The Weight of Heaven (7 page)

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.

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And the disappointment that seemed to permanently reside in her

eyes, like fish in a pond.

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
gora
s 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.

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4 3

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

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

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 studyingfudying 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.”

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4 5

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

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4 7

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 put 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

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

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