The Bones of Grace. Tahmima Anam
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my plane took off I looked up a list of jazz standards. ‘Love Me or Leave Me’. ‘Darn that Dream’. ‘Jonah and the Whale’. ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye’. ‘I Wish I Could Know What It Means to be Free’.
Professor Smith was leaning on a bolster, talking to a man in a beard and cap. ‘It’s a damn shame about Baluchitherium,’ the professor was saying. ‘It could have changed everything.’ Changed everything is the holy grail for people like us. We look for the bones that will rewrite everything we have known about our history. We look for the ear of Pakicetus, the ankle of Ambulocetus, the spine of Rhodocetus. I knew what he meant – Baluchitherium may have yielded such bones, but it was never fully examined.
Everyone in the small world of cetacean palaeontology knew that Professor Bartholomew Smith had spent his entire career in this part of the world. That he spoke the regional dialect and dressed in the manner of the local tribesmen, in long cotton tunics and embroidered vests. Now I was seeing this something of a legend man in the flesh and finding him weathered and small, his body as if recently unpacked from within a very small space. He had a betel habit that had turned his mouth a lurid colour of red.
He saluted me with a hearty ‘As-salaam alaikum!’ I was cheered by the warmth in his voice and I liked him immediately, his manner open and slightly clownish. He insisted I call him Bart and he poured me a cup of creamy tea, which I accepted (in case you’re wondering, I pissed like the proverbial racehorse the moment I got to camp).
‘This is Zamzam,’ Bart said, introducing the other man. With narrow shoulders and a timid face, Zamzam appeared out of place, though he must have thought the same about me. I had removed my veil and the dust was making my eyes tear, and I had already developed something of a tic, rubbing the back of my neck to get rid of the grit that had started accumulating there. I sniffed, blew my nose into a crumpled tissue, and exchanged polite hellos with Zamzam. On the bare ground was a pot of curry and a platter of stone bread. I was offered a plate and helped myself. The bread lived up to its name and was very hard, but the curry was delicious, sweetened by dried prunes.
Bart went on about Baluchitherium. My eyes stopped streaming and I tried to remember everything I knew about it – I recalled it was discovered in Dera Bugti by an Englishman at the start of the twentieth century and was thought to be one of the largest mammals ever, a rhinoceros-like behemoth who roamed the earth 30 million years ago. Young, then, compared to Ambulocetus.
‘A group of French archaeologists dug it out of the ground in ’99, and it was decided the skeleton would be moved to Karachi for examination. In the meantime, they stored it in the home of the tribal chieftain of the time, you know, Akbar Bugti. When the army raided Bugti’s home, they blew up his compound, killed him, and everyone thought they’d wiped Baluchitherium off the face of the earth,’ Bart said.
I didn’t know the end of the story. ‘What happened?’
‘Bugti had all the bones stored in metal containers, the bastard!’ Bart slapped his hand against Zamzam’s back. ‘That’s why we’ve got to get Ambulocetus out of the ground and put it somewhere safe.’
Ambulocetus tells about the moment, somewhere around 50 million years ago, when whales began to swim. The earliest ancestor of the modern whale, Pakicetus, was discovered several hundred miles north of here, in Punjab. Pakicetus drank fresh water, had a marine-mammal ear and swam in the shallows. The last time this area had been excavated, Gingerich had found Artiocetus clavis and Rhodocetus balochistanensis, the two specimens that had proven that whales evolved from Artiodactyla, split-hoofed, plant-eating mammals such as cows and hippos. And Thewissen had found many specimens of Ambulocetus in 1992, but no one had been able to bring a full skeleton back from the field.
‘Gingerich was here in 2000, but they shut him down when the war in Afghanistan started,’ Bart said, removing a folder from his backpack.
I had been meaning to ask Bart about this. For over a decade no one had been allowed anywhere near here. ‘How did you get permission?’
He pulled out a sheet of paper from the folder and wielded it with a flourish. ‘Aha, here it is.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Imagine, if you will, Ambulocetus, the sun on her back, the edge of the water lapping at her thick skin, the temptation to plunge within too great, the secrets of the ocean beckoning.’ I cringed at hearing my words read back to me, checking to see if Jimmy and Zamzam were laughing or, worse, staring down at the fat coagulating on their plates, embarrassed for me. Bart went on, in the manner of a hazing ritual: ‘Her secrets lie within her bones: her hips, her protected inner ear that allows her to hear underwater, the length of her femur. These are the clues that will tell us who she is, so long a mystery beyond the reach of science.’
My face burned. ‘Seriously, though. I thought this area was strictly off limits.’
Bart flung my application back into the folder. Then he pulled a tin box out of his pocket and selected a heart-shaped sheet of betel. ‘You know countries like this,’ he said, folding the betel leaf into a triangular packet and popping it into his mouth. ‘You gotta find ways to get around.’
‘Bart’s been working on it 24/7,’ Jimmy said.
The professor pulled at his scalp. ‘Got the greys to prove it.’ He chewed in silence for a minute, then said, ‘You have to keep everything in balance.’
I waited to see if he would explain. ‘You describe Ambulocetus beautifully,’ Zamzam said to me.
My eyes started tearing again and I rubbed them roughly, wishing I’d never taken liberties with the whale’s story. ‘My parents didn’t want me to come,’ I said, my voice unnecessarily loud. ‘They said it was too dangerous.’
‘Danger is relative,’ Jimmy said.
‘No one wants their kid to grow up and hunt fossils,’ Bart said.
‘Your parents have nothing to worry about,’ Zamzam said. ‘I can assure you.’
‘Anyway,’ Bart said, ‘we have our secret weapon.’ He fanned out his fingers behind his head and gave me a broad smile, displaying his betel-stained teeth. Then he closed his eyes and appeared to dismiss us. I didn’t ask him again how he’d received all the right permits and approvals, how he’d gotten the blessing of the local tribesmen, and he wouldn’t have told me anyway, that he had made a set of agreements that were held in place through a careful balance of bets and payments. He would have considered it an acceptable procedure; after all, according to him, in countries like these, some transfer of human life would be unsurprising, a kind of ransom to which we would all be subject, and lines had to be crossed to get at the treasure beneath our feet.
Jimmy showed me around the rest of camp. The tents were arranged in a semicircle around a central area that served as an open kitchen. Bart and I were each given our own tent, and Jimmy and Zamzam were sharing. There was a cook, a driver, a pair of guards, and a few local men who had been recruited to help us to break through the dense red shale. When our predecessors had mined this area, the bones they had found were encased in layers of red-bed sequence that were as hard as cement. If we wanted to get a complete specimen out of the ground, we would have to first quarry the area with our tools and then blast through the rock with explosives. Zamzam was in charge of the dynamite, which he kept buried in a tin trunk on the southern edge of the site.
Later, after I’d eaten another round of curry and stone bread, I ran into Zamzam outside the makeshift toilet. He was holding an empty can of water. The evening was cool and quiet. I had taken an antihistamine and I was feeling slightly better.
‘Have you seen Stupendemys geographicus?’ he asked.
I felt myself light up. ‘Just a few days ago. You know it?’
‘Only photographs. How fortunate you are to have seen it for yourself.’
He was right, I was lucky: I had walked the hallways of Wilson and Gould, seen Kronosaurus and Stupendemys and