was about all they knew about him. Once, Prakash
had tried questioning him, but Olaf had spoken such gibberish, half
in English and half in German, that he’d given up. Still, Olaf was
kind—he left one peg for Prakash in the bottle of Scotch he downed
every two or three days, winking as he handed the bottle over.
Prakash still remembered the day Olaf had come into the kitchen
and announced he was leaving. Going back to Germany. He had
been stunned. But being from Goa, Edna wasn’t too surprised. It