The Bones of Grace (28 page)

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, for 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.

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.