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
good home and disturb your sleep.”
“Listen,” Frank said. “I don’t want any more violence, you hear?
The last thing we need is more trouble.” He paused for a moment
and ran his hand over his tired face. “Who is this guy, anyway?
What did he kill himself for? And why the fuck are they angry at
me? What did I have to do with this?”
“Frank sahib,” Gulab said. “You go get some rest. And please,
not to come into the factory today. I will take care of everything.”
“That’s bullshit.” Ellie’s voice was louder and sharper than she’d
intended. “My husband is not a child. He needs to understand what
is going on.” She looked at Frank, silently urging him to side with
her, to demand an explanation from this man whom she disliked and
distrusted more with each passing moment.
Frank looked from Ellie to Gulab, as if just picking up on the
hostility that ran like a black wire from one to the other. “What’s
going on?” he said. “Who was that man?”
“A known Communist, sir,” Gulab replied. “Hating Americans.
Best of friends with Anand. Hung himself because he knew we were
watching him.”
Ellie was incredulous. Who the hell was this man who was treating Frank like a puppet? Did he himself believe a word of what he
was saying? Did Frank realize that he was being fed fiction? Would
he acquiese or protest?
“This is such crap,” she said. “I know this guy.” She turned to
Frank. “I didn’t tell you. I met this man who . . . who has died . . .
when I was at the clinic a few months ago. His wife is one of my
clients. He went into a tirade when he saw me in his home.” She saw
Frank’s eyes widen but forced herself to continue. “I didn’t want
to worry you at the time, sweetie,” she said. “Anyway, he went on
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and on about how he used to earn his living selling the leaves from
the
girbal
tree. And something about the guards not allowing him
access to the trees. He was very frustrated.”
Frank exhaled. “I see.” He looked at Gulab, not bothering to hide
his distaste. “Well, you better come in. We have to come up with a
strategy to deal with this mess.” He turned to face Ellie. “Thanks
for letting me know. Just wish you’d mentioned this at the time.”
Ellie saw something gleam in Gulab’s eye and knew that he had
picked up on Frank’s mild rebuke. She felt her jaw muscles clench.
This man was a snake. She could only pray that her husband saw
this. “Well, I guess I should leave you two alone,” she said at last.
She walked toward the kitchen, and the two men followed her
into the living room. “Sit down,” she heard Frank say, and then
she could only hear a low murmur of voices. “Ellie,” Frank yelled
after a few minutes. “Any chance I could ask you to make us a cup
of tea?”
Her stomach muscles clenched at the thought of serving tea to
Gulab. But she said, “Sure.”
Frank was scribbling something on a notepad when she entered
the living room with the tray. “Can you tell me what will happen to
those people they arrested?” she asked Gulab.
Instead of answering, Gulab turned toward Frank, who stared
at the floor. “Frank,” she said sharply. “There’s a woman in jail who
has just lost her husband. What do you intend to do about it?”
He looked up at her with a sigh. “What do you suggest I do?”
he said. Despite her mounting anger, she heard the fatigue—and
something more than that, a trace of confusion—in his voice.
“I suggest you get this guy here,” she pointed her chin at Gulab,
“to get them out of jail. Immediately. This morning. Before”—and
here she thrust in the knife, deliberately, calculatingly—“someone
else gets hurt in police custody, like earlier this year.”
Frank fixed her a baleful look. “That wasn’t necessary.”
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But it was. It was necessary to wake Frank up from the comatose state that he was in, to snap her fingers and break the diabolical
spell this horrible man was casting on her husband. She saw that
Gulab was looking back and forth between them, knew that he was
picking up on the tension between husband and wife, knew he was
exactly the kind of man who would file this knowledge away to use
at some later time. But she couldn’t be concerned with that right
now. The task of the moment was to make Frank say the words that
would spring Radha and the others out of jail. She was stunned that
Frank himself couldn’t see that, beyond the simple morality of the
issue, it was also the absolute best thing for HerbalSolutions, the
only prudent, political thing to do. A man is dead, she wanted to
scream at Frank to get him out of his catatonic state. A man has died,
hung himself from a tree that was part of his childhood inheritance
and that is now owned by a company headquartered eight thousand
miles away. A man has hung himself to prove the irrefutability of his
belonging to a piece of the natural world that we have taken away
from him.
“You know I’m right,” she now said, her voice cracking with
urgency. “I—I know the villagers better than you do. The arrests
will pour gasoline on the fire, Frank.”
Something in her words, her tone of voice, clicked. He turned
his head toward Gulab and said, “Call the police chief. Have them
release all of them.”
“But Frank
seth
—” Gulab began.
“Don’t waste any more time,” Frank cut him off. “Just make the
call. Ellie is right. It will save us grief in the end.”
Gulab rose to his feet and bowed slightly. “As you wish, sir.”
His manner was calm, imperturbable. “But best if I go down to the
police
chowki
myself.” He nodded toward Ellie. “Good making your
acquaintance, madam.”
She forced herself to nod back.
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At the door, Gulab turned around. “Better if you don’t come
in today, sir,” he said. “There may be some—trouble—at the factory.”
Frank closed his eyes for a moment. “Okay,” he said. “But call me
if anything is wrong. I want you to stay in touch with me during the
day, understand? And tell Deepak to call me as soon as he can.”
“Yes, sir. Get some rest, sir.”
They sat on opposite couches, staring at each other, after Gulab
had left. Neither one of them spoke for a few moments. Then Frank
said, “Still think coming to India was a good idea?”
She looked at him, unsure of how to answer. “I certainly didn’t
expect any of—this,” she said at last.
He shook his head. “I’d better call Pete and let him know,” he
said. “Seems like I’m giving him more bad news each time I call.”
He suddenly punched the palm of his left hand with his right fist.
“Goddamn it. So we settle with the workers in May in order to buy
ourselves some friggin’ peace. I give in to most of their demands.
But how the fuck can I anticipate that some yokel from the village is
going to kill himself and then blame us?”
Frank’s look of outrage reminded her of the expression on Benny’s face if he felt somebody had been unfair to him. Despite her
anger, her heart went out to her husband. “How did they know his
reason for committing suicide?” she asked. “Did Gulab say?”
“Yeah, apparently he told some of the village youth that his wife
had had to beg her parents for money for cooking fuel. The guy
had not worked in months.” His face crumbled. “Jesus, Ellie. What
the fuck am I supposed to do? How can they possibly hold HerbalSolutions responsible for something like this? I know these folks are
dirt-poor. But we didn’t create their poverty. And we’re a business,
goddamn it, not some social service agency.”
She looked away, knowing that what Frank needed from her
right now was unconditional support and not a self-righteous lecture. Beside, some part of her agreed with him. She knew Frank
Th e We i g h t o f H e av e n 2 4 1
and Pete well enough to know that destroying the local economy or
ruining a man’s life was the last thing they’d have anticipated when
they were negotiating for the grove of
girbal
trees. She remembered
how Pete had rushed to the hospital when Ben was dying, how he’d
looked as bleary-eyed and ruined as the rest of them at the end of
their vigil. Pete was a loving dad, a generous friend, a good citizen.
And so was Frank, a good man, despite his growing disenchantment
and callousness. You shouldn’t judge him, she chastised herself. She
didn’t have to deal with the stupefying Indian bureaucracy, with
the sullen, erratic demands of the workers, the casual disregard for
deadlines by the suppliers. For all practical purposes, Frank lived in
a different India than she did.
She pushed herself off the couch and went and sat next to him.
They sat leaning into each other. “I’m sorry, baby,” she murmured.
“But it will be okay. Don’t worry. Everything will be all right.”
She didn’t know if either one of them believed her comforting
words.
The young woman sitting across from him reminded Frank of Ellie.
That is, Ellie from twelve years ago, the fiery, impulsive woman
who had been willing to right every wrong in the world. There was
some of that in Sunita Bhasin, the journalist who had come into his
office a half hour ago. Frank couldn’t help but like her, even though
he was painfully aware of the fact that she saw him as one of the
wrongs she was trying to right.
He had blown her off the first time she’d called seeking an interview. He had been stunned to find out that Mukesh’s death—and
the ensuing strike by HerbalSolutions’ workers—had made news in
the Bombay newspapers. They were also dredging up the incident
involving Anand’s death in May. He had been shocked at how onesided and unfair most of the coverage had been—hell, I’ll never
bitch about Fox News again, he’d groused to Ellie. So when Sunita,
who worked for an English daily in Bombay, had first called him,
he’d hung up on her. Days of negative coverage followed, and the
stories never failed to include the line, “Officials at HerbalSolutions
refused to comment.” It was maddening. And thanks to the glories of the Internet, Pete was following every blasted story. To top
things off, the alternative paper in Ann Arbor had gotten wind of
Th e We i g h t o f H e av e n 2 4 3
the news, also. Every day now there were phone calls from Pete or
one of the other executives in Ann Arbor, demanding that he stop
the beating they were taking in the press. Demanding that he do
something to end the strike.
“What the fuck would you like me to do, Peter?” he’d finally
asked. “You wanna return the bastard trees back to them? That’s
what it will take.”
There was a short silence. Then Pete said, “Can’t do that. The
antidiabetes pill is our number-one seller these days. But you have
to do something, Frank. I was at Joe’s baseball practice last night,
and another parent stopped and asked me about the situation in
India. That’s bad.”
“So what would you like me to do?” he asked again.
“I don’t know, Frank.” Pete didn’t bother to hide the irritation in
his voice. “You figure it out. That’s what I pay you to do.”
He was shaking when he hung up from that phone call. Pete was
his friend. In all their years together, Pete had never thrown his
weight around, had never reminded Frank of the fact that he was
the head of the company. Also, the casual reference to Joe’s baseball game, with Pete’s indifference to the memories of Benny that
it would inevitably arouse in Frank, stung. He thought for a few
minutes and then dialed Sunita Bhasin’s number. “If you still want
to interview me, I’m willing,” he said.
He had expected a middle-aged professional journalist and so
was pleasantly surprised when a young, attractive woman of about
twenty-five walked into his office two days later. She was dressed
in the way many of the educated, college-age women in Bombay
did—a white kurta over blue jeans and carrying a long cotton bag.
Straight black hair framed an intelligent-looking face. His heart
lightened. She looked like someone he could talk to, someone who
clearly came from an educated, westernized background.
But half an hour later, he was conscious of the faint trickle of
sweat running down his face. He fought the urge to wipe it off, not
2 4 4 Th r i t y U m r i g a r
wanting her to see the effect her tough, matter-of-fact questioning
was having on him. They had already engaged in a spirited but general debate about the pros and cons of globalization, and as long as
the conversation stayed at an abstract, theoretical level, he felt sure
of himself, felt that he was on safe ground. But now she was asking
him about the circumstances of Mukesh’s death.
“Do you think it is ethical for a foreign company to own natural
resources in another country?” Sunita asked.
Frank made an exasperated sound. “Oh, for God’s sake. The land
was leased to us by your own government fair and square. If we’d
have known there would be all these problems, why, we wouldn’t
have even bid on it.”