The Bones of Grace. Tahmima Anam
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why are you doing it?’
‘Not everybody’s like you.’ I knew what Sally meant, but I let her finish. ‘Perfect boy, everything you could possibly want. This baby means Nadeem stays out of trouble, at least for a few years.’
‘Then what?’
‘I’ll pop out another one.’
‘That’s your grand plan?’
‘I didn’t go to Harvard. It’s the best I could do.’
No one would let me forget I’d gone to Harvard.
Over whisky-laced coffees, we listened to Nadeem strum his guitar. ‘You’re different,’ Sally murmured to me, her chin on my shoulder. Not as different as I could be, I thought. But I said: ‘I’ll be back to my old self in no time.’
I did not return to my old self. Every morning I woke up with a jolt and realised I was no longer in Dera Bugti. This reminded me of what it meant for me to be here, safe, in the arms of people who loved me, that the price for this safety was the life of another man. I was longing for more than the few cryptic messages we occasionally exchanged, but I was so diminished that I was convinced you would find me dull and unworthy of your notice, and anyway, I had still not found the words to describe what had happened, not even to you.
When I wasn’t obsessively Googling ‘whale prehistoric arrest Zamzam Baloch disappeared’, I was lying about the apartment and not answering Rashid’s phone calls. He sent me messages asking if he could come to the apartment, but I never replied and he stayed away, though I imagined him bumping into me when I took long, pathetic walks around Tank Park or pushed a shopping cart under the blue lights at Unimart. I was very hungry and frequently on the verge of tears. My father knocked on my door every morning and asked if I would have breakfast with him. I almost always said no.
My mother was distracted by a new job. I was thankful for this, because I knew that if she turned her attention to me I would be forced to put words to what was happening. In Bangla they refer to women like my mother as dhani morich, because the tiniest chillies are the hottest. My mother is tiny and terrifying. During the war, she drove her ambulance every day to Salt Lake, the refugee camp on the outskirts of Calcutta, where all the exiles were stacked into unused sewer pipes. She gave them vaccines and bandaged their wounds and held their hands as they lost their children to cholera. I believe her whole personality was built in that moment – only seventeen and having to look death straight in the eye – but she must have always been that way. My grandmother paints a picture of a girl who was more stubborn than a trapped fishbone, a girl who tried to cut down the guava tree in the backyard because it had given her a scratch the last time she had tried to climb it. But the war was fundamental, a kind of birth not just for the country but for all the too-young people who had willed the country into being.
My parents are now, forty years later, starting to come to terms with what that war has done to them. All the good things – their marriage, woven with the broken threads of what they lost; the sweetness of knowing their lives have meant something, for they are not, like so many, plagued by the pain of insignificance. And the bad – both their brothers lost, my father’s on the battlefield, and my mother’s, later, to religion; the fear that they may not, after all, have gotten it right, because every time the country falters, they take it personally, as if there was a tainted seed planted then that corrupted all that followed.
Recently they have been given a chance to take account in a trial for the men who aided and abetted the army. The word ‘genocide’ is in my home like the word ‘highway’, or ‘acorn’, may be in yours. My mother has given up her medical practice and she’s helping to gather research for the prosecution, travelling across the country to interview survivors and witnesses. She exists in a shroud of other people’s memories as she gently, patiently coaxes out their stories and writes them down. She is remote and sad and emerges rarely, as if from a deep sleep, and in these moments she is joyful, as if she is discovering, for the first time, that the war was won after all. And then, inevitably, she withdraws into those dark places. My parents whisper to each other at night, out of earshot. They follow the trial, every episode, every motion, every witness. Me, I don’t want to know. I seek the connection, but resist when the opportunity is offered. My heart is a nomad, still, after so many years of being in this country, child to these parents.
Can you ever know, Elijah, the feeling of being from a place you wish you could hate but are forced to love? Can you know what it is like to be from a country that everyone else is trying to escape? It is like running into a burning building. If you ask me, I’ll tell you all the things I love about it – the smell of paperbacks in the winter, the cold-but-warm gust of monsoon air, the burnished wood on the desk I had as a teenager, dark from the oil of my skin, lying under the ceiling fan on my grandmother’s bed, the taste of egg and parathas in my mouth. The love exists, but its domain is small, located in the particular bodies of particular people. My parents fought a war for this country, that is how much in love with it they are. There is a memory at every turn, an affection for every change in season, roots in the ground so deep you would have to tear them apart to separate person from place, body from soil. But not me.
One day my mother returns from the courthouse and she puts her head in her hands and cries as if someone is beating her. I stand a little apart and watch her shoulders sagging. My father goes to her and puts his arms around her and they sit that way for a long time. They see me and we look at each other and I stand there and they don’t ask me to enter or leave and I don’t enter or leave. I have witnessed it before, this thing that passes between them like a current, the knowledge that needs no explanation, and I know that she is remembering something, or remembering it through the story of someone else, heavy with what she knows and what she has recently learned, because it is always worse than she remembers, and every memory takes something away from the rest of her life, because she came away unscathed, and the burden of being who she is – whole – weighs heavy on her. She is a person with guilt at the very core of her being, and she spends her days compensating others for the fortune that brought her a life, a marriage, me. She is a moral economy all to herself, painted in tiny strokes of the past.
Someone had been nearly acquitted that day. They hadn’t been able to make the case against him and he had gotten off with a light sentence. With a change in government, even this small verdict might be overturned, and the man might walk free. On the streets, there were protests, and people painting their faces in green and red, and children with rope around their necks, holding up signs that read HANG THE BASTARD. My parents are not the only ones who want a reckoning.
What would you do with this messy history, Elijah? Your chamomile-scented home, your overfed cat, lemonade in the refrigerator, and that family tree, so august, no mystery blood, no revolutions, Indiana Jones an anchor in your provenance.
That afternoon, your message had read: Don’t You Pay Them No Mind.
‘Your mother and I are worried,’ my father said. Ammoo had left early for a field trip to Barisal, and we were on the balcony overlooking Gulshan Lake. I looked down and saw the green water, the rim of garbage that lapped the shore, the necklace of apartment buildings that sat at the edge of the water on the other side.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ I said. ‘I keep asking myself and I just can’t tell.’ I remembered seeing a drowned cow in the lake soon after we moved in, and I had returned again and again to the balcony, watching with disgusted fascination as its intestines burst out of its body and floated into the reeds.
‘Why don’t you come to the factory? They love it when you visit. In fact, you could come and work for me.’
‘You would give me a job?’
‘I could use that Harvard brain.’
‘Ammoo would have a stroke.’ I found myself laughing with him. After years working for the government, my father had decided to go into business, and it was Rashid’s father, Bulbul, who had lent him the money to open a textile factory. Freedom Fabrics foundered for the first few years, the costs outweighing the little profit it earned, but it rose to success when Western clothing