The Bones of Grace

by Tahmima Anam

  ‘You’d have to adopt him or something.’

  ‘I know.’

  I took a long sip of water. ‘No, you don’t. You don’t know anything.’

  You looked down at your empty plate. ‘If you’re trying to tell me I’m ignorant about what it’s like to come from here, you’re right. But don’t doubt my intentions.’

  ‘You make everything sound so easy when it’s not.’

  ‘Sometimes we think things are difficult – impossible – but we just have to do them.’

  Of course you were talking about me. But how could you know whether it would be easy or hard when no one had ever had any expectations of you, when your parents didn’t mind if you dropped out of graduate school or never had a career or married some strange girl you met at a concert? ‘You don’t know anything about me,’ I said. ‘Not the first thing.’

  ‘You have more will than you give yourself credit for.’

  ‘Because I’m a little orphan girl who made her way into the light?’ And this, of course, was my way of telling you what I was really afraid of – not the disapprobation of Rashid or Dolly or Bulbul, but that I would lose my parents, the family I had neither earned nor deserved, everything, really, that my life was based on. But I didn’t say this out loud, I just assumed you knew, and later when there came to be nothing but a thick silence between us, I wished I had made myself clearer. I wished I had told you that I had lived my life in fear that they would somehow take me back to where I was from, return me, that though I’d been loved and cherished by them my whole life, I had never been able to surrender the suspicion that they might, someday, change their minds.

  I found you awake in the middle of the night. ‘I can’t sleep,’ you said. ‘You married him. Why did you do that?’

  ‘Rashid and I were practically married anyway.’

  The moon was behind you and I saw the outline of your face but not the expression on it. ‘Fuck you.’

  I had never heard you say that word in an angry way, only a loving one.

  ‘I had a whole life before you, Elijah.’

  ‘You broke my heart. Back there in Cambridge. I won’t let you do it again.’

  ‘How am I doing it now?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have come,’ you said. ‘And we should never have taken it this far.

  My instinct was to argue that I hadn’t cheated on you; we had never promised each other anything: my engagement to Rashid pre-dated whatever it was that had happened between us, and that if anyone had a right to accuse me of betrayal, it was him. But that wouldn’t have been entirely honest of me. Of course we had made promises. That day together in Cambridge, walking along Mass Ave, the Glass Flowers, your grandmother’s funeral – it was all one long preamble to a pact. That was why I had vowed to remake myself in Dera Bugti, why I had waited with my heart in my stomach for every message you sent me, why I had taken it so badly when Zamzam was arrested and the dig was cancelled. It was because I knew, from the first note the pianist played after the intermission, that you would become the promise that overcame all my other commitments. I had cheated on you by getting married, and now I had to break everything apart in order to remedy that. I threw my arms around you and buried my head in your neck, your piney scent still lingering on your skin though it was tamped down by the sea, the damp heat of early summer, and I repeated, again and again, how sorry I was to you, meaning also that I was sorry to myself, to the whole enterprise of our togetherness. But there was only one thing I could say that would make it right. ‘I’ll do it,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell him. As soon as he’s back from China, I’ll tell him everything.’

  Some part of you didn’t believe me, I know that, but the rest of you wanted to so badly that you accepted my promise and allowed yourself to return my embrace, and for that moment, we were fully together, neither one of us the guilty, neither one of us the wounded.

  Looking for Mother

  You will, of course, have remembered all of this yourself. But I write it to you now so that you know that it is burned onto my memory, every moment, every word of it. And if, by chance, your regard for me has sunk so low that you have pushed all thoughts of me out of your mind, that you have forced yourself to forget, I am here to remind you. We were in love. We were real. There were witnesses, and I am one of them.

  I am at Bettina’s house for Christmas. It’s a modest townhouse in Astoria with a tiny front lawn and neighbours who have known the family since they first moved in four decades ago. From the little guest-room on the top floor, I can smell the malty flavour of the turkey and the bacon that is draped across its breast. Bettina’s mother tells me I need to eat, and I am reassured by this echo of mother talk, the same words I hear from Ammoo and Bashonti when I am at home in Dhaka.

  My father lived in New York once. He moved here after the war and drove a taxi and shared a room above a restaurant in Jackson Heights with a Bangladeshi man named Asif who told him never to take a fare above 116th Street. ‘Black people are all criminals,’ he said. My father had been in a war, and this made him unable to take such statements seriously. He soon befriended George, who also drove a cab and sometimes ordered eggs at the counter of the diner where my father picked up his morning coffee (an acquired taste, this, but one he had come to love). George had black and grey dreadlocks down to his waist and wore a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. He lived in Flatbush, in a house he shared with a dozen or so other people. They had a dish rota and read aloud to one another every evening after dinner, which they cooked using vegetables they grew in the back garden. When my father visited, a young woman answered the door and said ‘Namaste’ with her hands folded, and my father was going to explain to her that in his part of South Asia they didn’t say ‘Namaste’ but ‘As-salaam walaikum’, but then he realised, when the doorbell rang again and she greeted another person, this time a young man in a beard, that she used this word to greet anyone, not just someone who looked like he knew what it meant, and he couldn’t decide whether this lack of specificity was good or bad. Later, he read a few stanzas of Nazrul’s Bidrohi to the assembled group, which included an assortment of people who could be loosely classified as hippies.

  I am the rising, I am the fall,

  I am consciousness in the unconscious soul …

  I am the rebel eternal,

  I raise my head beyond this world …

  Afterwards several people came and hugged my father. This was the first time since he had arrived in America that he had been touched with such affection. The embrace made him cry, because he had never mourned his brother, who had died before his eyes on the battlefield. He considered leaving the apartment in Queens, the smell of cigarettes and homesickness and people wearing too many layers in November. But that night, when he went home, he heard Bangla in the corridors of the building, and he knew he had to stay, so he settled for spending weekends with George, listening to Joni Mitchell on the reel-to-reel, planting a banana tree in the sunny part of the garden. Slowly, the wound of his brother’s death began to heal. He wrote long letters to his mother, composed while stuck in rush-hour traffic, taught the hippies to play cricket, and even brought his roommate, Asif, to the commune, where he sat uncomfortably on the edge of a patchouli-scented sofa and listened while the group chanted ‘Om.’ By now, my father had been in America for four years, and his visa was about to expire. He considered going home, but he was too ashamed to admit that he had done nothing but drive a taxi the entire time he had been in New York. His brother had set up a successful brick-making factory on the banks of the Buriganga, and he knew he would get roped into joining him if he went home without a purpose. He brought the problem to his few acquaintances. George told him to consider the political implications of choosing to participate in the military-industrial complex by remaining in New York. His landlord, the owner of the restaurant downstairs, offered him a share in the new branch he was planning to open in Alphabet City, his first in Manhattan. It was Asif who suggested to my father that, if he wanted
to extend his time in America and take advantage of the opportunities in the land of opportunity – which he had not yet begun to do on account of his planting things and teaching people the correct way to bowl a cricket ball – the easiest thing for him to do would be to get married. There were networks for such things, people who knew people who knew people. But my father did not want an anonymous match. He gave himself three weeks to fall in love. He walked up and down the streets and tried to look into the hearts of the women he passed. He glimpsed into the rearview mirror at his customers. He glanced to the left and right of himself on the counter at the diner. But there was no one. No one would look my father in the eye. At the commune, the Namaste girl offered to marry him, and he refused politely. Finally, George introduced him to a friend, a rich Uptown girl who wanted to say fuck you to her parents. They got married in the back yard of the commune, flanked by the banana tree and the upright vines of tomatoes without a single relation on either side. Later, after my father decided he wanted to return to Bangladesh after all, his memories of the war now tamed, he was not saddened by the divorce, or by the letting go of his beloved taxi, or by moving out of the apartment he shared with Asif, but by George, who cried and said, ‘Man, you are a strange kind of people,’ and gave him a copy of Another Country to take with him on the long journey home.

  Does this explain my behaviour? No. I did not live above a restaurant in Jackson Heights. I did not drive people around in a taxi and wait tables and save every bit of money I earned. My father erased his history behind him and made everything in my life easy. But, when I thought about it, this story gave me permission to make excuses to myself: I was not the only one who had married to solve a problem.

  You wanted to play the piano one last time. ‘Can you take me up on the ship again?’ you asked Mo.

  We went to the beach together. Grace was starting to look battered. Her hull had been breached; just that morning, the cutters had sliced off a rectangular section of her starboard side. There was no way Ali would allow us on board now. You and Mo made plans to sneak in. Mo described the exact route – he had taken it many times when scavenging on Grace. Not for the first time I realised Mo had a life beyond our gaze, that I should work harder to find out which of his stories were true and which were made up. But like so much else in my life, it didn’t seem urgent. All I could think about was you, and thinking about you was also thinking of myself, of what I would do with you, and when I look back I think of it as a selfish time, a time when I put myself at the centre of the universe, and perhaps that is what love is, a moment of abnegation as well as a moment of greed, a person at once invisible and fully present to the rest of their lives.

  Because one side of Grace’s hull was now cut away, we did not have to be pulleyed up to the deck in order to board her. We followed Mo to a rope ladder that had been hung out of one of the lower elevations of the ship, and once we had climbed on board we followed a complicated route through the remaining corridors and stairways, till finally we crossed what looked like a bridge, but must have been a gangway, into a section that I could recognise as the level that had housed the auditorium. Our voices echoed against the steel, our footsteps clanging like bells. The door to the auditorium was gone – now it was just a hole cut out of the shell of the ship. The chairs had been pulled up, the carpets stripped away. The shape of the proscenium arch survived, but not the wood that had framed it. The curtains were gone, but the stage remained, with the piano legs still fixed onto its surface, as if it had survived a bombing, black and gleaming and the only flash of shine remaining on this canvas of rust.

  The piano stool had disappeared so you played standing up, leaning over the keys with your arms outstretched. I heard the familiar notes, the scale rising and rising. Variation 13. Little twists, an error here and there, places where you paused – it didn’t come naturally to you, Bach in the hands of a jazz pianist – but it was beautiful imperfection. Mo stood beside me and I slipped my arm around his shoulders, the music and the dark giving us permission to touch as if we were brother and sister, equal to each other in our love for you.

  Even to my untrained ear, I could tell the piano did not sound as it should. In that way, I thought, it was very much like you and me. Every day that passed, we were exposed a little further to the elements, every day we became a bit more fragile, showing how easily we might be destroyed. How much we needed to be saved.

  On the day of your departure we looked at the photographs we had taken together. There was an image of you leaning against the knotted roots of Heritiera fomes, the Sundri tree. The dark blue light of the forest cast a deep melancholy on your features, your usually bright eyes half closed, your lips pressed together without a smile. There were happier poses, you holding the oars at Foy’s Lake, you and Mo making sand angels on the beach, you and me up close, just an arm’s length from the camera, that first time we boarded Grace, but that one was my favourite because you were offering to leave a little piece of you in the frame, a glimpse into your darkest fears.

  The driver was coming to pick us up at three o’clock. I was going to take you to the airport and then I was going to come back and do one last interview with the workers. Then I was going to go home, wait for Rashid, and tell him I was leaving him. I looked at the time, willing the hour to go by quickly so our goodbye could be over. We got into bed and made love. Afterwards, you covered my face with the palm of your hand. I closed my eyes and thought about what it would be like if I was going with you, packing my suitcase now and saying goodbye to everyone at Prosperity. Telling my parents. I felt a surge of anger at you for not pressuring me to come away now, for leaving it up to me to decide when and how I was going to break with my life.

  We got up and started clearing up the last bits of your packing when it happened. I had wrapped the plastic bottle of honey in a bag and sealed it with tape, and I was leaning over your bag and slipping the honey into the side pocket when we heard a knock on the door. Mo went to answer it, and there, on the other side of the threshold, was Rashid.

  He did not appear surprised. He walked right up to you and shook your hand, as if he had expected to happen upon his wife packing another man’s suitcase. I felt my legs giving way under me, so I walked over to the window and leaned against the wall and watched the two of you introducing yourselves. ‘I’m Elijah,’ you said, your face lacking a single shred of remorse, and Rashid said, ‘You must be a friend of Zubaida.’ He may have even have said something like ‘Welcome to Bangladesh’, though I can’t recall the exact words because a roaring began in my ears and I was afraid if I opened my mouth I might have to shout in order to drown it out.

  I try and think of how a better person would have reacted. A better person would have taken the moment as an opportunity to bring everything out in the open – after all, if I had really meant what I’d said, if I was really going to leave Rashid, what better time than now? A better person would have told the whole story, in calm, unambiguous terms. A better person would have marked out her loyalties – not only to you, the man I was now in love with, but also to herself. But I was not that person, not even in the better light of your presence.

  The only sign that Rashid had noticed anything at all was in the slight force of his breath and the way he was lifting up various things and putting them down again, like the jar of pickles on the dining table or the camera Gabriela had left on the bookshelf. I finally found my tongue and stammered something about you coming to visit. You were waiting, I know, for me to say something truthful to Rashid, but I knew from the moment I saw him that I would not. He knew it too. We stood around awkwardly while you both waited for me to act, to set the terms for the conversation we were about to have. I was still holding the bottle of honey, and I walked over to you, Elijah, and placed it in your outstretched hand. ‘Don’t forget this,’ I said. And then I asked Rashid about China, and Rashid said it was a good trip, that it had ended early, that the car was waiting downstairs and if I was ready we could leave straight away.
‘The traffic gets bad in the evenings,’ he said to you, as if you too were planning to drive to the other side of town and spend the night in a frangipani-scented villa on the side of a hill.

  ‘I met Elijah at Harvard,’ I said to no one in particular.

  ‘Yes, I assumed that,’ I heard Rashid reply, though my eyes were on you, your back bent over the suitcase, your posture so terribly, terribly sad. It was starting to dawn on you now that I was not going to tell Rashid anything, that I was going to go home and leave you there at the apartment. I noticed Mo hanging around and I was afraid he would say something to give us away, so, with a wave of my hand, I motioned for him to leave the room. It was the sort of shooing gesture I had often seen Dolly make to her servants, and to this day, of all the things I am ashamed of, my gesture to him in that instant is what I regret the most.

  You went into the kitchen and I heard you talking to Mo. Then you both came out and shook hands with each other. Rashid and I stood and watched. You slipped a folded-up note into the front pocket of Mo’s shirt. He wrapped his arms around your waist and you had to peel him off. We heard his bare feet on the steps, the movements of a wounded animal.

  ‘You can collect your things later,’ Rashid said, and I nodded mutely, and turned towards the door and walked through.

  And as we parted, Elijah, right there in front of my husband, do you know what I was thinking? Not that I would regret, the moment I left the apartment, the way I trashed everything that had passed between us in the last weeks, not my treatment of Mo, not abandoning you without even a proper goodbye, not the bland expression I gave you as the last image of my face, not the way I allowed Rashid to circle my waist with his arm – no, none of that. All I could think about, as we descended the stairs and stepped into the air-conditioned car, was that if only Rashid had arrived a few hours later, I could have spared him the sight of me gazing at you as if I had just been born, and everything could have gone back to the way it was, and I would have had nothing to explain, no story to tell, no guilt weighing me down like stones around my ankles.