by Tahmima Anam
Prosperity Shipbreaking
And now we come to the time when you arrived at the beach and our lives turned to face one another again. The year I lived in the shadow of Grace and watched that great leviathan stripped down to her very bones. The year I broke your heart. I love this part of the story, not least because you are in it, but also because those few weeks we were together tell me everything I need to know about the rest of my life. Sure, it paints a picture of me that I am loath to remember, much less resurrect. But in order for us to come crashing down so decisively, we had to climb to those heights. We had to be those people whose fingertips brushed the atmosphere. I will always be grateful for that.
It is a year after the wedding. Rashid and I have been living in his parents’ house with the swimming pool on the roof and the locked bedroom doors. Anwar, in the meantime, is back in his village, carrying his secret, which is also my secret. He hasn’t begun to search for Megna, and he hasn’t yet arrived in the city where we will eventually meet. How I came to be there myself has to do with blood. My period was late. I had been assigned a car and a driver by the stern-looking man who managed Dolly’s household. The driver was young and skinny, and sank into his seat so that all I could see from the back was the sleeve of his shirt and his elbow as he manoeuvred the gearshift. I asked him to take me to the pharmacy in Gulshan 1, the one under the ice-cream parlour. The shopkeeper was standing behind a glass counter that was crammed with sanitary pads, and while I was searching my mind for the Bengali words for pregnancy test, I found myself re-annoyed by the fact that all the pharmacies were arranged in this way, and that if you wanted something embarrassing you had to ask someone to pull it down from a shelf or to open a cardboard box hidden in the back room. I decided my people were all terribly indiscreet. You couldn’t walk down an aisle and pick up condoms or tampons or haemorrhoid cream. The shopkeeper took my money and wrapped the rectangular box in a brown-paper bag. And then I went home and the two blue lines appeared immediately and I thought I would explode with rage.
Instantly I experienced an onset of symptoms. I felt a sharp pain in my abdomen and my legs were heavy and I wanted to devour a hamburger. I also had the overwhelming sense that my body had betrayed me by allowing this little seed to take root. What an ignorant little thing it was, didn’t it know that nothing had been right since the wedding, or earlier, since I agreed to marry Rashid, maybe even before that, when I had decided against the possibility of love – didn’t it know that it shouldn’t commit this one act, this act that had been denied my mother, and summed up an equation that had remained unsolved within me?
I sat with it for two weeks. Every morning I willed it to be over. Every morning I cursed this being whose provenance was more sure, within the first moments of life, than mine would ever be. I ate like the proverbial pig, ate everything, was repulsed by nothing except the little cluster of cells with my name on it. Every time I went to the bathroom I stared down at my blank, perfectly clean underwear. I contemplated dangerous acts, such as excessive drinking or jumping from high places, but I had never been courageous that way and I wasn’t about to start now. Dolly threw a party one day where everyone was asked to wear black and white and she put a tent out in the garden and hung strands of tiny lights from the trees, and I took a full plate up to my bedroom and ate what felt like an entire side of lamb.
The television was switched to the Discovery Channel and there was a programme on algae. Algae, the building blocks of life. At that moment, with the meat sitting densely in my stomach, I developed an attachment. I thought about meeting a person who was related to me by blood, something that had never happened to me before. Kin. I clutched my belly and took back all the things I had whispered to it. In the background an animated male voice said, The giant kelp is a large brown alga that may grow up to fifty metres in length, and I smiled and smiled to myself at this strange accident.
I told Rashid.
I don’t know how he had experienced the first year of our marriage. He seemed always upbeat and cheerful, and we’d had a few holidays together, a honeymoon in Thailand, a week in London, a business trip to Hong Kong to which I had tagged along. He had been right about the travel – it took the edge off of living in Dhaka. There were parties and family dinners and trips back and forth from Dhanmondi to see my grandmother. Sally and Nadeem’s baby was born in the summer, and we had watched them stumble clumsily around parenthood. The months passed. I read a lot of books. A hundred times I watched a YouTube video of Glenn Gould playing the thirteenth variation but that was the only paean to you I maintained. Although I still had had no word from Bart, a part of me was clinging to the possibility that he would suddenly summon me to Dera Bugti, so I didn’t look for a job.
As soon as I told Rashid I was pregnant it was as if I’d crawled into his head and turned on all the lights. He didn’t know how close I’d come to not saying anything, how many times I’d contemplated having an abortion. But it was – and I must tell you this, Elijah, though it will pain you – it was a moment of communion between us. When I woke up the next morning, there was a tray on the bedside table with tea, vitamins, and a bunch of tulips. God knows how he’d procured the tulips. I was thrilled when he agreed not to tell his parents, and we spent the next several weeks on a conspiratorial high. Every time we looked at each other, we widened our eyes and smiled. Every chance he got, he put his hands on my belly. We did things that people have done throughout the ages. We guessed the sex. We argued over names. We made cooing sounds to it, to each other. He told me repeatedly how beautiful I looked. He made love to me with extreme tenderness. It was everything it needed to be, and for the first time in our marriage I experienced a complete absence of dissatisfaction.
And then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the little knot of cells vanished. We were gathered around the top of Dolly’s twelve-seater dinner table, the five of us – Rashid and me, Dolly and Bulbul, his brother Junaid – and we’d just been presented with trifle, Dolly’s favourite dessert, served in a very large glass bowl. Rashid was passing the bowl to me, and as I turned to take it from him I felt a hot, abrupt pain scissoring through me. I grabbed his elbow as the pain intensified, watching in horror as a crimson stain travelled across my lap and towards my knees. Rashid was still holding the trifle bowl, and he set it down. The others were eating, dessert forks clipping against porcelain, custard and Jell-O smudged across their plates.
Rashid stood up and asked his father and his brother to leave the room. Junaid protested, saying he wasn’t finished, but Bulbul saw the look on Rashid’s face and ordered the boy out. When they had gone, I said to Dolly, ‘I’m very sorry, but I’m afraid I’ve spoiled your dining chair.’ The upholstery was stained beyond repair, I knew that even before I stood up, because I was sitting now in a pool of blood, the remnants of that much cursed, little-wished-for, newly coveted being smeared all over the cream-and-navy fabric. Dolly and Rashid pulled me up from that chair, very slowly, and Dolly wrapped a shawl around my waist, and we went up the stairs and into the bathroom, where I climbed quietly into the empty bathtub in my clothes. It wasn’t until much later, the tub filled, swirls of light and dark pink filtering into the water, that I let Rashid pull the kameez over my head. And then I lay there for a long time, swimming with the evaporating atoms of my child, utterly, excruciatingly alone.
It was suggested – after the doctor, and the scans, and the assurance that no irreparable damage had been done – that I should spend a few weeks in the southern port town of Chittagong, where Rashid’s family owned a country house. I had been there twice before – once on a summer holiday with my parents, and again just after the wedding, when Dolly and Bulbul had held a reception for that branch of the family. I agreed easily when the proposal was put to me, but I didn’t want anyone else to come. I thought they might refuse to let me go alone, but I found there was some power in what had happened, and I was allowed to dictate the terms, at least for now.
I also insisted that my parent
s shouldn’t know anything, especially my mother. Ammoo was preparing for the trial of Hossain Hashmi Kubul, a notorious war criminal who had spent the last forty years bragging about his wartime exploits, daring anyone to prosecute him. He had invested in land just after liberation, then started a cement factory that supplied all the building companies in the capital, and he was a powerful man – in the last government, he had even been given a ministry. Everyone knew he had done things, that he was a Razakar, but the tribunal needed witnesses, and Ammoo had found a family who had known him in ’71, a farmer and his ageing father who had seen Kubul ordering the Razakars to mow down all the men in the area and torch their houses. She was with the lawyers day and night, preparing the witnesses, finding supporting documents, scouring the area for anyone who might back up their story. She couldn’t know about my little hiccup. Every time I saw her I told her how wonderful everything was, and the clouds parted around her face, and I saw that there was no space in her for anything but the lightest of conversations.
I packed a suitcase of my old clothes and took the first flight out on a Wednesday morning. Rashid tried at the last minute to get me to change my mind, but I had to put some distance between us. The spell was broken. I couldn’t stop thinking about the look on his face when he realised what was happening, the slight censure that would have reared itself, and him batting it back, shielding me from the truth: that it would have saved us, and without it, we were once again adrift. He drove me to the airport, promising to fly down on Friday. A driver picked me up at the other end, and the caretaker, Joshim, greeted me at the front door.
Khondkar Villa was a modest, two-storey house built by Bulbul’s father in the 1950s. It had a large living room that opened onto a sloping garden. Outside, the bougainvillaea and its bright, flame-like blossoms dominated the landscape, and beyond the garden there were old trees, and more sloping earth, the cars and asphalt of the city nowhere in sight. Chittagong was a smaller version of Dhaka, with the same kinetic pace, the same political graffiti and billboards for shampoo and long-haul flights and mobile-phone packages. But here, elevated above the streets, the city retained its old character as a hill station, a place where the air was cool and empty and lightened by its proximity to the sea.
In the vacant house, the cook, Komola, reigned supreme. She ordered me to wash my hands and then she brought me a tray and ordered me to eat. I was surprised to find I still had a big appetite. The homemade guava jelly and white bread reminded me of childhood summers, when Nanu used to make big batches from the tree in her garden and I would stick a spoon directly into the pot and burn my tongue on the cloyingly sweet paste. Komola filled the guest bathtub and ordered me to get in, but not before she had given me a thorough massage with olive oil. The oil was warm and Komola’s hands were comfortably rough, and I slept deeply that night and woke up refreshed.
Rashid came on Friday and declared me better. ‘Let’s party,’ he said, jangling the car keys in his pocket. ‘I know everyone in this town.’ Komola stood in the doorway with a bowl of rice pudding in her hands. I told Rashid I wasn’t going anywhere. I know he wanted to help me fix it, to cheer me out of it, but it was obvious, in this case, that whatever was in his arsenal would not be enough. I spooned rice pudding onto my plate and pretended not to see his disappointment.
He went out after dinner and didn’t come back till very late, climbing into bed beside me and running his hands up and down my body. ‘Make love to me,’ he whispered, his breath fragrant with alcohol, and I went through the motions, trying to gain comfort from the closeness of our bodies, but eager for the visit to be over so I could be alone in the house again. What would I say to you, Elijah, if we were still in touch? What song title would communicate, now, the complicated forms of attachment that had been promised and taken away from me? We had stopped sending messages soon after the wedding. The last one I sent was an unencrypted sentence that delivered the news in its blandest form. Married. Happy. Farewell.
Rashid left Chittagong the next afternoon, and over the course of the following week, I slipped into a routine. An early breakfast, then a walk through the estate with Joshim, he holding a long stick and pointing out the names of the trees. After a few hours of reading, I ate lunch in the kitchen with Komola and the other servants. It took some arguing to get them to agree to let me eat with them, but I told them that I was lonely sitting at the long dining table all by myself. There was another cook, a maid, a guard, and a young girl who did the laundry and dusted Dolly’s furniture. In the evening, there was a bath, and more reading, and falling asleep to the sound of the wind through the open window. ‘Bou-ma doesn’t like air conditioning,’ I overheard Komola saying to the others.
I was turning my thoughts to returning home when I received a call from my mother’s friend, Rubana. I had, in fact, been thinking of Rubana on the very day she telephoned, recalling the last time I had seen her. It was a few weeks after my wedding, at the home of one of Dolly’s distant cousins, Sweetie. Sweetie had invited a large and superbly groomed group of friends to her house in Baridhara, and Rubana had stuck out in her plain clothes and lack of makeup. I had known Rubana since childhood and had always been a little afraid of her. That evening she appeared bored, looking often at her phone and wandering out into the garden with her hands around a mug of tea. I followed her and she looked me up and down, a giant red teep punctuating her forehead, and asked me what I was doing, not, what are you doing, dear? But What the hell do you think you’re doing? At least, that is how I heard it. What the hell did I think I was doing, I regularly said to myself. It made me feel a little better in the way that stating something obvious can do. ‘I’ve been thinking about you,’ she said now. ‘I heard you were in Chittagong.’
‘Yes, at my in-laws’.’
‘Oh, yes, the hill. Is Rashid with you?’
‘No, I came on my own.’
‘Escaping already? Wise woman.’ Rubana herself was married, but no one ever saw her husband. I imagined a small, whiskery man who shuffled around in a lungi and didn’t dare raise his voice above a whisper.
‘I know someone who’s working on a project. It’s in Sithakunda, about an hour from you. Have you heard of shipbreaking?’
Shipbreaking. Yes, I knew what it was. Places on the beach where they tore ships apart. Every few months you would read a story in the papers about how one of the workers had died in a fire or been crushed under falling steel.
‘There’s a British researcher who wants to do a documentary, but none of the workers are talking to her. You could go and help her make inroads. Translate. We have some local people there, an NGO called Shipsafe, but somehow it’s not clicking.’
The prospect of someone instructing me to work, to actually make something happen, gave me a sense of what I had wasted. Except Moby-Dick, I couldn’t recall the name of a single book I’d read in the last twelve months. I blamed Bart, the failed dig, but really I had just been stubborn, clinging to my coveted title, palaeontologist, not realising that it had been taken away from me and that I should just accept this instead of becoming one of those people I’d always hated. And why hadn’t anyone said anything? My mother, who crammed every day with a hundred useful, life-or-death activities, had remained silent as I had slept through the better part of a year.
‘I don’t know anything about it,’ I said.
‘Doesn’t matter. Use your wits.’
I mumbled an excuse about not being well, and heard Rubana sigh into the phone. She was weighing me up, judging my temperament, and finding me lacking.
‘Too bad,’ she said. ‘It’s probably not for you anyway. You’d have to move out of that fancy house and into the office quarters – it’s the only way you can have constant access. I don’t imagine you can survive without air conditioning.’ I found myself telling her about Dera Bugti. The overnight bus to Kashmore. Camp beds. Chiselling in the sun. The prospect of leaving this house, not to return to Dhaka, but to go elsewhere, was a possibility I hadn’t dared co
nsider. What would I tell everyone? But if I accepted a job, and if that job took me away from here, then it was out of my hands.
‘You’re a fairy godmother,’ I said to Rubana.
I told Rashid the following weekend, when he came to see me. ‘But I’m here to bring you home,’ he said. He raked his hair with his long, blunt fingers. I was exhausting him, but he couldn’t deny me, not after what had happened. At Dolly’s house, the dining chair would have been removed from the table. I wondered where the chair was, whether it was sitting discarded in a storeroom somewhere, or whether it had been sent back to the shop so that the fabric could be replaced, and who was doing this task, and how it been explained, and did they have to pay extra for the blood, for the workmen’s disgust?
I left it to Rashid to break the news, both to my parents and to his. He tried to persuade me to stay at Khondkar Villa – the driver would bring me back and forth – but I refused, hoping the accommodation in Sithakunda was terrible, suddenly yearning to get far away from the plush, unpopulated spaces of his house. I said goodbye to Komola and Joshim, meaning it when I said I would miss them, promising to return whenever I needed a good night’s sleep or a proper meal.
The next day Bilal, the Shipsafe coordinator, picked me up in a battered jeep. I climbed into the front seat beside him and we sped down the hill. Bilal had recently married, and he flicked through photographs of his wedding on his phone while navigating us out of the city. I commented on the loveliness of his bride. She looked not unlike how I must have appeared just last year, a line of tiny flowers in the parting of her hair. We took a route that skirted the sea. Oil refineries lined the road on one side, and high walls separated the road from the coast on the other, and, out in the water, giant oil tankers and container ships waited to load or dump their cargo. Then we turned inland, getting stuck in traffic almost immediately. Hunched over the steering wheel, Bilal simultaneously complimented his wife’s beauty and complained that Chittagong was no better than Dhaka, now that trade was booming. He pointed to a gate. ‘See,’ he said, as if I should understand. The sign said EXPORT PROCESSING ZONE. Then the traffic cleared and we sped through, leaving the low buildings and overhanging wires of the city behind, turning to a sky that was bright and open.
