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stereo playing Benny’s favorite song,
    “Yellow Submarine.” Benny climbing the tree house that Frank had
    built for him, his light hair looking like spun gold in the sun. The
    smell of the earth as Ellie dug a garden, Benny beside her with his
    red shovel, trying to help. The two of them lying on a blanket in
    the backyard, the grass green and sparkling in the afternoon light.
    Golden. The memory of those years felt golden, draped in yellow
    light. Although she knew that she had been as rushed and harried
    as any working mom, now when she revisited that time, it felt lazy,
    stretched out, like a movie reel that someone was winding very
    slowly. How blithely, how casually, she had treated those years, Ellie
    now thought. She had had the cavalier attitude of a woman who
    expected her good fortune to last and last, who never realized that
    every Eden came with its own handy-dandy snake, one who would
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    strike without warning and at the moment she would least expect
    it to.
    “Frank may be late coming home tonight, Ramesh,” she said
    over the whistle of the kettle. “I’m the best you have for now, I’m
    afraid.”
    The boy threw her a perceptive, needle-sharp look. “That’s
    okay,” he said hastily. “I like studying with you.”
    Ellie smiled to herself at the obvious untruth.
    They studied for another two hours. When Ramesh finally left
    after ten thirty, Frank had still not returned home.
    Chapter 3
    Through the curtain of fog and rain, the distant lights looked like a
    swarm of fireflies. But as the Jeep drew closer to the factory, Frank
    saw that the light came from the kerosene lamps carried by the
    twenty or so men milling around the gate. A few of them had black
    umbrellas, but the majority of them were soaking wet. Their long
    white tunics clung to their bodies, and despite being warm and dry
    in the car, Frank shivered in sympathy. Or perhaps it was the ugliness that he saw on their faces as they peered into the Jeep—their
    eyes wide open, their mouths twisted in anger as they shouted slogans, the sound of which barely reached Frank, given the rain and
    the fact that his windows were rolled up—that accounted for the
    shiver. Or the fact that several of them beat on the Jeep with their
    fists or with open palms as Satish slowly drove by them, waiting for
    the night watchman to open the large iron gate. Without intending
    to, Frank found himself turning in his seat and looking back, and he
    saw that the crowd had surged toward the open gate but was held at
    bay by the armed chowkidar . Shit, he thought. This is not good.
    The first time he had ever laid eyes on the factory, he had been
    embarrassed by the long, tree-lined driveway, by the green, manicured lawns, the flowering bushes, by the sheer wastefulness and
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    display of wealth in a village marked by so much poverty. Tonight,
    he was grateful for the distance it put between him and the workers outside the gates. The driveway wound behind the factory to
    a separate building that housed HerbalSolution’s corporate offices
    and where Satish was now headed. By the time Satish pulled up to
    the front entrance, the Jeep was almost out of sight from the angry
    gazes of the mob outside the gate. As he jumped out of the vehicle under the protection of the umbrella Satish was holding out for
    him, Frank felt unreal, had the feeling of being trapped in one of
    those movies based on a Graham Greene novel. He had needed the
    twenty-minute car trip here to gather his thoughts. A worker dead.
    What was their liability? Their responsibility? He felt totally out
    of his element, more of a stranger to India than on the day he had
    landed in the country last year. When he had gone into Pete’s office
    to accept the assignment, labor troubles had been the last thing he’d
    thought of. How to deal with the aftermath of a dead worker was
    something they had not taught him in business school. A