The Weight of Heaven (34 page)

“The government is corrupt,” Sunita said matter-of-factly. “Everybody knows. In fact, we are reviewing all the contracts.” She

looked away for a moment and then stared at Frank dead in the eye.

“How much in bribes did you have to pay to the officials?”

Frank half rose from his chair. “I’m not going to sit here and be

insulted, Miss Bhasin,” he said. “I gave you the interview in good

faith—”

“Okay,” she said hastily. “I withdraw the question. I’m sorry.”

“Besides, the deal was made long before my involvement with

the Indian plant,” Frank continued. “I was not part of it.”

“Okay,” she said again, looking down at her notebook. “One

other question. Are you planning on offering Mukesh’s widow any

compensation for her loss?”

There was something so smug and self-congratulatory about

her expression, he wanted to slap her face. “Let me remind you of

the fact that Mukesh was not our employee. In fact, until he made

this—unfortunate and tangential connection between him and us,

we had never heard of the man.”

“I didn’t ask about your legal responsibility,” Sunita said softly.

“I asked about your moral responsibility.”

Th e We i g h t o f H e av e n 2 4 5

“Touché,” Frank replied. “In fact, I don’t believe we have a moral

responsibility toward this man’s family. Now, this is not to say that

we won’t—”

A flame of color shot into the woman’s face. “It is exactly this

kind of callousness that these villagers are fighting,” she said. She

swallowed hard and asked, “Mr. Benton, do you have a family?”

“I have a wife,” he replied cautiously. He had no idea where she

was going with this line of questioning.

“But no children?”

He thought for a moment. “No.”

“I thought so,” Sunita said. “See, if you had children you would

feel differently about all of this, about your responsibility to the

natural world, to those trees that you are stripping bare, to this poor

woman who will now have to raise her child as a widow. I think

that’s what children do, no? They sensitize us to the miseries of the

world.”

He fought the urge to physically lift this smug, pious, ignorant

woman off her chair and throw her out of his office. It was a typical

Indian trait—this unforgiving inquisitiveness and then this unbearable, smug superiority. As if they fucking knew your life better than

you did.

“Listen,” he said, his eyes blazing. “Don’t you dare sit in judgment of me. You don’t know shit about me. I lost my only child a

little over two years ago. My wife and I are still recovering from that

loss, you hear? So don’t you dare lecture me about suffering and

misery. If you think I’m not torn up about that poor son of a bitch

who hung himself, then, well, you don’t know anything about me.

But I have other responsibilities. I have a company to run. Which is

a heck of a lot more difficult than cowering behind the protection of

a notebook and making up shit to put in the next day’s newspaper.”

To his horror, Sunita’s eyes filled with tears. “Oh, my God,” she

gasped. “I am so sorry.”

2 4 6 Th r i t y U m r i g a r

He shook his head brusquely. “Forget it.”

“No, I’m really sorry. My mummy always criticizes me for this—

for how easily I pass judgment on others.”

He listened in amazement as Sunita indulged in a feast of selfrecrimination. This whole interview was surreal. He thought with

nostalgia of Dave Kruger, the business reporter at the
Detroit Free

Press
, who had interviewed him on numerous occasions and always

maintained his brisk, professional manner. For all of his and Ellie’s

skepticism about objectivity in journalism, he was suddenly thankful to those journalists who at least tried. He had no idea if Sunita

was typical of her profession or not. But one thing he knew—even

after a two-martini lunch, Dave Kruger would not be indulging in

the kind of self-chastisement that Sunita currently was.

The other thing he knew: he had lost control, had allowed this

woman to rile him to the point where he had lost control of his emotions. He had exposed to a perfect stranger the raw nerve that rested

just under a thin layer of skin. It scared him, the realization of how

close to the edge he lived, of how it had taken the slightest of pushes

to topple him. For the first time, he admitted to himself how unsettling Mukesh’s suicide had been, how it had jarred his memory

of those awful days following Anand’s beating at the hands of the

police. And how each such incident reopened the trauma of Benny’s

death.

“Miss Bhasin,” he said finally. “No offense taken. Really. But

I have another appointment scheduled for now. So if you have no

more questions. . . .”

To his relief she jumped to her feet. “Of course, of course. I’m so

insensitive. Sorry. Thank you for your time. And once again, please

accept my apologies.”

They shook hands, and he escorted her to the door. But just

before leaving, she turned to face him again. “How—how old was

your son?”

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His eyes filled with tears before he could control them. “He was

seven. His name was Benny.”

She nodded. “It’s a good name,” she said. There was something

old and mature in her face, a new understanding.

“Thanks for asking.”

The strike lasted another two weeks. Pete called daily during that

time, micromanaging in a way he had never done before. Frank forbade Ellie from volunteering at the village clinic during this time,

knowing that it wasn’t safe. She complied without much protest, and

he suspected Nandita had given her the same advice. However, Ellie

attended Mukesh’s funeral without telling him. She only informed

him after the fact, and before he could protest, added, “It’s good that

I went. Radha was very grateful to see me. I earned you some goodwill, Frank. And they all treated me with great respect.”

Nandita and Shashi came to dinner during those two weeks. “So

what do you hear about the situation in the village, Nan?” Frank

asked. “Are things quieting down?”

Nandita looked down at her plate where the chicken tikka masala

lay untouched. “It’s pretty bad,” she said. “These people have no

safety net, no savings. So the strike is killing them.”

“Then they should come back to work.”

She smiled sadly. “I’m sure they will. Eventually.”

“They’d rather starve than come back to work?”

“They want access to their trees, Frank.”

“You mean,
our
trees.”

Nandita looked him in the eye. “No. I mean
their
trees.”

The room was silent, except for the roaring Frank heard in his

ears. He felt angry, embarrassed, humiliated.

Shashi cleared his throat. “This is silly,” he began.

“Chup re,”
Nandita hushed him. She looked across the table at

Frank. “You know I care about you,” she said quietly. “I know how

2 4 8 Th r i t y U m r i g a r

smart you are, and I know you have a good heart. So I will never

disrespect you by feeding you lies. I’ll tell you the truth, even when

it’s painful.”

He forced himself to look at her, hoping she couldn’t see the color

infusing his cheeks. “So what’s the truth?”

“The truth is, they should have access to trees their forefathers

planted. The truth is, this is a community that has never seen a case

of diabetes, thanks to the leaves. The truth is, it’s downright immoral to treat diabetes in the West at the expense of the people who

gave you the treatment.”

“But your truths are all subjective,” Frank said. “The fact is,

these people had not undertaken any reforestation programs. They

would’ve stripped the trees bare in a couple of generations. We will

actually protect them by planting new trees.”

“And what good will that do them if they can’t benefit from it?”

Ellie asked.

It hurt, the fact that Ellie, too, was siding with them. Although

Shashi had not said anything, Frank suspected that he agreed with

his wife. He thought he’d never felt more alone in all the time he’d

been in India. “Well, we can’t just hand the grove back to the villagers,” he said.

“Nobody’s asking you to. Just share some of the harvest with the

local people. Believe me, you won’t even notice.”

“Let me think about it,” he muttered.

He went into work the next day, armed with a proposal for Pete.

It didn’t take much to convince his boss to agree with his recommendations. Working through the village
panchayat
, or council of

elders, Frank announced that henceforth the villagers would get a

fraction of the harvest from the
girbal
tree. A small group of workers

trickled back to work the same day. With Pete Timberlake’s blessings, HerbalSolutions also gave a check of fifteen thousand rupees

to Mukesh’s widow. Finally, a fund was set up to help build a new

wing for Nandita’s clinic. It was to be called the Mukesh Bhatra

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Clinic. The last of the workers returned to work, and the strike was

officially declared over.

Sunita Bhasin wrote a laudatory story about how HerbalSolutions was at the forefront of a new consciousness on the part of foreign companies operating in India. Frank read the story on the plane

to Chennai, where he was to negotiate buying a machine that would

replace about a third of his workforce.

Chapter 22

Frank looked at his watch again. It was ten o’clock. Gulab was already fifteen minutes late. It was Sunday morning, and he was waiting for Gulab to drop off a stack of letters for him to sign. He had

returned from Chennai on Saturday, and Deepak urgently needed

him to get a head start on the pile of papers awaiting his signature.

Ellie had left an hour back to meet Nandita for breakfast, which was

the only reason it was possible to have Gulab deliver the papers.

Since the day of the riot, Ellie had made it quite clear she didn’t want

Gulab in her house.

Prakash was in the kitchen making lunch when the doorbell finally rang. The cook looked up inquiringly. “I’ll get it,” Frank said

curtly. “I’m expecting a visitor.”

What he didn’t expect was the look that came over Prakash’s

face when Gulab Singh walked into the kitchen. The man blanched.

Gulab, however, didn’t seem to notice as he looked at the cook imperviously. “
Kaise ho
, Prakash?” he said.

“Theek hu,”
the man mumbled, keeping his eyes on the counter.

“Good,” Gulab replied in English. Turning to Frank, he smiled.

“Good to see you, sir.” He glanced at the briefcase he was carrying.

“Deepak sahib has sent many-many papers for you to sign.”

Th e We i g h t o f H e av e n 2 5 1

“That’s all right,” Frank said. He led the way to the living room

and was about to sit down on the couch when Gulab said, “Shall we

sit on the porch, sir?”

“If you like.”

“I used to come to this house a lot, sir,” Gulab said conversationally as Frank led the way. “I knew the previous owner well. Did

some . . . jobs . . . for him.”

“What sort of jobs?” Frank asked, even though he didn’t really

want to know.

“He was German, sir. Unmarried. I used to procure women for

him.”

Frank felt his stomach turn. A typical Indian habit, he thought.

Always giving you more information than you need. When they’re

not being inscrutable, that is. “I see,” he said primly. “Huh. Well.

Let’s begin—”

Gulab eased his bulk into a wicker chair near the porch swing.

“That fellow in there,” he continued, “his wife used to get real angry.

Blamed me for corrupting her little Olaf uncle. So I told Prakash to

take her to a movie or something when the women came over.”

“That how you know him? Prakash, I mean?”

Gulab snorted. “Prakash? I’ve known him since he was running

around in his bare bottoms. Little chit of a fellow he was, always

coming around our house for scraps of food my mother used to

throw at him.” He straightened in the chair and looked at Frank.

“He was an orphan, you know. Mother died in childbirth, and father

a few years later. So he ran around from one house in the village to

another. My mother had a soft spot for him for some reason. Always

giving him our old shirt-pants and feeding him. Such a pasting I

used to give him, trying to chase him away. But always, like a stray

dog, he’d show up at dinnertime.” Gulab threw back his head and

laughed.

Frank felt an intense revulsion for the man sitting next to him.

If this were anybody else Gulab was talking about in this manner,

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he would’ve thrown him out of his house. But his own dislike for

Prakash found a home in Gulab’s casual cruelty. “Well, I guess him

being an orphan explains why he’s such a lousy father,” he said. Despite himself, his voice softened at the thought of Ramesh. “Pity is,

he has a wonderful son. Bright as anything. Could run a company

such as ours some day, if he had the proper guidance, instead of

this—this—jealous, petty fool for a dad.”

Gulab’s eyes narrowed, and Frank knew the man had heard the