by Tahmima Anam
At Chittagong Airport, I watched you help a man manoeuvre a refrigerator-shaped box onto a trolley, then lift your own suitcase from the carousel and drag it behind you. You were easy to spot through the panels of glass that separated the arriving people from the waiting people on the other side. You wore a shirt with a round collar and those same loose trousers I had seen on you that first day. You were walking through customs when an officer looked you up and down and motioned you over to a desk. Worried you’d be stopped, I made my way towards you and waved my arms.
You looked up and met my eyes through the glass. The customs officer put his hands deep into your suitcase and began to remove your things. A pair of trousers. A T-shirt. He opened the zippered case of your toiletries bag. Toothpaste. You were beautiful. That’s all I could think as you held my gaze, tilting your head to the side. Smiling hello. A sandal. A square package wrapped in red tissue. You tried to stop him but he shook his head, tore open the gift. Dark blue silk melted out of the paper and onto his hand. Embarrassed, he passed it to you. You turned and held it up, showing it was for me. I smiled. Thank you. Three paperbacks. Underwear. A linen shirt. The other sandal. My heart was exploding in my chest. Shampoo. At the bottom of the suitcase the officer found a heavy container with a green cap. He pulled it out and thrust it at you. You tried to explain. The officer shook his head. You held up your hands. Wait, please. You twisted off the cap. Lifted the jug and poured a little of the contents into the upturned cap. An offering. What’s happening? Wait, please. You gestured to the officer to put his finger into the liquid and taste. He did. You smiling. The officer smiling. Screwing the lid back on the jug. Patting each other on the back. Tucking a strand of hair behind your ear. Repacking your suitcase. A pair of trousers. T-shirt. Toothpaste. Sandals. A silk blouse. Maple syrup. I watched you put everything back in its place, pull the zipper back around the suitcase and start walking towards me.
I had practised again and again what would happen when you arrived. What we would say to each other. I believed the time that had passed had made us both more distant and more intimate, the trick of a long separation and those cryptic song titles. But when I caught sight of you, gesturing to me through the glass, I was struck with the one thing I had not rehearsed, the one thing that was entirely unanticipated. I had practised warmth, I had practised small talk, a little awkwardness, and, yes, also disappointment (a person thought of so often, and used in my imagination in such diverse ways, how could he measure up?), but I had not practised what occurred, which was this: terror. When I saw you, I felt you were coming to me after the separation of war, a feeling at once desperate, pathetic, stomach-churning, want-heavy, and entirely unwelcome. It wasn’t possible, it couldn’t be, to fear someone so much, to be sickened, at the very moment of their arrival, at the prospect of their ever going away again. As you approached me, I thought of being apart from you, that I would never be able to tolerate that again, that the distance between us right now, the several feet, was horrible, and as the space narrowed, as your face came into focus, there was a lightness on the horizon of my vision, the sensation of floating, your image multiplying as my eyes watered from longing to see you more; and then, the collision of our bodies as you hugged me over the railing that divided us.
I was trained in the art of keeping up appearances, and I wonder if you knew, when I greeted you politely, that I wanted to dig my fingernails into your bearded cheeks. I may have told you later that when you leaned over the railing and hugged me that I had the urge to blame you for everything that had occurred in the last year, because if it hadn’t been for you, I would have been a happier person, but that in your presence, happiness was immaterial – you had taken that away from me. But I didn’t say any of that. I believe I displayed all the appropriate reactions, keeping my fists to myself, words hidden under my tongue, fingernails safely away from your cheeks.
‘Hello,’ I said, inhaling your shoulder, the hair tucked behind your ear.
We had to walk side by side for a long time until the divider ended. Then you pointed to one of the plastic chairs. ‘Let’s sit here for a moment. Hello.’ You took both my hands and pressed them together between your palms. I was aware of the size of you, of your physical presence that seemed to make everything else shrink. I pulled my hand away, knowing people would stare, and when I tried to look down at the floor, which was littered with cigarette butts, your eyes followed me. ‘Hello,’ you said again.
We remained on the plastic chairs for a few minutes, not speaking. I passed you a bottle of water and you twisted off the cap and held it for a while before taking a sip. Then you straightened, and said, ‘I wasn’t going to come. I almost turned around at the airport and went home.’
At this moment, Mr Ali walked past us. I stood up and introduced you. He had come to pick up another potential buyer, after the first one, Mr Reza, had commissioned most of equipment on Grace, leaving behind the electrical appliances, the furniture, and the piano. You shook hands. My attention drifted for a moment, then I heard you saying, ‘And thank you for allowing me to visit your ship.’
‘Oh, you are seeing the Grace. Miss Zubaida did not tell me.’
I had wanted to bring it up with Ali slowly, once he’d gotten used to the idea of having you around. ‘Sorry, Mr Ali – I hope it’s all right,’ I said. ‘My friend is a pianist, so I thought he might like to see the instrument on Grace.’
‘Yes, yes of course. You are most welcome,’ Ali said, holding his hands behind his back. ‘But you must give me some time to organise the visit.’ I said of course we would wait for his permission. It was his ship, after all.
I had considered meeting you in Dhaka and showing you the sights: Louis Khan’s parliament building, full of sharp, grey angles, or the bank of the Buriganga, which had once given Dhaka the ambition of calling itself the Venice of the East; and more personal landmarks, the graveyard where my grandfathers were buried, the fancy school I was admitted to when we moved to Gulshan, but I had decided to meet you in Chittagong instead. When I think about it now, it seems unlikely I would have urged you to visit if I had remained in Dhaka, married or not. It was only in this third place that our meeting, and all that followed, was possible.
We stepped into the heavy damp of the morning, pushing through the crowd until we reached the car. I watched you put your bags into the trunk, and you slipped beside me into the hush of the back seat.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘For coming in the end. For not turning around.’ And then, because I didn’t know what else to say, I asked, ‘Did you watch any movies on the plane?’
You pulled a book out of your shoulder bag. Anna Karenina.
I realised, at that moment, that you were always going to come, that you had been waiting, all these months, for my invitation.
The car was held up on the link road out of the airport. You rolled down the window and let the air in, thick and warm. A train, painted a long time ago in ivory and blue, clattered past, passengers standing between the carriages and leaning through the bars on the windows. The car moved and you closed the window.
‘A lot of things happened,’ I said.
‘You got married.’ Your voice was flat.
‘I did. I did.’
The car lurched to a stop again on the turning to Chittagong town. I wanted to sound an apology for rushing into the alliance with Rashid, but if I started apologising I might not be able to stop; I might go on and say sorry for the shabby look of my country, the tacky billboards advertising halal soap and mobile phones and air conditioning, the tangle of the telephone wires that hung between poles on the side of the road, the roads themselves, narrowed by trash and people braiding their edges with their hands out, showing off the empty spaces where their limbs should have been, and the air itself, its smell and texture, heavy with missed chances, everything chipped and messy and never quite beautiful, and I would say sorry for not waiting for you, for not believing in our few days together and assuming it was nothing to you, but if I
did that, I would not be able to stop and we would begin and end with nothing but a string of sorrys, and that was precisely why I did not want to be your lover, because everything about my life seemed poor when I looked at it through your eyes.
Instead I sat back in my seat, waiting for the traffic to clear so I could point out some of the landmarks on the way.
As we stopped on the main Chittagong roundabout, I thought about Boils Man, and hoped he wouldn’t show up today. Not because you wouldn’t be able to handle it, the sight of a naked man with small tumours protruding from every inch of his body, but because you would have to see me turn my face away and refuse to look at him, which would tell you too much – everything, really, about my place in this world.
We stopped, the lights changed, horns blaring behind us.
‘Tell me again what happened with your trip to Pakistan,’ you said.
As I recounted the story I felt acutely the distance between the moment I had said goodbye to you in Boston, and this moment, all the things that had crowded into those months coming back to me in a rush. Sitting there in the traffic, I felt that Ambulocetus couldn’t be further away, and when I had been picking at the red sequence in the shale of the Tethys, Cambridge and Shostakovich were only distant memories, and that night when I met you, it was as if my long history with Rashid had never taken place. Every episode of my life seemed to exist in its own articulated space. I wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t started thinking about my adoption, if I hadn’t met you that evening, if Zamzam hadn’t been Didag Baloch’s son. I had always told myself that marrying Rashid was an inevitability, but so much had happened to frame that event, so much before and so much after – Prosperity and Grace and the pulling crew – that it didn’t seem possible that they weren’t all occurring as a result of one another.
On the way home, I thought about my dadu, my father’s mother. Her name was Mehrunessa Bashir and she was born in a village in Trishal, in Mymensingh District, the fourth of seven children. Her father, a munshi, taught her how to read and write, but, though they weren’t poor, no one expected Mehrunessa to remain unmarried past puberty. When she married my grandfather she was thirteen and he was twenty years older, already a practising lawyer. It wasn’t until a decade into their marriage that Mehrunessa showed herself to be an exceptional wife. She demonstrated frugality in the administration of the household expenses, spreading the small sum my grandfather brought home every month to stretch between five sons and the various relations who came to live with them. She oversaw the purchase of a small plot of land in the town and moved the family there so that her boys would not have to grow up in the village, where school ended once help was needed in the fields. A few years later, she insisted they move to the capital, even though they could not afford it at the time, and, for the first few years, when her husband’s clients were few and far between, Mehrunessa found ways to ride out the lean. My grandfather then became well known for a case he fought against a corrupt judge of the Dhaka High Court, becoming the first Bengali lawyer to successfully sue a British lawmaker. The memoir he wrote of that trial, Amar Shikha, was transcribed and typeset by Mehrunessa, who had an eye for typographic detail that her husband lacked. My grandfather died of liver cancer a few months before the war, so he did not witness the destruction and rebirth of the country. He was not there to bury his youngest son, a revolutionary felled by an enemy bullet, his body carried for miles by his fourth son, my father, and buried in an unmarked grave near the village he helped to liberate. He was not there to see the expansion of the family’s fortunes, not there to witness his eldest son become a successful barrister, the house growing to two, then three storeys, and he didn’t see the arrival of the film star Shalaila Mehndi, or the marriage of his other sons and the birth of their children, or the arrival of me from an unknown woman’s arms. That was all Mehrunessa, growing severe in her old age, as if there was work yet to be done, children yet to raise, boys yet to be turned into men. All her life she had brought my grandfather his morning tray and placed it on the table by his bedside so that the smell of simmering tea would wake him up, and she had watered down his dal so that he could afford it at every meal, and she had made sure his shirts were ironed and his children washed and sent to school, and in every way that can be counted, she was ordinary, doing the things that wives do, resolute, undeterred, a woman made entirely of her time and age, and in this simplicity, she was her own life’s magician.
These are the kinds of wives that pre-dated me, Elijah. Invisible, magic-wielding, food-stretching, loyal to the last breath. This is the world you crashed into, not a world with people who behaved exactly as they should – of course they didn’t – but who always exceeded what was expected of them, no matter how small their mandates.
We turned onto the highway and I kept glancing over at you to see if I could discern your mood, whether you were angry, or disappointed, wondering if maybe some part of you had thought I hadn’t gotten married after all, but I knew now that you hadn’t moved on as I’d imagined, that I had betrayed you, and despite all that, here you were, your voice marked by the wound I had inflicted.
I had booked you into a small guest-house near the beach, and I suggested we go directly there in case you wanted to freshen up, but you said you wanted to see the beach first. In the car, I was getting ready to point out the scrapyards on the highway, but by the time we had wound our way out of the city, you had fallen asleep, your head tucked against the bend of your arm, your mouth slightly open.
When we arrived an hour later, I gave you a small nudge. ‘You missed the build-up,’ I said. The car passed through the Prosperity gates, and Grace appeared in her eerily pristine form, all three thousand feet of her, white and regal.
I was nervous as you stepped out of the car, as if I had to prove it was worth your coming all this way. You shielded your eyes against the glare of the sun, taking in the ships in the adjacent lots, some already in their last weeks of cutting, and the workers, scattered and small.
‘This is it,’ I said. Together, we looked at Grace. A few men were on deck, lowering what appeared to be a bathtub to the crew waiting below. The bathtub, fastened with rope, knocked against Grace’s hull as it came down. We watched it hit the sand. The men pulled the ropes away, and then two of them turned it upside down like a canoe and marched it up the beach. They passed us, and I recognised Russel, and called out to him, but he didn’t hear me. In the distance, another large object crested Grace’s deck.
You put your hands behind your head and gazed up at the sky. ‘I don’t know what to say. This place needs a new language.’
‘Deconstruction won’t do?’ I joked. But I was relieved, because you could see it too, the scale of what was happening.
‘No,’ you said. ‘Even Derrida would struggle.’
The tide started coming in and before long the water lapped at our sandals. We agreed we should return later, but you didn’t move for a long time, your eyes going from Grace to me and back again. Then, after a few minutes, we turned together and headed up the beach. ‘My mother said to tell you hello,’ you said.
‘How is your family?’
‘They’re fine. We haven’t seen a lot of each other lately. That’s the thing about big families, no one ever assumes you need company.’
‘When you’re an only child everyone figures you’re lonely, but they can’t do anything about it. No one can be your sister or your brother.’
You told me you had never thought about it that way. You said your brothers were close, that you saw them often, but that you were the only one who had ever wanted to leave the country.
This surprised me. ‘You don’t all share the same restless spirit?’ I asked.
‘They travel,’ you said. ‘But they don’t wish they were somewhere else.’
I had always, I told you, had my adoption to blame on my sense of not belonging. Every time I wanted to do something weird, or if I liked something that my parents didn’t – chocolate, f
or example, Ammoo hated chocolate – I told myself, my mother would have liked chocolate. Not that she probably ever tasted chocolate.
You told me that biology wasn’t everything, but that it must be hard, not knowing. And I told you I’d never really thought about it till I met you.
It was lunchtime and I invited you to the apartment for something to eat. It was the first time we were alone, and you were careful not to touch me and I was careful not to touch you. I made elaborate moves so that we weren’t in too close proximity to each other. At the dining table I made sure we were across and not beside each other, in case our hands accidentally reached for the same thing and the back of my palm, or a finger, overlapped with the back of your palm or your finger. And yet I thought all the time about what it would be like to hold your hand, to feel the bristles of your cheek against my face. The terror I had felt upon first seeing you at the airport had softened somewhat, but I could still feel it churning away inside me. The more I wanted you the further away I stayed. It wasn’t like before, in Cambridge – I was married now, and there were other people to consider – but I wasn’t guilty. I can’t really explain why, but nothing about it felt wrong, or like I was doing violence to someone else, or that I was breaking a promise I had made. And, anyway, I hadn’t done anything, not yet.
