“And I thought I was the only investigative reporter in the family,” Nandita muttered.
“Shashi, you’re a sly one,” Ellie said. “And romantic. Such a romantic.”
“Withstood years of her ignoring me,” Shashi continued, as if speaking to himself. “When she did notice me, it was only to ask me for money for some cause or the other. I had almost given up.” He suddenly looked up at them. “But then, one day, she said yes.” He sounded delighted, as if Nandita had said yes to him yesterday.
Ellie had the strangest feeling that as Shashi spoke, the physical space that separated him from her disappeared. She felt that she was entering the body of this man who had always felt a little aloof to her, so that she could relive his long-ago anticipation at having finally met a woman whose picture he’d fallen in love with, his crushing disappointment at her rejection of him, his steady doggedness at hovering at the periphery of her life, his triumph at having won her over at last. She suddenly knew what it felt like to be Shashi from the inside—his sadness at the knowledge that he would always love Nandita a little more than she loved him, his delight at having a brilliant, beautiful woman as his wife, his ambivalence, that mixture of pride and bashfulness at the way she barged ahead in life, shaming and chastising his rich relatives and business associates into donating money to whatever cause she was championing. Ellie felt she had a glimpse of what it meant to be a man who was married to a cloud—ever-shifting, hard to pin down, filtering light but also holding rain.
Something was shifting, the mellow happiness of earlier making way for a sweet sadness. But before the melancholy could descend on her any further, she felt Frank’s arm around her. “Hey, baby,” he said softly. “You okay?”
Ellie wished suddenly that someone would invent an album for filing moments, just as you could photographs. If so, she would file the imprint of Frank’s warm hand against her sleeveless arm, the quizzical smile that played on his lips, the breath-stopping expression of curiosity and love that she saw on his face.
“Beyond okay,” she said, snuggling closer to him.
It was almost one o’clock when they got up to leave. At the front door, Nandita gave each of them a hug. “You come and see us soon, okay?” she said to Frank. And then, with her voice lowered, “And you know you can always ask Shashi for advice, right? He’ll help you in any way he can.”
“Thanks, Nan,” Frank said lightly. Ellie noticed that even the reference to work didn’t yank Frank out of the languid, mellow mood he was in. Weed therapy, she said to herself. I’m going to ask Nandita for some.
“And you should start coming to the clinic,” Nandita said to Ellie, loud enough that Frank could hear. “You’ll be absolutely safe, I promise.” Both women waited for Frank to react. He didn’t. “I’ll come pick you up at eleven tomorrow,” Nandita said.
Satish had brought the Camry to pick them up, and they rode in the back seat together with Ellie cradled in Frank’s arms. They rode quietly in the dark, and after a few moments, Ellie heard the sound. At first she thought it was Frank humming, but then she realized what it was. Frank was snoring lightly, rhythmically, even while he kept his arms wrapped around his wife.
CHAPTER 6
Prakash glanced at the big clock in the kitchen again. It was only ten thirty in the morning, too early to sneak into his shack and have a drink. Edna was in a foul mood this morning, and it was making him jittery. He could tell by the way she was sweeping the floor around where he was standing in front of the stove. Usually, she would wait respectfully for him to lower the flame and move away from the stove before sweeping near him. But today she sat on her haunches and hit his bare feet with the thick end of the jaaro, grunted an abrupt, “Move.” He resisted the urge to strike her on the head, aware of the fact that Ellie memsahib was still in the house, rushing from the living room to the bedroom as she got dressed. But he stood his ground, even though his hands shook. “No eyes to see I’m cooking?” he muttered to her. “So-so much in a hurry you are. Late to meet a boyfriend or something?”
She looked up at him, her eyes barely hiding her disdain. “After you, I swear off men. Even a rat would be better than you.”
As usual, he looked away first. It hurt when she talked to him like this, brought back memories of his childhood when he used to wander from house to house, exposing himself to whatever mood a particular resident was in. Never knowing whether the women would chase him away with a curse or welcome him in with a sweet. And the worst part was, the children themselves picked up on the moods of the adults, so that one day they would invite him to play kabaddi or hopscotch with them and the next day they would chase him around the village calling him names—Orphan Boy, Long Face, Cursed One.
“Move, men,” Edna said. “You deaf or what?”
“You deaf or what?” he imitated but heard the feebleness of his counterattack and got no satisfaction from it. He went and stood in the doorway.
There was a time when Edna would’ve killed herself before talking so rudely to him. She had been only twenty-three when they’d met; he, almost ten years older. Enthralled by a Bollywood movie shot in Goa, he had impulsively asked his boss at the auto shop for two weeks’ leave, borrowed a motorcycle from one of his clients, and taken off for Goa.
He met Edna on his second day there. She was working as a maid at the run-down, ten-room motel where he was staying. He was immediately smitten, although in those days he spoke little English, and he thought her Goanese Hindi was hilarious. She told him of cheap places to eat and what beaches to visit. On the third day of his visit, she had the day off and airily proposed that she show him around. By the fourth day, he was sure that she was the woman he had to marry. They eloped two weeks later, after Edna had convinced him that her Catholic father would never give his blessings to her marrying a Hindu. She was right—neither her parents nor her older sister ever saw her again.
“Are you wanting me to convert?” she had asked him after they’d been married for about six months. “Will that make you happy?”
“Why for?” he’d replied, in the broken English he’d started learning soon after meeting her. “I marry knowing you are Christian.”
She flung her arms around him. “Thank you,” she whispered. “You Hindu fellows have so-so many gods, it would make me giddy, trying to decide which one to worship.”
In the early days, he would come home from the auto shop, go for a swim in the sea, and then help Edna with the evening meal. He discovered an aptitude for cooking, and Edna delighted in teaching him the Goanese and continental dishes that her mother had spent a lifetime making for the British babu who had visited Goa forty years ago and never left. Sometimes they would go for a night show at the village’s only cinema and ride home on Prakash’s bicycle, him pedaling standing up and Edna perched on the seat. If they overheard the tsk-tsking of the neighbors, saw someone looking at them askance, they ignored it, accepting the villagers’ judgment at their intermarriage as the price of their happiness.
The first time he had made her bebinca, the Goanese pancake made from coconut milk, she had wept with gratitude, told him it tasted better than her mother’s even. He had last made the dessert for her two months ago. This time, Edna had chastised him for trying to add fat to her hips, ignored him when he protested that she was as beautiful as ever, accused him of stealing her family recipe, and told him it didn’t taste as good as her mother’s, anyway.
Standing in the doorway, eyeing his wife, Prakash thought he knew exactly when things had begun to sour between them—it was after Ramesh’s birth. Edna had not informed her parents of her pregnancy, as she had wanted to surprise them after the birth of their first grandchild. For nine months she had pictured the reconciliation—her teary parents cradling the infant in their arms, welcoming Prakash into their family, her mother covering Edna’s face in kisses, telling her how much she’d missed her. But the telegram she had sent them announcing Ramesh’s birth was answered by one that said, “We have no grandson. Sto
p. Because we have no daughter.”
Prakash had held her in his arms for hours that day, a wailing infant on one side and a sobbing wife on the other. “They will change, na, Edna,” he said. “We have one miracle, our Ramu. Second miracle take time.”
She had shaken her head. “You not knowing how stubborn my papa is.” She picked up Ramesh and held him to her breast. “It is decided—my son will pay for my sins.”
Something had turned cold inside him then. Sins? Edna thought of her marriage to him as a sin? The old childhood names—Cursed One, Bad Luck—came back into his mind. He saw himself clearly at that moment—a skinny, ungainly man with a third-grade education, who had few prospects and little to offer his son and young wife.
“Sorry,” he said, rising to his feet. “Your father right. You marry trouble.”
“Prakash,” she cried. “I’m not meaning anything bad.” She set the baby down and cradled his face with her hands. “You—you never my trouble. You are my joy. You make me so happy.”
He shook his head. “I have nothing to give this boy. Nothing more than my hands.”
“Is enough, Prakash,” she said fiercely. “We will love our son enough for everybody.”
But it hadn’t been. It was the great source of sorrow in Edna’s life, that Ramesh was growing up without knowing his elders. Maybe that was why she had seemed so pleased when Frank had first taken an interest in Ramesh. And Prakash had not minded either, when, a few months after the Americans had moved into the beautiful bungalow with the pink stucco walls and the bougainvillea growing up those walls, Frank had offered to pay Ramesh’s tuition so that he could attend the missionary school in Kanbar. But now Ramesh was spending more time at the main house than with his own parents. When he’d mentioned this to Edna last month, she had turned on him. “Stupid idiot,” she’d said. “Jealous of your own son. Should be glad someone so powerful paying him attention but no, jealous instead.”
“Let him mind his own business. His son dead, so he’s trying to buy my son.”
“Shameless, shameless man,” Edna had replied. “The devil is talking from your lips.”
Some days Prakash found himself missing his old boss, Olaf. He was the first pink man that Prakash had ever seen, much less spoken to. Olaf spoke little English and no Hindi and took absolutely no interest in Ramesh. Every few days the German would go to the market to shop for fresh fish and vegetables—a task that he refused to hand over to Edna after he’d hired her—and that was the extent of his communication with the local people. The village children followed him at arm’s length, giggling and nudging each other, as he bought his okra and eggplant and pomfrets. The vendors quoted him absurd prices that would’ve drawn a sharp rebuke from Edna if she’d been allowed to accompany him, but he didn’t seem to notice. He just drove back to the house, set the bags on the kitchen counter without a word, and then withdrew to his typewriter and resumed his click-click-click. Over time, Edna had figured out that Olaf wrote books, but that was about all they knew about him. Once, Prakash had tried questioning him, but Olaf had spoken such gibberish, half in English and half in German, that he’d given up. Still, Olaf was kind—he left one peg for Prakash in the bottle of Scotch he downed every two or three days, winking as he handed the bottle over.
Prakash still remembered the day Olaf had come into the kitchen and announced he was leaving. Going back to Germany. He had been stunned. But being from Goa, Edna wasn’t too surprised. It was a common enough occurrence—Europeans coming to Goa for a visit and falling in love with the beauty of the place and the warm friendliness of the people, which they mistook for a childlike innocence. Next thing you knew, they were buying up beachfront property on their accountants’ and nurses’ and plumbers’ salaries. They lived in Goa for years until one day, a sudden urge to eat fish and chips at the Blackheath pub or to see the Seine at dawn or to revisit the Cologne cathedral came over them, and they heard themselves tell a nephew or a niece they had last seen thirty-five years ago that they were coming home.
“Why you looking like someone dead, men?” Edna had said to Prakash. “The old man has to go home, no?”
Prakash shook his head. “I thought his home here.”
Edna laughed. “He live here twenty-five years and never speak the language. And you think this his home? At least Olaf is a decent fellow—told me today he giving us ten thousand rupees. The British gent my mama cook for for years, you know what he leave her? A picture of himself. Say he not want to insult their friendship by giving money. Can you imagine?”
Before leaving, Olaf also told them in his broken English that he’d sold the house to an American company called HerbalSolutions and that someone from the company would soon be living there. He had highly recommended Prakash and Edna to the new owners. The ten thousand rupees was to tide them over in the eventuality that there would be a delay in the arrival of the new occupants.
Now, thinking of Olaf as Edna finished sweeping the kitchen, Prakash said to her, “Do you remember—”
“Do you remember, do you remember?” she mimicked him. She got up from the floor and straightened herself. “All I remember is you come home at eleven last night, like an ordinary ruffian. Drunker than the devil himself.”
He had to look away from the fury he saw in her eyes. How to explain to her what had made him stagger out of the house and head to the bootlegger’s joint, last night? He had been in the courtyard pruning the bushes when Ramesh had returned to their shack after knocking and knocking on the door of the main house. “Arre, bewakoof, I told you they not home,” he’d called out to his son.
Ramesh’s forehead was creased with worry. “But I am needing help on a maths problem, dada,” he said. And then, “How come you cannot help me?”
The shame had risen in him, like acid from the stomach. Unable to speak, he had instead smacked his son on the head. “Go inside and study,” he said. He lingered in the courtyard for a few minutes, knowing that he was not going into their one-room shack, that he was too embarrassed to face his son. He gave the bush one savage clip, put away the shears, and walked to the village instead.
Edna was still staring at him. “In Goa they at least have AA meetings,” she said. “In this godforsaken place, nothing.”
“Goa, Goa,” he said, forgetting to keep his voice down. “If your Goa so good, pack your bags and go. See who will marry an old boodhi like you.”
“And who made me an old boodhi, you rascal? So young and plump I was when I met you…” And Edna was down the road that she walked at least once a week, a path full of recriminations and accusations and blame and nostalgia for the Goa of her youth. Usually, he simply ignored her, made his mind fly like a kite to some other place, but today he felt pity for his wife, heard in her lament for her lost youth something that he himself was feeling. Stopping her mid-sentence, he put his arms around her. “Chup, chup, Edna,” he said softly. “I understand the reason for all this gussa. You is just missing your mummy and papa.”
Her eyes filled immediately with tears, and he knew he had diagnosed the problem accurately. But how to solve it, he didn’t know. Not for the first time, he cursed the pigheaded father-in-law he had never met.
Feeling her relax and soften, glad that he had been able to interrupt her tirade, he continued. “Listen, my bride,” he said to her in Hindi. “Our son doesn’t lack for anything, does he? Together, we provide him with all the love in the world.”
She pulled away from him. “Yah, and what are you knowing about family love, you stupid orphan?”
He flinched and moved away from her, the same expression on his face that the stray dogs wore after they had been kicked in the ribs by one of the village children. “Prakash,” Edna began, but he shook his head fiercely.
“Go,” he hissed. “Get out of the kitchen. Take your sad face out of my sight.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“You go, I say. Before I lift my hand to you.”
She picked up the broom and left th
e room. He stood in the kitchen for a few moments, forcing the sting of her words to lessen. He noticed that the rice was done and turned off the burner. He heard Edna and Ellie in the living room. It sounded like Ellie was giving Edna some instructions. He eyed the door.
It would take only a minute to cross the courtyard to their shack and take a long swig of the daru bottle that he had hidden in the kitchen. He could come back and finish cooking the rest of the food before Edna was done talking to the memsahib. He moved stealthily across the floor and shut the door quietly behind him.
CHAPTER 7
Ellie crossed the courtyard behind the house and opened the wooden gate that led to the driveway where Nandita was waiting in her car. Edna followed behind her. “What time will you be home, madam?” she called.
Ellie felt a wave of irritation. She hated how Edna kept track of her all the time. “I don’t know,” she said.
Nandita leaned over to give her a peck on the cheek after she climbed into the car. “You know, I think you’re wise to not have live-in help,” Ellie grumbled as Nandita backed out of the driveway.
“Why? What happened?”
“Oh, Edna’s so fucking controlling at times. And witnessing this hostility between her and Prakash gives me a headache. It’s like—shit, it’s hard enough to run my own marriage, without having to watch those two every morning.”
“Uh-oh. What has happened to my kind-hearted, high-minded friend this morning? How come she’s sounding like the rest of us mortals?”
“Oh, shut up.”
“Wow. You are a grouch today. But speaking of marriages…you and Frank seemed pretty lovey-dovey last night.”
“It was the weed.”
“Bullshit. You two were making eyes at each other from the moment he walked in.” She looked away from the road to glance at Ellie. “So. Did you get some action last night?”
Ellie laughed. “You’re baaaaad.”
The Weight of Heaven Page 7
