by Tahmima Anam
Return to Grace
Abul Hussain came to collect me the next morning, but at the airport, there were no flights to Chittagong. ‘Sorry, ma’am, due to bad weather all flights are indefinitely postponed,’ the girl behind the counter said, wearing a surprisingly tight red-and-grey suit.
‘When is the next flight?’
‘Scheduled for tomorrow morning, ma’am, but that also may not depart.’
I thought about going home, but now that I had set my mind on returning to Sithakunda, I couldn’t turn back. I ducked into the car. ‘Abul Hussain, can you drive us to Chittagong?’ It was a five-or six-hour drive; Dolly and Bulbul had done it regularly in their jeep before the domestic terminal was refurbished.
Abul Hussain glanced at me in the rearview mirror. ‘We would have to tell sir.’
‘Baba won’t mind, I’ll call him now.’
‘There isn’t enough petrol.’
I rifled through my bag, failing to find any money. ‘Stop at a bank, I’ll get some cash.’
We drove through the city again, going south from Mohakhali to Mohammadpur. Abul Hussain parked in front of a shopping mall, where a uniformed guard opened the door to a tiny air-conditioned cubicle that housed an ATM machine. I had always found it strange that in America the cash machines were exposed, as if there was nothing remarkable about being able to take money out of a cavity in the wall. At the shop next door, I bought a packet of Uncle Chipps and a few bottles of water. Then I remembered I hadn’t really eaten anything since the night before, which felt like a lifetime ago now, so I hunted through the mall for a restaurant, finally settling on a place that sold fried chicken. I bought a box for myself and one for Abul Hussain.
In the car, I sent a text message to Abboo. Ok if Abul Hussain drives me to Chittagong? Urgent business. Then I gave Abul Hussain a hefty tip and passed him the fried chicken. ‘You can stay the night and drive back tomorrow.’
He selected a piece of chicken from the carton, taking a bite and then placing it on his knee, where it remained as he negotiated the traffic. In Mohammadpur he picked it up again and took another bite, leaving an oily stain on the leg of his trouser. I offered him a napkin, guilty for making him drive all the way.
After Mohammadpur the traffic cleared and the dense tangle of the city gave way to low-slung buildings and carts piled high with vegetables, and then, acres and acres of brickyards, everything red, dotted with tall, narrow furnaces that churned smoke into the sky. Eventually, the view turned to farmland, chequerboard patches of land planted with rice as far as the eye could see, everything flat and green to the horizon. I closed my eyes, willing sleep to come and cut out the hours until I arrived at the beach, to Mo and Gabriela and Grace.
My phone rang, but I ignored it, knowing it would be my parents or Rashid. I recalled now that Ammoo had slapped me once, when I was eleven, for stealing her make-up bag and wearing lipstick to school. The principal had telephoned, and after a wordless ride home Ammoo had hit me softly across the cheek with a bewildered look, as though her arm had acted of its own accord. When I finally locked myself in my room and Ammoo had called out repeatedly. When I finally opened the door I found her curled up on the sofa. She hadn’t seemed sorry as much as surprised. The phone kept ringing. Eventually I decided to answer. It was Abboo.
‘Your mother is very upset. Dolly also called a few times. And there’s a storm coming.’
‘I know, that’s why I’m driving.’
‘They’re saying it’s going to be bad.’
‘Please, let me go. I know you did what you thought was best. But I can’t rest. I can’t work, I can’t do anything. I can’t be at peace.’
‘You were just a baby, a few weeks. A tiny thing in my hands. The most beautiful thing I had ever seen.’
I hung up so he wouldn’t hear me cry. Last night, when I couldn’t sleep, I had written an email to Rashid. It was full of regret for all the things I had allowed myself to do, that there was no excuse for the way I had behaved, but that, perhaps, if he tried very hard, he would see that there would have been no way for us to go ahead if I hadn’t at least made an attempt to piece together my past. I had gone over it again and again, but I had been unsure how to finish the message, whether I could tell him now that it was all over and we could begin again, but as a pale baby bird of a sun crested the horizon, I had decided not to send it.
I closed my eyes for a moment, and when I opened them the wipers were on and I could hear the sound of water above and below, rain on the car’s roof and on the road. I checked the time and it was only noon, but the rain clouds had smothered the light. We drove on, slowed by the darkness and the dense sheets of water. Abul Hussain switched on his headlights and bent over the wheel, holding on with both hands.
I called the Shipsafe office but no one answered. I asked Abul Hussain to turn on the radio, and the reception drifted in and out. I rifled through the magazines my father had left in the car and found a recent copy of Outlook India. There was news about Bollywood, a corruption scandal in the Indian Army, a recipe for Urad Dal. For a stretch of the highway, the sky cleared momentarily and the rain thinned, and I could make out the trees on either side of the road, the landscape changing from flat to gently rolling. Abul Hussain pointed to a sign. ‘Apa, can we stop for tea?’
He parked in front of a squat concrete building. I waited in the car while he ordered tea from a young boy sitting in front of a large kettle on a propane stove. When the tea was ready he passed me a small clay cup through the window. After a few minutes the sky thickened and it began to rain in earnest, and after Abul Hussain retrieved my cup, we set off again, seeing very little in front of us except the road ahead and the grey outlines of the hills in the distance.
The shops along the highway to Sithakunda were all closed. The car stalled, water sloshing around the tyres. Abul Hussain switched off the engine, then revved it again, propelling us forward, and we covered the last few miles at a crawl, the sound of the wipers beating back and forth. An hour or so later we reached the Shipsafe office.
The front door was locked. I borrowed a key from the caretaker, who informed me that everyone had gone home early because of the storm. I concentrated very hard on remaining downstairs instead of rushing up to the apartment and crawling on my hands and knees in search of a last fragment of you. Even down here at the office, I felt your presence, your footsteps burdening the air above me.
I switched on the overhead light. There was my desk, the glass chipped and taped together, the ancient computer, the corkboard with edge-curled newspaper clippings, Bilal’s battered armchair with the striped towel draped across the back, the smell of tea and biscuits. I had only been away a few months, but I realised I had left long before that, that the moment you arrived I hadn’t cared much for any of it. I remembered the feeling of being around you, which is that you swallowed all the air in the room, though perhaps it wasn’t you at all, but the strength of my feeling for you. In any case, I had been a poor volunteer; I had not done well by the pulling crew. And Mo I had let down altogether.
I glanced over the transcripts of the interviews. Without sentiment, I began to read. The words were flat on the page, one sad story following another, each starting with its same moment of fracture – an illness, a bad crop, the death of a father – and the long journey south, the bag of things they carried, the tiny pocket of hope, and then arriving at the shipyard and finding the acres of steel and rust, and Mr Ali, the dormitory, the long dark nights, carrying iron on their shoulders to the sound of chanting. I felt nothing, no sorrow, no jolt of recognition as the words I had heard and recorded appeared in black and white.
Then I came to the story of Shahed, a young man we had interviewed together. I remembered the way you held his gaze because he had refused to look at me. He had been sent here only a few months before, and was living not at the dormitory but in a room he shared with a few other strays. Ali had taken him on as an apprentice, and he had yet to be paid. He ate, he said, by beg
ging on the highway at night, and during the day, when the others saved him a few mouthfuls of rice. He had a cut on his arm that looked raw, which we only discovered when you put your hand out to touch him and he flinched, the thin fabric of his shirt sliding from his shoulder. You dressed the wound yourself, telling me later your father had taught you first aid in the days when you’d lived in the house in the mountains and there wasn’t a doctor around for miles. Now, reading Shahed’s words, and imagining in the pauses your fingers unrolling the bandage, splashing alcohol on the wound, and all the time Shahed not flinching, not making a sound, his lips parting as you finished, wanting to kiss the hand that touched him with as close to a caress as he had known since saying goodbye to his mother in the winter, she with a touch of her palm on the top of his head, you with a careful tap of the surgical tape.
I went upstairs to the apartment to face Gabriela. I assumed she had built up a catalogue of things to say; I had left without a word to her and ignored her many phone calls and messages, and, worse, I hadn’t even asked after Mo or any of the other men on the beach.
Inside, the place had been stripped of its last traces of you. Gabriela had cleaned everything up. The grey mosaic floor was spotless. All the dusty corners of the flat, the empty bookcase and the window grilles, had been washed. Even in my bedroom the blanket had been folded and the sides of the mosquito net pulled up so that it formed a flat grey canopy over the bed. As soon as she saw me Gabriela said, ‘Where the fuck have you been?’ and I braced myself, but she laughed and put her arms around me. I began to explain, starting with your name, but she said, ‘First, we drink. Then you can grovel.’ We repeated the ritual of my first night at the apartment, though this time the tequila went down easily, and after two big gulps from the bottle I didn’t even feel a little bit drunk.
I asked after Mo. Gabriela told me that he had continued with his duties, cooking and cleaning and looking after her. I had thought, for just a whisper of a moment, that wherever you had gone, you had perhaps taken him with you, but I knew this would be impossible. You would have wanted to leave right away, and Mo didn’t have a pair of shoes, much less a passport. You would have left him behind, though you would not have abandoned him as roughly as I had. And you would not have abandoned me at all.
‘The only thing is, he seems to have run into some trouble with Ali. I’m not sure exactly what – Ali always pretends he hasn’t the faintest clue what I’m saying when I try to talk to him.’
‘I’ve fucked everything up,’ I said, the alcohol finally hitting me.
Gabriela laughed. ‘I was married once too, you know.’
I had never asked her. She had taken the studs out of her top two piercings, and her shirt was loose and fell several inches below her hips. She looked more normal now, yet somehow diminished.
‘I should have taken better care of you,’ I said.
She waved her hand. ‘Don’t worry, darling,’ she said. ‘I could see you were preoccupied.’
‘He was – is – a childhood friend. A childhood sweetheart.’ This is how I had always described Rashid. A childhood connection. ‘So romantic,’ my cousins used to sigh. ‘So sweetly old-fashioned.’
‘I met Elijah at a Shostakovich concert. Out of the blue. Lightning and thunder and all that.’
Gabriela nodded. She pulled a packet of cigarettes out of her handbag, a foreign brand in a dark blue box. ‘I didn’t know you smoked,’ I said.
Gabriela inhaled. ‘I never needed to before.’
‘And what about you?’
She scraped a match against a rough wooden box. ‘We were children, we didn’t know what we were doing.’
‘I sort of feel like that. But that’s not an excuse. I mean – for me.’
She laughed. ‘He’s the director of the film. We’re still close friends.’
‘What happened?’
‘I cheated, he forgave me. I was the one who finally left. Now he’s married, he has three children. The terrible thing is, I’m probably still in love with him.’
Something in her face reminded me of Ammoo. Not that Ammoo herself regretted anything, but she was in constant fear that I would have regrets, that if I didn’t marry Rashid, for instance, that I might carry around the expression that could be seen on Gabriela’s face right now, the sense of having allowed a chance at happiness to pass me by. Ammoo wanted, more than anything, to mitigate disappointment for me. I wasn’t sure what to say to Gabriela, and what would it be like for me, ten, twenty years from now? Would I pine for Rashid, for the familiar rituals of our togetherness, being able to anticipate so many of his gestures – would I miss the safety of that or, as now, would I be tired of knowing so much, would I continue to long for otherness, for the pleasures of the alien?
The door opened, and Mo entered carrying a shopping bag. His smile when he saw me was so wide, so undiminished, that I stood up and walked over to him and lifted him up in my arms. He was heavier than he looked, and smelled of sweat and iron.
‘Did you hear about the piano?’ he said.
I hadn’t.
‘It’s going to America. Elijah is going to fix it.’ The sound of your name in Mo’s mouth was the first time I had heard it uttered aloud since you left, and it struck me with great force. Mo didn’t know the details, but he had heard Ali saying that the American who had been visiting had somehow arranged for the Steinway to be transported to Boston, where it would be restored, and then presumably sold on. I stood frozen as the tears gathered in my eyes, my ears still humming to the sound of your name, and beyond, to the notes you had played on Grace.
I wanted to hug Mo again but I didn’t. My arms were suddenly without feeling or energy. I asked after the others. ‘How is everyone?’ I asked him.
‘Russel is still looking for his brother,’ he said.
‘And Belal?’
Mo kept his eyes trained on his feet. ‘Belal has gone home.’
‘Why?’
‘Mr Ali said he was making trouble.’
‘Did he do something?’
Mo shrugged. ‘I can’t say.’
Again I was pierced with guilt for having abandoned them. I tried to remember if there was anything about Belal that stood out. He didn’t strike me as the type of person who would get under Ali’s skin. Ali had told me once that he would periodically encourage a turnover so that the workers would remember who was keeping their bellies full. I recalled it now, and the way Ali had said it, as if it was nothing to exchange one man’s labour for another’s. ‘You stay out of trouble,’ I said to Mo.
‘Mr Ali won’t leave me,’ he said. His belief that there was some security in his life made him seem all the more fragile. I was about to ask him why, whether there was some particular reason Ali would keep him around, but he disappeared into the kitchen, declaring he would make the best spinach curry I had ever tasted.
‘Did you practise the letters?’ I called out. ‘Every day!’ he replied, and in those words, in that voice, there was a small measure of consolation.
When I stood up to leave, I was suddenly dizzy, and I had to sit down again.
‘You sure you don’t want to sleep here?’ Gabriela asked.
‘I promised Rashid I’d stay in town.’
‘Under lock and key, are you?’
‘The errant wife.’ And, with that, I asked Abul Hussain to take me to the villa, where Komola was waiting at the door, her hands soft against my face.
In the morning, when the car stopped inside the gates of Prosperity, I watched for a long time as a cutter made his final pass and a large piece of Grace came crashing down onto the sand. I was wearing sunglasses, a pair I had found in the bedside drawer of my room and had probably belonged to Dolly, and through the sepia-tinged frames I saw the people I had so carefully come to know appearing as vague shapes against the broken silhouette of Grace. A tanker had arrived while I was away. Now it was wedged between Grace and a half-demolished container ship in the neighbouring lot. Grace had been pared down. Her
foredeck and bridge had been sliced off, large panels of steel cut away from her hull. She was all gloom now, empty of the footprints of happy people.
Ali was waiting for me in the Prosperity office. ‘Welcome back, Miss Zubaida.’ He pulled at his beard, which appeared fuller and longer.
‘Thank you, Mr Ali. It looks as if you’ve made a lot of progress,’ I said, gesturing towards the beach.
‘By the grace of Allah, we are ahead of schedule with the cruiser.’
He didn’t ask me to sit down, but I took a seat opposite him anyway. ‘I heard also that you have sold the piano.’
‘To your friend, the American. He was very persistent.’
‘Yes. He’s a difficult man to refuse.’
‘And you have come back. Will you stay long?’
‘I would like to continue with the interviews,’ I said.
‘We are always pleased to act as your hosts,’ he said. ‘And you are entitled to employ who you wish, of course.’
It took me a moment to realise he was referring to Mo. He tapped the desk with the end of a pencil. ‘As long as the boy completes his duties, he is free to live where he finds a place, but you will understand that it may cause some disturbance among the other men. As you have taken such an interest in the boy. I hear you are teaching him to read.’
‘He didn’t get a chance to attend school.’
‘Neither have any of the others.’
‘Have they complained?’ I wasn’t sure where he was going. He obviously didn’t care if my favouring of Mo had caused problems with the workers.