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
“So you’re going to go to this peace rally thing?” he asked.
She wavered for a moment, wondering if this was his way of
reaching out to her, asking her to spend the evening with him. But
then she remembered the conversation she’d had with herself earlier today, about wanting to be enlarged by tragedy rather than
shrunken, about using her loss to connect her to the lives of others.
Besides, if Frank needed her to stay, he had to learn to ask.
“Yes,” she said, and turned away first.
Autumn and Winter 2007
Girbaug, India
The drumming was thrilling—loose and wild and yet totally controlled. It brought out something in Ellie that she hadn’t felt in a long
time—a nervous excitement as well as a deep happiness, the kind
she normally felt only when faced with the vastness of the ocean or
in Big Sky country. This is India, she kept saying to herself, I’m in
India. As if she had just arrived.
Before her, Asha, carrying a short red stick in her hand, danced
with a man from the village. All traces of the demure, shy girl who
acted as Ellie’s translator were gone. In her place was a whirling,
twirling, gyrating seductress who rhythmically struck her baton or
dandiya
against the one her dance partner was holding, who moved
and swayed to the incessant pounding of the
dhols.
Along with maybe
two dozen other villagers, the couple was dancing in the clearing in
front of Nandita’s school and clinic.
All of Girbaug’s residents seemed to have turned out in their
finest clothing for the Diwali celebration this November. Ellie snuck
a sidelong glance at Frank. He had been reluctant to come, afraid
of the reception he would get from the villagers. But Nandita had
marched into their home a few nights ago and told him sternly that
he had to attend, that the villagers would take his absence from their
2 1 8 Th r i t y U m r i g a r
most important holiday celebration as a slight. “Besides, Frank, you
might actually have a good time,” she’d added sarcastically. And
Frank had grinned and told Nandita that she sounded exactly like
Ellie and that he could fight one of them at a time but once they
ganged up against him, he had no goddamn choice but to acquiesce.
Ellie was glad he was here. And, judging from the way his fingers were involuntarily tapping against his thigh as he kept time to
the music, so was he. In his open white shirt and dark green pants
Frank looked gorgeous, she thought. The sun was setting behind
them, and it lit up Frank’s golden hair like a streetlamp.
She wasn’t the only one who had noticed, apparently. A cry went
up from the crowd as Mausi, the village’s oldest resident at ninetytwo, got to her feet and hobbled her way to the clearing where the
dancers were gathered. She was supported on either arm by two
boys who were Ellie’s students and whom she assumed were Mausi’s grandsons. But as the three-person procession moved up to the
front row, where Frank and Ellie were sitting with Ramesh, Nandita, Shashi, and a few other westerners who were visiting Shashi’s
resort, Mausi stopped. Shaking off the boy who was holding her
right arm, she reached out one bony hand and ran her gnarled fingers through Frank’s hair. Frank froze, his eyes darting toward Ellie
for help. But then Mausi removed her hand, gathered her fingers
together, put them to her lips, and flung a kiss at Frank, who had
turned three shades of red. All around them, the crowd roared with
laughter. Hoots and whoops rose in the air.
But Mausi was not done. Still standing beside Frank, she pantomimed that she wanted him to escort her to the dance floor. Frank
looked as if he’d been drilled into his chair. It didn’t help matters
that Ramesh, sitting between Frank and Ellie, was bouncing up and
down yelling, “She is wanting you to do
dandiya
with her, Frank.”
“I can’t,” Frank said finally. “Tell her, I can’t—I don’t dance.”
But just then two of the drummers strayed from the clearing and
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made their way to where they were sitting.
“Chalo ji, chalo,”
one of
them chanted, and the pounding got even more fervent and loud.
Nandita leaned over. “Guess you have no choice, Frank,” she
grinned over the noise of the drums. “Mausi always gets to choose
her first partner.”
Mouthing a silent
fuck
that only Ellie could hear, Frank let one
of the drummers pull him to his feet. The crowd roared. Mausi
grinned, showing all of her three teeth. The dancers opened up a
space for the newcomers. One of the men handed Frank a baton and
showed him a few steps.
He looks like a clumsy-footed white man, Ellie thought with bemusement as she watched her husband struggle to clink the baton in
time with Mausi’s. It didn’t help that Mausi, bent with osteoporosis,
came up to his waist. What Ellie had always loved about Frank was
his lithe, catlike surefootedness, which made him a wonderful dance
partner. But here, dancing in the open air under a darkening sky,
surrounded by brown-skinned men and women dressed in a dazzling array of reds and greens and yellows, he reminded her of an
elderly man in those checked green pants at a golf outing.
Nandita must have read her mind. “You have to go help him,”
she said. “He looks miserable out there.” And before Ellie could
answer, Nandita was pulling up both Shashi and Ellie. “Come on.
I’m dying to dance.”
Ellie didn’t need to be asked a second time. From the time they’d
arrived here for the feast and celebration, from the second she had
heard first the Bollywood music over the loudspeakers and later the
beating of the
dhols
, from the instant she had taken in the dazzling
beauty of the village women and seen the laughing excitement of the
children as they set off their fireworks—the rockets that raced in a
zigzag line toward the sky, the fountains that erupted in a shower
of red and blue sparks, the spirals that spun in an orbit of light and
color before dying out—she had felt something relax within her, felt
an expansive, giddy joy. Also, a sense of belonging that she didn’t
2 2 0 Th r i t y U m r i g a r
quite understand. Yesterday, while visiting the homes of some of the
village women who couldn’t come to the clinic, she had noticed that
each mud-baked hut had a clay
diva
at its entrance. The simplicity of
the tiny earthenware oil lamp had brought a lump to her throat. She
thought of them as emblematic of the quiet, simple dignity of the
people who lived in those homes.
She had tried describing Diwali, or the Festival of Lights, to her
parents last year. Imagine July Fourth lasting for a week, she’d said,
but she knew that didn’t quite capture the sheer lavishness, beauty,
and generosity of the festivities. Just the universality of the offering
of food—there was no way to explain that to her middle-class parents. Every home in Girbaug bought or made sweetmeats for Diwali
and distributed them among neighbors, friends, and visitors. All the
women who had come to see her at the clinic yesterday brought her
a few pieces of sweets. All of them, no matter how poor. The mothers of the children who came to school also sent an offering of some
kind. In one case, a child had simply given her a single piece of rock
sugar. It was like Christmas, except you exchanged gifts with the
whole town.
Now she was trying to control the sway of her hips, trying hard
to resist the tug of the pounding drums that were making her lose
her inhibitions, making her want to dance manically, the way she
used to in nightclubs when she was in her teens. But that was the
beauty of the
dandiya
dance—it celebrated the paradoxical joy of
movement and restraint, of delirium within a structure. This was
not about individual expression but about community.
Frank turned to her with something akin to relief. She saw the
beads of sweat on his face. “Hey,” she yelled, above the music, tapping his baton lightly with hers. “Having fun?”
“I’ve had better dance partners before,” he said wryly, but then
he grinned, as if he was having a good time despite himself.
Nandita and Shashi made their way up to them, Shashi shaking
his hips in such an uncharacteristically uninhibited way, it made
Th e We i g h t o f H e av e n 2 2 1
Ellie giggle. There was something nerdy and a little absurd about
Shashi, and she loved that about him.
Nandita, on the other hand, was all business. “Come on, Frank,
move,” she said, striking her stick smartly against his. “You’re dancing like a fucking mortician.”
They danced in a small circle for a few minutes and then were
joined by the other westerners. They expanded the circle to let
them in, but Ellie almost immediately lost interest, felt a kind of
deflation. She also became aware that they had unwittingly formed
a cocoon, their own private circle that excluded the villagers. As
soon as she could, she stepped away and began to dance with some
of her younger students. Frank followed her in a few minutes. She
saw that he had abandoned his stiff posture and was genuinely enjoying himself now, sweating freely, loosening the buttons of his
shirt. “Boy, do they ever let up and take a break in between numbers?” he grinned. “This is like dancing at one of those techno
clubs.”
“Close your eyes,” she yelled back. “Just dance with your eyes
closed. It’s a wonderful feeling.”
“And risk clobbering that old lady on the head with my stick?
No thanks.”
“No,” she said, looking closely at him. “Just dance with me.
You’ll be able to do it, you’ll see.”
So they did. For a full five minutes they danced with each other
with their eyes shut. To their astonishment, they were completely
in sync, never rapping each other on the knuckles with their sticks,
never missing a beat. Ellie opened her eyes first. She took a step
closer to him, and as if sensing that movement, his eyes flew open.
“You see?” she said, as if she’d scored an important victory, transmitted some essential information to him.
“I see,” he replied. “And I love you. Very much.”
“You’re my guy.” She felt she was being maudlin, sentimental,
about to cross that thin line between happiness and melancholy. But
2 2 2 Th r i t y U m r i g a r
she didn’t care. It suddenly seemed like the most important thing on
earth that Frank knew what he meant to her.
“I know,” he said quietly. And then, “Thanks for bringing me
here. This is quite wonderful.”
She flung her arms wide open, smacking the man dancing next to
her. “This is my India,” she said dramatically. “Now you see why I
love it here.”
Even above the music she heard the envy in his voice. “You’re
lucky. The India I deal with every day is nerve-wracking.”
“Don’t think about that tonight. Just . . . enjoy.”
A rocket whizzed over their heads and landed on the ground just
past the dancers. Frank looked nervously over to where a group of
teenaged boys were setting off the firecrackers. “I hope these kids
know what they’re doing,” he said. “That was a little too close for
comfort.”
Just then, one of the boys lit a cone-shaped firecracker. A shower
of blue and red erupted from its mouth and came cascading down
in colorful streams. “God,” Ellie shouted. “I love these fireworks so
much more than the ones back home. These are so much closer to
the ground and—I don’t know—this feels more democratic, somehow.”
Frank smiled. “Methinks you’re in love with India.”
She smiled. “I am.” She waved her arms again. “Look around.
How could you not be in love with a country with so much color
and vigor?”
Ramesh came dancing up to them. The boy was wearing a white
cotton kurta and pajamas with a maroon vest. Ellie thought he
looked more beautiful than she’d ever seen him. The boy was carrying himself with a self-consciousness that she knew came from
wearing new clothes, and she was glad Edna had bought him this
outfit for Diwali. She resolved to use Christmas as a pretext to buy
Ramesh a bunch of new outfits. Now she turned her head and looked
around for Edna and Prakash, but they were lost in the crowd that
Th e We i g h t o f H e av e n 2 2 3
sat behind them. She had offered to have the housekeepers ride with
them earlier this evening, but Edna had whispered in a conspiratorial tone, “No, thank you, miss. Prakash is in a foul-foul mood
today. Better you go alone, only. Just take Ramesh.”
“I love this jacket,” she now said to the boy over the music, and
was gratified to see Ramesh beam.
“It’s velvet,” he replied seriously, fingering the soft material.
“Yeah, you look like a young prince,” Frank said. His tone was
light, teasing even, but Ellie could detect the pleasure in his voice as
he inspected the boy dancing next to him.
“When I grow up, I want to be a prince,” Ramesh said. He cast
Frank a mischievious look. “I know, I know. In order to be anything