The Bones of Grace

by Tahmima Anam

  The café closed and we stepped out into the night, which was bright with heat and cones of streetlight. We drifted slowly towards my apartment. There seemed an infinite number of things left to say. We hesitated at the top of my street, reluctant to part, and, if I had paused to think for a moment, I may have had a premonition of what was to come: breaking your heart, finding my mother, Grace, the end and the beginning, the pulling crew, the discovery of love and its abandonment, and my telling you this story of our love, and of Anwar, and my mother. But I didn’t pause, and the clairvoyant moment passed me by, and so we said an ordinary goodbye, promising to meet in the morning. When we parted, I felt my mind freeing itself of the story of my birth and turning to more graspable things, the dig I was about to go on, the fossil that was waiting in the earth, the lip balm and magazines I needed to buy before I departed.

  You will wonder, as I often have, about the precise moment we fell in love. Was it on Grace, after you played the piano, or was it before that, the moment I saw you through the print-smudged glass at Chittagong Airport, or in your parents’ living room, or as we parted that first evening, Shostakovich soaring in my music-mind, turning around as you walked away so that I could see you retreat with slow steps in your sandalled feet and hippy trousers?

  But I should tell you now that it was not that night, because that night, I did not believe in love. I knew, of course, that it existed. I knew that it was the central principle around which most people built their lives, and I wasn’t foolish enough to assume that it was something I could avoid entirely. But I did not believe that I lived in an age when a great love was possible. Everything about my life was too easy. I could love whomever I wanted, and marry or not marry them, or change my religion, or get divorced multiple times and have children with three different fathers if I wanted. I came from what you might call a traditional society, but I was not in thrall to that society. What I was in thrall to was the past. This had to do with my parents and the war they had been in, and, as a model for love, for what was possible between two people, they had set an example that fixed in my mind the notion that the epic thing, the one that went down in legend and song and was anointed with passion that lasted beyond beauty and youth, was something that only happened to other people, people that came before me or were born into magical, troubled times. I didn’t believe that I was immune – of course I would love, and be loved – but I had proposed to myself a life that respected its historical moment and demanded something less, something tamer than those deeper furrows and interruptions of the heart.

  As for you, if you had asked me, I wouldn’t have been able to give you a single reason for your interest in me. I told myself this: (a) I would make an amusing anecdote for you later. Hey, you would tell yourself, I met this Bangladeshi palaeontologist and we listened to Shostakovich and then Nina Simone and she loves Anna Karenina. What’re the odds? Or, (b) you felt sorry for me. Or, (c) you were actually a social outcast, totally unlikable and in desperate need of company, and I just couldn’t see it. There was, of course, another option, which was that your interest in me was genuine – but I couldn’t really fathom that, because I would have had to change my own understanding of myself and admit that I was what you were looking for, and that would have been beyond my imagination.

  Now that my estimation of myself has taken a significant battering, I can say this: you did love me. You loved me from the very start. It could have been because you found me beautiful, or interesting, but more than that, it was because, although you bore none of the outward signs of being anything like me, we were, in fact, very similar. In me you saw embodied all the things you had felt about yourself: that you had been born into the wrong family, that there were things within you that had yet to be voiced and you might, if you were lucky, find yourself uttering them in my presence. In other words: we were nothing, yet everything alike. And you had the wisdom to see that from the start, even if I didn’t.

  As I approached the apartment, I could hear music spilling out onto the street, and then I remembered my goodbye party. I called Bettina, the anthropologist I had lived with since my first year, and my closest friend in Cambridge. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘You’re late,’ she said.

  ‘I met someone.’

  ‘An Amphibian?’ ‘Amphibian’ was our code word for people like us. Bettina was Argentinian, born in Queens, had grown up in Buenos Aires when her parents had decided to un-immigrate themselves, gone to college in Paris, taken several years off and backpacked through China, where she had been bitten by monkeys, and landed up here, in Cambridge, by which time her parents had returned to their place in Astoria, chastened by the more exciting side of the planet. ‘Amphibian’ signalled people in between, people who lived with some part of themselves in perpetual elsewhere. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Waspish, by all accounts.’

  ‘Honey, if you’re going to cheat, at least put some colour in it.’

  I tried to conjure Rashid’s face in my mind, stoking my memories for a feeling of tenderness, arousal, something – but nothing came, so I said, ‘It’s not like Rashid and I are married.’

  ‘Where are you? I can hear music.’

  ‘I’m on the porch.’

  ‘We can unpack this later. Hang up and come inside.’

  Bettina had installed an air conditioner in the living room the summer before, and, though the apartment was crowded, it was cooler than the street. I scanned the room and saw my lab partner, Kyung-Ju, and a few other graduate students from my department, but it was mostly anthropologists, the coolest and most depressed social scientists, huddled together in small clusters. I caught fragments of their conversation, complaints about the new department chair, a journal article one of them had failed to get published, a new class on semiotics, the fraud that was Slavoj Žižek. I had gotten to know them well; they spent a lot of time at our apartment, drinking tea and watching television ironically. My own friends from the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, on the other hand, preferred to get drunk on weekends, letting themselves into the prep lab or falling asleep between the shelves of the Invertebrate collection. Bettina often joked that I was in the wrong department, but there was something pleasantly straightforward about scientists, and I found I could live among them without giving much away, and, in those days, hiding in plain sight was what I did best.

  I caused a stir as I moved through the crowd. A cheer went up from somewhere in the kitchen. Bettina, larger than me in every way, bones and height and volume, enveloped me in a smothering hug and passed me a plastic cup of sangria. ‘So what happened?’ she asked, pulling her thick hair into a ponytail.

  I plucked an orange segment out of my cup. ‘It was so strange. I was listening to the music, and there was this guy there, and then I started to cry.’

  ‘It was bound to happen,’ Bettina said, fanning her face. She liked to act as if nothing could surprise her when it came to men. I took a large gulp of sangria and followed her into the living room. Bettina and I had met a few weeks into my first fall at Harvard, when I had decided to take a shortcut through Tozzer Library on my way to the Museum of Comparative Zoology. I entered the building, expecting an ordinary arrangement of books, but instead came upon a very dark room, and, when I dove further in, the lights suddenly came on and illuminated a totem rising two, three storeys into the gallery. I was terrified and let out a small yelp, which Bettina, a few feet behind me, witnessed and found hilarious.

  We started talking and she mentioned she was looking for a roommate. At the time I was living in a tiny room in one of the dorms off Kirkland Street, and the walls were so thin I could hear my neighbour, a doctoral student in Political Philosophy, clicking her retainer into her mouth at night. It turned out Bettina’s first choice, a law student whose boyfriend lived in New York, so she would only have been there a few days every week – absence being the holy grail of roommate desirability – had backed out at the last minute.

  Our first weeks together were awkward, because B
ettina seemed to inhale all the oxygen in the apartment, but it didn’t take long for little tendernesses to grow between us. One day I offered to make dinner, and Bettina fell in love with the one dish I could cook competently, which was dal with spicy omelette. And then, in the first cold snap of the year, I caught the flu, and Bettina made ginger tea and introduced me to TV I’d never seen before, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Gilmore Girls. After that, we shopped at Trader Joe’s on the weekend, went to the occasional movie together, and even sat in on each other’s classes. (I accompanied her to Homi Bhabha’s seminar on melancholia, and she came to my Analytical Palaeontology course. She claimed I got the better deal, and I had to agree.)

  Bettina’s parents had helped her buy the apartment, a two-bedroom flat on Trowbridge, when she had started graduate school. I brought back a few things from Dhaka after the first winter holiday, a clock made out of recycled paper, a length of cloth studded with small round mirrors creating a partition between the living room and the kitchen. We found a battered sofa on the street and dragged it inside with the help of Bettina’s boyfriend, a master’s student at the Ed School, who was dispatched a few weeks later when she grew bored of him. We named the sofa Edvar, after him, and the armchair, donated by an aunt of Bettina, Maude. The apartment was warm and more like home than I had ever imagined I could be in America, and, looking around, I realised it would be a long time before I had a place of my own again.

  ‘The palaeontologists are hanging out by themselves, as usual,’ Bettina complained, collapsing on Maude.

  ‘The anthropologists are doing their best to look intimidating.’

  ‘And failing.’

  I took another sip from the plastic cup and felt the warmth of wine and sugar spreading through my body. I wanted an excuse to talk about you. ‘So this guy, I haven’t seen him around campus before. Turns out he’s a Philosophy grad.’

  ‘What’s his name?’ Bettina asked.

  ‘Elijah Strong.’

  Bettina rolled her eyes. ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Seriously.’ A thought suddenly occurred to me. ‘Unless he gave me a fake name. Do you think he gave me a fake name?’

  ‘Definitely. In the meantime, there’s pie.’

  I replayed our conversation in my mind and decided no, you hadn’t lied, Elijah Strong really was your name. Later that night, I would look you up and find a photograph taken before you’d grown your beard and made you look very young, and for a moment I thought it wasn’t you, but of course it was. ‘Pie?’

  ‘As American as. I turned the oven on in this crazy heat to lure you back to our shores.’

  We had been debating for months about whether I should return to Cambridge after my fieldwork. In the end, I had decided I wouldn’t. I could just as easily write my thesis in Dhaka, where I could be closer to the dig and closer to Rashid. I had decided this despite knowing the world was full of doctoral students who never finished their degrees. My ambivalence was compounded by my lack of determination to stay in your country – I’d never dreamed, like others I knew from back home, of living in America. When I was a teenager, I had once visited New York with my parents. My father had a cousin on Long Island, and we stayed in the guest-room of a two-storey house off the highway. I recalled an impressively fluffy wall-to-wall carpet and large rooms that smelled of onions. I had wondered why all the women covered their heads and why there were framed Arabic inscriptions on the wall above every doorway. When an alarm clock belted out a canned Azaan, I had not been able to stop myself from laughing. My mother had scolded me, but I knew she was secretly judging too, that in her mind an immigrant was someone who had abandoned their country.

  That was all I had known of America before landing in the small college town I had chosen for my undergraduate degree – it was before my parents’ fortunes changed, and it was the only place that had offered me a scholarship. Those four years were spent in misery, frigid winters and lonely weekends, marooned among other international students with no car. It wasn’t until I discovered palaeontology, and the whale, that it began to crystallise in my mind, the prospect of making a life for myself, here where people cared about the bones of animals that had lived far before memory or human ambition. Still, I couldn’t shake the image of that house on Long Island, the way all the people from home clung to each other. To my parents and to Rashid, I said nothing about the allure of living here; to my friends, like Bettina, I explained that there was no way I would settle anywhere but Dhaka. My parents were there, I was an only child, and they had lived through a war. To construct my loyalties in any other way would constitute a betrayal, and I was, above all things, aware of my commitments.

  I spotted Kyung-Ju and Brian, a boy from my cohort, and pushed through the crowd to them. My lab partner was drunk, her thin, bluish-black hair sticking to her forehead. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Ready for your big dig?’

  ‘You had enough to drink?’

  Kyung-Ju clawed the air. ‘I’m the Asian tiger. I’m the Asian tiger.’ The slight animosity that had rippled through the lab when I had been chosen over the others to work on the dig in Pakistan had turned brittle over the course of the spring. Underneath it all was the implication that I had been chosen because I had a Muslim name and spoke a few words of Urdu. No one had been allowed near Dera Bugti since the start of the war in Afghanistan in 2001, but somehow the leader of the expedition, Professor Bartholomew Jones, had been granted permission to dig around the Western Suleiman. If we were successful, we had a chance to make a significant discovery in the field.

  All the graduate students in my department had applied for the place. I had waited until the last day to submit my application, uploading the essay with minutes to spare. And, instead of describing all the technical skills I would bring to the team, I painted a picture of the world as it might have appeared to Ambulocetus: the landscape of the Early Eocene Era after the extinction of dinosaurs, home to the whale who both walked and swam, an amphibian that was also a tetrapod, a creature embracing its duality, its attraction to both the lure of the seas and the comforts of land. I had sent off the essay and decided to think very little of it, telling myself I would have to do my thesis research in a library while secretly believing they would choose me, not because of my name, but because there was poetry in Ambulocetus, and she demanded someone who would understand that. Kyung-Ju had congratulated me after the announcement, but I knew it was particularly difficult for her. She worked harder than me, had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Eocene, and answered to parents who, unlike mine, took a daily interest in her progress.

  I tried to grab the cup from Kyung-Ju’s hand. I knew she had a crush on Brian and I didn’t want her to embarrass herself.

  ‘My mom was so mad,’ Kyung-Ju said, dodging me. ‘It was bad enough I wanted to study palaeontology, but I couldn’t even be the best at it.’

  ‘I just got lucky.’

  ‘Don’t sweat it, Kyung-Ju,’ Brian said, ‘you get to stay here with the rest of us, while Miss Glamourpants gets her hands dirty.’

  Brian threw his arm casually around me, his unshaved chin bristling against my cheek. I smelled whisky. His beard reminded me of the concert, your fingers entwined in mine. I let a small sound escape my lips. Brian lingered, leaning towards me, and I thought about kissing him, because I wanted so much to kiss you. Brian had asked me out during our department orientation, and I had laughed it off, saying we had only just arrived, there would be plenty of time for romance. He hadn’t repeated the offer, and soon everyone knew about Rashid. I pushed him away gently now and wrestled Kyung-Ju’s paper cup from her hand. ‘That’s enough,’ I said. ‘Here, eat some cashews.’ I steered her towards the sofa, supporting her head as she leaned against the armrest.

  ‘I wanted it more than you,’ Kyung-Ju said, her voice cracking.

  ‘I’ll whisper your name into the dust,’ I said.

  I wandered onto the porch, wishing you’d given me your phone number. I would call and tell you about the party
, the people spilling onto the tiny patch of grass in front of the house, Kyung-Ju’s head rolling forward onto her arms, the smell of cigarettes and baked fruit. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and started sending Rashid a text. It was a few lines long before I gave up, unable to capture the thread of feeling that had begun to unspool inside me: a sadness at having to leave this place, which I had always treated as temporary, and a parallel restlessness, an eagerness to go because the conversations were folding back onto themselves, and I was thinking about the woman who gave birth to me, tucked away in some part of my country, and that, out of loyalty to my parents, I would probably never know, because the word biological was terrifying to them, and had never been uttered.

  Bettina came through the door with two of her fellow anthropologists, Suzu, who wore her blonde hair in a pile of dreadlocks, and Chandana, an Indian woman I had never particularly liked. I wondered who had invited her. ‘Hey girl,’ Bettina said, ‘we’ve been looking for you.’

  ‘I was dealing with Kyung-Ju. She’s drunk.’

  ‘I know. She threw up in the kitchen.’ Bettina leaned against the railing, while Suzu pulled a red packet out of a small purse she wore around her neck. Chandana joined me on the porch step, sitting a little closer than I wanted her to.

  ‘Brian’s taking her home now.’

  ‘I don’t think she’s used to drinking,’ Suzu said. ‘What did you put in that sangria?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Bettina said.

  ‘She’s rebelling,’ Suzu said. ‘Do they drink where you come from, Zubaida?’

  ‘Yes and no,’ I said, recalling the parties I had gone to in high school, where the booze was in plain sight. ‘Officially, no. But everyone drinks.’

  ‘Everyone? Surely not everyone. Not the farmer, or the rag-trade worker,’ Suzu said, lighting a cigarette.