by Tahmima Anam
‘So,’ you said, inhaling deeply, ‘what were you planning to do your last few days in Cambridge?’
‘Nothing much. Finish at the lab, return some library books.’
The meal was over. I put my palms on the table. ‘Thank you for breakfast.’
‘I wish it was two weeks ago,’ you said again. ‘Or last year.’
‘Me too,’ I replied, believing I meant it more.
We looked at each other, wondering what to do next. Finally you said, ‘Would you like to come to my grandmother’s funeral?’
I tried to imagine what would happen if my grandmother died and I brought you to her funeral. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘How about later? We’re having lunch at my mother’s.’
I didn’t want to meet your entire family, not like this, but I wanted an excuse to see you again. I said, ‘I thought about last night, and it all made sense to me. It’s because I’m going, and I’m not sure when I’ll be back – something like that.’
‘You’re an intermediate species, like Ambulocetus.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Maybe if we’d met under different circumstances, we might have decided to see what it was like. To be together. But if that’s not on the cards, that’s okay. I still want to spend time with you. Is that all right?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I do too.’ I was unsure if I had gotten what I wanted. Without being coy or hesitant, you spoke about our being together, and accepted with equanimity that we would not be. I should have been relieved – an awkwardness averted – but instead I felt disappointed, as if the conversation had hurried past me and I had failed to hail it down.
You asked if I had ever heard the Goldberg Variations. I hadn’t. ‘You remind me of number thirteen,’ you said. ‘Shostakovich is okay, but Bach is the source.’
I had to go to the MCZ and pack up my lab.
You checked your watch. ‘Call me when you’re done,’ you said. I wished you good luck for your grandmother’s funeral. I wanted so much for you to hold my hand, to put your arms around me like you had last night, but the moment, if it had ever existed, had passed, and so I settled for walking back down Mass Ave with you, the sidewalk warm beneath our shoes, everything brilliantly cloudless above.
I shared a large, brightly lit room on the ground floor of the Museum of Comparative Zoology with six other graduate students and a visiting professor. A bank of windows faced out towards Kirkland Avenue. Everything smelled of old wood. When I arrived to pack up my desk, Kyung-Ju was photographing the ankle bones of the Pakicetus we had borrowed from the University of Michigan, and I could hear some of the others in the back room with the scanner. The lab had been my home for the last three years, and after breakfast with you I found myself indulging in a moment of nostalgia, because I knew now that whatever happened on the dig, I would return to Dhaka, and that meant the end of late nights in here, over-sugaring my tea and arguing about when the Tethys had finally dried up. The department was moving anyway, to a brand-new facility on the other side of the quad.
I had first discovered the whale while leafing through an article in National Geographic, which my parents, like so many of their generation, dutifully collected. Photographs of Ambulocetus, with her hind legs and long, slender mouth, fascinated my younger self. I was naturally curious about origins and unusual digressions in history, such as a whale who walked and also swam, while all the other animals were pulling themselves out of the sea and making their homes on land. My mother had not been pleased. ‘Fish?’ she kept saying, when I told her I was doing a PhD in Evolutionary Biology. My mother had been an ambulance driver and a revolutionary and the kind of woman who stood in front of picket lines. She had been in a war. And I was hiding behind very large sea creatures. But what was my alternative? Medicine, like her? I was good at science, but I did not like bodies, at least, not the ones that hovered between life and death, the scale tipped by my hand – too much responsibility, that – or English?, my love of novels started young, deepened by the lack of company, and although my parents’ shelves were on the dry, political side, I read Ibsen and The Last of the Mohicans and Bleak House, and, too early, Jane Eyre, and there were totems in those books: with every age I recognised the clues that would lead me, Gretel-like, through life, but who wants to know and be known like that? Not me. Jane was poor, obscure, plain, and little, I did not want to know her, or the her that lurked within me. Hiding in plain sight, that was my habit, or maybe I should have been some kind of humanitarian, but the reasons against that should be obvious by now, because I would have been looking around the corner for myself, the subject and object at the same time. Bettina would have said it was possible to auto-anthropologise, but that sounded too much like ‘apologise’; I would have spent the whole time feeling sorry for all the people I would never become, trapped in guilt like my mother, and again we return to her, because she made everything possible and impossible.
So, you see, there was nothing for me but those skulls and bones and taxonomy and strata, Hutton’s earth, with ‘no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end’, that was what I chose: the earth with its hot centre, and its rocks that threw up history, and bones, enduring bones, skipping back to a time when I couldn’t be found.
‘Ready for departure?’ Ju said, holding the camera at arm’s length and clicking. She smelled strongly of soap. Neither of us mentioned the night before.
‘Not nearly,’ I said. ‘Though I finished packing the apartment late last night when I couldn’t sleep.’
I had brought a small carry-on suitcase with me the week before, when I’d begun putting away my papers. Now I started with the filing cabinet next to my desk. There were old articles I had photocopied; course syllabi; teaching materials for Archaeology 101, which I had worked on as a tutor for three semesters, winning rave reviews from my students; essays; transcripts; the whole catalogue of my three years as a graduate student. I threw most of it away, keeping only a thin file of papers that related to the dig. Around midday, I sped up, clogging the blue recycling bin and bequeathing my model of the 50 million-year-old Rodhocetus balochistanensis skull to Ju. We hugged goodbye, Ju holding on for an extra few seconds by way of apology, and I promised to keep in touch. I took out my phone and dialled your number, but there was no reply. I thought I’d sit under one of the big oak trees in the Quad for a few moments before trying you again, but when I went through the double doors, dragging the suitcase behind me, there you were on the steps. You had removed your jacket and rolled up the sleeves of your shirt, and for a brief moment I imagined you making love to your Indian girlfriend and how your forearms would have straddled her body and how she must so desperately miss those forearms, in fact, was probably thinking about them at this moment, that she and I must be having the same dream, and how much she would hate me for being closer to your forearms than she, thousands of miles away in Delhi. Poor girl. Poor Delhi.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked. You passed me a pamphlet, printed on craggy recycled paper. Clementine Alexandra Rowena Morris. Cartographer, Adventurer, Poet, Activist, Mother, Dancer, Artist.
The day had cracked open, the sidewalks shimmering in the heat. We walked in silence, struggling with the upward slope of Mass Ave as it neared the wider streets of Somerville. You stopped to look in the window of an origami shop and we discussed paper, and folding, and cranes, then we turned into a side street, and you led me to a pale yellow house with rocking chairs on the porch and wilting daffodils in the front yard. The sort of house I had walked by many times, Obama posters in the window, the smell of laundry and Thanksgiving, modest, Protestant, indifferently grand.
The door was open. A few people stood on the porch, and, as we approached, one of them waved and called out your name. I saw a tall man with wide shoulders and a square, friendly face who shook my hand and introduced himself as your uncle, and as we passed through the front door and more guests said hello and patted you on the back, you took my hand and guided me through.
People’s shoes were noisy on the wooden floorboards and their voices rose up to the high, white ceiling. The house was bright and frayed and bigger than it had seemed from the outside. We entered a room at the back with tall windows and double doors that opened onto the garden beyond. Immediately you pointed out a woman who you said was your mother. She was slim under long, loose layers of black and dark grey, with tousled hair and a pair of eyes that matched yours in warmth and colour. You told her my name and she smiled distractedly and asked me to make myself at home. I gripped your arm, and we turned towards an older woman with a narrow face. She held out a thin hand, the bones close to the surface, and you told me she was your great-aunt.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I’m Autumn, Clementine’s sister.’ Her voice was reedy and English.
‘Zubaida Bashir. It’s lovely to meet you.’
‘I met Zubaida last night, at the Shostakovich,’ you said.
Autumn asked me if I was a musician. Although they must be around the same age, she could not have been less like my grandmother. Nanu had fewer lines around her eyes, but in her manner she was much older, her ironed saris, the pearl necklace she always wore around her neck, and Autumn, though her face was craggy and she had a slight tremor in her hands, appeared as though she took long walks in the snow. I told her I was no musician, but a palaeontologist.
‘Fossils! You know, Elijah’s great-great-great-grandfather was the original Indiana Jones.’
Of course he was. I looked around me now, at all the people in black dresses and suits. On a sofa that faced the garden, three men who looked almost identical to each other and to you were crowded together, playing Scrabble. They must be your brothers. I realised I didn’t even know which one you were in order of age, but, even as I asked myself the question, I knew you must be the youngest. Ezekiel, Erasmus, and Eric. Hello. Hello. Even sitting, they were almost as tall as me. Their teeth gleamed in their faces. No one had asked me if I wanted anything to eat, so when you let go of my hand and moved towards the piano, I made my way to the table and found mismatched casserole dishes, pie plates, and baking trays holding lasagna, cold salads, cheeses, and sticks of vegetables. There was an open bottle of wine on the sideboard and a woman pouring herself a glass asked me if I wanted any.
A loud, rhythmic tune exploded from the piano. ‘Thelonious Monk,’ you called out above the crowd, ‘Grandma’s favourite.’
‘Oh, stop that now. Play something with a tune,’ someone said, but the crashing jazz continued. The woman who had offered me a glass of wine now asked, ‘Where are you from?’ She had a milky, freckled face and a beautiful mouth, her long hair pulled into a French braid.
‘Bangladesh,’ I said, then realised she was asking how I came to be there. ‘I’m a friend of Elijah.’
‘You know, my grandma once made us watch a documentary about Bangladesh. And we spent the next few weeks chanting “Joy Bangla”.’
‘That’s something of a national slogan.’
‘Grandma was an old leftie.’
‘You must be Elijah’s sister.’
‘That’s right. Ada.’
When she leaned down and hugged me, I wanted to cry.
‘I recommend the tuna casserole. My mother is a terrible cook.’
In the meantime, you had started to sing. ‘Imagination is funny/It makes a cloudy day sunny.’
Ada joined in, with a strong, practised voice. ‘Makes a bee think of honey.’ She led us to the piano and then you were sitting side by side on the stool. Others circled you, and the chorus of voices was sweet and loud.
I stepped back, holding the plate of tuna casserole, watching your back sway to the music, and then I drifted away, down a corridor and past a pair of swinging doors into the kitchen. I found the countertops worn and scrubbed, the whole place smelling of old trees. I leaned against the wood-burning stove for a moment, enjoying its warmth even on this very hot day, before examining the photographs on the fridge. A collage of willowy, beautiful people smiled indirectly at the camera, holding dogs and babies against backdrops of mountains and dark lakes. I opened the fridge and found an open tin of cat food and a jug of lemonade crowded with spears of fresh mint.
The song had finished. I liked how no one noticed as I came and went. When I went back inside, a wave of warm air swirled through the room, the smell of lavender drifting in from outside and settling on the furniture. I saw, then, that there was a large portrait of your grandmother displayed on a side table. Someone had pencilled her features, a strong jaw and wide-apart eyes and a pair of dark-rimmed glasses. She wore a small smile, as if she had just seen someone she knew and was about to wave hello. Beside the drawing there was a notebook on which people were writing messages. I looked closer. May you be as treasured above as you were among us. And: Tell God it’s getting hot down here! And: Grandma, as you left the planet, you sent me a gift. Thank you.
A few people carried plates into the kitchen and I heard the sound of water running. I found your mother reclining on the sofa. The sun zigzagged against her face. Your brothers were outside, huddled together beside an old swing set. In a gazebo at the back, I spotted Autumn sitting on her own, and I wondered if I should go and talk to her. A man was narrating a story about how Clementine had crashed his parents’ wedding dressed as a camel. I watched you as you listened to the story – you had obviously heard it before – and I wondered what it was like to be so sure of your provenance, to talk about ancestors whose lives were documented, birth certificates and university degrees and marriages officially registered. To be told a straight story that you knew was true. Me, I couldn’t look at another living person and see something of myself, the angle of eyes, a gait, a particular texture of hair, or identify the things I hated about myself, the smallness of my breasts, the weakness of my ankles. The kink in my hair had no echo. In a culture where people commented freely on everyone’s looks, people rarely said anything about mine, because a simple phrase, ‘how beautiful you are’, couldn’t be followed by, ‘just like your mother’. Just like who? To whom did these long bones belong, the tone of my skin? Not to the ancestors collaged onto my history.
I laughed with everyone else as the man described the look of shock on his parents’ faces, the judge at the registrar’s office standing up and ordering them to leave.
‘We should go,’ you said, appearing behind me. You had changed into shorts and a red T-shirt with Chinese lettering on the front. ‘Zubaida has things to do.’
‘I didn’t get to say a proper hello,’ your mother said, pulling her glasses from on top of her head.
‘I’m leaving in a few days,’ I said.
‘Well, that’s a shame.’ Your mother put her hands on my shoulders and regarded me, and I wanted to ask her if I could stay, to walk up the stairs and fold myself into the blankets on her bed. ‘Here,’ she said, as if reading my mind, ‘take this.’ And she pulled a necklace over her head and then over mine. It was made of old buttons, each one a slightly different shade of blue. I kissed her on the cheek and said goodbye. Outside, a pair of brown cats had draped themselves on the porch. The air was packed tight in the heat, everything quiet and solemn.
Meeting your family changed something between us. I saw the way you wrestled with your brothers, punching them on the arm by way of hello, and how everything was so perfectly dishevelled in your house. And I could imagine almost every day of your childhood, because it would have been documented in films or on television – in that way, you had probably lived a deeply unremarkable life, had experiences without specificity, and that had bothered you, the way my own past grated at me. All the things that irritated you were things that I had longed for, and all the things you longed for were things I took for granted. I fingered the necklace your mother had given me. It was so light around my neck I could hardly feel it, and I sought that, that lightness and impermeability, things passed from person to person with little significance.
‘I was Clem’s favourite,’ you said, in answer to my question. ‘I�
�m going to miss her.’
‘Was your father there?’
‘I didn’t want to overwhelm you.’
I was suddenly hungry. You suggested we return to Harvard Square and have lunch. We debated the merits of Felipe’s and Chipotle’s, both of which I had frequented over the years and would miss, and at that point I remembered I had left my suitcase at your house and I stopped in a rectangle of shade, asking if we could go back.
You told me to wait there, and jogged backwards. A few minutes later you were wheeling the suitcase down the street. When you stopped I closed my eyes and I thought you might kiss me lightly and tenderly on the forehead, as if you had been kissing me for years, as if we had lived together in a house and raised children and frowned over the sagging roof and made French toast on Sundays.
‘So tell me again,’ you said, putting your hands into your pockets and leaning back on your heels. ‘About your boyfriend.’
‘There’s nothing to say, really,’ I said, taking the suitcase from you and starting to walk again. ‘He’s lovely.’
‘How does he feel about new friends?’
I imagined how I would describe our meeting to Rashid without making it sound as if I had done something wrong, which I hadn’t. Not yet. I thought about the ease with which I had just entered your home. I had, since arriving in this country, assumed an air of being able to float seamlessly from place to place: a grateful guest at Thanksgiving dinner, a girl from far away who understood everyone’s jokes because her English was so good. It was better to render my difference invisible, brush over the small discomforts I occasionally felt, always too cold in the spring when everyone wore T-shirts, occasionally emphasising a syllable (I once mispronounced ‘intestine’, making it sound like ‘Lichtenstein’ to a table full of laughing Americans). You held me in a very tight gaze now, in a way I don’t believe I had ever been looked at, and I found myself struggling to speak, and still I believed there was nothing for me to regret or be ashamed of, because, though the feeling had the intensity of being sexual, it was something altogether different – not a churning but a quieting, as if I were being put back together, piece by piece. I felt the sidewalk burning beneath the soles of my feet, and the sun high and bright above, and, thus framed by a day that seemed to stretch over my whole life, I declared to myself that you were the best friend I’d ever had.