He lit a bidi as soon as he reached the beach. Ellie had forbidden him from smoking in his own house, lecturing him on how bad the smoke was for Ramesh. So many times he’d wanted to remind them that Ramesh was his flesh, not theirs. So many times he’d had to look away so that they would not see the anger that rumbled inside him. What was it that Rakesh had said at Anand’s funeral? That the goras poked their noses into other people’s business so much, it was a miracle they were still attached to their faces. Prakash laughed out loud, imagining Frank without a nose. He walked along the water, moved fast, wishing to get away from Ellie’s line of vision.
Ellie was nice. Polite to him and Edna. Best of all, she never mistook Ramesh for her son. And when she looked at them, she saw them. Unlike Frank, who looked through him and Edna as if they were air. Always searching, searching for Ramesh, like they were water he had to look through to get to the bottom of the glass where Ramesh was.
At least the tamasha about Anand’s death had kept Frank away from Prakash’s family for a few days. He was spending all his time at the factory now. For that Prakash was grateful. For several days now, there had been no thump, thump of the basketball in the driveway as the American and his son played game after game, jabbering away in English. Ramesh’s squeals of delight felt like pinches on Prakash’s body, then. And Frank was coming home too late to help the boy with his homework. Just last night Prakash had ordered Edna to help Ramesh, but after struggling for an hour, Edna had given up. He had looked away then, not wanting to see the shame and helplessness in his wife’s eyes. Already, their son knew more about the world than both of them. Of this fact, they were proud—and ashamed.
Edna had not wanted to go to the funeral with him. Out of loyalty to them. The Americans. “How it look if we go?” she’d asked. “Like we supporting the union?”
“I knew Anand from the day he was born. His mother is a good woman.” He didn’t say the rest—that Shanti, who was several years older than Prakash, had always been nice to him. That was how Prakash judged all the villagers—who had been nice to him and who had scorned him when he was a little orphan boy, wandering from home to home.
“You go, then. I don’t even know these people.”
“You living in Girbaug all these years and still putting on Goa airs. You must come. A wife must follow the husband. It says in the Bible.”
Edna let out a snort. “What you know about the Bible, you heathen? Illiterate as a mouse, you are.”
He looked outraged. “I know Bible say the husband have right to beat his wife if she is not listening. You must go.”
The truth was, he wouldn’t have gone to the funeral without Edna. He had not lived in the village for years now, not since they had moved into the servant’s quarters of the house by the sea. Finding it hard to feed his new bride on his auto mechanic’s salary, Prakash had years ago approached the scary-looking German who had come to him with a car repair question and tried to convince him that he needed someone to clean and cook for him. “My wife very good,” he had said. “All Goanese dishes she making.” To his great surprise, Olaf had agreed—but on the condition that the two of them move into the shack behind his new home. It turned out that his current servant was not terribly reliable—and reliability was the great German virtue that Olaf prized above all.
For Edna and Prakash, the arrangement was perfect. Olaf doubled Prakash’s salary, and they had a free place to live. In the beginning, Prakash did the cleaning and Edna the cooking, but as time went by and Prakash discovered his culinary talents, they reversed the arrangement. Olaf didn’t seem to notice.
But living away from the village also meant forgoing the easy familiarity that Prakash had developed as a young orphan, the access that had allowed him to enter people’s homes without knocking. He had always held a peculiar position in the village, had been an object of affection but also of pity. The villagers saw him more as a talisman or a mascot than a human being. He himself never got rid of the feeling of being the eternal outsider. If he had married a girl from the village, perhaps things would’ve been different. But taking the first vacation of his life, he had gone to Goa and fallen in love with Edna. They had eloped to Girbaug two weeks later, knowing that her Catholic father would never consent to her marrying a Hindu. The villagers were as shocked by their marriage as Edna’s family had been.
Prakash threw the stub of the bidi into the sea and immediately lit another one. Soon he’d have to get his bicycle and go pick up Ramesh at school. He decided to linger by the water a little longer. Edna had been in a bad mood since the funeral. He himself had been unprepared for the emotionalism at the scene. He tried now to blink away the memory of Shanti beating her breasts and trying to fling herself onto the burning pyre that was devouring her son. Of Anand’s sobbing sister holding her mother back. Of Mukesh, Anand’s best friend, saying bitterly, “You see how ’Merica is slaughtering those Iraqis? Arre, bhai, they won’t rest until they do the same to us.”
The funeral had made him hate Frank. On the way home he told Edna, “I don’t want our Ramu going over their house for studying-fudying anymore. You see now who these people are.”
But Edna had turned on him like a snake. “Okay, stupid. Then you teach him. Talk to your son in your broken English. And you pay his school fees. And buy his shoes and uniform. All on your salary—which Frank sir pays, anyway.”
Prakash stared at the gray waters of the sea. These days, Edna felt as far away from him as that place where the sky touched the lip of the sea. And Ramesh was always sullen around him, as if he’d picked up on Edna’s constant criticism of him. If only he had the means to make the boy smile the way the gora seemed to be able to do without trying. A few weeks ago, Frank had knocked on their door late in the evening and presented Ramesh with a brand-new basketball. This, after Prakash had spent an hour putting a rubber patch on the old one, made it as good as new. Show off. Always buying off his Ramu with presents.
Prakash felt his nose twitch as he fought back his tears. He rubbed his nose on his shirtsleeve, then looked up at the sky. Two more hours and he could have a drink. He thought with longing of the full bottle of daru that awaited him at home. As if the brown alcohol had already entered his body, he felt it uncoil and relax.
CHAPTER 5
Ellie had not left the house in over a week, and now she paced the living room, anxiously awaiting Nandita’s arrival. Ever since Anand’s death, Frank had begged her not to leave the house, told her it was unsafe for her to be out on her own on the streets of Girbaug. And Ellie had swallowed her normal resistance and stayed at home even as she resented how little Frank was telling her about what had transpired at the police station the day that poor boy had died or about the aftermath of his death. For that, she had to rely on Edna, who, despite her cautious and diffident manner, managed to convey the mood on the street to her employer. It was Edna who had told her about the rumors being circulated by the police about Anand having terrorist sympathies, a rumor that first made the men who knew him laugh and then infuriated them and finally, after it had been repeated over and over again, muted them into a kind of baffled silence.
But what had really unnerved Ellie was the scarlet streak of betel juice on Frank’s blue shirt when he returned home the day after Anand’s funeral. One of the pan-chewing men at the factory had walked up to Frank, looked him dead in the eye, and spat on him. It turned out that the worker was Anand’s uncle, and of course he had immediately been fired, but something of the stunned surprise that Frank felt at that moment stayed with him that evening, so that he blurted out what had happened before Ellie could even question him.
“Deepak told me to have the fellow arrested,” he said. “I refused. Would just inflame an already volatile situation, y’know?” There was none of the usual belligerence that crept into Frank’s voice when he talked about the factory situation. In its place was a kind of puzzled weariness.
Frank’s uncertainty tugged at Ellie’s heartstrings, made her decide to pu
t all her doubts aside, the nagging voice that said, But a man is dead and all because he dared to ask for a lousy wage hike. Frank would never do anything to deliberately hurt another person, she told herself. He would never do anything that would cause a mother to lose her son, because he knows what that kind of grief does to someone. And in order to take her mind away from the path it was taking, she reminded herself of the sweet, fun-loving young man she’d fallen in love with in grad school, remembered marching alongside him in Washington to protest the first Gulf War, recalled the genuine anguish he had felt when the Abu Ghraib story first broke. Only an innocent could’ve been that appalled and shocked, she now reminded herself, even as she remembered that her own reaction had been more worldly, more knowing, more pessimistic. So she silenced her doubts and held her husband at night and whispered words of comfort to him. And sometimes Frank responded by clinging to her in a way that reminded her of Benny during a rainstorm. And at other times, he gazed at her with the cloudy, distant eyes of a man who had traveled in space for so long he had forgotten what life on earth was like.
It was that latter look that made it hard to sustain the unconditional support, because it reminded her of how Frank had moved away from her immediately after Benny’s funeral, how he had turned into an immobile object, someone who could not bear to be touched or to touch. How it had taken her months to realize that what she thought was numbness was not; that the blankness in his eyes was pure anger, a white rock of searing rage. That all the while she was raging against the heavens, against a pitiless, merciless God, he had been raging against—her. That he blamed her for the death of their son. Not that he would ever say that aloud. Only once, six months after Benny’s death, had there been a fissure in the blank deadness that he normally presented to her, and then his very voice had sizzled with rage as he said, “What kind of mother falls asleep when her son is sick?”
How to answer a question like that? Where to begin? With the fact that she had already been awake for sixteen hours when sleep overtook her? With the defense that Benny had been stable, that she had checked him just as Dr. Roberts had asked her to, before she decided to get a few hours’ sleep? With the plea that he understand that she was a mother, yes, but also a human being caught in the normal, mortal needs of sleep, hunger, fatigue? With the accusation that if he’d not been on a business trip to Thailand, there would’ve been two of them to watch over their sleeping son? With the simple truth that when she’d retired to her room, the aspirin seemed to have worked—Benny’s fever was under control, and there was not a trace of the rash that would spread like an evil lace over his body a few hours later?
There was no answer to a question like that. And the mortification she saw on Frank’s face made clear that there was no need for her to answer, that even if she’d tried, her reply would’ve been covered up by his stricken, “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I didn’t mean that. I don’t know where that came from.”
She thought she’d buried that memory, but when in the days following Anand’s death Frank gave her that same blank look, Ellie found it hard to play the role of the loving, supportive wife. Also, India had changed Frank. Ever since the labor unrest began, he came home day after day railing about how slow the workers were, complaining about their lousy work ethic and their lack of initiative, his voice brittle with contempt. The final straw came when Frank had missed a day of work because of the stomach flu and found out the next day that they had all taken the afternoon off because nobody could figure out how to fix one of the machines that broke down and disrupted the production line. “Can you friggin’ believe it, Ellie?” Frank had cried. “Even the foreman acted all helpless, like he’d never heard the word repair in his life. These people have no concept of deadlines or meeting orders. God, what a country.”
It was that last comment, that generalization that indicted a billion people, that had made the words shoot out of Ellie’s mouth, “Well, if you paid them a little better, maybe they’d care more.”
Frank had turned on her, his eyes wide with hurt. “You can’t help yourself, can you? It’s a bad habit, right, always siding with others against me?”
The memory of that hurt made Ellie watch what she said to Frank this time. We’re all alone in this country, she said to herself a hundred times a day. I’m all he has here. She had been lucky to have formed a friendship with Nandita that had in short order become as strong as any friendship she had in Michigan. Nandita had talked her into volunteering at the NIRAL health clinic and school, which she did several days a week. From the moment they had landed in Girbaug, Ellie had felt at home here, seen something on the faces of the local women that felt timeless and universal to her, seen in those brown, sunbaked faces the faces of her own sister, mother, and aunts, although she knew that her ruddy-faced Irish-American family would be shocked if she ever told them this. The fact was, India fit Ellie like a garment cut to size. Frank, she knew, found the garment too tight and oppressive, and she was sorry for him.
In the beginning, she had hoped that Frank and Nandita’s husband Shashi would form a close friendship, and indeed the men spent some time bicycling together and playing table tennis at Shashi’s bungalow. But somehow the friendship didn’t take. Frank found Shashi too mild, not competitive enough, and Shashi—well, it was hard to know what Shashi really thought of Frank. He always seemed happy enough to see him, but there was a faint air of superiority in the way Shashi carried himself that made Frank grouse. Once, when the labor trouble at HerbalSolutions was first heating up, Frank had tried talking to Shashi about it.
“So how does one handle the labor situation in India, Shash?” he’d asked. “Any special tips?”
Shashi had turned toward him, the usual smile on his lips. “What do you mean, special tips?”
“Well, you know. You’ve run a successful hotel around here for many years. You must have some insight into the minds of the workers. What makes them tick, that kind of thing.”
“What makes them tick is—good pay and good working conditions. Same as workers all over the world.” Shashi laughed. It was impossible to know if he had just mocked Frank or mocked the entire labor class.
Frank’s jaw tightened. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, and then the women had taken over, filling the strained silence with their patter until the mood at the table lightened again.
The doorbell rang, and Ellie skipped toward the kitchen door. “Oh, God, how I’ve missed you,” she cried when she saw Nandita, flinging her arms around her.
“Wow.” Nandita grinned as she stepped in. “That’s a nice welcome.”
Ellie had already put the kettle on, and now she poured them each a cup of tea as the two women sat at the kitchen table. “Hmm,” Nandita sighed. “You’ve certainly learned how to make a great cup of chai, El.”
Ellie made a face. “Well, we’ve only been in the country, what, sixteen months. At least I have something to show for it.”
Nandita tilted her head. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” She took a sip of tea. “Edna says they’re now saying that Anand was a terrorist,” she blurted out.
Nandita gave a short laugh. “Yah, this is the new India. Every two-bit criminal is now accused of being a terrorist—not that that poor kid was even a criminal,” she added.
“This is not the India I’d imagined when I urged Frank to take this job, I’ll tell you that,” Ellie said. She could hear the bitterness in her own voice.
Nandita’s tone was bemused. “What did you imagine? Cows on the streets and a guru and a snake charmer at every corner?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Ellie said. But the fact was, she had not thought much about it at all. What she had pictured was simply a country that would be the backdrop, the wallpaper before which she and Frank would enact their family drama of estrangement, healing, and reconciliation. She had certainly not imagined a teeming, heaving country that would become a player in their domestic drama. India, she now knew, would not be content staying in the ba
ckground, was nobody’s wallpaper, insisted on interjecting itself into everyone’s life, meddling with it, twisting it, molding it beyond recognition. India, she had found out, was a place of political intrigue and economic corruption, a place occupied by real people with their incessantly human needs, desires, ambitions, and aspirations, and not the exotic, spiritual, mysterious entity that was a creation of the Western imagination.
“How was work at the clinic today?” Ellie asked, but before Nandita could reply, “I’m so tired of being stuck at home. I want to start work at NIRAL again.”
“You should,” Nandita said. “I mean, I don’t think the situation is dangerous or anything. You may get a few dirty looks, but that’s about it. I tell you, El, that’s what impresses me the most about the poor—the amazing restraint that they show. Others call it fatalism, but I’ve worked among them for years now and I tell you, it’s nothing as weak as fatalism. In fact, it’s—it’s fortitude. A kind of dignity. How much shit these people take from”—Nandita waved her hands to include the opulent surroundings they sat in—“from people like us. And still they don’t fight back.” She shook her head and managed a wan smile. “All right. Enough of my lecturegiri, as Shashi would say.”
Nandita is the only person in my life who says what I think, Ellie thought. The old Frank, the man she had fallen in love with, would’ve understood and felt the same way. But she knew that if Frank were here right now, he would raise his eyebrows, ask both of them if they weren’t sentimentalizing the poor, and wasn’t it possible that the poor were adaptive, that they had learned the art of smiling and bowing even while plotting murder against the likes of them? What happened? she asked herself. India was supposed to humanize us. Instead, it has made Frank cynical and bitter.
The Weight of Heaven Page 5