The Bones of Grace (37 page)

‘My baby-babu misses his bride,' Dolly said.

‘A few weeks.' Under the table, I reached for his hand.

‘Can't someone else do it?' Dolly said. ‘It's so sad when newlyweds have to be apart.'

‘Why don't we all go down for a weekend?' Bulbul said. ‘We haven't been to the house in months.'

‘It's going to rain the whole time. You'll catch a cold. Rubana is really being unreasonable,' Dolly said.

‘I've missed the Chittagong golf course,' Bulbul said. ‘If we go down I can play a few rounds.'

Dolly plunged her spoon into the ice-cream tub. ‘That's it. You'll drag me all the way down there and disappear for the whole day.'

‘Weather is nice this time of year.'

‘No, it's not. And Sigma and Pultu will be disappointed if we don't invite them for lunch.'

‘Of course,' Bulbul said, leaning back in his chair. ‘But Pultu can play a round with me and we can have lunch at the club.'

Dolly and Bulbul went back and forth a few times about whether they should fly or drive down to Chittagong, where they should have lunch, and Rashid excused himself, and we all dispersed before the tea trolley arrived. ‘You really have to go?' he asked as soon as we had closed the bedroom door
behind us. He pulled his phone out of his pocket, unrolled his shirtsleeves and threw himself down on the armchair.

Rashid had decided not to think about the depth of my entanglement with you, but simply about the fact that I had strayed, because it would then remain a problem to be solved. That had always been his way. And I knew that his main strategy was keeping me close, watching over me and treating me with great care, as if I had developed a hairline crack all across my body that would slowly heal, but only if my two halves remained pressed together for a long time.

‘You can come to Chittagong and visit, like your mother said.'

‘I wish you would call her Ammoo,' he said, bringing up a conversation we'd had months ago, about what we would call each other's parents once we were married. Rashid had slipped easily into calling my parents ‘Ammoo and Abboo' after a lifetime of ‘Maya auntie and Joy uncle', but I had been unable to make the transition.

I was in no mood to argue. ‘Like Ammoo said.'

He stood up, removed his watch, placed it carefully back in its case, and started to undress. ‘I need to get out of here,' I said. ‘I feel like someone cut my anchor.'

He looked at me and I saw myself through his eyes, clouded and unreadable. ‘I don't understand. You have everything in life. Everything.'

I wanted to tell him about the day before, about what my parents had told me, that I was giving up the search – I knew this would appease him – but instead I unbuttoned his shirt and let it fall to the ground, slipping my arms around him and stroking the ribbed cotton of his singlet. I raised my face to kiss him and he lowered his mouth towards me, but he stopped as our lips briefly touched, pushing my elbows away. ‘I can't,' he said. I nodded, stepping
away, feeling rejected despite everything. He picked up his shirt from the floor and darted into the bathroom, and I cried while he brushed his teeth. When he came back he lay down on the bed and fell asleep quickly, letting me curl around his tense, bowed back.

Return to
Grace

Abul Hussain came to collect me the next morning, but at the airport, there were no flights to Chittagong. ‘Sorry, ma'am, due to bad weather all flights are indefinitely postponed,' the girl behind the counter said, wearing a surprisingly tight red-and-grey suit.

‘When is the next flight?'

‘Scheduled for tomorrow morning, ma'am, but that also may not depart.'

I thought about going home, but now that I had set my mind on returning to Sithakunda, I couldn't turn back. I ducked into the car. ‘Abul Hussain, can you drive us to Chittagong?' It was a five-or six-hour drive; Dolly and Bulbul had done it regularly in their jeep before the domestic terminal was refurbished.

Abul Hussain glanced at me in the rearview mirror. ‘We would have to tell sir.'

‘Baba won't mind, I'll call him now.'

‘There isn't enough petrol.'

I rifled through my bag, failing to find any money. ‘Stop at a bank, I'll get some cash.'

We drove through the city again, going south from Mohakhali to Mohammadpur. Abul Hussain parked in front
of a shopping mall, where a uniformed guard opened the door to a tiny air-conditioned cubicle that housed an ATM machine. I had always found it strange that in America the cash machines were exposed, as if there was nothing remarkable about being able to take money out of a cavity in the wall. At the shop next door, I bought a packet of Uncle Chipps and a few bottles of water. Then I remembered I hadn't really eaten anything since the night before, which felt like a lifetime ago now, so I hunted through the mall for a restaurant, finally settling on a place that sold fried chicken. I bought a box for myself and one for Abul Hussain.

In the car, I sent a text message to Abboo.
Ok if Abul Hussain drives me to Chittagong? Urgent business
. Then I gave Abul Hussain a hefty tip and passed him the fried chicken. ‘You can stay the night and drive back tomorrow.'

He selected a piece of chicken from the carton, taking a bite and then placing it on his knee, where it remained as he negotiated the traffic. In Mohammadpur he picked it up again and took another bite, leaving an oily stain on the leg of his trouser. I offered him a napkin, guilty for making him drive all the way.

After Mohammadpur the traffic cleared and the dense tangle of the city gave way to low-slung buildings and carts piled high with vegetables, and then, acres and acres of brickyards, everything red, dotted with tall, narrow furnaces that churned smoke into the sky. Eventually, the view turned to farmland, chequerboard patches of land planted with rice as far as the eye could see, everything flat and green to the horizon. I closed my eyes, willing sleep to come and cut out the hours until I arrived at the beach, to Mo and Gabriela and
Grace
.

My phone rang, but I ignored it, knowing it would be my parents or Rashid. I recalled now that Ammoo had
slapped me once, when I was eleven, for stealing her make-up bag and wearing lipstick to school. The principal had telephoned, and after a wordless ride home Ammoo had hit me softly across the cheek with a bewildered look, as though her arm had acted of its own accord. When I finally locked myself in my room and Ammoo had called out repeatedly. When I finally opened the door I found her curled up on the sofa. She hadn't seemed sorry as much as surprised. The phone kept ringing. Eventually I decided to answer. It was Abboo.

‘Your mother is very upset. Dolly also called a few times. And there's a storm coming.'

‘I know, that's why I'm driving.'

‘They're saying it's going to be bad.'

‘Please, let me go. I know you did what you thought was best. But I can't rest. I can't work, I can't do anything. I can't be at peace.'

‘You were just a baby, a few weeks. A tiny thing in my hands. The most beautiful thing I had ever seen.'

I hung up so he wouldn't hear me cry. Last night, when I couldn't sleep, I had written an email to Rashid. It was full of regret for all the things I had allowed myself to do, that there was no excuse for the way I had behaved, but that, perhaps, if he tried very hard, he would see that there would have been no way for us to go ahead if I hadn't at least made an attempt to piece together my past. I had gone over it again and again, but I had been unsure how to finish the message, whether I could tell him now that it was all over and we could begin again, but as a pale baby bird of a sun crested the horizon, I had decided not to send it.

I closed my eyes for a moment, and when I opened them the wipers were on and I could hear the sound of water above and below, rain on the car's roof and on the road. I
checked the time and it was only noon, but the rain clouds had smothered the light. We drove on, slowed by the darkness and the dense sheets of water. Abul Hussain switched on his headlights and bent over the wheel, holding on with both hands.

I called the Shipsafe office but no one answered. I asked Abul Hussain to turn on the radio, and the reception drifted in and out. I rifled through the magazines my father had left in the car and found a recent copy of
Outlook India
. There was news about Bollywood, a corruption scandal in the Indian Army, a recipe for Urad Dal. For a stretch of the highway, the sky cleared momentarily and the rain thinned, and I could make out the trees on either side of the road, the landscape changing from flat to gently rolling. Abul Hussain pointed to a sign. ‘Apa, can we stop for tea?'

He parked in front of a squat concrete building. I waited in the car while he ordered tea from a young boy sitting in front of a large kettle on a propane stove. When the tea was ready he passed me a small clay cup through the window. After a few minutes the sky thickened and it began to rain in earnest, and after Abul Hussain retrieved my cup, we set off again, seeing very little in front of us except the road ahead and the grey outlines of the hills in the distance.

The shops along the highway to Sithakunda were all closed. The car stalled, water sloshing around the tyres. Abul Hussain switched off the engine, then revved it again, propelling us forward, and we covered the last few miles at a crawl, the sound of the wipers beating back and forth. An hour or so later we reached the Shipsafe office.

The front door was locked. I borrowed a key from the caretaker, who informed me that everyone had gone home early because of the storm. I concentrated very hard on remaining downstairs instead of rushing up to the apartment
and crawling on my hands and knees in search of a last fragment of you. Even down here at the office, I felt your presence, your footsteps burdening the air above me.

I switched on the overhead light. There was my desk, the glass chipped and taped together, the ancient computer, the corkboard with edge-curled newspaper clippings, Bilal's battered armchair with the striped towel draped across the back, the smell of tea and biscuits. I had only been away a few months, but I realised I had left long before that, that the moment you arrived I hadn't cared much for any of it. I remembered the feeling of being around you, which is that you swallowed all the air in the room, though perhaps it wasn't you at all, but the strength of my feeling for you. In any case, I had been a poor volunteer; I had not done well by the pulling crew. And Mo I had let down altogether.

I glanced over the transcripts of the interviews. Without sentiment, I began to read. The words were flat on the page, one sad story following another, each starting with its same moment of fracture – an illness, a bad crop, the death of a father – and the long journey south, the bag of things they carried, the tiny pocket of hope, and then arriving at the shipyard and finding the acres of steel and rust, and Mr Ali, the dormitory, the long dark nights, carrying iron on their shoulders to the sound of chanting. I felt nothing, no sorrow, no jolt of recognition as the words I had heard and recorded appeared in black and white.

Then I came to the story of Shahed, a young man we had interviewed together. I remembered the way you held his gaze because he had refused to look at me. He had been sent here only a few months before, and was living not at the dormitory but in a room he shared with a few other strays. Ali had taken him on as an apprentice, and he had yet to be paid. He ate, he said, by begging on the highway
at night, and during the day, when the others saved him a few mouthfuls of rice. He had a cut on his arm that looked raw, which we only discovered when you put your hand out to touch him and he flinched, the thin fabric of his shirt sliding from his shoulder. You dressed the wound yourself, telling me later your father had taught you first aid in the days when you'd lived in the house in the mountains and there wasn't a doctor around for miles. Now, reading Shahed's words, and imagining in the pauses your fingers unrolling the bandage, splashing alcohol on the wound, and all the time Shahed not flinching, not making a sound, his lips parting as you finished, wanting to kiss the hand that touched him with as close to a caress as he had known since saying goodbye to his mother in the winter, she with a touch of her palm on the top of his head, you with a careful tap of the surgical tape.

I went upstairs to the apartment to face Gabriela. I assumed she had built up a catalogue of things to say; I had left without a word to her and ignored her many phone calls and messages, and, worse, I hadn't even asked after Mo or any of the other men on the beach.

Inside, the place had been stripped of its last traces of you. Gabriela had cleaned everything up. The grey mosaic floor was spotless. All the dusty corners of the flat, the empty bookcase and the window grilles, had been washed. Even in my bedroom the blanket had been folded and the sides of the mosquito net pulled up so that it formed a flat grey canopy over the bed. As soon as she saw me Gabriela said, ‘Where the fuck have you been?' and I braced myself, but she laughed and put her arms around me. I began to explain, starting with your name, but she said, ‘First, we drink. Then you can grovel.' We repeated the ritual of my first night at the apartment, though this time the tequila
went down easily, and after two big gulps from the bottle I didn't even feel a little bit drunk.

I asked after Mo. Gabriela told me that he had continued with his duties, cooking and cleaning and looking after her. I had thought, for just a whisper of a moment, that wherever you had gone, you had perhaps taken him with you, but I knew this would be impossible. You would have wanted to leave right away, and Mo didn't have a pair of shoes, much less a passport. You would have left him behind, though you would not have abandoned him as roughly as I had. And you would not have abandoned me at all.

‘The only thing is, he seems to have run into some trouble with Ali. I'm not sure exactly what – Ali always pretends he hasn't the faintest clue what I'm saying when I try to talk to him.'

‘I've fucked everything up,' I said, the alcohol finally hitting me.

Gabriela laughed. ‘I was married once too, you know.'

I had never asked her. She had taken the studs out of her top two piercings, and her shirt was loose and fell several inches below her hips. She looked more normal now, yet somehow diminished.

‘I should have taken better care of you,' I said.

She waved her hand. ‘Don't worry, darling,' she said. ‘I could see you were preoccupied.'

‘He was – is – a childhood friend. A childhood sweetheart.' This is how I had always described Rashid. A childhood connection. ‘So romantic,' my cousins used to sigh. ‘So sweetly old-fashioned.'

‘I met Elijah at a Shostakovich concert. Out of the blue. Lightning and thunder and all that.'

Gabriela nodded. She pulled a packet of cigarettes out
of her handbag, a foreign brand in a dark blue box. ‘I didn't know you smoked,' I said.

Gabriela inhaled. ‘I never needed to before.'

‘And what about you?'

She scraped a match against a rough wooden box. ‘We were children, we didn't know what we were doing.'

‘I sort of feel like that. But that's not an excuse. I mean – for me.'

She laughed. ‘He's the director of the film. We're still close friends.'

‘What happened?'

‘I cheated, he forgave me. I was the one who finally left. Now he's married, he has three children. The terrible thing is, I'm probably still in love with him.'

Something in her face reminded me of Ammoo. Not that Ammoo herself regretted anything, but she was in constant fear that I would have regrets, that if I didn't marry Rashid, for instance, that I might carry around the expression that could be seen on Gabriela's face right now, the sense of having allowed a chance at happiness to pass me by. Ammoo wanted, more than anything, to mitigate disappointment for me. I wasn't sure what to say to Gabriela, and what would it be like for me, ten, twenty years from now? Would I pine for Rashid, for the familiar rituals of our togetherness, being able to anticipate so many of his gestures – would I miss the safety of that or, as now, would I be tired of knowing so much, would I continue to long for otherness, for the pleasures of the alien?

The door opened, and Mo entered carrying a shopping bag. His smile when he saw me was so wide, so undiminished, that I stood up and walked over to him and lifted him up in my arms. He was heavier than he looked, and smelled of sweat and iron.

‘Did you hear about the piano?' he said.

I hadn't.

‘It's going to America. Elijah is going to fix it.' The sound of your name in Mo's mouth was the first time I had heard it uttered aloud since you left, and it struck me with great force. Mo didn't know the details, but he had heard Ali saying that the American who had been visiting had somehow arranged for the Steinway to be transported to Boston, where it would be restored, and then presumably sold on. I stood frozen as the tears gathered in my eyes, my ears still humming to the sound of your name, and beyond, to the notes you had played on
Grace
.

I wanted to hug Mo again but I didn't. My arms were suddenly without feeling or energy. I asked after the others. ‘How is everyone?' I asked him.