The Bones of Grace. Tahmima Anam
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area with sand and packed everything down with shovels. We removed the cordon, the markers, the outlines we had drawn. Our movements were hurried and messy. Jimmy rolled a cigarette and we passed it back and forth. Finally, when it was too dark to see, we gave up and made our way back to camp. I tried to make a few phone calls on the satellite phone, but I couldn’t get through to anyone. I even tried you, Elijah. I remember thinking you would have known what to say at this moment, that you wouldn’t go on about what a bad idea it had been to come here in the first place. I had an awareness of being in danger, but mostly I thought about Zamzam. I wondered if he was dead, or if he was somewhere that made him want to be dead. And I feared for Diana, that she would, like Baluchitherium, remain entombed, never to be fully known.
Jimmy rifled through Bart’s things and found another bottle of whisky. We kept drinking. I went over and over in my mind the look on Zamzam’s face when that second punch landed, the fight fleeing so suddenly from his features. Of course the more I thought about it, I realised it wasn’t his arrest that was strange, it was our being there in the first place. Jimmy told me about the arrangement that Bart had made with the army. He had promised to keep an eye on Zamzam in exchange for permission to excavate, and he had promised Didag Baloch that he would try and find out General Alam’s next move. He had played both sides, but he hadn’t bargained on Zamzam’s worth, that the army would have wanted more – they would have wanted Zamzam himself, because Zamzam would give them leverage, something to bargain with in their battle for the area. Jimmy was cursing himself, saying he had tried to warn Bart, but Bart had promised him he’d had it all under control.
All this time, Zamzam had been our secret weapon. Our little talisman against the dangers of the desert. Now that he’d been arrested, perhaps his father would come to us, search through our carefully documented collection of broken geology for a clue to the betrayal of his son. I was too full of regret to fear this, wishing I had paid more attention, had somehow got the measure of Zamzam, or Bart, before this very moment when it was all too late.
In the morning Bart returned in an army jeep. It was unclear whether he’d been arrested – he wasn’t in handcuffs, but there was a man with him and whatever this man told him to do, he did. Below his forehead, his face had collapsed into troughs and craters, and he had stopped chewing betel so his mouth was pale and undefined. We were ordered to dismantle the camp. ‘I’m sorry,’ Bart murmured to me. ‘I’ll write to your adviser and explain.’
We packed our things into the jeep. The driver wore metal-rimmed sunglasses and blasted the air conditioning. He drove us down to Sui, where we boarded a tiny plane for Sukkur, where we changed to another flight bound for Karachi. At the ticket counter in Karachi, we changed our reservations, paid the airport taxes, and made declarations on our customs forms. Chisel. Hammer. Liquid plastic. There were no samples, no fragments of Diana encased in rock; we had just left her there, unmarked and unprotected. Jimmy repeatedly asked Bart if there was anything more we could do for Zamzam, if there was someone he could call to pull strings and get information on where they were holding him. Bart, a dead look in his eye, didn’t reply. He kept glancing at the man who had accompanied us from Dera Bugti. At one point, Jimmy declared he wouldn’t get on the plane, that he would remain in Pakistan until Zamzam was released, and Bart hushed him, putting his hand on Jimmy’s enormous forearm.
My phone had found a signal and I read: Fly Me to the Moon.
When the flight to Dhaka was announced, I said goodbye to Bart and Jimmy at the gate. It wasn’t until I entered the bridge that I realised the dig was really over, that we would never get Diana out of the ground or discover her true age, that there was a man in a cell somewhere and that we were leaving him to his fate. And to you I replied: Nobody Loves You When You’re Down and Out.
Zamzam’s mother stood outside the Quetta Press Club for sixty-seven days after his arrest with a photograph safety-pinned to her dress. Then she went in front of the High Court. In Islamabad, she set up camp with other parents of the disappeared. Jimmy sent me links to the articles that had been written about her, mostly by local papers. They called her ‘the Mother of the Missing’. Then, years later, after we had long given up on knowing what had happened to him, Zamzam was returned to his family, his face barely resembling the portrait she had carried around, his face barely resembling a face at all. But somehow, from wherever he had been, before he died, Zamzam had managed to get a message out. And someone had received this message and through the network of people who had known about the dig, they had arranged to commit this last act of rebellion, sending me Diana, bone by bone. I want to believe it was his father, a powerful man now with nothing left of his son but this last wish. I want to believe he was sorry for wanting a different sort of child, one who would take on the mantle of a fighter, and that it was he who had sent out the order to retrieve Diana from the ground, to pack her up and send her to me. I do not claim to be this man’s only act of resistance, but perhaps his most idiosyncratic, the one that makes the least amount of sense but reminds his comrades that there are scientists as well as revolutionaries, and both of these are men of the soil.
Homecoming
Anwar told me that it wasn’t until he almost died that he realised he needed to find the woman he had once loved. I’ve thought about that a lot in the last few years, that if Anwar hadn’t worked on that building site, he might never have gone looking for Megna, and if he hadn’t done that, I might still be in the dark about my past. I’ve only ever been a hair away from being utterly alone in the world, Elijah, and it was Anwar who shone a light where once there was only darkness.
I now have a confession to make (another one? But yes). This isn’t the first time I have been back to the place we met. Not the first time I’ve stalked these streets, hoping to run into you. I was here last year for Bettina’s graduation. Early summer and the streets pink with fallen apple blossoms. Everything looked the same. Bettina had accepted a job at Stanford, and I helped her pack our little apartment into a U-Haul she was going to drive all the way across the country herself. When I expressed some concern, she assured me she was equipped with addresses of a carefully curated series of men she could call on the way – an insurance broker in Hartford, an engineer in Las Vegas, a creative writing professor in Iowa City. I waved as she drove away, holding on to the first edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude she had given to me as a parting gift. That was last year. When I wrote to tell her I was coming back, she offered to let me rent the place. I pay her a fraction of the sum she could get elsewhere, but she insisted and I don’t have the will to refuse. I bought a futon and taped a photograph of Nina Simone on the wall above my head, but otherwise it is completely empty.
You don’t care about any of this. The present is full of mundanities. What happened next, Elijah? The dig ended and I had to go home. My parents came to collect me at the airport. I was quick to regress to childhood patterns and greeted them meanly, keeping most of the episode to myself, already smothered by their worry.
On the plane I had sat next to a man who repeatedly asked me if I was Japanese. I had closed my eyes and pretended to sleep and seen Zamzam’s face and wondered whether his anger at his father had made some part of him long to be caught. Zamzam’s father wasn’t unlike my own father, who had joined a movement to break away from an old country. My father was called a freedom fighter because his side had won and now he had a passport and a parliament and a vote, none of which Zamzam would ever have. Zamzam would die in that prison, and the world would remain divided between people who had countries and people who did not.
‘My baby’s home,’ my mother said.
‘I don’t want to talk,’ I murmured, depressed at the sight of her.
My message to you was: Baby It’s Cold Outside. And, a few minutes later, you replied: You Go to My Head.
I folded myself into the front seat and leaned my head against the window, immune to the sight of my city, the airport road flanked on either side by fields of paddy, electric wires dangling low across the highway, and the watery air making everything heavy and indolent. ‘Rashid said to phone him when you land,’ Ammoo said.
Rashid had already sent me several text messages. I begged him not to come. ‘Not today,’