The Weight of Heaven: A Novel Read online

  The Weight of Heaven

  A Novel

  Thrity Umrigar

  for Anne Reid

  and

  Cyndi Howard,

  peace and love

  Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be

  The blood of paradise? And shall the earth

  Seem all of paradise that we shall know?

  —“SUNDAY MORNING,” WALLACE STEVENS

  Sleep child, for your parents’ sake.

  Soon you must wake.

  —“A LULLABYE,” JAMES AGEE

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  A few days after Benny’s death, Ellie and Frank Benton…

  Book One

  Chapter 1

  They had finished dinner a half hour ago, and now…

  Chapter 2

  Trouble’s coming.

  Chapter 3

  Through the curtain of fog and rain, the distant lights…

  Chapter 4

  Prakash felt as if even the sea was receding away…

  Chapter 5

  Ellie had not left the house in over a week,…

  Chapter 6

  Prakash glanced at the big clock in the kitchen again.

  Chapter 7

  Ellie crossed the courtyard behind the house and opened the…

  Chapter 8

  At exactly six a.m. the following morning, there was a…

  Chapter 9

  Edna seemed thrilled at the prospect of her son’s outing…

  Chapter 10

  Ellie gritted her teeth and swore to herself. Edna was…

  Chapter 11

  Bombay.

  Chapter 12

  The Fourth of July picnic was held on the grounds…

  Chapter 13

  Ellie leaned her head against the car door and stared…

  Book Two

  Chapter 14

  He wanted to buy her.

  Chapter 15

  All that fall, it smelled of watermelons. And burning firewood.

  Book Three

  Chapter 16

  The world had never seemed crueler in its bounty and…

  Chapter 17

  The disappointment was a new feeling. From the first day…

  Chapter 18

  She wanted him to laugh. But that seemed impossible. So…

  Book Four

  Chapter 19

  The drumming was thrilling—loose and wild and yet totally controlled.

  Chapter 20

  Ellie heard it first. A chattering, a sound that appeared…

  Chapter 21

  The young woman sitting across from him reminded Frank of…

  Chapter 22

  Frank looked at his watch again. It was ten o’clock.

  Chapter 23

  Prakash tried lifting the pot from the stove but couldn’t.

  Chapter 24

  Frank was in a meeting when Ellie called him the…

  Book Five

  Chapter 25

  The sun was God.

  Chapter 26

  For two months now he had been losing his son…

  Chapter 27

  Arthur D’Mello, HerbalSolutions’ IT man, laid the laptop down on…

  Chapter 28

  Ramesh was gone. Vanished. Disappeared. Along with his father.

  Chapter 29

  They stood silently in front of the modest stucco house,…

  Chapter 30

  Five days had gone by since Prakash had brought the…

  Chapter 31

  “So what’s he doing that’s making you so nervous?” Nandita…

  Chapter 32

  Somehow, he managed to shake Ramesh off. Told the boy…

  Chapter 33

  “Thanks for coming on such short notice,” Frank told the…

  Chapter 34

  It wasn’t until eight on Saturday evening that Frank began…

  Chapter 35

  Ellie miss was to have left for the train station…

  Chapter 36

  He ran. Down the steps of the porch leading to…

  Chapter 37

  The sky dripped gold that evening. And reds and purples,…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Thrity Umrigar

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  A few days after Benny’s death, Ellie and Frank Benton broke into separate people. Although they didn’t know it then. At that time, all they could do was concentrate on getting through each bewildering day, fighting to suppress the ugly memories that burst to the surface like fish above water. On the day of the funeral, Frank urged himself to go up to Ellie and say something brave and consoling to her, something that would reassure her that he understood, that he did not blame her for what had happened. But he was felled by a clear, sharp thought: He didn’t know how. Without Benny, he had forgotten how to make his way home, how to make his marriage whole again. Benny had been dead for less than a week, and already his marriage felt like a book he had read in high school and Ellie a character in it whose name he had forgotten. Something inexplicable happened in the days following Benny’s death—it was as if a beautiful blue bowl, no, it was as if the world itself had fallen and broken into two halves. Try as he might, Frank couldn’t help but feel toward Ellie how he imagined Adam had felt toward Eve after the Fall—hostile and compassionate. Sad and doomed and resentful. Above all, lonely. Above all, unable to regain that lost, broken thing.

  It was not as though Benny had always been part of their marriage. He and Ellie had been married for eleven years, and Ben had been seven when he died. And that was not counting the year of courtship, when he and Ellie were inseparable. A lot of history there, as Ellie might have said to one of her clients. A lot of great times even before they had conceived of Benny, let alone conceived him. But a strange thing happened once Benny was born. It was as if they all ceased to be individual people. Three people merged into one and became a unit, a family. The unit traveled together or stayed home together and breathed the same domestic air. Even when they were apart—when Frank was flying to Thailand, say, to supervise a new project, or Ellie was counseling her clients, or Benny was at school, they were linked to each other, their awake thoughts full of each other. Hope Ellie remembered to fax Benny’s math homework to the hotel, Frank would think while sitting in a meeting in Bangkok. Fuck. Did I remember to buy peanut butter yesterday? Ellie would wonder while listening to a client tell her about how her sister had embarrassed her in front of the whole family at Thanksgiving dinner. Little Benny would memorize a joke someone had told at school and repeat it as soon as he got home, giggling so hard that he often messed up the punch line.

  And now, they were two. Benny was gone. What was left behind was mockery—objects and memories that mocked their earlier, smug happiness. Benny was gone, an airplane lost behind the clouds, but he left behind a trail of smoke a mile long: the tiny baseball glove, the Harry Potter books, the Mr. Bean videos, the Bart Simpson T-shirt, the fishing rod, the last Halloween costume. A tiny rosewood box with a few strands of his hair. A mug that read, #1 MOM. His school photo. Photographs of the three of them at Disney World. The Arts and Crafts bungalow in Ann Arbor was positively shimmering with mockery.

  Even so, Frank didn’t leap at the chance when his boss, Pete Timberlake, asked if he was interested in heading the new factory that the company had bought two years ago in Girbaug, India. Four months after Benny’s death he was still concentrating on the Herculean business of putting one foot in front of the other. Of making up reasons to get out of bed in the morning. He mumbled somethi
ng to Pete about how much he appreciated the vote of confidence, but that it wasn’t the right time in his life to relocate. But Ellie heard about the offer from the wife of another executive. And saw in it what Frank couldn’t—a chance to save her marriage. To start clean in a new place. To put the baseball glove and the size-four Nike sneakers in storage, to not be slapped daily by the patter of feet not heard, by the sound of a high-pitched voice not squealing its exuberance over breakfast. And so Ellie broke the cardinal rule that she had always preached to her own clients: the one about not making any major decisions for a year after a life-altering event. Accept Pete’s offer, she urged her husband. And Frank, too tired to argue, to think, let himself be guided by the faint light of hope he saw in his wife’s eyes. India, he thought. He knew about the new, deregulated, globalized India that everyone was raving about, of course. The booming stock market. The billion-dollar acquisitions. The call centers, the manicured IT campuses. But he let himself dream of the old India, which he believed was the real country. India, he thought. Elephants. Cows on the streets. Snake charmers.

  Above all, he comforted himself with the thought of being in a country with a new moon, a new coastline, a new sky. Of living in a house whose walls did not carry the telltale pencil marks of measuring a child’s height. Whose rooms did not echo with the sounds of a boy’s whoops of laughter. A country where there was no possibility of running into one of his son’s teachers. Whose parks, rivers, lakes, stadiums, video parlors, movie theaters did not constantly taunt him, remind him to look at his own broken, empty hands. He went into Pete Timberlake’s office on Monday morning and accepted his offer.

  And so, banished from their once Edenic life in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Frank and Ellie Benton traveled east until they arrived at the Shivaji International Airport in Bombay on a cool January morning in 2006.

  BOOK ONE

  Spring 2007

  Girbaug, India

  CHAPTER 1

  They had finished dinner a half hour ago, and now they sat on the porch waiting for the rains to come. The nighttime air was heavy with moisture, but it held its burden in check, like a widow blinking back her tears. While they waited, the storm entertained them with its flash and dazzle—the drumbeat of the thunder, the silver slashes of lightning against the black skin of the sky. With each explosion of lightning they saw the scene before them—the tall shadows on their front lawn cast by the coconut trees, the still sand beyond the lawn, and even beyond that, the restless, furious sea, straining against the shore.

  He had always loved thunderstorms, even as a young boy in Grand Rapids. While his older brother, Scott, cowered and flinched and pulled the bedcovers over his ears, Frank would stand before the window of their shared bedroom, feeling brave and powerful. Talking back to the storm. He would deliberately turn his back on Scott, embarrassed and bewildered to see his older brother, usually as placid as the waters of Lake Michigan in the summer, turn into this fearful, unrecognizable creature. If they were lucky, their mother would come into their room to rock and calm her oldest boy down, and then Frank was free to escape to the second-floor porch that was adjacent to the guest bedroom. Being on this porch was the next best thing to being outdoors. From here, he felt closer to the tumultuous Michigan sky and violently, perilously free. Thunderstorms made him feel lonely, but it was a powerful lonely, something that connected him to the solitude of the world around him. If he stood on his toes and leaned his upper body out on the porch railing just so, the rain would hit his upturned face, the tiny pinpricks painful but exhilarating. The wind roared and Frank roared back; his hands tingled with each burst of lightning, as if it was nothing but a projection of the jagged, electric energy that coursed through his pale, thin body.

  Years later, it would become one of Frank’s greatest disappointments that his son had not inherited his love of thunderstorms. When little Benny would crawl into bed with them, when he would whimper and bottle up his ears with his index fingers, Frank fought conflicting urges—the protective, fatherly part of him would pray for the thunderstorm to pass, would want to cradle his son’s trembling body in the nest of his own, even as a small disappointment gathered like a lump in the back of his throat.

  Unlike in Michigan, thunderstorms in western India did not pass quickly. They had been in Girbaug for seventeen months now and knew how it could rain nonstop for days during the monsoon season. Now, although it was only May, the forecast called for rain tonight. Frank felt grateful to be home to watch it. He sat impatiently, waiting for the heavy, laden sky to deliver its promise. The wind whipped around them, high enough that they didn’t have to rock the swing they were sitting on. Behind them, the house was dark—Ellie had turned off the lights after they’d picked up their after-dinner coffees and padded out to the porch. Every few minutes the lightning lit up the whole panoramic scene before them, like a camera flash. Frank knew that when the rains came crashing down they would come swiftly, brutally, and his body ached with anticipation. So far it had all been foreplay—the whispers of the tall coconut trees as they leaned into each other; the cloying sweetness of the jasmine bushes; the painful groaning of the thunder. Now, he longed for the satisfying release that the rains would deliver.

  He turned toward Ellie and waited for the next flash of lightning to illuminate her face. They had exchanged a few aimless words since moving to the porch, but for the most part they had sat in an easy silence for which Frank was grateful. It was a contrast to most of their interactions these days, which were laced with bitterness and unspoken accusations. He knew he was losing Ellie, that she was slipping out of his hands like the sand that lay just beyond the front yard, but he seemed unable to prevent the slow erosion. What she wanted from him—forgiveness—he could not grant her. What he wanted from her—his son back—she couldn’t give.

  The lightning flashed, and he saw her white, slender body for an instant before the darkness carried her away again. She was sitting erect and still, her back pressed against the wooden boards of the swing. But what made Frank’s heart lurch was the look on her face. She sat with her eyes closed, a beatific expression on her face, looking for all the world like one of the Buddha statues they had seen on a recent trip to the Ajanta caves. She seemed to feel none of the agitation, the exciting turmoil, that was coursing through his body. Ellie seemed far away, as distant as the moon he could not see. Slipping away from his hands. Completely unaware of the memories tumbling through his mind—Ellie and he running through the streets of Ann Arbor at night during a thunderstorm, laughing wildly and singing at the top of their lungs before arriving at the house she was renting, stripping off their wet clothes at the door and falling naked onto the couch she had inherited from the previous grad student who lived there; him coming home from work one evening and finding Ellie lying on her stomach on the floor, trying to pull their four-year-old son from under their bed where he was hiding during a rainstorm.

  A savage malice gripped Frank. As was common these days, something about Ellie’s calm irritated him. Deliberately, he said, “Do you remember how he used to—”

  “Yes. Of course I remember.” She was wide awake now, having heard something in his voice that perhaps even he was not aware of. The satisfaction that Frank felt from having destroyed Ellie’s calm was tempered by something approaching regret. Her serenity, which he used to value so much, was now a scab he had to pick away at.

  “I think a year more, and he would have been fine,” he continued, unable to help himself. “I’d been thinking about taking him on a couple of camping trips, y’know, just the two of us, thinking that would help with—”

  “He was already getting over it,” she interrupted, and his stomach dropped. Was he imagining the triumph in her voice, the knowledge that she had scored the knockout blow and that he now had no choice but to bite the bait she had set up?

  Hating himself, he asked, “Getting over his fear of thunderstorms? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It was going to be a surprise. I—I t
rained him. Behavior modification—same thing I do with my clients.”

  He felt a hot surge of jealousy at the thought of Ellie and Benny alone at home, while he was flying off to Thailand, the other place where HerbalSolutions had a factory. How many meetings had he sat through, how many treks to villages in the hinterlands, how many miles logged on planes, nights spent in strange hotel rooms, all the time thinking he was doing this for them? He remembered his desperation when the cell phone signals were weak and he couldn’t call in time to wish Benny good night; how he had tried to send Ellie an e-mail as soon as he got into a hotel room in whatever city he was in. How he had fought to stay connected with them even when he was across oceans and time zones. Only to learn that the two of them had their own secrets, their own rituals from which he was excluded. He tried to remember if he had always known this and if it had ever bothered him before. But he couldn’t remember. Whole chunks of his memory of life when Benny was alive were gone. Or rather, the memories were there but the feeling was gone. So that he knew that he had been happy with Ellie, that they had had a good marriage, and he remembered a million acts of love and sacrifice on her part. But how it had made him feel—the sweetness, the delicacy, the intricacy—he could no longer conjure up.

  “How long had he not been afraid? And how many more years were you planning to wait before telling me?”