The Weight of Heaven

by Thrity Umrigar

  “What the hell is going on, Gulab?” Frank said before the other man could greet him. “What happened to Anand?”

  Gulab took out a white handkerchief from his jeans pocket and deliberately wiped off the phone’s mouthpiece before setting it down. Stupid Indian habit, Frank thought. All he’s doing is moving the germs around. He forced himself to take his mind off the phone and focus on Gulab.

  Frank’s head of security was a big, burly man with a clean-shaven, strong jaw, a boxer’s nose, and large, meaty hands. He was by far the largest Indian that Frank had ever met. Everything about him exuded power and raw, brute strength. He alternated in dress between the traditional Sikh long tunic and pajamas to occasionally showing up at the factory in a shirt and blue jeans. It was as if he changed his dressing habits often enough to remain something of a mystery. Something about Gulab had always made Frank uneasy, but he had never been able to put a finger on it. Unlike the other workers, Gulab always kept his word, was hardworking, reliable, and could think for himself. Nor was he obsequious or ingratiating like the others, traits that Frank despised. Most of the Indians he knew were either as blunt as a fist to the mouth or ingratiating as hell. But their fawning just made him feel aloof and distant. The more distant he got, the greater the intensity of the vigorous head-nodding and the smiles and the yessirs. Though, in fairness, he didn’t quite like the opposite either, this new sternness and seriousness that had overcome them since the labor situation arose two months ago. Men who had seemed infantile to him just a few months ago now seemed hardened and mature, and looked at him as if they saw something in him that he himself couldn’t see, as if he was something more than just Frank Benton from Ann Arbor, who had accepted a posting in a distant land and was trying to make a go of it, a working stiff (when you got right down to it) the same as any of them.

  “So what’s going on?” Frank said again, taking his position behind his desk so that Gulab had no choice other than to sit on the visitor’s chairs facing him.

  Gulab shook his head. “It’s not a good situation, sir. As you know, Anand was taken in police custody two days ago. And—”

  “Wait. Did I know this?”

  Gulab shot him a curious look. “I informed you myself, boss.” There was something in his voice Frank could not pick up on. “I think you were on your way to the weekly meeting when I told you. And your answer was—you asked me to take care of it.”

  Frank felt something form in the pit of his stomach. “So what did you do, Gulab?”

  Gulab spoke slowly. “I thought your instructions were clear, sir. So I told the police chief to, you know, put some dum—apply some pressure—on the boy. He was the ringleader, see? And I thought if we could break his back, we’d break the rest of the union before things got out of hand.”

  “You asked them to kill him?” Frank’s voice was a whisper.

  Gulab looked startled and sat even more erect in his chair. “Sir. Of course not, sir. The death was a terrible accident. They were just—roughing him up—to make sure he came to his senses. God knows what went wrong. Police here know how to beat so that marks don’t show, so that nothing too serious happens. This boy must’ve been weak for starters.” Gulab’s eyes darted about as he thought. “In fact, it probably was a heart condition he was having. Yes, probably had a weak heart.”

  That feeling of unreality, of being caught in a bad movie, swept over Frank again. I’m sitting in an office in India in the middle of the night discussing how to cover up the death of a young man, he thought, and despite the horror, the shame, the revulsion he felt, there was no escaping it—there was also a kind of excitement, a sense of being tested, of being adult and worldly in a way he never would’ve been if he’d remained in Ann Arbor. “So is that our defense?” he heard himself ask. “That Anand had a bad heart?”

  “Defense?” This time there was no mistaking the fact that Gulab was mocking him, that he knew that Frank was out of his element, out of his depth, an innocent American boy trying to swim in murky, adult waters. Dimly, Frank remembered an earlier conversation with Gulab where the man had told him about his stint with the Indian Army in Kashmir. “I have killed men with my bare hands, sir,” Gulab had said. “It was that or be killed by the Muslim swine myself.” Now, he forced himself to focus on what Gulab was saying. “No need for a defense, sir. Our company is not responsible for his death. If Anand had a bad heart, he should’ve thought twice before becoming a union leader. Conditions in jail are such they resulted in his untimely death.”

  “You think they’ll buy it?” And then he caught himself, heard himself becoming an accomplice in the death of a youth he barely knew, a man who had come into his office a few weeks ago with a petition demanding better pay for the workers and longer breaks. There had been nothing exceptional about Anand, no trait that had snagged itself onto Frank’s memory, and it was that everydayness, that ordinariness, that filled Frank with a deep sorrow and revulsion at the conversation he was now having. “Listen,” he said, faking a resoluteness he wasn’t feeling, “there’s got to be a better way to handle this. We can simply come clean. Say that the police tortured Anand, and that we had nothing to do with that.”

  “Frank, sahib. Just think. If we do this, our involvement with the police becomes clear, no? Why did they arrest him at all, sir? It’s because we—I—asked them to. He had done nothing criminal. Still, they went into his house in the evening and pulled him out for questioning. And secondly, if we finger the police this time, what do you think happens when we need their help next time? For the last year the villagers have been disputing our rights to the trees that are HerbalSolutions’s lifeblood, sir. You know that. Who do you think helps us keep those ignorant villagers from claiming the trees for themselves?”

  Frank was aware of the simmering discontent among the villagers about the fact that HerbalSolutions had signed a fifty-year lease to thousands of acres of forest land from the Indian state government. The villagers had traditionally brewed, chewed, and even smoked the leaves of the girbal tree—the same leaves that HerbalSolutions was now harvesting and processing to use in its SugarGo line as an alternative treatment to control diabetes. The villagers were also used to chopping what they thought of as their trees for firewood. After signing the lease, HerbalSolutions had posted guards to protect the trees against poachers. But there were constant disputes and run-ins between the hired guards and the people who believed that despite what the government said, the trees belonged to their forefathers and were to be passed on to their children. Several times, the police had been called to quell the unrest.

  “So what do we propose we do?” Frank said, hating this feeling of being boxed in.

  “Just leave things to me, sir. I’ll take care of everything.”

  “No, thanks. I won’t make that mistake again. The last time I asked you to take care of things, I end up with a dead man on my hands.” The words shot out of Frank, fired by the anger and resentment he felt.

  Gulab stiffened imperceptibly, and his eyes went flat and hollow. Frank could tell that he had drawn blood. He felt a small satisfaction followed by a twinge of regret. Gulab was not someone he wanted to turn against himself. “I’m sorry,” he began. “That was—”

  “No harm done, sahib.” Gulab’s smile was stiff, perfunctory. “And sir. I honestly thought I was following your instruction. When you told me to take care of the situation with Anand, I thought—”

  Was the fellow trying to implicate him? Trying to ensure that his hands were dirty—hell, bloody—too? And what had he meant when he’d told Gulab to handle the situation? Just the reflexive mutterings of a harried executive? Or had there been something more sinister—a desire for the problem to go away, to be solved by any means necessary—in that command? He could barely remember saying those words to Gulab. But even if he had, dear God, surely he had not meant murder, had not even meant torture. Frank remembered when he had first read about the Abu Ghraib scandal. He had felt physically sick. This is so not us.
This is not what Americans do, he’d thought. Ellie, of course, had been characteristically more cynical. C’mon, Frank, she had said, what do you think happened in Vietnam? Hell, what do you think happens in U.S. prisons every day? But he had been genuinely shocked, repulsed by the pictures on television. He looked at Gulab now, trying to think of a way to explain all this to him, to make him see that his was not a world of police torture and beatings and prison deaths. For a moment he thought with longing of the house in Ann Arbor, the animated dinner parties with friends who shared their political views, the easy conversations where they all vowed to move to Canada if Bush won a second term and never mentioned it again after he did. But it was like looking into that world from a thick sheet of ice, as if his former life was encapsulated inside one of those snow globes, delicate, fragile, lovely, and he was holding it in the palm of his hand, looking at it from the outside. After living in India for the past year and a half, he felt closer to the American soldiers who were up to their ears in shit and muck in Iraq, felt that he could comprehend their lost innocence and their confusion and irritation, even their contempt and hatred for a culture they had come to save but that was destroying them. All his liberal beliefs—that people were the same all over the world, that cultural differences could be bridged by goodwill and tolerance—seemed dangerous and naïve to him at this moment. The man who sat before him right now was as unknowable as a mountain, as impenetrable as a dense forest. The distance between them was greater than the geographical distance between their two countries.

  “Listen, Gulab,” he said. “You know damn well that whatever I said, I didn’t intend any violence. That’s not how we do business.” He looked at Gulab and thought again of how he didn’t want this man as an enemy. Forcing himself to lighten his tone, he said, “Anyway. It’s a shitty situation, but we’ll have to face up to it. I’ll back you in this. And you’ll just owe me big, won’t you?”

  Gulab looked puzzled at this last, unfamiliar Americanism. Then, he nodded. “I’m in your debt, sir.” He opened his mouth to say more, but just then there was a knock on the door.

  “Come in,” Frank called, and Deepak Mehta, Frank’s second-in-command, walked in. “Hi, Frank,” he said, ignoring Gulab. “What a tragedy, hah? I just now only got the news. Roads were bad, but I came as quickly as I could.”

  “You shouldn’t have come in at all, Deepak. I could’ve handled it.” Frank realized that he had not even thought of calling Deepak. You’re not thinking clearly, he chastised himself. You’ve got to do better than this.

  “Nonsense. Wouldn’t think of letting you deal with this alone. Have you seen the crowd at the gate? There’s about fifty people there. Including the mother.”

  “What mother?”

  Deepak blinked. “Why, the man’s—that is, Anand’s mother.”

  “She’s outside the factory?”

  “Yah. I got out and talked to her. But she’s not satisfied. She wants to talk to you, only.”

  Frank blanched, and from the slightest movement of Gulab’s head, he knew that the man had seen his fear. But he was beyond caring. The thought of meeting Anand’s mother, of answering her accusations, of looking her in the eye, was beyond what he could physically do. He knew his limits. Less than two years ago, he had attended his own son’s funeral, had avoided eye contact with another bereaved mother, who happened to be his own wife. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t.

  “Frank,” Deepak was saying. “It will probably help a lot if you could, y’know, go out and address the crowd. Say a few sorrys to the mother.”

  “I can’t.” Instinctively, Frank turned to Gulab for support. The man was staring at Frank in fascination, as if he was solving a puzzle. Slowly, a look of understanding spread across his face. But Frank was too anguished to register much of this. He felt like a cornered animal, actually rubbing his hand over his neck, where he felt the unmistakable bite of a noose being tightened.

  “It’s customary here.” Deepak seemed oblivious to Frank’s discomfort. “Mark of respect. You have to pay condolence to—”

  “Deepak babu,” Gulab said, jutting out his right arm as if to stop the flow of words. “Not a good idea for Frank sahib to face the crowd tonight. Maybe we can give the mother a few hundred rupees and send her home tonight. Later on, we shall see.”

  Deepak’s mouth tightened. “A twenty-two-year-old boy has died here,” he said. “I don’t think a few hundred rupees will appease the mother.”

  Gulab laughed. There was something dismissive and frightening about his laugh, and it had the desired effect. Deepak looked uncertainly from one man to the other. “I’ll deal with those junglee villagers outside, sahib,” Gulab said. “Once they see that both of you have left, they will leave, also. And I’m going to make arrangements for both of you to leave from the back road, okay? No need to face that crowd again.” Although he was addressing both of them, his eyes bore into Frank’s, who sensed that a subtle, imperceptible shift had occurred between him and Gulab, that Gulab had spotted some essential weakness in him and was protecting him.

  “Okay,” Frank said. His mouth was dry, his voice weak.

  Gulab shot him another look. “I’ll go find your driver,” he said and left the room.

  “What the hell is going on, Frank?” Deepak turned to him as soon as Gulab was out of the door. “What are we going to do?”

  “It turns out the boy had some kind of heart condition. Being in jail probably stressed him out. It’s very unfortunate.” Even to Frank, his voice sounded wobbly and untrue. But he already had the premonition of saying those words over and over again, until they would finally set, harden, become true.

  Deepak gave him a long, thoughtful look. “I see. Is that what we’re saying?”

  Frank’s tone was wooden. “That’s what’s true.”

  “I see,” Deepak said again. He too sounded flat, his natural exuberance leveled into a kind of bleariness. And then, in a sudden, savage burst, “These greedy bastards. Everything was going so well. And then they had to start wanting more money and this and that.”

  Frank appreciated what Deepak was trying to do, incite himself, convince himself that the crowd waiting for them to appear outside the gate was to blame for the tragedy that had occurred. Out of the blue, he remembered an interview with a young soldier in Iraq whose buddies had been accused of slaughtering innocent civilians. “These mofuckin’ rag-heads are treacherous, man,” he had told the reporter. “One moment they’re smiling at you and shit and the next they’re pelting you with stones. So they bring a lot of this shit on themselves, man.” Watching the interview, Frank had been ashamed and repulsed. But now, he was grateful for what Deepak was doing, understood that he would have to start thinking the same way himself.

  “Deepak,” he said urgently, taking advantage of Gulab’s absence. “Whatever happens, I don’t want to face the mother, okay?” He tried to find a lighter tone. “That wasn’t part of the job description,” he added, but it came out wrong, thin and whiny instead of casual and jocular.

  “I already met with the mother,” Deepak mumbled, shifting in his chair, averting his gaze. “Also, there will be a funeral. Someone from the factory will have to attend.” His expression made it clear that he wasn’t volunteering for the job.

  Frank sighed. “It’s late. Let’s get home for a few hours and meet again in the morning, okay?” He got up from his chair to indicate the meeting was over and opened the door. Together, they walked down the hallway, only to run into Satish, who was hurrying toward them.

  “You need a ride, Deepak?” Frank asked.

  “No, thanks. I drove myself.”

  “Okay. Be careful going home.”

  “You, too.”

  In the Jeep, Frank climbed into the back seat, ignoring Satish’s quizzical look. The driver expertly steered the vehicle down the side road behind the office, until they were off the HerbalSolutions grounds and could loop around again on the main road, thereby bypassing the crowd.

&nbs
p; The rain had slowed down and the air-conditioning was on, but the vehicle still felt stuffy and hot. Frank tapped on the driver’s seat. “Satish,” he called. “Pull over.”

  He had jumped out of the Jeep before Satish could even come around to open the door for him. Running to the side of the road, he bent over and threw up. It was too dark to see the contents of tonight’s dinner, but Frank had the inescapable feeling that he was throwing up more than food—that he was bringing up bruised and beaten flesh, gallons of spilled blood, the unbearable, inexpressible anguish of a bereaved mother and the lost promise of a life that he may have unwittingly taken with his careless words.

  CHAPTER 4

  Prakash felt as if even the sea was receding away from him. In all the years he had lived in the one-room shack behind the big house where the Americans now lived, he had always felt that the sea belonged to him. During the Olaf years, Prakash could escape to the beach to smoke a bidi or to get away from Ramesh’s wailing whenever he felt like it. Olaf, the German bachelor who had built this house, had been the perfect employer—bas, as long as you gave him his morning coffee and poured him his evening Scotch and cooked and cleaned in between, he left you alone to come and go as you pleased. Olaf never once sat on the porch and waved to you as you crossed the lawn to take the stone steps down to the beach. As Ellie was doing right now. “Hello, miss,” he muttered as he hurried past the flowering bushes and toward the steps.

  The Americans seemed to spend all their time on the porch. God knows why. A perfectly nice, big house with air-conditioning in every room, and instead they preferred to bake in the afternoon sun. Unlike him, who had no choice but to be out in the sun if he wanted to avoid Edna’s nagging. Some days, he wanted to burn down their one-room shack, just to get away from the shrillness of her voice. And the disappointment that seemed to permanently reside in her eyes, like fish in a pond.