The Weight of Being Good
THE WEIGHT OF BEING GOOD
Ravi Sharma is the kind of man who irons tomorrow's shirt tonight.
He says good morning to the watchman every day and means it. He empties the bowl under a leaking pipe his landlord won't fix, morning and evening, for four months straight. He sends money he doesn't have to repair a wall in his mother's house in Lucknow, and quietly postpones the medical checkup he can't afford instead.
He is honest in a city that does not require it of him, and good in a job that does not reward it.
When Ravi discovers his colleague has been quietly stealing from clients for two years, he does the only thing a man like him knows how to do - he reports it. The firm thanks him by asking him to leave.
The Weight of Being Good follows one ordinary year in Ravi's life - a stolen promotion, a leaving girlfriend, a destroyed credit score, a stray dog who starts waiting for him at the gate - in spare, precise, devastatingly tender prose. It is a quiet story about what goodness actually costs, told without sentimentality and without cynicism, set in the Laxmi Nagar of rental rooms and biometric scanners that work on the third try, far from the Delhi most novels choose to see.
This is a short, literary novel - closer to two sittings than ten - built for readers who want every page to matter and none of them wasted.
For readers of Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger and Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance: a book for anyone who has ever done the right thing in a room where no one was keeping score.
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