The Bones of Grace

by Tahmima Anam

  Also by Tahmima Anam

  The Good Muslim

  A Golden Age

  Published in Great Britain in 2016 by

  Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  www.canongate.tv

  This digital edition first published in 2016 by Canongate Books

  Copyright © Tahmima Anam, 2016

  ‘All of Me’ Words and music by Gerald Marks and Seymour Simons © 1931, Reproduced by permission of Bourne Co/EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London W1F 9LD

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful to be notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on

  request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 84767 977 2

  Typeset in Bembo by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  For Roland Lamb, again (and always)

  And for my sister Shaveena, who, though she arrived late, saved me from the loneliness of one

  Without really knowing, we divine; our life has a sister ship, following quite another route. While the sun blazes behind the islands.

  ‘The Blue House’, Thomas Tranströmer

  Contents

  The Preludes

  The Dig

  Homecoming

  Prosperity Shipbreaking

  The Testimony of Anwar

  The Arrival of You

  Looking for Mother

  Return to Grace

  The Last True Story

  Acknowledgements

  I saw you today, Elijah. You were crossing the road. There is a building on the corner of Mass Ave and Harvard Street that looks like a miniature version of the Flatiron Building in New York. You had your back to the building, and when the little white man began to blink, you stepped off the sidewalk and onto the street – that’s when I saw you. You made a little gesture with your hand that made me think you had seen me too, that you were waving, but it was a small motion of your wrist that meant nothing – you were just bruising the cold November air, and before you caught my eye, I bolted.

  I knew it would only be a matter of time before we ran into each other. Cambridge is a small town and the orbits are modest. I’ve been back three months, and every day I’ve swept the corners of my vision, hoping and not hoping, as the warm days turned to ice, that it might be you in that charcoal coat, your legs in that pair of loose-fitting trousers. Your voice ordering the coffee before mine.

  Diana has brought me back. She is here – or, at least, a very small part of her is here – in my hand. Her ankle bone is paler and lighter than I had imagined – time has robbed it of its weight – but her presence is nothing short of a miracle, here in this lab, in this town where my dreaming of her and my dreaming of you began. When we left her behind in Dera Bugti, I never thought I would see her again. I thought the mystery of the walking whale would remain in the ground forever, one of the secrets we were never meant to unearth. But earlier this year I received a message, written in Urdu and translated, reluctantly, by my mother:

  Dear Miss Zubaida Haque,

  Here is a gift from our departed friend. I do not understand why a man would give his life for such a thing, but perhaps you will. He got a letter out, asking me to recover his treasure and send it to you.

  I have no choice but to dispatch my duty to a brother and comrade. We scoured the desert for your Diana, and now I am sending her to you, piece by piece. I do not know what these bones mean, but if you are reading this, you will know that our friend had a parting wish, and that I have endeavoured to fulfil it.

  I didn’t want to believe the message was real – after years of silence, could it be that Zamzam was helping to finish what we had started? But there was no other explanation, no other possible reason for this stranger’s message, and he had used her name, Diana. I replied, listing the department’s details, offering assistance to cover the transportation costs, the formalities that would have to be completed in order for ancient fossils to cross borders. Then I boarded a plane, I came here, and I waited.

  When the box arrived, it was wrapped in several layers of duct tape, and inside, within folds of newspaper, encased in a layer of red matrix, was Diana’s double-hinged ankle. I closed my fingers around the padding and felt the sting of tears in my eyes. I knew immediately that this wasn’t just the fulfilment of a dream I have so long desired yet had taught myself to renounce; it was also a way for me to make a final plea for you. Diana is the reason I left this town, and Diana is why I have returned. I think of her as a spirit of comings and goings, a beacon that leads me across continents and through time. I live in hope that she will lead me back to you.

  I suppose I must have been composing this story in my head for some time, but as I held Diana’s bone in my hand that day, a flood of words came to my mind, and I rushed home and wrote them down. I have been living in a state of waiting, Elijah, for this moment, this opportunity for reckoning, and Zamzam, from beyond his grave, has granted me my wish. Diana is here, and I have seen you, and now I can take account of the whole thing – not just of you, the great love of my life, and not just of Ambulocetus, but also of Anwar, the man who led me to my mother, and of Grace, the ship that was ground to dust before our eyes. There is a whale, a woman who gave up her child, a piano, and a man who searched so long and hard for his beloved that he found me. But you have interrupted me too soon. I am not finished yet, and until I do there will be no way for us to wend our way back together.

  You were ahead of yourself, Elijah, standing in that intersection before you were meant to.

  The Preludes

  The first words I ever said to you were: ‘When I was nine years old, I found out I was adopted.’ And you replied: ‘Aristotle was an orphan.’ And I said: ‘So was the Prophet Muhammad.’ That evening, the music and the heat of late summer had made me recall the day my parents had finally confessed the thing that I had, even as a small child, always suspected. I remembered that after my ninth birthday party, when the guests had gone home and what remained was the smell of fried chicken and torn corners of wrapping paper and the scatter of fallen potato chips, my parents told me that they had adopted me two years after they had married and fifteen years after the war. I hardly ever thought about that day, but, on the evening we met, I recalled it clearly: my father had built a piñata that had emptied its candy onto the lawn, and a boy from my school had taken the piñata stick and chased the other boys into a shady corner of the garden where the cobwebs were as thick as books. I remembered being sandwiched between my parents as they narrated the story, remembered each holding one of my hands and telling me about wanting so much for a baby and the miracle of finding me, remembered that I developed the sudden urge to vomit, that my vomit was candy-orange, and remembered especially the colour, because in those days there was no flush in the evening and I’d had to pour six mugfuls of water from the bucket into the commode to make it go away. It came back to me in a flood on that hot night in Cambridge that sat heavy on all of our shoulders, late summer and the semester about to begin, the campus sparse. I was preoccupied with the final preparations for my trip to find a complete skeleton of the ancient whale Ambulocetus natans, and my memories mingled with thoughts of packing away my apartment and the journey I was about to embark on, imagining the dig, the moment of discovery, the possible unveiling of a fossil that had already changed the way we looked at the relationship between the land and the sea, and in t
his interlude, between the memory and the anticipation, a crack appeared, a pause in which everything slowed down, an in-between moment that was neither here nor there – and into that crack fell you: a man with piano hands and the smell of cold weather on his collar.

  I had gone, as you of course know, to a concert at Sanders Theatre. I sometimes spent evenings in that wood-panelled auditorium, and on that night, on the eve of my departure, I allowed myself this indulgence as a coda to my seven years in America, immersing myself, as I was often wont to do, in sounds that would always resonate, despite, or perhaps because of, their unfamiliarity. I usually forgot the music, except once, when Yo-Yo Ma played the Bach Cello Suites. The event was more of an interview than a concert so he only played for a few minutes at the end, but it was brief and magical, and the only time I had wished to share the experience with someone else.

  So it was my last night, and my last concert. I found, when I arrived, that it would be the Shostakovich Preludes. I had heard of Shostakovich, but other than the name I didn’t know anything about the music. I saw a grand piano on stage, then the lights went down and I was surprised when a slight woman emerged from behind the curtain. She was older, possibly in her sixties, and she wore a long skirt and had her hair tied into a grey knot that hung low on her neck. She began to play short pieces of perhaps five minutes each. I found the music pleasant but unexciting. It would begin on a romantic note, but somewhere in the middle it would become distant, almost intellectual. I couldn’t connect. At one point I became aware of a man to my left: of you, Elijah, of the way you tapped your hand against your knee, the frayed material of your jeans where your fingers rested, your sandalled feet and the canvas bag that sat under your chair.

  Though I turned to look at you a few times, you didn’t glance back. Aside from your hand, the rest of you was very still. I wondered at your stillness. I followed your eyes that were fixed on the tight pool of light around the instrument, on the float and hammer of the woman’s fingers, and as you gazed so seriously, you compelled me to do the same, to really listen to the music. At the end of No. 4, I felt the fraction of an earthquake open in my chest, and after No. 5, which was tender, then triumphant, the tremor rose, so that when the music stopped, I felt it making its way up towards my neck. And that is when the memory returned to me: the birthday party, the confession, sleeping between my parents that night, their anxious breaths mingling over my face. Before I knew it, my cheeks were wet with tears, and it was all I could do to stop myself from sobbing out loud as the next piece began. I held my arms tight around myself, attempting to contain whatever it was that was erupting, and finally you turned around and saw that I was crying, and, though it was dark, I could see from the outline of your face that you were perfectly solemn and had registered no alarm. You put your palm against the sleeve of my shirt, the warmth of your touch radiating from my arm all the way across my shoulders. At your touch, I felt calmed at first, and then, when the music ended and you lifted your hand away, I experienced a piercing loneliness, the loneliness of being the sole inhabitant of my body.

  We had our first exchange, which, looking back, is an odd thing for two people to say to one another as introduction, but which at the time felt perfectly natural. Your voice was deep and mellow in the quiet. You took my hand, and the blood rushed to that hand, leaping beneath my skin as if to leap out and mingle with yours, and this is how we sat for the rest of the first half, my heart hammering in my chest as the hour came to its end and the lights went on in the auditorium.

  In the sudden brightness I noticed you were very pale, with blue eyes and a beard that was neither messy nor particularly trimmed. I rubbed my face, willing the evidence of my tears to disappear. I pulled my hand away, seeing the people file out for intermission and wondering if anyone had recognised me. You asked me if I would like a glass of water, and I would have said yes, but I worried you would disappear and I would never see you again. Finally, the lights went down and the second half began. This time the audience seemed restive, people shifting on the shallow wooden benches that angled around the stage. I thought again about the matter of origins. Not so much about where I was from, but of the fact that, in my twenty-five years, I had lingered so little on the matter. How few questions I had asked – none, really, possibly because of the fierce love of my parents, which I had reciprocated without question until that very moment. While all of this was cycling through my mind, the concert came to an end with an energetic blur of the pianist’s fingers and a triumphant hand-stretching series of chords. The crowd rose to its feet, a meadow of standing figures, and the applause went on for a long time, but there was no encore, so the lights came on eventually and the concert ended. As the auditorium emptied again we both rose, and you stepped towards me and leaned in, letting other people pass on their way to the exit. I inhaled your scent: wood shavings and trees that survived snow. A cold-weather smell on this, the hottest and closest of evenings.

  We considered one another. You fixed your eyes on me as if we were the last two people left in the world. I had never seen a gaze like that, so direct, so unambivalent. Most people like to be in at least two places at once, but you – you were standing there as if roots had grown around your feet. I could hardly bear it, so I said, ‘All right, then. Goodbye.’ You laughed at this, and, relieved, I laughed with you. We made our way to the exit, and I thought for a moment about inviting you to stay the night with me, but instead I suggested we go to the Korean café for a cup of tea. I hadn’t eaten dinner but I wasn’t hungry, and you didn’t mention food either. We walked up Mass Ave and ordered iced tea, and I asked for tapioca pearls in mine and you looked at me with a question in your eyes, and I explained that I had been introduced to bubble tea in Bangkok, which was a short distance from Dhaka, Bangladesh, where I was from. ‘A snack at the bottom of your drink,’ I said. ‘Try it.’

  You told me things about you, things that seemed irrelevant at the time, but that I recalled later in order to make better sense of our meeting. You said you had once built a fountain out of used water bottles and that, a few years ago, you had participated in a staged reading of Ulysses that had lasted one hundred and seventy-six hours. I found myself attempting to match the eccentricities of your stories and only coming up a little short, beginning with the story of my parents’ confession, and how afterwards they never mentioned it again, and that I had never asked, because, in the way of children, I knew the subject had simultaneously been opened and closed.

  You had recently dropped out of a doctoral programme in Philosophy. Why, I asked, and you told me, as if you were realising something only at that very moment, that it was no longer important to you. What would you do? You weren’t sure. You might travel, see something of the world. Or you might practise the piano for a few years. You seemed very sure of yourself, in the way you held yourself and carefully paused before you spoke, and yet the things you told me betrayed a man with little ambition or certainty, a man with nothing to push against and hence adrift in a sea of infinite choices.

  When I looked around, I saw that we were the only two people left. I was about to suggest we go somewhere else and decided instead that we should wait until the café closed and we were forced to leave. Your gaze was still fixed on me and I shifted in my seat. You seemed comfortable with pauses in the conversation but I needed to fill the silence, so I told you about the dig. ‘I’m going to Pakistan next week,’ I said. ‘I’m going to dig out a whale fossil.’ I told you that I was joining an expedition to find the bones of Ambulocetus natans, the walking whale. ‘We’re hoping to bring an entire skeleton back. The pelvis will tell us a lot.’ I matched my pace to yours. Every word came out slow and deliberate. The word ‘pelvis’ sent a charge through me.

  I asked about your family, and you told me the kind of story I had never heard before, that is, the story of perfect American people. Parents both professors at Harvard, now divorced but still great friends, three brothers and a younger sister, a house in Porter Square, a grand
piano in the living room, lemonade in the refrigerator, a kitchen that smelled of wood and chamomile (the last details made up, but close to reality, as I would soon discover). No wonder you were lost. With nothing to resist, you floated like a fallen leaf. Then you said, ‘My grandmother died last month. Every night I go to Sanders and I listen to the music. When there isn’t anything at Sanders, I go to the Boston Philharmonic, and, sometimes, to the movies or to Shakespeare in the Park or to the Hatch Shell.’ I reached out to touch your knuckle with my tea-cold hand. You seemed pleased by my touch, yet you didn’t return the gesture. I told you that I had never been close to anyone who had died. Then I said: ‘I know this will sound strange. But when I remembered my parents telling me I was adopted, it felt like a death. Like there’s a person I’ve been my whole life and she’s a fake, a ghost.’

  ‘It must be hard, not knowing.’

  ‘I’m afraid of what it means. And I feel alone in the world.’

  ‘Loneliness is just part of being a person. We long for togetherness, for connection, and yet we’re trapped in our own bodies. We want know the other fully, but we can’t, we can only stretch out our hands and reach.’

  It was so close to what I had felt an hour or two ago, when you had touched me and then untouched me, that I said, ‘I think that’s the best thing anyone has ever said to me,’ and you smiled, your lips disappearing into your beard. You said were pleased to have been given the opportunity to say the right thing. Then you asked me to tell you more about Dhaka. ‘I don’t know anyone from Bangladesh. In fact, I can’t say I know any whale-hunting Shostakovich fans from any country.’ I was charmed by this description of myself. I said you should come and see the place for yourself. You said you would like that. I told you how my parents had met during the Bangladesh War, that it had been the event that had framed their lives, and mine. We talked about that for a bit, and I gave you the potted history of my country I had narrated many times in the last seven years.