The Weight of Heaven

by Thrity Umrigar

  She looked away, knowing that what Frank needed from her right now was unconditional support and not a self-righteous lecture. Beside, some part of her agreed with him. She knew Frank and Pete well enough to know that destroying the local economy or ruining a man’s life was the last thing they’d have anticipated when they were negotiating for the grove of girbal trees. She remembered how Pete had rushed to the hospital when Ben was dying, how he’d looked as bleary-eyed and ruined as the rest of them at the end of their vigil. Pete was a loving dad, a generous friend, a good citizen. And so was Frank, a good man, despite his growing disenchantment and callousness. You shouldn’t judge him, she chastised herself. She didn’t have to deal with the stupefying Indian bureaucracy, with the sullen, erratic demands of the workers, the casual disregard for deadlines by the suppliers. For all practical purposes, Frank lived in a different India than she did.

  She pushed herself off the couch and went and sat next to him. They sat leaning into each other. “I’m sorry, baby,” she murmured. “But it will be okay. Don’t worry. Everything will be all right.”

  She didn’t know if either one of them believed her comforting words.

  CHAPTER 21

  The young woman sitting across from him reminded Frank of Ellie. That is, Ellie from twelve years ago, the fiery, impulsive woman who had been willing to right every wrong in the world. There was some of that in Sunita Bhasin, the journalist who had come into his office a half hour ago. Frank couldn’t help but like her, even though he was painfully aware of the fact that she saw him as one of the wrongs she was trying to right.

  He had blown her off the first time she’d called seeking an interview. He had been stunned to find out that Mukesh’s death—and the ensuing strike by HerbalSolutions’ workers—had made news in the Bombay newspapers. They were also dredging up the incident involving Anand’s death in May. He had been shocked at how one-sided and unfair most of the coverage had been—hell, I’ll never bitch about Fox News again, he’d groused to Ellie. So when Sunita, who worked for an English daily in Bombay, had first called him, he’d hung up on her. Days of negative coverage followed, and the stories never failed to include the line, “Officials at HerbalSolutions refused to comment.” It was maddening. And thanks to the glories of the Internet, Pete was following every blasted story. To top things off, the alternative paper in Ann Arbor had gotten wind of the news, also. Every day now there were phone calls from Pete or one of the other executives in Ann Arbor, demanding that he stop the beating they were taking in the press. Demanding that he do something to end the strike.

  “What the fuck would you like me to do, Peter?” he’d finally asked. “You wanna return the bastard trees back to them? That’s what it will take.”

  There was a short silence. Then Pete said, “Can’t do that. The antidiabetes pill is our number-one seller these days. But you have to do something, Frank. I was at Joe’s baseball practice last night, and another parent stopped and asked me about the situation in India. That’s bad.”

  “So what would you like me to do?” he asked again.

  “I don’t know, Frank.” Pete didn’t bother to hide the irritation in his voice. “You figure it out. That’s what I pay you to do.”

  He was shaking when he hung up from that phone call. Pete was his friend. In all their years together, Pete had never thrown his weight around, had never reminded Frank of the fact that he was the head of the company. Also, the casual reference to Joe’s baseball game, with Pete’s indifference to the memories of Benny that it would inevitably arouse in Frank, stung. He thought for a few minutes and then dialed Sunita Bhasin’s number. “If you still want to interview me, I’m willing,” he said.

  He had expected a middle-aged professional journalist and so was pleasantly surprised when a young, attractive woman of about twenty-five walked into his office two days later. She was dressed in the way many of the educated, college-age women in Bombay did—a white kurta over blue jeans and carrying a long cotton bag. Straight black hair framed an intelligent-looking face. His heart lightened. She looked like someone he could talk to, someone who clearly came from an educated, westernized background.

  But half an hour later, he was conscious of the faint trickle of sweat running down his face. He fought the urge to wipe it off, not wanting her to see the effect her tough, matter-of-fact questioning was having on him. They had already engaged in a spirited but general debate about the pros and cons of globalization, and as long as the conversation stayed at an abstract, theoretical level, he felt sure of himself, felt that he was on safe ground. But now she was asking him about the circumstances of Mukesh’s death.

  “Do you think it is ethical for a foreign company to own natural resources in another country?” Sunita asked.

  Frank made an exasperated sound. “Oh, for God’s sake. The land was leased to us by your own government fair and square. If we’d have known there would be all these problems, why, we wouldn’t have even bid on it.”

  “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.”

  “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.”<
br />
  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 self-recrimination. 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?”

  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 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 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.”

  “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, 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 bitterness in his voice. Careful, he said to himself. This man is your employee. No point in telling him too much.

  “Yah, I know the boy. Seen him around the marketplace with his mother. A sunny nature he is having.” Gulab paused. “What is making that old fool jealous, sir?” he asked. His voice was casual, almost disinterested.