The Bones of Grace

by Tahmima Anam

  A journalist arrived with a cameraman, making us pose around Diana with our tools. Bart carefully brushed away a layer of dust and exposed Diana’s pelvis. The journalist cheered, and, in the tent that night, Jimmy and I drank cheap whisky while Zamzam sipped on a Pepsi, and we talked about the journal article we would co-author. I couldn’t sleep, dreaming of the weeks and months that would follow, chipping away the matrix, preparing the fossils, taking them back to Michigan and mounting them at the Museum. I couldn’t wait to tell you. My labours would soon be on display, like the Glass Flowers, and people would come and wonder at them and make up stories about my mythical creature. I felt my fate being determined, here in this dry, inhospitable land whose very dust was created long before history. The next afternoon, one of the drivers brought us the newspaper from Quetta, and on the front page was a photograph of Bart, the light in his eyes making him almost beautiful.

  We kept going. In my excitement I thought little about the conversation I’d overheard, and within a week or two it had faded from my mind. Things had a tinge of the hallucinogenic about them. Inch by inch, we pared away the rock that encased Diana. It was late October now, and the afternoons were cooler, so we worked through the day, stopping only when the light faded to grey. Our quarrying was almost finished, when, one evening, as Jimmy and I were cataloguing small bone fragments, Bart entered the tent, followed by a man in an army uniform.

  ‘I want a detail of your activities,’ the man said to Bart, looking around and drawing a circle with his finger that encompassed it all. He was wearing a cap and ironed trousers. Multicoloured lapels.

  ‘I told you,’ Bart said, ‘we’re just scientists. We look for fossils. We found one a few weeks ago.’

  ‘It was not in your daily report. We had to read about it in the paper.’

  Bart looked around him. ‘This isn’t the place to discuss it,’ he said.

  ‘We will decide what is the place.’

  The man went to Bart’s table and ran his hands through a pile of paperwork. A few sheets slid to the ground. I wondered if my story about Ambulocetus was among them.

  ‘General Alam no longer trusts you to give him what you promised.’

  ‘We are about to make history.’

  ‘You are no longer free to make your history here.’

  At that moment, Zamzam entered the tent. In his hand was a chisel. Bart looked at the officer, then at Jimmy and me, and then at Zamzam, who turned around and attempted to run. He made it two steps when the officer took hold of his arm and flung him to the ground as if he was no more than a small dog. Then he crouched down and held Zamzam by the throat. Zamzam gasped for breath, hacking unproductively at the officer’s foot with his chisel.

  It comforted me to recall the last woman I had met, an auntie who had sat beside me on the flight from Doha. She had asked whether I was married, and I had felt compelled to tell her I was engaged to a very nice man from back home. I tried to bring it to mind now, her hair-spray scent, the way she called me ‘darling’.

  ‘Do you know, Professor, the punishment for harbouring a terrorist?’ he said, his knee on Zamzam’s chest.

  ‘Please call my father,’ Zamzam whispered. The officer punched him, and Zamzam’s face swivelled sharply. I found myself moving towards him, taking a piece of cloth from my jacket (used, yesterday, to dust our half-discovered treasure), attempting to staunch the blood flowing from his mouth.

  The officer turned to me. ‘Please remove yourself, madam.’

  ‘He’s only a curator,’ I said.

  The officer tilted his head. ‘What else would he be?’

  ‘Leave it,’ Bart said, when Jimmy rose to his full height, dwarfing the rest of us. ‘There’s nothing we can do.’

  ‘He hasn’t done anything,’ I repeated. I didn’t know why I was talking.

  Jimmy came towards us and I was afraid and hoping he would start a fight. He pulled me away as the second blow landed on Zamzam, aimed at the exact same place, a wound upon a wound, and that was when a drop of blood travelled onto my retreating hand. Jimmy carried me to my tent.

  ‘Don’t move,’ he said, pulling down the zip.

  I waited inside.

  I heard Zamzam being dragged out, his soft struggling, boots against the sand, a car door slamming shut. Within seconds they were gone. Jimmy unzipped my tent and pulled me out. I must have been crying, but I don’t remember exactly, just that everything became blurred. Bart was arguing with one of the soldiers, and the soldier was just standing there and staring down at him, and after a few minutes Bart followed him into a jeep, calling out to us to take care of Diana.

  Jimmy and I debated what to do. We could try and get her out of the ground. Zamzam had showed us how he was going to wire the site, where exactly he was going to place the dynamite. But even if we were able to control the blast, what would happen after? We had no way of shifting the bones, no hope of getting across a border with them. We had no other option but to cover the fossil over as best we could. For months after, this decision would continue to haunt me.

  Jimmy and I drank the last of the whisky and spent the afternoon hiding Diana. We filled in the quarried area with sand and packed everything down with shovels. We removed the cordon, the markers, the outlines we had drawn. Our movements were hurried and messy. Jimmy rolled a cigarette and we passed it back and forth. Finally, when it was too dark to see, we gave up and made our way back to camp. I tried to make a few phone calls on the satellite phone, but I couldn’t get through to anyone. I even tried you, Elijah. I remember thinking you would have known what to say at this moment, that you wouldn’t go on about what a bad idea it had been to come here in the first place. I had an awareness of being in danger, but mostly I thought about Zamzam. I wondered if he was dead, or if he was somewhere that made him want to be dead. And I feared for Diana, that she would, like Baluchitherium, remain entombed, never to be fully known.

  Jimmy rifled through Bart’s things and found another bottle of whisky. We kept drinking. I went over and over in my mind the look on Zamzam’s face when that second punch landed, the fight fleeing so suddenly from his features. Of course the more I thought about it, I realised it wasn’t his arrest that was strange, it was our being there in the first place. Jimmy told me about the arrangement that Bart had made with the army. He had promised to keep an eye on Zamzam in exchange for permission to excavate, and he had promised Didag Baloch that he would try and find out General Alam’s next move. He had played both sides, but he hadn’t bargained on Zamzam’s worth, that the army would have wanted more – they would have wanted Zamzam himself, because Zamzam would give them leverage, something to bargain with in their battle for the area. Jimmy was cursing himself, saying he had tried to warn Bart, but Bart had promised him he’d had it all under control.

  All this time, Zamzam had been our secret weapon. Our little talisman against the dangers of the desert. Now that he’d been arrested, perhaps his father would come to us, search through our carefully documented collection of broken geology for a clue to the betrayal of his son. I was too full of regret to fear this, wishing I had paid more attention, had somehow got the measure of Zamzam, or Bart, before this very moment when it was all too late.

  In the morning Bart returned in an army jeep. It was unclear whether he’d been arrested – he wasn’t in handcuffs, but there was a man with him and whatever this man told him to do, he did. Below his forehead, his face had collapsed into troughs and craters, and he had stopped chewing betel so his mouth was pale and undefined. We were ordered to dismantle the camp. ‘I’m sorry,’ Bart murmured to me. ‘I’ll write to your adviser and explain.’

  We packed our things into the jeep. The driver wore metal-rimmed sunglasses and blasted the air conditioning. He drove us down to Sui, where we boarded a tiny plane for Sukkur, where we changed to another flight bound for Karachi. At the ticket counter in Karachi, we changed our reservations, paid the airport taxes, and made declarations on our customs forms. Chisel. Hammer.
Liquid plastic. There were no samples, no fragments of Diana encased in rock; we had just left her there, unmarked and unprotected. Jimmy repeatedly asked Bart if there was anything more we could do for Zamzam, if there was someone he could call to pull strings and get information on where they were holding him. Bart, a dead look in his eye, didn’t reply. He kept glancing at the man who had accompanied us from Dera Bugti. At one point, Jimmy declared he wouldn’t get on the plane, that he would remain in Pakistan until Zamzam was released, and Bart hushed him, putting his hand on Jimmy’s enormous forearm.

  My phone had found a signal and I read: Fly Me to the Moon.

  When the flight to Dhaka was announced, I said goodbye to Bart and Jimmy at the gate. It wasn’t until I entered the bridge that I realised the dig was really over, that we would never get Diana out of the ground or discover her true age, that there was a man in a cell somewhere and that we were leaving him to his fate. And to you I replied: Nobody Loves You When You’re Down and Out.

  Zamzam’s mother stood outside the Quetta Press Club for sixty-seven days after his arrest with a photograph safety-pinned to her dress. Then she went in front of the High Court. In Islamabad, she set up camp with other parents of the disappeared. Jimmy sent me links to the articles that had been written about her, mostly by local papers. They called her ‘the Mother of the Missing’. Then, years later, after we had long given up on knowing what had happened to him, Zamzam was returned to his family, his face barely resembling the portrait she had carried around, his face barely resembling a face at all. But somehow, from wherever he had been, before he died, Zamzam had managed to get a message out. And someone had received this message and through the network of people who had known about the dig, they had arranged to commit this last act of rebellion, sending me Diana, bone by bone. I want to believe it was his father, a powerful man now with nothing left of his son but this last wish. I want to believe he was sorry for wanting a different sort of child, one who would take on the mantle of a fighter, and that it was he who had sent out the order to retrieve Diana from the ground, to pack her up and send her to me. I do not claim to be this man’s only act of resistance, but perhaps his most idiosyncratic, the one that makes the least amount of sense but reminds his comrades that there are scientists as well as revolutionaries, and both of these are men of the soil.

  Homecoming

  Anwar told me that it wasn’t until he almost died that he realised he needed to find the woman he had once loved. I’ve thought about that a lot in the last few years, that if Anwar hadn’t worked on that building site, he might never have gone looking for Megna, and if he hadn’t done that, I might still be in the dark about my past. I’ve only ever been a hair away from being utterly alone in the world, Elijah, and it was Anwar who shone a light where once there was only darkness.

  I now have a confession to make (another one? But yes). This isn’t the first time I have been back to the place we met. Not the first time I’ve stalked these streets, hoping to run into you. I was here last year for Bettina’s graduation. Early summer and the streets pink with fallen apple blossoms. Everything looked the same. Bettina had accepted a job at Stanford, and I helped her pack our little apartment into a U-Haul she was going to drive all the way across the country herself. When I expressed some concern, she assured me she was equipped with addresses of a carefully curated series of men she could call on the way – an insurance broker in Hartford, an engineer in Las Vegas, a creative writing professor in Iowa City. I waved as she drove away, holding on to the first edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude she had given to me as a parting gift. That was last year. When I wrote to tell her I was coming back, she offered to let me rent the place. I pay her a fraction of the sum she could get elsewhere, but she insisted and I don’t have the will to refuse. I bought a futon and taped a photograph of Nina Simone on the wall above my head, but otherwise it is completely empty.

  You don’t care about any of this. The present is full of mundanities. What happened next, Elijah? The dig ended and I had to go home. My parents came to collect me at the airport. I was quick to regress to childhood patterns and greeted them meanly, keeping most of the episode to myself, already smothered by their worry.

  On the plane I had sat next to a man who repeatedly asked me if I was Japanese. I had closed my eyes and pretended to sleep and seen Zamzam’s face and wondered whether his anger at his father had made some part of him long to be caught. Zamzam’s father wasn’t unlike my own father, who had joined a movement to break away from an old country. My father was called a freedom fighter because his side had won and now he had a passport and a parliament and a vote, none of which Zamzam would ever have. Zamzam would die in that prison, and the world would remain divided between people who had countries and people who did not.

  ‘My baby’s home,’ my mother said.

  ‘I don’t want to talk,’ I murmured, depressed at the sight of her.

  My message to you was: Baby It’s Cold Outside. And, a few minutes later, you replied: You Go to My Head.

  I folded myself into the front seat and leaned my head against the window, immune to the sight of my city, the airport road flanked on either side by fields of paddy, electric wires dangling low across the highway, and the watery air making everything heavy and indolent. ‘Rashid said to phone him when you land,’ Ammoo said.

  Rashid had already sent me several text messages. I begged him not to come. ‘Not today,’ I said. ‘I’m tired and I look terrible. I’ll see you tomorrow.’ He appeared in the early evening. I had struggled to wash the sand out of my hair, so Bashonti, our cook, was putting olive oil on my scalp.

  ‘I told you to wait,’ I said.

  ‘You’re full of shit,’ he replied.

  Bashonti released my hair. ‘Bhaiya, look at this mess.’ She pointed to my face, the rings of sunburn around my eyes.

  Rashid was wearing a waistcoat over his shirt that emphasised his slim frame and the bulk of his upper arms. He had cut his hair short and changed his aftershave, but the rest of him was the same, his square forehead, his deep-set eyes and slightly flared nostrils. Looking at him, I remembered he’d had a bar installed over his bedroom door, that he pulled himself up on it every morning before going downstairs to eat breakfast with his mother. I was comforted by the sight of him, and I thought about resting my head against his shoulder, forehead to clavicle, and how reassuring that would be, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Zamzam, and Diana, and the end of my life as I’d known it.

  ‘Tell me everything,’ he said.

  Outside, I heard the sound of a neighbour scolding someone, a child perhaps or a servant. The blood pumped against my scalp where Bashonti had been aggressive with the brush. I’ll never be a palaeontologist, I wanted to say, but I knew he wouldn’t be able to pretend convincingly that this mattered to him. ‘One of the people on my dig got into trouble and they had to shut it down,’ I said.

  We ate dinner together, Rashid and my parents and my flattened hair, Bashonti piling rice onto his plate. Rashid spoke mostly to Ammoo, telling her about the new factory he and his father were opening out in Savar. After dinner my parents claimed they were craving ice cream and made a point of letting us know they would be gone for an hour.

  When I was twelve we went to Thailand with Rashid’s family. My father’s business hadn’t yet taken off, so we stayed at a modest hotel across the street from the beach, even though Rashid’s parents could afford much better. Rashid spent the entire holiday watching a Test series between the West Indies and Australia while I lay in the hammock under a tree beside the kidney-shaped pool. One day, while I was staring up at the sky and thinking about Sylvia Plath’s suicide, Rashid nudged me with his foot and said, ‘Let’s go swimming.’ And, even though I had been waiting desperately for him to notice me, I knew there was nothing I could say that wouldn’t embarrass me later, so I ignored him, picking at the jute fibres on my hammock. ‘C’mon,’ he said again, tapping the top of my head, ‘it’s so fucking hot.’
It was thrilling to me that he would say the word ‘fucking’ out loud, and to me. ‘I don’t know how to swim,’ I said, still not able to look at him. ‘It’s okay,’ he said, ‘you can just float.’

  I lay flat on my back, and he put his warm palm on my spine and ran me around and around the pool. We did this for what felt like hours. Later that year, when my parents bought an apartment on the other side of town and I struggled to make friends at the new school, Rashid took me under his wing, not embarrassed to be seen with me in the morning before the bell rang, waving to me from where he stood in front of the wicket, handsome beyond belief in his cricket whites, and when he ran the ball up and down his leg and made pink streaks on his uniform, I thought I would suffocate under the weight of my crush, but I didn’t, I just kept feeling his hand under me, his steady presence, teaching me to swim, to belong, to fit in. I don’t tell you this story to hurt you, Elijah, but to explain that the idea of leaving Rashid was like the idea of leaving behind my childhood, and, because I was a person whose life began with her own life, and not, like you, with a family tree that stretched back generations, I clung to every piece of my past, unable to forget, or let go, of a single thing, and maybe if Zamzam hadn’t been arrested and we had managed to get Diana out of the ground, I would have been able to move through this moment with greater confidence, the confidence to break old threads and strengthen new ones, but now, in the shadow of this spectacular failure, I became, again, an obedient orphan.

  Rashid was all over me, kissing my face and my neck. ‘I can’t believe you’re home,’ he said. I leaned my head against him for a moment, but it was not as I had imagined.

  I had, a few minutes earlier, received this from you: Ne me quitte pas.

  ‘Oh, jaanu, don’t be mad. I can’t be happy to see you? What’s the matter?’