The Weight of Heaven: A Novel

by Thrity Umrigar

  “Ellie,” Ramesh was saying. “I’m asking and asking. Where’s Frank?”

  “I’m sorry, baby. He’s gone back to work. I don’t think he’ll be home in time to help you tonight.” Even as she said those words, Ellie was amazed that Frank hadn’t taken the time to cross the courtyard and knock on Edna’s door to tell the boy not to come over tonight. Something really serious must have called him away.

  “Can you help me?” And intercepting the look of refusal on Ellie’s face, Ramesh added, “Please, Ellie. I have two big-big tests tomorrow. And in geography I’m a duffer.”

  She smiled at his choice of words. This boy was charming. She could see why he’d stolen Frank’s heart. Still, Frank needed to be careful—and so did she. She didn’t want to fall victim to Ramesh’s undeniable charms. On the other hand, she couldn’t refuse the boy a shot at doing well on his tests. “Well, lucky for you, I’m very good at geography. So let’s do a quick revision session, okay? Where do you need to start?”

  Ramesh sat at his usual spot at the kitchen table and flung open an ominously thick book. He turned the yellowing pages fast and carelessly as Ellie murmured, “Careful, careful. You must treat books with respect.” But even as she spoke she noticed how used the book was, saw the passages underlined by the scores of students who had used the textbook before Ramesh had purchased it. She remembered how clean and crisp the pages of Benny’s books used to look. From the time he was little, Benny had always taken good care of his books, turning the pages carefully and tenderly, as she had taught him. But God, how much easier it was to do when the books were worthy of that care.

  Ramesh had opened to the section about different mountain ranges. Ellie looked at the chapter uncertainly. “So what do you want me to do?”

  He looked at her impatiently for not knowing the routine, as if she were the student, and a rather slow one, at that. “I’ll review the chapter quickly. And then you ask me test questions.”

  “Sure.” She read over his shoulder and, despite herself, marveled at how fast the boy read. Frank was right. Ramesh was as bright as the Indian sunshine.

  “You ready?” she said after they’d both finished. “Shall I grill you on some questions?”

  “Grill me? Like a fish?”

  “Very funny, Ramesh. Now listen, time to hit the books, okay?” She caught the gleam in his eye. “And no more puns. No, I’m not explaining what a pun is. You’re taking a test tomorrow in geography and math, not in joke-making.” She scanned the pages of the chapter again, formulating her first question. “Outside of Asia, what is the world’s tallest mountain range?”

  “The Andes,” he said promptly.

  “Right. And what is the height of Mount Everest?” she asked, even as she wondered, Who cares? Why do they make schoolchildren in India memorize all this?

  “Eight thousand eight hundred and fifty meters,” he said. “Correct, Ellie?”

  “Correct.” She had to smile at the triumphant enthusiasm she heard in his voice. “You lied to me. You’re not a duffer in geography, at all.”

  He made a face. “I am. There is one boy in the class who is getting the higher marks in geography than me. Always hundred out of hundred, he’s getting.”

  “But that doesn’t make you a duffer. You just have to—”

  “My dada say I’m a duffer,” Ramesh said. There was something in his voice Ellie couldn’t quite pick up on, as if he was defying her to contradict his father, even while hoping that she would.

  But before she could react, Ramesh was talking again. “Ellie,” he said. “I had a card for you. But Ma said not to give it.”

  Ellie cocked her head. “What card?”

  The boy suddenly looked bashful. Ellie noticed that he was avoiding her eye, staring at the blue table. “A Mother’s Day card. We made them in school. I made one for you.”

  Something crept up the base of Ellie’s neck. Yesterday had been Mother’s Day. She had made herself forget the fact. All day long she had glanced at Frank, willing him not to acknowledge it either. To her immense relief, he hadn’t. “I—” She struggled to find the right tone, unwilling to let Ramesh know how rattled she was. “Thanks,” she said. “But speaking of school, let’s get back to—”

  “How did your boy dead?” It took her a second to realize that Ramesh was asking about Benny, and she was shocked. He had never asked her such a personal question before. But then again, she had never really spent time alone with the boy. “Die,” she corrected absentmindedly. “How did your boy die?”

  Too late, she realized that Ramesh was waiting for her to answer her own question. At this moment, Ellie hated this peculiarly Indian inquisitiveness. And if this had been an adult being so nosy, so brutal in his directness, she would have bristled, wouldn’t have tried to cover up her outrage. But the fierce, intent expression on Ramesh’s face was throwing her off stride. “He was sick,” she said.

  A look of such adult understanding crossed the boy’s face that Ellie felt naked beneath it. “Typhoid,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  “No, not typhoid. A, a, rash. Do you know what a rash is?”

  Ramesh glanced at his welted, mosquito-bitten hands. “Like this?”

  Was it like that? Ellie tried to remember. She had been half asleep when she had first seen the horrifying purple that had covered Benny’s face within a matter of hours. At midnight, when she had finally put her agitated, restless son to bed, his face had been as lovely and smooth as the moon. At four in the morning, woken out of an inexplicably deep sleep by a single cry, she had hurried to Benny’s room, turned on the night lamp near his bed, and seen an unrecognizable boy sleeping in her son’s bed. Even now, Ellie could remember how her stomach had dropped, the fear that gripped her, an instantaneous, icy-cold fear that she had to consciously battle with, beat down, so that Benny would not see in her scared face what she didn’t want him to see. She had run her fingers over his body, one hand unbuttoning his pajama top even as the other inspected the skin on his chest, his neck, his arms. And everywhere she touched there were bumps and welts. “Are you okay, sweetie?” she had asked. “Does it hurt?” And he had nodded no, but with a rising panic she took in the heavy-lidded eyes, the hot, flushed cheeks, the hair sticking to his sweaty forehead. And when he formed his lips to say, “My throat feels funny,” she saw the effort it took him to speak, heard the hoarseness in his voice. Still, she managed to keep her voice steady, as if she were walking a plank on a particularly turbulent sea. “I’m going to call Dr. Roberts again, okay, sweetie?” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Is this a rash?” Ramesh was holding his hand up for her to inspect.

  Ellie glanced toward the door, willing Frank to walk through it and distract Ramesh from this line of questioning. “No, not really,” she said. “Achcha, let’s get back to the books, shall we?”

  “Achcha,” Ramesh said but the boy was in a strange mood tonight, because the next minute he stuck out his index finger and touched Ellie’s wrist. Just that—the light touch of a single finger that nevertheless felt to Ellie like a lit match against her flesh. Idly she noticed the black crescent under his fingernails. They both stared at the spot where Ramesh’s finger rested on Ellie’s wrist. Then Ramesh said, “I am feeling so sad for your son.”

  And Ellie thought back to the funeral—to Father O’Donnell’s rageful, heartfelt eulogy, to the whispering women clad in black, the silent, solid presence of the men, the brave, lip-trembling steadiness of her mother, the fierce, protective support of her sister, Anne, the terror on the faces of the mothers of Benny’s friends, the pity on the faces of their husbands. She thought of the weeks and months that followed—the lasagnas and pot roasts dropped off by neighbors; the spontaneous hugs in grocery stores from people whose names she couldn’t recall; the condolence cards from well-meaning friends who felt compelled to include pictures of Benny from their own photo albums; the cautious, careful looks she got from her own clients when she finally returned to the prac
tice, as if they wanted to measure the temperature of her grief before they shared any of their own; the treasured, handwritten note from Robert, Benny’s best friend, that read, “I will always love him.” And then she looked at the dark-skinned boy with the dirty fingernails who sat touching her with one finger, and she knew that nothing that had happened in the weeks after Benny’s death—not the notes or the cards or the whispered messages of courage and hope or the prayers or the homilies or the platitudes—had penetrated her as deeply as this boy’s awkward, ungrammatical words. Everyone else had said they were sorry, everyone else had said it was a tragedy, a shame, a pity, a travesty, some had shaken their fists at God, others had advised her to bow to His will. But no one had told her that they felt sad for Ben. No one had understood that sentiment—that much of her anger, her rage, her grief at what had happened, was not for herself or for Frank, though, of course, their grief was monumental, almost inhuman in its size and dimensions, so that she felt as if mere humans could not understand it, only the ocean and the mountains and the wind could. No, what she felt most of all was a screaming anger for what Benny had been cheated out of, at the destiny that had been wrestled out of his tiny, unformed fist. She and Frank had lost Benny, but Ben, Ben had lost not just his parents but his unborn children; not just his best friend from elementary school but the unknown friend from college and the women he would have dated and loved, the woman he would have married. Sometimes, when Ellie thought about the enormity of Benny’s loss, she was dumb-founded by its magnitude—the books he’d never read, the movies he’d never see, the symphonies he’d never hear (or compose), the geometric theorems he’d never solve, the all-night college rap sessions he’d never bullshit his way through, the junior year abroad that he’d never take, the debates about Nietzsche and Kierkegaard he would never participate in, the first kiss he would never have, the continent of difference between having sex and making love that he’d never discover, the thrilling knowledge that he’d outgrown his parents that he’d never possess, the first job, the first promotion, the first trip abroad, the first love letter, the first heartbreak, the first child—and God, so much more—the pimply awkwardness of being fifteen, the reckless giddiness of being twenty, the contentment of being forty, the achievement of being sixty, the acceptance of being eighty—none of this would be Benny’s fate. Ellie understood now why people mourned the death of children. The reason to mourn the death of a child of seven (or eight, or nine) was simple—at seven (or eight, or nine) children are stupid, so unformed, so inexperienced, that they may as well belong to a different species. The true reason to mourn the young dead was not because of what they were but of what they would never be.

  Now Ramesh was drawing tiny circles on Ellie’s wrist with his fingernails, a shy, self-conscious gesture that she immediately recognized. Without thinking about it, she lifted his thin hand to her lips and kissed it. An American boy may have been embarrassed by this. Ramesh beamed. “I like you, Ellie,” he said, but his voice was thin and uncertain with shyness, as if he was asking her permission, as if the statement had a question mark at the end of it.

  “I like you, too,” she said. Then, to mask her own embarrassment she added gruffly, “Now come on, enough dillydallying. You want to do well on the test tomorrow, don’t you?”

  “Dillydallying.” Ramesh giggled. “Is that like khaata-mitha?”

  She frowned. “Kaataa-meeta?”

  “It’s meaning sour and sweet. Like eating a green, unripe mango”—Ramesh screwed up his face—“and then eating an ice cream.”

  “Well, dillydally is nothing like that. It means to waste time on purpose. Which is what, you, dear boy, are doing.”

  Ramesh’s grin was disarming. “Caught me,” he said. He stretched his hands in a leisurely yawn above his head so that Ellie could see the flat, hollow stomach under his shirt. “I’m feeling lazy just now, Ellie.”

  “But ten minutes ago you were all frantic”—she saw he didn’t know that word—“worried about your test. Now come on, a few more questions and then we can stop.”

  Outside, the music of the storm continued unabated and the house creaked and groaned in accompaniment. When she was satisfied that Ramesh knew the answers to her questions, she got up. “I’m going to make a cup of tea. You read another chapter, okay?”

  He nodded, but each time she turned away from the kettle to look at him, she caught Ramesh staring at the front door. He’s keeping a vigil for Frank, the same as I am, she thought, but was not offended by the thought. In fact, it touched her, reminded her of how Benny used to wait for his father to return home at the end of each workday. Except for Thursdays, when Ellie worked late, she always came home by three o’clock so that for a few uninterrupted hours, it was just her and Benny in the house. But by six the boy would be agitated, his voice just a little louder, his playing a little more aggressive, looking out the living room window for his dad.

  Ellie felt her throat swelling at the memory of those long afternoons with her son. The dappled sun climbing into the kitchen as she cooked their supper. The stereo playing Benny’s favorite song, “Yellow Submarine.” Benny climbing the tree house that Frank had built for him, his light hair looking like spun gold in the sun. The smell of the earth as Ellie dug a garden, Benny beside her with his red shovel, trying to help. The two of them lying on a blanket in the backyard, the grass green and sparkling in the afternoon light. Golden. The memory of those years felt golden, draped in yellow light. Although she knew that she had been as rushed and harried as any working mom, now when she revisited that time, it felt lazy, stretched out, like a movie reel that someone was winding very slowly. How blithely, how casually, she had treated those years, Ellie now thought. She had had the cavalier attitude of a woman who expected her good fortune to last and last, who never realized that every Eden came with its own handy-dandy snake, one who would strike without warning and at the moment she would least expect it to.

  “Frank may be late coming home tonight, Ramesh,” she said over the whistle of the kettle. “I’m the best you have for now, I’m afraid.”

  The boy threw her a perceptive, needle-sharp look. “That’s okay,” he said hastily. “I like studying with you.”

  Ellie smiled to herself at the obvious untruth.

  They studied for another two hours. When Ramesh finally left after ten thirty, Frank had still not returned home.

  CHAPTER 3

  Through the curtain of fog and rain, the distant lights looked like a swarm of fireflies. But as the Jeep drew closer to the factory, Frank saw that the light came from the kerosene lamps carried by the twenty or so men milling around the gate. A few of them had black umbrellas, but the majority of them were soaking wet. Their long white tunics clung to their bodies, and despite being warm and dry in the car, Frank shivered in sympathy. Or perhaps it was the ugliness that he saw on their faces as they peered into the Jeep—their eyes wide open, their mouths twisted in anger as they shouted slogans, the sound of which barely reached Frank, given the rain and the fact that his windows were rolled up—that accounted for the shiver. Or the fact that several of them beat on the Jeep with their fists or with open palms as Satish slowly drove by them, waiting for the night watchman to open the large iron gate. Without intending to, Frank found himself turning in his seat and looking back, and he saw that the crowd had surged toward the open gate but was held at bay by the armed chowkidar. Shit, he thought. This is not good.

  The first time he had ever laid eyes on the factory, he had been embarrassed by the long, tree-lined driveway, by the green, manicured lawns, the flowering bushes, by the sheer wastefulness and display of wealth in a village marked by so much poverty. Tonight, he was grateful for the distance it put between him and the workers outside the gates. The driveway wound behind the factory to a separate building that housed HerbalSolution’s corporate offices and where Satish was now headed. By the time Satish pulled up to the front entrance, the Jeep was almost out of sight from the angry gazes of the mob
outside the gate. As he jumped out of the vehicle under the protection of the umbrella Satish was holding out for him, Frank felt unreal, had the feeling of being trapped in one of those movies based on a Graham Greene novel. He had needed the twenty-minute car trip here to gather his thoughts. A worker dead. What was their liability? Their responsibility? He felt totally out of his element, more of a stranger to India than on the day he had landed in the country last year. When he had gone into Pete’s office to accept the assignment, labor troubles had been the last thing he’d thought of. How to deal with the aftermath of a dead worker was something they had not taught him in business school. A feeling of dread came over him, a deep resistance at having to deal with this situation. The men who were gathered at the gate during a thunderstorm were not going to forget about their fallen comrade any time soon. He knew that. This is fucked up, he thought. I come to this country just trying to do my fucking job, and next thing I know, I’m dealing with a mob that has some serious hatred on their faces.

  By the time he walked through the long hallway that led to his office, anger had replaced fear. He noticed that every light in the one-floor corporate building had been turned on, and for some reason, this irritated him. Did these people think this was a picnic or something? Who the hell did they think was paying their electric bills?

  He was further annoyed to find Gulab Singh sitting on his chair at his desk and using his phone. At least the man had the decency to rise from Frank’s chair when he entered the room. “Achcha,” Gulab was saying. “Okay, no problem. First thing tomorrow morning I will be there. But the big boss just walked in. We will talk again tomorrow, achcha?” He disconnected the phone.