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told the police chief to, you know, put some dum —apply some
    pressure—on the boy. He was the ringleader, see? And I thought
    if we could break his back, we’d break the rest of the union before
    things got out of hand.”
    “You asked them to kill him?” Frank’s voice was a whisper.
    Gulab looked startled and sat even more erect in his chair. “Sir.
    Of course not, sir. The death was a terrible accident. They were
    just—roughing him up—to make sure he came to his senses. God
    knows what went wrong. Police here know how to beat so that
    marks don’t show, so that nothing too serious happens. This boy
    must’ve been weak for starters.” Gulab’s eyes darted about as he
    thought. “In fact, it probably was a heart condition he was having.
    Yes, probably had a weak heart.”
    That feeling of unreality, of being caught in a bad movie, swept
    over Frank again. I’m sitting in an office in India in the middle of
    the night discussing how to cover up the death of a young man, he
    thought, and despite the horror, the shame, the revulsion he felt,
    3 4 Th r i t y U m r i g a r
    there was no escaping it—there was also a kind of excitement, a
    sense of being tested, of being adult and worldly in a way he never
    would’ve been if he’d remained in Ann Arbor. “So is that our defense?” he heard himself ask. “That Anand had a bad heart?”
    “Defense?” This time there was no mistaking the fact that
    Gulab was mocking him, that he knew that Frank was out of his
    element, out of his depth, an innocent American boy trying to swim
    in murky, adult waters. Dimly, Frank remembered an earlier conversation with Gulab where the man had told him about his stint
    with the Indian Army in Kashmir. “I have killed men with my bare
    hands, sir,” Gulab had said. “It was that or be killed by the Muslim
    swine myself.” Now, he forced himself to focus on what Gulab was
    saying. “No need for a defense, sir. Our company is not responsible
    for his death. If Anand had a bad heart, he should’ve thought twice
    before becoming a union leader. Conditions in jail are such they resulted in his untimely death.”
    “You think they’ll buy it?” And then he caught himself, heard
    himself becoming an accomplice in the death of a youth he barely
    knew, a man who had come into his office a few weeks ago with a
    petition demanding better pay for the workers and longer breaks.
    There had been nothing exceptional about Anand, no trait that had
    snagged itself onto Frank’s memory, and it was that everydayness,
    that ordinariness, that filled Frank with a deep sorrow and revulsion
    at the conversation he was now having. “Listen,” he said, faking
    a resoluteness he wasn’t feeling, “there’s got to be a better way to
    handle this. We can simply come clean. Say that the police tortured
    Anand, and that we had nothing to do with that.”
    “Frank, sahib. Just think. If we do this, our involvement with
    the police becomes clear, no? Why did they arrest him at all, sir?
    It’s because we—I—asked them to. He had done nothing criminal.
    Still, they went into his house in the evening and pulled him out for
    questioning. And secondly, if we finger the police this time, what do
    you think happens when we need their help next time? For the last
    Th e We i g h t o f H e av e n
    3 5
    year the villagers have been disputing our rights to the trees that are
    HerbalSolutions’s lifeblood, sir. You know that. Who do you think
    helps us keep those ignorant villagers from claiming the trees for
    themselves?”
    Frank was aware of the simmering discontent among the villagers
    about the fact that HerbalSolutions had signed a fifty-year lease to
    thousands of acres of forest land from the Indian state government.
    The villagers had traditionally brewed, chewed, and even smoked
    the leaves of the girbal tree—the same leaves that HerbalSolutions
    was now harvesting and processing to use in its SugarGo line as
    an alternative treatment to