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
doing—goes against everything that I know and believe in. Do
you understand? I—we Americans believe in the sanctity of life. I
was brought up to believe, Thou Shalt Not Kill.”
Something bright flashed in Gulab’s eyes. But when he spoke, his
tone was flat, his face expressionless. “Yes, sir. World over, Americans are known for respecting life.”
Was the guy mocking him? Frank peered closely, but Gulab’s
expression was as blank as a wall. “In any case, I want an assurance
that you will—you will do this job yourself.”
“No problem, sir.”
“And—one more thing. How much—that is, what do you charge
for this job?”
Gulab’s smile was thin and stretched. “No fixed rate, sir. This is
not exactly my profession, to bump off people. Just as a favor to you.
So whatever your heart tells you to pay is good.”
Frank felt the sweat forming on his forehead again. He felt weak,
nauseous, and his hands fluttered in his lap. “Gulab, I have no idea
what would be fair.”
“Would one lakh be possible, sir? A special discount rate for
you,” he added.
One lakh. Frank did a quick calculation. That was about twenty-3 3 0 Th r i t y U m r i g a r
five hundred dollars. He felt something twist in his heart. He now
knew the value of a human life. Of two lives.
Gulab was waiting for his answer. “That’s fine,” Frank said. “But
this money has to come from my personal account, obviously. And
I have to withdraw it without making my wife suspicious. So I need
to think about how—”
“Buy a carpet.”
“Excuse me?”
“My friend has a shop, sir. Sells handwoven carpets. Good quality. You buy a very cheap one. He will give you receipt for one lakh.
You just give me a bearer’s check next week. And I will get you the
invoice. Carpet delivered few days after—after the job.”
So Gulab knew how to launder money. It shouldn’t surprise him,
really, that someone as worldly as him would have the whole thing
figured out. This, after all, was a country where bribery was so
common that middle-class businessmen openly boasted about never
paying so much as a traffic violation fine. He himself had gotten
used to paying
baksheesh
for every doggone license and permit that
he needed at HerbalSolutions.
“One other thing, sir,” Gulab was saying. “We should decide
now only the date you will pay me. Best I come here to pick it up.
After that, there should be no contact between us until—after. Safer
for you, that way.”
“Okay,” he whispered. “But . . . what if something goes wrong,
Gulab?”
Gulab sat up straight in his chair and threw his shoulders back.
“I don’t know if you remember, sir. But a long time ago—when the
Anand situation was going on—you held me responsible for what
had happened to that boy. At that time you said that I owed you.” To
Frank’s consternation, Gulab swallowed hard, and Frank realized
that his careless words had deeply affected this man. “Well, Gulab
Singh doesn’t like to owe any man, sir. So I give you my word, if
Th e We i g h t o f H e av e n 3 3 1
something goes wrong, I will not betray you. I will hang from the
gallows before I do that. I will say I had an old score to settle with
Prakash. Okay?”
And Frank had the unreal sense that in the space that it took
Gulab to make his promise, the world had broken into a million
jigsaw pieces and been rearranged again. This man whom he had
thought of as a coldhearted killer had suddenly displayed the sensitivity of a butterfly; had taken his nonchalant Americanism—
you
owe me
—and heard it as a challenge to his honor. He thought back
to the revelation he’d had during his illness. A kindly old God with
a long, flowing beard could’ve never created as complicated a being
as Gulab; it took the randomness of an indifferent universe to have
birthed a man who was this immoral and honorable.
“Okay,” he said.
He sat in his chair for a long time after Gulab left. Multiple voices
competed for his attention—his mother’s voice, reading the Bible to
him as he lay in his boyhood bed, Scott discussing Hegel and metaphysics with him when they were both young men, Ellie reading
out loud passages from Father Oscar Romero’s last sermon, Benny
reciting the prayer that he said every night before going to bed:
Thank you for the world so sweet
Thank you for the food we eat
Thank you for the birds that sing
Thank you God for everything
He looked down at his hands. They looked dirty, stained, as if
the deed that he was contemplating had already occurred. And then
suddenly he was retching. He pulled the trashcan toward him, afraid
he was about to soil his shirt. His mouth filled with the pungent taste
of vomit, but he couldn’t throw anything up. The foulness remained
lodged, deep within his gut.
3 3 2 Th r i t y U m r i g a r
*
*
*
Prakash was walking down the street near their house as Frank got
home that evening. The man was probably headed to the village bar,
Frank surmised. “Stop,” he told Satish. “I’ll get out here. You go on
home. I’ll be right behind you.”
He hopped out of the car. “Wait up, Prakash,” he called and
crossed the street.
Prakash stopped. A wary look came over his face.
Frank stood in front of him, his blue eyes looking into Prakash’s
dark ones. “Hey, look. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed you. I—I
wanted to say sorry.”
The wary look never left Prakash’s face as he stood silently.
Frank dug up a fifty-rupee note from his pocket and thrust it into
Prakash’s sweaty palm. He repressed the shudder that ran through
him as his fingers made contact with Prakash’s moist hand. “This is
for you,” he said. “As a way of saying I’m sorry.” He turned his head
in a conspiratorial way. “Don’t tell Edna,” he added.
He was rewarded with the thinnest of smiles. “
Achcha
.” Prakash
raised his hand to his forehead. “Thank you,
seth
.”
Frank waited as Prakash nodded, turned around, and walked away
a few feet. Then he called out, “Oh, Prakash. One other thing.”
Prakash stopped, the wary expression back on his face. Frank
bridged the distance between them, keeping the smile on his face.
“There’s a big soccer match two weeks from now. I want to take
Ramesh. He will enjoy it very much, I know.” He watched Prakash
watching him carefully. He made a downcast face. “Problem is, it’s
in Bombay.”
He stood quietly, waiting for Prakash to say something. There
was a long silence. Then, Prakash said, “You are wanting to take
him?”
Frank gave a broad shrug. “I do. But I don’t want any more tension with you. If you say no, I won’t fight you. I’ll—you can just tell
the boy you don’t want him to go.”
Th e We i g h t o f H e av e n 3 3 3
Prakash stared at the ground. Then he looked up. The guarded
expression was gone from his face. “Take him,” he said simply. “No
problem.”
“You sure?” Frank said, wanting to prolong the moment. “You
won’t back out at the last minute?”
Prakash’s eyes were clear. “I sure. Ramu love soccer.”
And just like that, the final brick fell into place.
It wasn’t until eight on Saturday evening that Frank began to miss
Ellie. He and Ramesh were walking along the seaside across from
the Taj when the boy tripped on a broken sidewalk and cut his knee.
To Frank’s consternation, Ramesh burst into tears. He held the sobbing child in his arms, shocked at how openly Ramesh was crying
in public. He examined the gash on his knee, dabbed at the droplets
of blood with his handkerchief. He had seen Ramesh take tumbles
that were much more severe when he and the boy had been engaged
in an aggressive game of basketball. Then, the boy simply got up,
dusted himself off, and resumed playing. So Frank was a little taken
aback by this public display of emotion. He looked around helplessly,
wishing Ellie was here. Passersby were taking in the scene—a white
man holding and consoling a dark-skinned child—and shooting
him curious looks. A gray-haired lady stopped and said to Ramesh,
“
Su che, deekra?
Are you okay?” Ramesh nodded and pointed to
his knee. “I fell,” he sobbed, and the woman
tsk-tsk
ed a few times
before resuming her walk. “You should take him home and wash the
wound,” she tossed over her shoulder.
“C’mon, kiddo,” he said to Ramesh. “Let’s go back to the hotel,
and I’ll clean this off for you.” They stopped at the Taj’s pharmacy
Th e We i g h t o f H e av e n 3 3 5
on their way up, and he purchased some gauze and a box of Band
Aids. But as Ramesh continued to cry in the room, it began to dawn
on Frank that the boy’s tears had nothing to do with the fall. And as
if to confirm his suspicions, Ramesh said, “I miss Ellie.” And then,
“I miss my dada.” Frank was crushed. Ever since they’d said goodbye to Ellie and Ramesh’s parents this morning, he had endeavored
to make sure Ramesh was having the time of his life—letting the
boy hang his head out of the window as Satish drove them along
the coast to Bombay, playing the wretched Hindi film music that
Ramesh insisted on listening to on the car radio. At the soccer match
this afternoon, he had allowed the boy to eat four samosas and drink
two Cokes, until he was afraid Ramesh was going to puke. None of
this had apparently been enough to distract him from homesickness.
For the first time since he had hatched the plot with Gulab, Frank
worried about how the boy would deal with his parents’ death. He
had been so busy grappling with his own conflicted emotions that he
had not stopped to consider how Ramesh would handle the event that
was about to befall him. Now, mortified by his own obliviousness,
he wondered how he could’ve possibly failed to factor in Ramesh’s
grief. In a few hours from now, Ramesh would be an orphan. He
flinched inwardly as his mind focused on that last word.
“Frank,” Ramesh was saying. “Can we phone Ellie?”
“We can’t,” he replied gently. “She’s on the train to Delhi, remember? No cell phone reception there.” Seeing Ramesh’s crestfallen face, he added, “She’ll be back on Thursday. You’ll see her
then. Now, do you want to watch some TV before it’s time for
bed?”
“Okay,” Ramesh said. “But I choose the show.”
Frank pretended to grumble as he handed the remote to the boy.
“You’ve become a world-class bully,” he said.
At ten o’clock they were still watching a Jackie Chan movie. Finally, Frank grabbed the remote and turned the TV off. “Come on,
now. You have to go to bed. Go brush your teeth.”
3 3 6 Th r i t y U m r i g a r
Ramesh looked surprised. “I brushed my teeth in the morning.”
“Don’t you brush again at night?” Frank asked, and Ramesh
shook his head no. Once again, Frank wished Ellie were here. She
had been in charge of the boy’s nightly rituals the last time they’d
traveled with him. “Well, you have to brush twice a day while you’re
here with me.”
Ramesh shot him a dirty look but rolled out of bed and padded
into the bathroom. “Finished,” he said a few minutes later.
“Okay, off you go to bed,” Frank said. He wondered if there
were any bedtime rituals that his parents performed with the boy
each night. Probably not, he thought. So he was taken aback when
Ramesh came up to him and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek.
“My ma always gives me good-night kiss,” the boy said, grinning
slyly.
Frank ran his hand through the boy’s short hair. “Good night,
pumpkin,” he said and then regretted his choice of words as Ramesh
convulsed with laughter. “Pumpkin,” the boy repeated, holding his
sides. “You said pumpkin.”
“You are a silly boy,” Frank smiled. “Now come on, go to bed.”
He turned off the lights.
Ramesh was asleep within five minutes. But Frank was wide
awake. His heart had begun to thud loudly as soon as the room had
fallen dark. He glanced at the digitalized alarm clock by his bed
every few minutes. Time crawled slowly. He turned on the televison
set again, hitting the mute button, so as not to disturb Ramesh. He
needn’t have worried. The boy’s steady breathing told Frank that
he was fast asleep.
Love Story
was showing on one of the channels. He
watched part of it. He wondered where Gulab was at this moment,
whether his heart was racing like his was. Somehow, he doubted it.
He did a quick calculation. Gulab was to creep into Prakash’s shack
at about two in the morning. The plan was to . . . take care . . . of
the couple before breaking into the main house and ransacking it a
bit. Maybe take a small item or two and then drop it in the driveway,
Th e We i g h t o f H e av e n 3 3 7
as if the thief had been scared into fleeing. So by the time Gulab
made the anonymous phone call to the police and they investigated,
it would be five or six o’clock before he heard anything. He would
have to pretend to be sleepy, disoriented, when they called. As if