by Tahmima Anam
We talked endlessly about the strangeness of the place, its ugliness and beauty, how the effluent had turned the sand dark grey, and I told you about the sound of chanting, like a keening, as the men carried the heavy sheets of steel on their shoulders, and the insults they would hurl at each other in order to make it from the carcass of a ship to the rolling machine without giving up and letting the metal crash to the ground.
As the sun set and the light in the apartment turned yellow, then orange, it became easier to be in your presence, and I felt myself relaxing, laughing with you as you narrated a story about your recent attempt to learn the ukulele. Mo arrived to make our dinner, and the two of you played a card game that went late into the night. I had feared Gabriela might resent your presence, but she took to you immediately, and it was as if you had always been there, as if you had nowhere else to be but with me in that shabby apartment by the sea. After Gabriela and Mo had gone to bed, you pulled the blue blouse out of your bag. ‘I meant to give this to you earlier,’ you said. There was a silk flower on the neckline, and a panel of lighter coloured fabric along the hem. I thanked you, believing it was the most intimate thing anyone had ever given me. I recalled the suitcase full of saris that had arrived from Rashid’s house on the morning of our wedding, the matching shoes and handbags, the six sets of jewellery, each in its own velvet case. It was disloyal of me to compare that experience with this one, but I couldn’t help myself, trying and failing to stop from imagining what it would have been like with you, wedding and gifts and moving in together and sharing a home, copies of Anna Karenina united on a bookshelf.
‘Oh, and the maple syrup,’ you said. ‘Tomorrow I’ll make pancakes.’
It was almost already tomorrow. I could smell the heat of the day approaching. You leaned back on the floor cushions and tucked your feet under you. It was too late now for the guest-house so I suggested you get a few hours’ sleep. I fetched a blanket and draped it over your legs. Your eyes were heavy and you murmured something about how glad you were that you had come, and before I pulled myself towards you, never again to be free, I retreated to my bedroom and tried to sleep.
We spent the next few days waiting for Ali to give us permission to go aboard Grace. The days seemed longer and shorter with you in them; I felt myself doing everything in a hurry and also with a sense of ease, eating meals with you and listening to music on my tiny wireless speaker and watching you make line drawings of Grace. We took long walks along the shore, your skin darkening quickly as we made our way past the half-broken ships in the adjacent lots. Mo followed you around everywhere with an expression of glee on his face, as if he had been reunited with a long-lost friend.
You liked to run in the early mornings, and that was how you met a few of the workers. You became known as ‘Bharmon’, after one of them asked you to tell him what was written on your T-shirt, and not able to pronounce the ‘V’ of ‘Vermont’, he spread the word that this was your name, Bharmon. ‘Bharmon is from America.’ ‘Bharmon can play the instrument in the belly of the ship.’ ‘Bharmon runs all the way across the beach to Patenga.’ Now, when I walked down to the shipyard with you, they gathered around, unafraid of Ali. I don’t know what you talked about, or even how you communicated, but in your mutual hand gestures there was laughter and camaraderie.
They told you stories about the ship that I hadn’t known, for instance, that there had been an ice-skating rink, that three thousand people sat down to dinner every evening and hence there were freezers as big as trucks and pots as big as bathtubs, and that it had all been sold and the only thing remaining was the piano. Nobody wanted it.
Ali telephoned one day to say that one of the buyers was coming to inspect the ship, and they were going to rig a special lift for him, a system of pulleys that would be handled by men from on top and below. We could see the piano, then join Ali and the buyer for lunch. When we arrived at the beach, Ali introduced his guest. ‘Please meet Mr Sakhawat Sakhawat,’ he said with a small bow.
Sakhawat Sakhawat flashed the gold rings on his fingers and shook hands with you. We crowded onto the flat platform and were lifted up along Grace’s hull, the curve of the beach retreating from view, the brackish blue of the Indian Ocean deepening the higher we rose. I noticed little of the scene, however, because your hand was on my elbow and I was aroused by the graze of your knuckle against my rib.
When we reached the top, I held you back and allowed Ali to lead Sakhawat to the staterooms on the top floor. Mo was waiting for us on the promenade deck. He had three kerosene lamps lined up against the railing. I let him lead the way, knowing he would get a thrill from revealing the piano to you. It had been his discovery, after all.
As we made our way across the ship, I noticed a few things missing. All along the deck, the doors had small round gaps in them where the doorknobs used to be. Ali had told me that Harrison Master had asked for a few things from the ship for himself, for a guest-house he needed to furnish on short notice. Perhaps the doorknobs were on that list, or perhaps they were in a hotel in Dhaka somewhere. Grace was already being scattered across the country.
We reached the auditorium and Mo disappeared inside. You held the door open for me and we entered together. There was the navy darkness, and the particular scent of wood and velvet. We held up our lamps. ‘It’s behind the curtain,’ I whispered, but you and Mo were already making your way to the stage. I decided to remain in the audience, choosing a seat in the front row and setting my lamp on the floor. Then I closed my eyes and waited, nervous now in the compressed hush of that big and silent room, and it came, the scrape of the piano stool as you sat down, and the first note, like a question mark.
I realised I had never heard you play, not seriously, and I was glad to be listening without seeing you. When the music began, I knew I had heard the song before, but I could not remember now what it was called. You played softly, the sound muffled by the curtain, and occasionally I heard you stop to press down on one of the notes a few times, testing the sound. I thought I heard you humming along with the song, but I couldn’t be sure.
You played a scale, and then another song. I might have fallen asleep, not because I was tired, but because it was hypnotic and slightly surreal, sitting in the auditorium of a beached ocean liner listening to the sound of a resurrected piano played by the hands of a man who appeared as if from another world. Then you began to sing. Your voice was soft, cloaked in the dark and muffled by the curtain.
All of me
Why not take all of me
Can’t you see
I’m no good without you
It was so quiet I could almost hear the breath that accompanied each word of the song. I matched my breath with your breath, my head light and without a thought.
You took the best
So why not take the rest
Eventually the sound of the notes faded away. I heard the whine of the lid’s hinge, heard the scrape of the stool as you pushed away, heard the curtain part, heard your muffled footsteps coming towards me. You weren’t with Mo and you weren’t holding your lamp. When you sat down beside me, I thought you might say something about the piano, but instead you whispered a story to me about your childhood, something about those two years on the farm, about a rosemary bush your mother had planted outside the kitchen window when you had first moved to that remote part of the country. Sometimes when it rained you leaned out of the window and caught a whiff of that rosemary bush. The house was at the edge of a steep hill, the land falling away from it on three sides, the view of trees and the mountains beyond clear for miles. Then you said, ‘When I started playing that piano, it was like the rosemary bush outside our kitchen window. As far as I can tell, everything about home, everything I can remember, comes from that smell, everything human and amazing and old. I’m so glad I came, Zubaida. Thank you for bringing me. Thank you for showing me this.’
I swallowed away the lump rising in my throat and closed my hand around your hand. I was reminded again of your strang
eness, and also of the way you were both more sure of yourself than anyone I had ever known and yet also unmoored, as if you had never managed to find something to attach yourself to. You moved your hand and you were touching my elbow, and then my back. I shifted closer to you, wanting to tell you that, however glad you might be that you had come, you couldn’t possibly be as glad as I was, because, holding your hand now, I was obliterated by feeling.
I wanted to stay in that room forever, the weight and warmth of your hand on my arm. But a moment later I was suddenly claustrophobic, realising we were trapped in a tight, airless bubble, and so I stood up abruptly and led you out and up the stairs, not quite sure where I was heading, following the air and the light until we were back on the promenade deck.
By the time we emerged, the afternoon was in full force, the sun descending brutally, the workers below huddled in the shadow of the ship, seeking a patch of grey among the bright, bright white. You unbuttoned your shirt and your skin shone between the open panels of fabric. I gestured to the men that they should work the pulleys and we floated down as if from a stage, the real world below us in all its ugliness and sorrow.
Something had happened, something I couldn’t name. We walked back up the beach without saying a word. I remembered we were invited to have lunch with Mr Ali. I said maybe I should try and get us out of it.
‘We should probably oblige him,’ you said. But I saw the pulse leaping at your throat.
Ali had laid out a table on the second floor of the Shipsafe office. There were a number of meat and fish dishes, each one topped with a slick puddle of oil. Sakhawat was already seated with a full serving in front of him. Ali piled rice onto our plates and we helped ourselves to the curry. There were no utensils and I saw you making tiny pyramids of rice and placing them carefully into your mouth.
‘Mr Ali, what will happen to the piano?’ you asked.
‘It wasn’t possible to sell it.’ Ali said. ‘No one wanted such a big thing.’
‘What will you do?’ I wondered aloud.
Sakhawat licked the grease from his knuckle. ‘We could give it to one of the shops, see if they can sell it. But it would be very costly to get it out of the ship. There is a chance of damage.’
‘It’s a very precious instrument,’ you said.
Ali motioned for one of his men to clear the plates away. ‘We will do our best,’ he said. The man returned a few moments later with a bowl of water and a bar of soap and we all washed our hands.
‘There was a storm once,’ Sakhawat said, ‘out of season. And the water came in so high it flooded all the ships. There was a whale trapped in one of Haroon’s ships, you remember that, Ali?’
‘A whale?’ I said.
‘It was the cyclone in ’91, a long time ago,’ Ali said. ‘A lot of people died. Strange things washed up on shore. One of the neighbouring shipyards had just bought a cruiser, like Grace, and the thing was trapped in the swimming pool.’
‘What happened to it?’
‘Nothing we could do,’ Ali said. ‘It died a few days later.’
‘People came from all over to see it. It was thrashing around, skin all dried up. Making horrible noises.’ Sakhawat made a gesture with his hands to illustrate the whale’s suffering, pinching his thumb and forefinger together.
I wished Sakhawat and Ali had not told me this story. Sakhawat replaced the gold rings on his stubby fingers and leaned back on the chair with a soft belch. The stranded animal was probably something smaller than a whale, maybe an Irrawaddy dolphin from upstream, or perhaps it was a short-finned Pilot whale. I tried not to imagine the end of its life, the people staring down as it struggled in the shallow water, its blowhole wheezing and squeezing shut. I glanced over at you and found that you were swallowing this story and that it was changing your relationship to this place, making it more terrible, and yet somehow enchanted, a place where people tore ships apart and whales died in swimming pools and tides threw up the trash of the entire world.
That night, you accompanied me to the dormitory for my next set of interviews. The men were happy to see you, shaking your hand and offering you a share of the cigarette they were passing around. You let them light it for you and you took a drag and then you sat among them on their bunks instead of beside Gabriela and me. We set up our equipment and the light from Gabriela’s camera illuminated the room.
‘It’s my turn,’ Mo said.
I was surprised. Mo had avoided all of my questions, and Gabriela’s, about his childhood, only informing us that his parents were dead and that he had grown up on the beach. ‘Tell us,’ I said. ‘Start with where you were born.’
‘Story is not about me.’
‘It’s about his girlfriend!’ Belal said, snapping his fingers.
‘You have a girlfriend?’ I asked. I looked over at you and you kept your gaze steady on Mo. Mo didn’t answer yes or no to the question about his girlfriend, he just said, ‘Her name is Shona. She lives with a man.’
‘What kind of man?’
‘A bad man.’
‘Can you tell us more?’
‘Madam sold her. Now she has to live with the man. He beats her, I saw the cut on her face.’ He drew a finger across his cheek.
‘He’s lying,’ Belal said.
‘He’s always making up stories,’ another of the crew said.
Mo shook his head. ‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘I want to kill him.’ He stood up, made a stabbing gesture. He stood over Belal and pulled at the loose collar of his singlet. ‘I want him to be dead.’ We watched as he made his way from one of the men to the next. ‘Like this!’ he said, his hand wrapped around an imaginary knife, going up, going down.
Once, when I had asked Ali how Mo had come to live on the beach, he said simply that there were worse fates for a boy, and I assumed that meant Ali considered himself to have rescued Mo from somewhere else.
‘Sit down, Mo,’ I said. ‘Tell us about your friend.’
‘Her mother died and left her with the madam.’
‘Did you know your mother?’ I asked.
He stopped, his hand in mid-air. ‘My mother was a whore.’
‘Don’t insult your mother,’ someone said.
‘No one believes anything that comes out of your mouth,’ another one said. ‘Remember that time he claimed his father was an English captain? What, no English ever came to claim him.’
A murmur travelled around the room. Mo stood in the middle of the circle, his hand still clenching the imaginary knife. ‘I never lie,’ he said, raising the pitch of his voice. ‘I never lie!’
At that moment, you stood up, walked over to Mo, picked him up, and carried him out of the room. Gabriela emerged from behind her camera. She wiped her face. ‘I can’t take it any more,’ she said, pulling the camera off the stand. ‘This place is hell.’
I tried to start up the conversation again, but no one wanted to talk, and after a few minutes I shut off my tape recorder and followed you out to the beach. You and Mo were sitting on a small raised sandbank and staring out at Grace, not saying anything. Gabriela and I joined you. The sand was cool and packed tight beneath us. We watched the sparks from the night crew’s blowtorches, listened to the waves breaking and retreating. Finally, I suggested we go home. It was late. You stood up, brushing the sand from your trousers, but Mo seemed reluctant to move. ‘We’ll join you later,’ Gabriela said, taking Mo’s hand, and so we left them together and made our way to the apartment.
When we got home you disappeared into the bathroom. By the time you emerged, I had heated some rice and dal on the stove and brought everything to the table. Your cheeks and your chin were pale and shining. ‘You shaved,’ I said. ‘Why?’
You held both of my hands and directed me to the sofa. ‘Come, sit with me,’ you said. Your face appeared naked before me. I could see everything when you swallowed, the motion of your jaw and your neck and your Adam’s apple. I was amazed by your mouth, which was beautifully pink. You leaned towards me and I closed my e
yes, waiting for the touch of your lips, anticipating the heat of your breath floating over my face, but you didn’t kiss me, you just pressed the side of your face against the side of my face. The smell of soap was overpowering. I opened my eyes and saw over your shoulder to the rough metal bars on the windows, the frayed paint on the shutters, the rusted latches. Now your chin was resting on my shoulder, and my chin was resting on your shoulder. Your hair was soft against my mouth. I opened my mouth and took a strand between my teeth. My mouth filled with saliva. ‘Elijah,’ I said. ‘I’m in love with you.’
Later, after I drove you from the beach, after everything had ended so terribly between us, I thought back to that night and remembered everything about the way you held me, and kissed me, and fluted your breath across my fingers, that you traced the line of my jaw with your hand, that your hair swung down onto my skin and touched me before your mouth touched me. I remembered the words we said to each other. Telling you there was nothing in the world except that I loved you. I remembered laughing. I remembered the weight of your palms on my palms. I didn’t remember speaking. I didn’t remember being sad. I remembered crying. When you cried, I licked the salt from your chin. I remembered the edge of your thumbnail, inadequately trimmed, scraping a tender patch on the inside of my thigh. I remembered the inside of my thigh. Hello, inside of my thigh. Hello, Zubaida, Putul, Abbasid princess, orphan, provenance unknown. Hello Mrs Rashid, meet the inside of your thigh, meet your mate, this man, only this man, your only mate in the world, your only relation, because you know no one whose blood matches your blood, well, here is a man whose presence obliterates the need for blood, because you are made of the same things, you are nothing and everything alike, because your taste in his mouth is all the closeness you will ever need, the bed is hard beneath your bodies, the bed of a person who has never left this country, the smell of this country is the smell of the sun on the paddy, were your parents farmers or beggars and were there children after you, sons, maybe, that they kept? You don’t know and you don’t care. You want to find your parents. You want to say sorry to your parents. You want to say sorry to yourself, and to this man, because you loved him from the first moment that you met, but you turned away from this certainty and sank your hopes into history, and now there is nothing except holding him, and kissing him, and fluting your breath across his fingers.
