by Tahmima Anam
‘Not exactly. But I’ve known them a long time, and they don’t take to change very well.’
‘We won’t be here long.’
‘That’s precisely the issue, madam.’ He continued to tap on the desk with the end of his pencil. It was mid-morning and work was going at full tilt on the beach. ‘After you go, things will have to return to normal. That is the way here. We have been operating for many years.’
‘I’m not sure I understand.’
He smiled again, raising his hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘Nothing to worry about, madam. All is up to the Almighty. Now I must go, I have some business to attend to.’
Ali appeared to dismiss me. I wasn’t sure what had just happened, but I guessed the conversation had sounded different to Ali’s ears than to mine. As I turned to go, he said, ‘Please give my regards to your father.’
‘You know my father?’
‘Sir is a respected man, a son of Chittagong. Of course we all know him.’
He was talking about Bulbul. ‘Yes, of course.’ And I turned to go, still confused by the exchange. Outside, a large sheet of metal was being pulled up the beach. The cutters would come soon with their tools, trimming the sheet down again so that it could be dragged to the equipment at the northern edge of the beach, where it would be rolled and flattened and eventually transported. I looked for Mo, but couldn’t find him, so I made my way to the office. As I passed the dormitory, I saw Gabriela coming out of one of the side doors. I wondered what she was doing there, but she swept past me before I could call out to her.
I allowed myself to consider for a moment what would have happened if I’d gone away with you. Hopped on a plane. Goodbye, everyone. Sending Rashid and Ammoo an email, perhaps the same one. I’m on my way to America, it would have said, with Elijah Strong. They would have considered it a joke. Called me, and then each other. Would they have been any angrier with me than they were now? I laughed to myself, because I knew now that losing you was scarier than any of it, and since I had done that and was still here, it meant I could probably do anything. I wish I had discovered that about myself before it was too late.
When I returned to the dormitory for an interview session that evening, I found Gabriela already there, passing around tea and bowls of puffed rice to the men. Mo hung back, dodging me as I entered, and none of the others stopped to say hello. I guessed I had offended them with my abrupt departure. Only Russel seemed happy to see me, asking after you. You were in America, I said. I told him about the piano, but word had already spread. ‘Can we smoke?’ Russel asked, and there was a small commotion as the biris and the matches were passed around, and after everyone had lit up, small conversations bloomed around the edges of the group. No one seemed in any particular hurry to start talking.
‘So,’ I began, ‘we are almost at the end of our interviews, but there are a few of you who have yet to tell me your story. I am sorry for the break—’
‘Will it be on TV?’ Russel interrupted.
‘Yes, in my country,’ Gabriela said.
‘In foreign,’ I translated.
‘What about Bangladesh?’ someone asked from the back.
‘We will try,’ Gabriela said.
‘We don’t know,’ I said. ‘But you don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.’
Someone raised his hand from the back of the room. ‘Apa, what about the other place? Can you take the camera there?’
‘Don’t worry,’ Gabriela said. ‘We won’t leave anyone out.’
‘We are only getting interviews from the pulling crew,’ I said. ‘The film will focus on your group.’
‘I mean the other pullers.’
‘She’s not supposed to meet the other pullers,’ Mo interjected.
‘What other pullers?’ I glanced at Mo, at Gabriela. I looked around. ‘Where’s Belal?’ Belal, who had lost his wife and his daughter.
A man stood up. I didn’t recognise him – a heavy, powerful face, square shoulders. ‘As-salaam alaikum Apa,’ he said. ‘My name is Selim.’
‘Selim has just arrived from the north,’ Gabriela said.
‘I was here last year,’ he explained. ‘My father died, so I went home for the winter.’
I was struggling to keep up. Something about the equation between us, and the workers, and Ali, had fundamentally altered in my absence. The group appeared charged up, lacking in the tired resignation that had dominated our previous conversations. I remembered what Bilal had said about not trusting Gabriela, her inability to get the workers to speak with her. And now, the warm, almost intimate way she was sitting among them, passing them mugs of tea, using Selim’s cigarette to light one of her own.
I took Gabriela aside. ‘What’s this about the others?’
‘I was going to tell you,’ she said. ‘There was an accident here last week.’
‘On Grace?’ No one had said anything to me. ‘Does Rubana know?’
‘They hushed it up. Ali’s hiding the wounded workers.’
‘That doesn’t sound right. Where would he hide them?’
‘There’s a place down the road. He paid them off, doesn’t want them in hospital.’
The sound of conversation rose around us. ‘Don’t you want to see them?’ Selim asked.
I looked around the room, lit by Gabriela’s camera and the solitary bulb that hung from the ceiling, and replayed the conversation I’d had with Ali that morning. I knew they were waiting for me to say something. I dialled Rubana’s number but there was no reply. I remembered Dera Bugti now, and being inches away from Ambulocetus, and having to put all that earth, all its history, back in its place, its secrets packed away for someone else to discover. I gestured to Mo and asked him, first of all, why he hadn’t said anything to me. Mo stared down at his feet, and I had to put my fingers under his chin and force him to look at me. ‘I didn’t want you to be hurt,’ he said, and I took this to mean that he was afraid I would get into trouble with Ali. It’s you who will be hurt, I wanted to say. And I won’t be able to protect you. Again I will betray you.
I turned to the assembled crowd. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Take me with you.’
I followed Selim and Mo a few hundred yards down the highway. We turned into the market, which was empty now, past the small mosque, then down a dirt alley. Mo gripped my elbow, helping me skirt the flooded potholes, the loose electrical wires, the small pyramids of garbage. We pushed open the tin door of a small concrete shed. The smell of blood and bleach was overpowering; my eyes adjusted to the darkness and I saw three cots laid out in a row. I saw a man without legs, another who was wrapped all around his waist and his chest, his bandages glowing in the dim caramel light. The third man, lying on his stomach, a thin layer of gauze shielding his burnt skin, was Belal. I would not have recognised him if Mo hadn’t whispered his name into my ear.
It wasn’t as if I had ignored the fact that they all had a story of death that followed them around like a shadow – a friend or a brother or someone they had only a passing acquaintance with, a man who shouldered a few inches of the weight they shared – a piece of steel crushing a skull, a chest, an errant metal rope escaping from the winch and cutting a throat. I had heard all the stories; I had read the reports and I knew the statistics, but I was unprepared for this. My stomach revolted from the smell and the soft moans coming from Belal’s bed. I hung back while Gabriela rushed to one, then another, ignoring everything I had told her about approaching people she didn’t know, tracing her fingers over their bandages, holding the hands that were still whole. She had been here every day, knew the progress of every injury, every wound. The amputated man would survive; the man whose chest was split open with the winch that had snapped and struck him would probably not. They weren’t sure what would happen to Belal.
I had spent many years thinking about bones. When I studied the fossils of Ambulocetus and Pakicetus, I told myself the souls of those ancient creatures were in their bones. I knew that the fusing of Diana’s pelvis would produce a smooth
bowl shape that would tell us how Ambulocetus had evolved into an amphibian when her ancestors had been terrestrial. But the bones I had studied, pressed down by millennia, were always partial. I would work with fragments and imagine the whole, fill in the parts that had been broken by history, and this was how it should be, because our knowledge of the past could only ever be in pieces, left there for us to put together. But now, confronted by these fragments of people, a room in which the atmosphere had been thinned by the fleeing of hope, my knowledge of bones gave me nothing, no explanation, no prescription. I could not imagine these men whole, no matter how expert I was at putting things together.
‘We have to take them to a proper hospital,’ I said. ‘They can’t stay here.’
‘They won’t go,’ Gabriela said. ‘I already tried.’
‘Ali’s paid them,’ Selim said. ‘Says he’s going to take care of their families.’
The bandaged man whispered something. Mo went to a metal drum in a corner of the room and filled up a glass of water. The man lifted himself up, struggling to reach the glass held out by Mo. I couldn’t bear the sight of him, the tendons of his neck straining towards Mo, his mouth open and dry, his arms pinned down by their bandages, and I ran out of the shed, my foot catching on the raised wooden threshold and flinging me violently into the alley outside.
Gabriela and I stayed up late talking about what we should do.
‘It seems so pointless to make a film,’ I said.
‘Exactly,’ Gabriela agreed, ‘it’s no fucking good.’
We couldn’t go to the police; Ali had already paid them off. And what would we charge them with, if the men themselves wanted to remain where they were? We discussed the possibility of alerting the press, and I left another message for Rubana.
‘My mother would know what to do,’ I said, a surge of feeling for Ammoo coursing through me. The sight of those workers, the ones Ali had gone to such trouble to hide from us, who even Mo had deemed were too dismembered to take part in the interviews, changed what I knew about this world and my place in it. It made everything else shrink – my little quest to find my origins, even the wound of your absence. Ammoo would know what it was to be overcome by the discovery of something ugly, of secrets that are just below your gaze and unnoticed by you until a terrible moment breaks it all open.
Gabriela and I sat in silence, then, for a long time, until it was almost morning. I had to leave – Rashid would arrive in a few hours. We agreed to return to the injured workers’ hut the following afternoon, with Mo, and decide together what to do about the film. I left Gabriela dozing in the brightening day, her arm thrown over her eyes, as if she wanted to go back in time and erase the sight of everything she had seen in the last months.
I went to pick Rashid up at the airport. I don’t know what I expected to feel when I saw him; I was raw from the night before, tired and full of uncertainty, and I thought maybe if I tried to reach out, tried to tell him something about what had happened, we might make a connection. He had just seen me, and we were waving to each other, and I was telling myself I was doing the right thing to let him in, when he stopped to talk to a man in a dark suit. The man put his arm around Rashid’s shoulder and they passed through the gates and came towards me.
‘Darling,’ Rashid said. ‘This is uncle Harry.’
Harry reached out and shook my hand. He was wearing gloves. ‘What a pleasure,’ he said. ‘I have heard so much.’
‘Zubaida’s been staying here. Taking in the Chittagong air.’
I smiled distractedly, wondering how long we would have to stay and make small talk. ‘Yes, I know,’ Harry said. ‘Ali has told me everything.’
I turned to Rashid. ‘Ali?’
‘Uncle Harry owns the shipyard,’ Rashid said.
Harrison Master. Uncle Harry. ‘Prosperity,’ Harry said. ‘My father loved that place. I don’t care for it much, but he made me promise we wouldn’t sell.’ He took a tube of chapstick out of his pocket and smeared it over his lips.
Here was my chance. Gabriela and I had wondered, time and again, what sort of people would own businesses like these – well here was a man standing right before me, and I could ask him anything. How do you feel, sir, about lining your pockets with the broken backs of poor farmers from the north? And was it your idea to take a group of injured men and lock them away for the sake of your business? Of course I didn’t say anything. I even managed a smile as we parted, watching Harry’s companion, a man I hadn’t seen at first, pull a comb out of his pocket and smooth Harry’s hair before they exited the airport.
In the car on the way home, I exploded at Rashid. ‘You couldn’t suck up to him any more if you were a mosquito on his leg.’
‘Oh, hell, Zee I was trying to be nice. For your sake.’
‘That man should be thrown in jail. No, shot by a firing squad.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘You have no idea what they do to these people.’ I was angrier at myself than anything else; a lifetime of living with my mother should have taught me better. Of course the stories were worse than they first appeared; of course Ali was hiding the really dark truth; of course there was something dirtier, something more frightening, underneath.
It started to rain. ‘You can’t fix everything,’ Rashid said.
‘Everything? I haven’t fixed a damn thing.’
‘If you want to feel guilty about something, there’s a lot to choose from.’
I had given him a lifetime of ammunition. He would forgive me, I knew that, but I could see now that he would be free to throw it back in my face at any time. Isn’t that what people do, accrue debts they end up paying off for the rest of their lives, waiting for something to happen that will narrow the difference between themselves and the people they destroyed? I couldn’t tell him any of it, I could see that now. We rode home in silence, beside each other in the back seat of his car, and I wondered if I was the only one who felt we were far, far away from each other, or if he, too, felt the distance stretching open between us.
Komola and Joshim greeted us gaily at the door. The rest of the family would arrive soon. ‘Go upstairs,’ Komola said, ‘dress up for your mother-in-law.’
I went upstairs and saw that Komola had laid out my clothes. A green silk sari, the matching blouse and petticoat were all ironed and on the bed. Rashid was still steaming over our argument. ‘I’m going to play golf,’ he said, changing into shorts and a polo shirt. ‘I’ll be back in time for dinner.’
I showered, trying to put aside the sight of the injured workers, but there was too much there, Mo and Gabriela and you, always you hovering at the edge of my thoughts. I lay back on the bed, my hair blotting the bedcover.
When it was time to get dressed I realised I needed help putting on my sari. Komola wasn’t in the living room or kitchen. I made my way to the back of the house to the servants’ quarters. A narrow cement staircase led to the rooms above the garage. The washing – a checked lungi and a red petticoat – hung between two metal pegs at the top of the stairs and created a barrier over the open door. I called out and waited, heard nothing in return, and was about to turn back, already feeling like an intruder, when I heard shuffling from inside. Komola came out, fiddling with the soft cotton folds of her sari.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m disturbing you.’
‘I was praying,’ Komola said.
‘How long have you lived here?’ I asked, catching a glimpse of her cluttered room, the trunks stacked up against the wall, clothes folded in an open shelf, a small round mirror nailed to the wall.
‘Since I was a girl,’ Komola said, pinning her hair with a quick motion of her wrist. ‘Before you were born.’
I was about to ask her more, about where she had come from, where her people were, but Komola was uncomfortable, closing the makeshift curtain behind her.
‘Can you help me with my sari?’
She followed me back inside and up the stairs. I changed into my blouse and petticoa
t and started on the sari, but Komola took it from me, searching for the correct side, controlling the long, liquid fabric. I thought about how she always looked at me slightly indirectly, her head tilted down or to the side, but she was bold now, folding and tucking. ‘Apa, there’s something,’ she said. ‘I heard you crying in your room. Why?’
Had I been crying? I couldn’t remember. ‘It’s nothing; don’t trouble yourself.’
She made pleats, holding the end of my sari between her teeth. ‘I knew you when you were a baby, you know.’ The words came out narrow.
I took a moment for this to sink in. It wasn’t unlikely – my parents had brought me here as a child to visit Dolly and Bulbul. Perhaps she had seen me then, peeling leaves off the banana plants. I swallowed the lump in my throat. ‘You’ve been here a long time,’ I said.
She passed the anchal behind me and over my shoulder. Then she crouched down and took hold of the pleats. I looked down at her and I could see the wide parting of her hair and the grey streaks that fanned out on either side. This was the head of a woman who had been parting her hair the same way her whole life, committing the same rituals, washing, oiling, braiding. Perhaps, as an occasional indulgence, she had once or twice bought herself a clip.
When she was finished with the hem, she took a safety pin from her own blouse and started attaching my anchal. Her touch was light, her fingers papery, their lines deep and serrated. ‘Tell me,’ I whispered, ‘did I seem all right?’ What I meant to ask was, did I seem different, as in, different from the rest of them, born fully into privilege, but I couldn’t quite get the words out.
‘You were a sweet child. Maybe a little lonely.’
She was finished. I sat down on the bed. My hands started to shake and Komola took them between hers.
‘I feel lonely now.’
‘God has blessed you.’
The breaths came so sharply out of me that I could hardly speak. ‘My mother – was she – did she love me?’
