The Bones of Grace

by Tahmima Anam

  He saluted me with a hearty ‘As-salaam alaikum!’ I was cheered by the warmth in his voice and I liked him immediately, his manner open and slightly clownish. He insisted I call him Bart and he poured me a cup of creamy tea, which I accepted (in case you’re wondering, I pissed like the proverbial racehorse the moment I got to camp).

  ‘This is Zamzam,’ Bart said, introducing the other man. With narrow shoulders and a timid face, Zamzam appeared out of place, though he must have thought the same about me. I had removed my veil and the dust was making my eyes tear, and I had already developed something of a tic, rubbing the back of my neck to get rid of the grit that had started accumulating there. I sniffed, blew my nose into a crumpled tissue, and exchanged polite hellos with Zamzam. On the bare ground was a pot of curry and a platter of stone bread. I was offered a plate and helped myself. The bread lived up to its name and was very hard, but the curry was delicious, sweetened by dried prunes.

  Bart went on about Baluchitherium. My eyes stopped streaming and I tried to remember everything I knew about it – I recalled it was discovered in Dera Bugti by an Englishman at the start of the twentieth century and was thought to be one of the largest mammals ever, a rhinoceros-like behemoth who roamed the earth 30 million years ago. Young, then, compared to Ambulocetus.

  ‘A group of French archaeologists dug it out of the ground in ’99, and it was decided the skeleton would be moved to Karachi for examination. In the meantime, they stored it in the home of the tribal chieftain of the time, you know, Akbar Bugti. When the army raided Bugti’s home, they blew up his compound, killed him, and everyone thought they’d wiped Baluchitherium off the face of the earth,’ Bart said.

  I didn’t know the end of the story. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Bugti had all the bones stored in metal containers, the bastard!’ Bart slapped his hand against Zamzam’s back. ‘That’s why we’ve got to get Ambulocetus out of the ground and put it somewhere safe.’

  Ambulocetus tells about the moment, somewhere around 50 million years ago, when whales began to swim. The earliest ancestor of the modern whale, Pakicetus, was discovered several hundred miles north of here, in Punjab. Pakicetus drank fresh water, had a marine-mammal ear and swam in the shallows. The last time this area had been excavated, Gingerich had found Artiocetus clavis and Rhodocetus balochistanensis, the two specimens that had proven that whales evolved from Artiodactyla, split-hoofed, plant-eating mammals such as cows and hippos. And Thewissen had found many specimens of Ambulocetus in 1992, but no one had been able to bring a full skeleton back from the field.

  ‘Gingerich was here in 2000, but they shut him down when the war in Afghanistan started,’ Bart said, removing a folder from his backpack.

  I had been meaning to ask Bart about this. For over a decade no one had been allowed anywhere near here. ‘How did you get permission?’

  He pulled out a sheet of paper from the folder and wielded it with a flourish. ‘Aha, here it is.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Imagine, if you will, Ambulocetus, the sun on her back, the edge of the water lapping at her thick skin, the temptation to plunge within too great, the secrets of the ocean beckoning.’ I cringed at hearing my words read back to me, checking to see if Jimmy and Zamzam were laughing or, worse, staring down at the fat coagulating on their plates, embarrassed for me. Bart went on, in the manner of a hazing ritual: ‘Her secrets lie within her bones: her hips, her protected inner ear that allows her to hear underwater, the length of her femur. These are the clues that will tell us who she is, so long a mystery beyond the reach of science.’

  My face burned. ‘Seriously, though. I thought this area was strictly off limits.’

  Bart flung my application back into the folder. Then he pulled a tin box out of his pocket and selected a heart-shaped sheet of betel. ‘You know countries like this,’ he said, folding the betel leaf into a triangular packet and popping it into his mouth. ‘You gotta find ways to get around.’

  ‘Bart’s been working on it 24/7,’ Jimmy said.

  The professor pulled at his scalp. ‘Got the greys to prove it.’ He chewed in silence for a minute, then said, ‘You have to keep everything in balance.’

  I waited to see if he would explain. ‘You describe Ambulocetus beautifully,’ Zamzam said to me.

  My eyes started tearing again and I rubbed them roughly, wishing I’d never taken liberties with the whale’s story. ‘My parents didn’t want me to come,’ I said, my voice unnecessarily loud. ‘They said it was too dangerous.’

  ‘Danger is relative,’ Jimmy said.

  ‘No one wants their kid to grow up and hunt fossils,’ Bart said.

  ‘Your parents have nothing to worry about,’ Zamzam said. ‘I can assure you.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Bart said, ‘we have our secret weapon.’ He fanned out his fingers behind his head and gave me a broad smile, displaying his betel-stained teeth. Then he closed his eyes and appeared to dismiss us. I didn’t ask him again how he’d received all the right permits and approvals, how he’d gotten the blessing of the local tribesmen, and he wouldn’t have told me anyway, that he had made a set of agreements that were held in place through a careful balance of bets and payments. He would have considered it an acceptable procedure; after all, according to him, in countries like these, some transfer of human life would be unsurprising, a kind of ransom to which we would all be subject, and lines had to be crossed to get at the treasure beneath our feet.

  Jimmy showed me around the rest of camp. The tents were arranged in a semicircle around a central area that served as an open kitchen. Bart and I were each given our own tent, and Jimmy and Zamzam were sharing. There was a cook, a driver, a pair of guards, and a few local men who had been recruited to help us to break through the dense red shale. When our predecessors had mined this area, the bones they had found were encased in layers of red-bed sequence that were as hard as cement. If we wanted to get a complete specimen out of the ground, we would have to first quarry the area with our tools and then blast through the rock with explosives. Zamzam was in charge of the dynamite, which he kept buried in a tin trunk on the southern edge of the site.

  Later, after I’d eaten another round of curry and stone bread, I ran into Zamzam outside the makeshift toilet. He was holding an empty can of water. The evening was cool and quiet. I had taken an antihistamine and I was feeling slightly better.

  ‘Have you seen Stupendemys geographicus?’ he asked.

  I felt myself light up. ‘Just a few days ago. You know it?’

  ‘Only photographs. How fortunate you are to have seen it for yourself.’

  He was right, I was lucky: I had walked the hallways of Wilson and Gould, seen Kronosaurus and Stupendemys and the Glass Flowers. Held hands with you. I wondered what had motivated him. ‘What made you come?’ I asked.

  ‘My father thought it was a terrible idea.’

  I smiled. ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘Some other time, perhaps.’

  He darted away and I looked back to see him walking at a fast pace towards his tent, the night sky above us lit up with a fraction of moon and a dense scatter of stars.

  We started at dawn, driving west in a pair of jeeps with a tiny pink sun at our backs. I noticed our guard was wearing something of a uniform this morning, a half-sleeved shirt and a pair of light khaki trousers. The gun tucked into his belt was visible when he turned his back and adjusted his turban against the wind. The hills were jagged, softened occasionally by plumes of wild shrubs. Against the horizon we could see a thin scattering of acacia trees. The Suleiman range appeared to retreat into the distance, though we were actually approaching it – a trick of the savannah – and finally we stopped at a site about two hundred yards across, marked off by Jimmy and Bart as they had prepared the location.

  Jimmy was a sedimentologist – he would examine the bed of the Tethys for the environmental context of Ambulocetus and try to re-create the landscape from which the shale had been formed. The hired men would use sledgehammers to bring down l
arge chunks of red rock and then Zamzam, Bart, and I would sift through each one, examining the broken stone with bits of bone and teeth scattered within it like flecks of white confetti. From the first moment the physical exertion was soothing in its simplicity. We baked in the heat, fierce even at this early hour, and, though it seemed there was no movement in the air, soon our skins were dusted red with the powder of the dried sea. That first morning went by very quickly, and we returned to camp for a late lunch, remaining inside as the afternoon blazed, cleaning, sorting, and setting up a rudimentary system of cataloguing what we had found.

  I lasted a week. On the second Monday, Bart found me leaning against a rock with my head between my knees and ordered me off site. I was dehydrated, and the sunburn behind my neck had blistered. One of the guards offered to drive me, and I sat next to him in the front as he raced the jeep back to camp, speaking to me only once, to ask if I needed a ride to the hospital in Multan. I said no and spent the afternoon on top of my sleeping bag, angry at myself for succumbing to the environment. I had a lot to prove – not just to the others, because I was the only woman there, but also to myself, to my sheltered childhood, to my parents and even to you, Elijah.

  I had decided that my week with you was the start of a new me. I would use it to turn myself into the sort of person who knew exactly what to expect from the world. I would no longer be the pampered only child of two doting parents. When I died the invitation to my funeral would say ‘Palaeontologist. Adventurer. Rock-Slayer. Amphibian. Ninja’. I would be difficult to surprise, intractable. Even funny. Yes: I would develop a sense of humour, a dry, intimidating one. I kept repeating the word ‘Ninja’ to myself, smiling until my lips cracked.

  I turned on my phone and of course there was no signal. The battery was almost dead, but I scrolled through my song list and chose the Nina Simone version of ‘Here Comes the Sun’. I felt a strong desire to hear your voice, to tell you about this place, the searing pain at the base of my neck where the desert had pierced my skin, the aniseed scent that followed Zamzam around everywhere as he chewed on stalks of wild fennel, and the packed crimson rock that held its secrets so close. You realise, don’t you, Elijah, that this is the way you worked your way into my heart? Not just in those days together in Cambridge, but in the aftermath, when I couldn’t stop talking to you, when every turn of my story included a footnote of conversation as I pictured how you might respond, the way the desert light would catch your hair, the effect of the parched, history-heavy air on your voice. What would you have made of all of this, the green flags of our tents on the lunar surface of this ancient place, our little argument with time? That is, I know now, how people fall in love – in the words they recite to each other, the images they weld out of their abbreviated encounters, narrating themselves into the sort of connection that they will later refer to as fated.

  In the evening, Zamzam and Jimmy brought me dinner and some sachets of oral rehydration salts. Zamzam put a sachet on the ground next to my sleeping bag, and I thought I heard his footsteps retreating, but he was rummaging around in my backpack, looking for water. He tore the sachet open and poured the contents into my flask.

  ‘Did you find anything?’

  ‘Only the murmurings of ghosts,’ Zamzam said.

  I opened my eyes and noticed that his face was leavened by pale-green eyes. ‘I’ll be back on site tomorrow,’ I said.

  Jimmy said, ‘When I was in Afghanistan, I passed out at least a dozen times. This kind of dry heat can kill you.’

  Zamzam finished making up my saline water and dropped the flask beside my sleeping bag.

  I was eager for them to go, but they seemed to want to stay until I’d finished eating. I took a bite of bread and felt it turning back into dough in my mouth. ‘What was it like out there, in the war?’ I asked.

  ‘Paid off my loans,’ Jimmy said.

  ‘My dad was in the army once,’ I offered.

  ‘Was he a Mukti Bahini?’ Zamzam asked.

  I nodded, surprised he knew the Bengali word for ‘freedom fighter’. ‘Bangladesh used to be a part of Pakistan,’ I explained to Jimmy. ‘My father was in the war of independence.’

  ‘Fighting for a cause.’ Jimmy said. ‘Wish I knew what that was like.’

  I put the plate down and took a large gulp of saline, its sweet saltiness reminding me of the time I had contracted food poisoning from eating a stick of roadside sugar cane. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I feel better.’

  Zamzam put his hand to his forehead in a gesture of farewell. I recognised something – a mournful yet euphoric expression I often caught on my parents’ faces, the look of a person who believed they could remake the world. I sometimes thought, when I looked at Zamzam, that he was trying to tell me something. But I was tired and a little light-headed, and as soon as he left I closed my eyes and stopped thinking about him.

  The next morning Bart announced we’d be spending the day at camp. No, it wasn’t on account of my heatstroke – we were having a few guests for lunch. When I emerged from my tent, I saw a seating arrangement had been made around the middle of the campsite, with plastic sheets and tablecloths covering a shady patch near the cooking area. The bolsters had been brought out from Bart’s tent, and there were even table settings, tin mugs and plates arranged in a semicircle. Bart rolled a cigarette, smoked it, wrapped a betel, chewed it, swallowed, and started all over again with the tobacco, all the while shouting orders to the workers to clear up the site and hurry up with the cooking. The smell of singed meat and baking bread spiralled around us.

  Bart said it would be better if I wore the burkha and the face veil again, so I did, and then he said something to me about keeping a low profile, which I gathered meant that I should either stay in my tent or not talk to anyone. I was going to ask Jimmy who exactly we were expecting, but I hadn’t seen him since breakfast.

  A convoy of jeeps arrived just after noon. The men, about a dozen, greeted Bart warmly, embracing him, then holding their palms to their chests. Jimmy and Zamzam approached, and, as they made their introductions, Zamzam fell to the ground and touched a man’s feet. The man put his hand on Zamzam’s head, and when Zamzam stood up they hugged. Someone came around and served stone bread and roasted goat. From inside my veil, I observed how the men were expert at positioning themselves so they didn’t have to remove the guns slung across their chests even as they ate. Bart spoke to them in Balochi. Occasionally, someone told a joke and everyone laughed. Zamzam didn’t say a word; neither did Jimmy. Tea was passed around, then tobacco. The man who had touched Zamzam’s head stood up first. His face, lined as if with a fountain pen, was beautiful in a ruined sort of way. He made a speech, and then, his shoes heavy on the plastic sheet, he paused and waited again for Zamzam to come over and touch his feet. Then he led the others into their trucks and they drove away, copper dust trailing behind them like breaths from a dragon.

  ‘What did he say?’ I asked Bart, and Bart said, ‘You will look after my brother’s son.’

  It was finally explained to me that Zamzam was the son of one of the most influential tribal chiefs in the area, a man called Didag Baloch, who was said to be a possible successor to Bugti. The older man who had come was not Didag Baloch himself, but his brother, Abrar Baloch, Zamzam’s uncle. I spent the rest of the afternoon in my tent again, but thought about Zamzam differently after that, deciding we had something in common, the sense that we had been cast far from our provenance. What did Zamzam’s father make of him, an unferocious man more interested in bones than in the fate of his people? Did his father remind him that it was his duty to wrest his land from armies, governments, and copper prospectors, that this work was insignificant in comparison? I said none of this to Zamzam, but when we passed each other that evening, as roofs of light slanted over the savannah, I made sure to look him straight in the eyes as if to say, I know who you are, I know all about it, every last hammer of doubt.

  And then we found Diana’s tail. Or, rather, Zamzam did. A few weeks af
ter the visit from his uncle, Zamzam came running to where Bart and I were chiselling. He’d found a fist-sized bone that looked promising. We abandoned what we were doing and started quarrying carefully, paring away the surrounding stone to a radius of about three feet. Another, slightly smaller bone was lodged a few inches away. We worked on, ignoring the afternoon sun as it roared above us, and, slowly, like fairytale crumbs, the outline of bones in ascending size began to emerge from the rock. We were on the fifth when the light faded and Bart called it a night. All day we had hardly spoken more than a few words to each other, but as soon as we set off back to camp we spoke at once. Had anyone noticed the notches on the third bone? And what was the size telling us, the distance between vertebrae? Once we reached the end of the spinal column, the pelvis wouldn’t be far away. Please let it be intact. Let it be perfect.

  Zamzam suggested we blast the area immediately but Bart said he wanted to take his time with the hand tools first. They went back and forth a few times, but Bart insisted, so we set ourselves upon the area, chiselling through the sequence from dawn till sunset every day. In the evenings we staked claims on a name. From the beginning I thought of her as female, and the others seemed to agree. It was Jimmy who suggested the name Diana, after the Roman goddess of the hunt. Crouching over her the next day, Zamzam whispered a prayer over the eight vertebrae of her exposed spinal column. ‘What’s he doing?’ Jimmy asked.

  ‘These are bones of grace,’ Zamzam said, lifting his grass-coloured eyes to meet mine.

  I woke the next morning to the sound of Bart’s voice. ‘I have to keep him here,’ he was saying. And another voice – Jimmy’s – saying, ‘You have to tell him,’ and Bart said he would, he just needed a few more days. ‘Let’s get to the pelvis,’ he said. They seemed to go back and forth a few more times, their voices quieting as they reached an agreement. ‘Fine,’ Jimmy said finally, ‘but it’s on you, Professor.’