The Bones of Grace (10 page)

I deleted your playlist from my phone and humoured Rashid while he talked about moving into a flat. I began to suspect that was an imminent end to my problems, an end to living and reliving a scrap of a week, obsessing about Diana trapped in the ground, imagining the look on Zamzam's face as he was loaded into the back of that van. The lie upon which my whole life rested. All of it.

In the evenings Rashid and I sat on the balcony and swatted mosquitoes, sometimes sharing a cigarette, staring out at the lake and the scatter of buildings on the other side. Sally's pregnancy was starting to show, and the four of us went to parties where Rashid mixed cocktails and held me while we danced. I liked that he was a poor dancer and I could look into his eyes as he made jerky movements with his arms. He sneaked into my room a few times, leaving without a trace before morning, not even his scent lingering on the sheets.

Early one Friday morning, when the traffic was thin, we drove out of the city to Savar and stood under the sail-shaped war memorial. He had brought breakfast, a thermos of tea and a pair of stuffed parathas wrapped in foil. It was cold; we huddled together under our shawls. By this point I had stopped thinking about you entirely, or at least that's what I had told myself, trying to turn it into a happy, light memory, like a preamble to something, but not the substance of life itself. It had been a month since you had written:
Do I Move You?
And I had not replied.

Rashid and I walked past the memorial, to the rectangular pool at its base. The path was paved in small red bricks. Pink lotus flowers floated on the surface of the water, which was deep green and opaque.

‘So, you going to marry me, or what?' We were at the far end of the pool now, and I looked over at the memorial, the white folds of concrete rising up to a triangular point, and I remembered once when my parents had driven us out here and I had soiled my pants, and Ammoo had made me stand up in the back seat all the way home. I didn't often worry that my parents would send me back to wherever I had come from, but that day, somewhere in my mind I feared they might, and I had gripped the seat in front of me in terror, wondering if the driver would be directed to drop me off on the side of the road and pull away because, although Abboo and Ammoo had promised to love and look after me as if I were their own child, I had crossed an imaginary line.

Rashid reached out from under his shawl and took something out of his pocket, and when I glanced down at his hands I saw that it was a small velvet box with an engagement ring inside.

The week before, I had written to Bart to ask if there was any news about Zamzam or the dig, but he hadn't replied, and now I felt the years fall away – the long episode in America, the evenings of music, the sweet cold of New England winters.

Rashid was directing me to sit at the edge of the pool. ‘We don't have to live here, you know. We can live in London. And we'll travel anyway.'

The implication that I was not at home in my own country irritated me. ‘What makes you think I don't want to live here?'

‘You want to live here? Great. Makes my life easier.'

‘You think I don't fit in?'

‘It's fine, Zee, don't worry about it. I just meant, you know, it's nice to get out once in a while.'

‘Because you're rich, so we can take holidays in Bangkok and Dubai?'

‘What's wrong with Dubai?'

There were a million things wrong with Dubai, and I could start listing them, but if I did I knew we would have to break up, so instead I said, ‘I want to live here.' The concrete was cold; I tightened the shawl around my shoulders. Rashid passed me the flask and I took a long sip of tea.

‘Okay. That's settled, then. We live here. Together.'

I took another sip. ‘Did you put whisky in the tea?' I reached out and held his hand under the shawl. ‘I feel tipsy.'

‘Let me take care of you, Zee.'

I looked up and saw that the sky was greying and thickening. It would rain on the way home, and we might get stuck in traffic. ‘Let's do it as soon as possible. How about January?'

His arms shot up. ‘Yes!'

So this is how it happened, Elijah. As Rashid and I made our way back to the car, what passed through me was relief, because now we could all stop pretending there had ever been any other future in my stars, and for the first time in a long time, all the ways in which I felt the absence of my mother, the mother that knew the seedling-me – the me that was here before I was here, a flutter in the guts, that voice of knowledge and doubt – was silent and obedient.

At my door, Rashid asked if he could spend the night. ‘Your parents are asleep. And anyway, who's going to give them a grandson?' he winked. ‘Gotta practise.'

‘I'm tired,' I said, evading him. ‘It's been a long day.'

‘You're killing me!' he said, holding my gaze, holding my elbow in his palm, holding every year we had known each other in the outlines of his face. I imagined him turning on his heel and marching back to the stairwell, jiggling the car keys in his pocket, his irritation dissipating within moments of leaving me, so I relented, undressing in silence at the foot of the bed and letting him fall asleep with his back turned to me, and all the time I was thinking of you, and what it might be like to be with you in this bed, whether you would be as serene in sleep as the man beside me now.

The next day, I went to visit my grandmother. The traffic in Dhaka is unimaginably bad, and it took two, sometimes three hours in the car to get to her apartment in Dhanmondi, which left about one hour for playing rummy, gossiping, and eating the vast number of snacks Nanu could conjure up at a moment's notice. She was waiting for me in a starched blue sari, smelling comfortably of pressed roses and talcum powder. Pithas – sweet steamed rice cakes – were already waiting, covered with a piece of foil to keep them warm. A teapot and a pair of apples joined them on a tray.

‘I told her to make them after you arrived, but she wouldn't listen,' she complained, referring to the cook she had recently hired. ‘So stubborn. Let me look at you.' She examined my shalwar kameez, nodding in approval.

‘So,' she said, shuffling the cards, ‘you want to bet money, or just keep it friendly?'

‘I'm getting married,' I said.

She flung the cards aside. ‘Finally! Somebody brings me good news. Is it that boy?'

I bit into a pitha. ‘Yes. Dolly auntie's son.'

‘Good. Your mother will be so happy. She told me you came back and ignored him.'

‘I did, and then I changed my mind.' It sounded strange when I put it this way, as if I was returning to a bowl of leftover soup. ‘He's very sweet.'

‘Your mother used to tell me she would never get married.'

‘And what did you say?'

‘I told her marriage is wonderful, and children are even better.' She pulled off her heavy glasses. Nanu had been a young bride, and then a young widow, and anytime she mentioned her husband, an expression of such grief and longing came over her that it was as if she had just lost him the other day. And yet, she could have made an excellent case for being a woman on her own. There was a lightness to her, humour and joy, that she hadn't passed down to my mother. She had a regular bridge date with her friends, and hosted a monthly kitty party, in which her cousins and neighbours pitched in their savings, so that one person could win the whole lot once a month, names pulled out of an old pillowcase and celebrated with sweets. And she spent as many hours reciting from her Qur'an as she did in front of the television, watching old Hindi films and singing along to the musical numbers.

‘Is he nice to you?' she asked, wiping her eyes.

‘Very nice.'

‘That's the most important thing. And so handsome.'

‘Extremely,' I said.

She asked me a few more questions about what kind of wedding I wanted. Winter or summer? Outside or inside? And what kind of a mother-in-law would Dolly auntie be? She advised me to push Rashid to move out of his parents' house. ‘It's always better that way, you won't argue about the cooking.'

‘I hate cooking anyway.'

‘But you would still argue about it,' she laughed. Then she looked at the clock on the wall and said, ‘Will you wait here? I'll come back in a few minutes.'

It was six. She was going to turn on the television for her favourite soap, an Indian series about a villainous mother-in-law and her twelve obedient sons.

‘Go,' I said, ‘I'll be fine.' I looked down at my phone and saw:
I Get Along Without You Very Well (Except Sometimes)
. I didn't know that one, so I looked it up and played it on my phone.

I get along without you very well

Of course I do

Except when soft rains fall

I lay down on the sofa and gazed up at the ceiling. Nanu's chandelier swam above me. I could hear the crude violin chords of her soap opera.

I've forgotten you just like I said I would

Of course I have

Or maybe except when I hear your name

Someone's laugh that's just the same

I turned off my phone and stuffed a pitha into my mouth, washing it down with a swallow of cold tea. The cook came to take the tray away, but I waved her off. I bit into an apple. After what felt like a long time, Nanu returned.

‘You won't believe,' she said. ‘A car accident, and mother-in-law dead.'

‘She'll come back.'

‘No. The car was burnt, everything.'

‘You'll see.'

‘Why are you lying down?' She put her hand on my forehead. ‘Are you feeling okay?'

‘Don't worry.' I looked at my phone. ‘I have to go.'

‘Go, go. Or traffic will eat you.'

‘I'll come next week.'

‘Come just before prayers, the streets will be empty then.'

She unlocked the door. ‘Bye, Nanu-jaan.'

‘Have you told your mother?'

‘Not yet.'

‘Tell her quickly. You know I can't keep a secret.'

Diana's femur is encased in a thick layer of matrix. Suzanne and I have been debating the best way to prepare it, and I have persuaded her to use an acid treatment. She makes a three per cent acetic acid dilution and we slowly lower the femur into it. Then we place it under the hood and wait for the acid to do its work. It has to be watched carefully; as soon as it dissolves the final layer of matrix, it has to be removed, and the acid washed numerous times. We want it to eat through the matrix but leave Diana in peace.

Suzanne continues to pare away at the ankle bone with a tiny chisel. It's slow work, but she doesn't seem to mind. She chips away, fragment by red fragment, until we see the white of bone. Then she uses a brush from a make-up bag she never lets me touch to clear the last layer of dust. Every few hours we step back and admire her, and the world that preserved her so perfectly, pristine bones and her exquisite red blush.

Bettina has invited me to spend Thanksgiving with her parents, so tomorrow I will take the bus down to New
York. I wanted to stay at the lab but I was afraid that, with Cambridge vacant, I would spend the entire weekend wandering the streets, calling out your name. It is too soon to let my desperation get the better of me. Until you hear the whole story, there's no point bumping into you on the street and cracking my chest open as you brush past me, or, worse, pretend not to know me at all. I haven't really even begun, and there is also Anwar, waiting in the wings, with his own story.

Let me tell you, instead, about one of my ancestors. My great-great-uncle Kashiful Muslehuddin Ali, whose nickname was Khoka, had once loved a Jewish girl. All his life the family believed there was something not quite right about Khoka: he was overly sentimental, lamenting the number of indentured farmers that starved when the harvest was lean, that he fussed over the goats when they died of the cold, that he moaned over the waste of food whenever there was a banquet. His mother believed it was because he had spent too long in the birth canal, her most difficult labour, and when Khoka came out, he was blue in the face and didn't seem to have any life in him. In fact, the midwife had pronounced him dead, and his mother had curled herself onto the bed when she heard a small cry coming from the black-and-white-tiled floor where they had left him. When he came of age and refused to behave like a man, she blamed that blue tone for making her spoil him.

Years later, unmarried and without a vocation, having proven himself unable to handle either the family accounts or the management of the estate, Khoka took a flat in Calcutta, where he purchased a motorcar and frequented the theatre and Firpo's, a restaurant on Chowringhee Road. It was at Firpo's that he met Rachel Mosel, a Jewish-American
dancer who had come at the behest of the proprietor, Signor Firpo himself, to teach the young women of Calcutta how to dance. The specially sprung floor at Firpo's, which was much advertised in the newspapers of London, was shamed by the badly executed foxtrots of the women of Calcutta. Even the very modern ones, who came in dresses rather than saris, danced badly; so did some of the memsahibs who had been too long in India – their ankles were graceless, their arms flapped about without purpose. So Miss Mosel, who Signor Firpo had met in New York, was drafted in for this very special and delicate task, and, that is when Khoka met her, and for some reason no one in the family was able to fathom, she chose him from among all the young men who instantly fell in love with her.

When Khoka brought Rachel to the estate in Bardhawan – when it was still at its glorious peak, when the Grand Trunk Road was indeed very grand, and the Howrah–Delhi railroad track was still pristine, before my great-grandfather mortgaged the estate, then sold it, before the family's fortunes declined swiftly under the influence of gambling and speculation – his mother regarded Khoka and decided that perhaps there was something enchanting about the gentle slope of her son's forehead and his full-petalled mouth, and that Miss Mosel would have been charmed by the way he noticed every beautiful thing. But this new awareness did not make Khoka's mother agree to the match. She marshalled the family against him, cut off his allowance, sold his Daimler, and stood over his head while he wrote to Rachel to break off the engagement.
I regret to inform you, my dear Miss Mosel, that it will not, after all, be possible for me to marry you
. Twelve hours after the letter had been dispatched, Khoka walked to the railway station, removed his neckerchief and lay down on the
tracks, letting the 6.05 Delhi train, which was then called ‘the Spear of Kali', glide over his slight frame like a spoon through Signor Firpo's famous Scotch broth. And there ended the sad romance of Kashiful Muslehuddin Ali, the only man in the history of my family to have ever ventured beyond the boundaries of his home in search of love.