The Bones of Grace (18 page)

This was a much better idea than the one she'd had before, but I was still unsure. For one thing, the others might consider Mo a snitch if they knew he was helping us. I told her so.

‘But if they talk to us, we can help them. We can put them in the film.'

When he returned with the tea, I said, ‘Mo, can we come and meet some of your friends?'

He put down the tray in front of me and passed me a cup. ‘Which friends?' he asked.

‘Your friends from the beach,' Gabriela said. ‘We want to make a film about them.'

I repeated the words in Bangla. He turned to me. ‘What film?'

‘A movie about the beach, about the ships and the workers.'

I was sure – and halfway hoping – that he would say no. But Gabriela kneeled in front of him and pulled at his collar, straightening and smoothing. ‘It's very important,' she said. ‘Will you help us?'

‘We need to talk to the men,' I said. ‘Not the ones Ali selects for us – the others.'

‘Do you want to talk to the day shift or the night shift?' he asked.

‘Which shift are you?' I said, but he didn't reply to that, only cleared away the plates and disappeared into the kitchen. I followed him to the back of the apartment, where there
was an empty room with a small square window on one side. It was dark, and the cement floor was streaked with dust. ‘Do you want to stay here?' I asked him, and he said, ‘Only sometimes, when Ali doesn't need me.'

I looked at him closely. His hair sprouted vertically from his scalp, and when I extended my hand to stroke his head I felt a uniform coarseness, the gentle slope of his crown, and the upright tendons at the base of his neck.

‘Bring your things,' I said. He nodded and we looked at the room together, the grey floor, the grille crudely fixed to the sill of the window. Mo said he had to go and that he would come by later with his bag. Then he padded away in bare feet, closing the door behind him with a sharp click.

And that is how Mo came to live with us, how he came to be the link between me and the crew of men who worked on the beach. How Gabriela and I came to belong to this place, came to know all the men who hauled the bodies of ships along the metal-flecked sand. Everything that happened in the later chapters of this story occurred because Mo said yes; even you, Elijah.

The dormitory that housed the Prosperity workers was built by Harrison Master's father. He was an old-fashioned sort of businessman who knew the names of all his workers and asked after their wives and children back home, ordered them off the beach in a rage if they talked back to the foreman or got caught in one of the brothels in town. That is what Dulu, one of the men Mo had lined up to talk to us, told me. But the businessman died and his son inherited the place and hired Ali, which was how they all came to be here, crammed into the dormitory, because the son didn't believe in expanding the facility, and anyway they were
grateful it was there at all, because the men in the neighbouring beaches didn't get anything, they just lived on whatever ship they were breaking, which was bad news, because if the fires didn't kill you, the fumes from the tanks would finish you off slowly. Not that there was much living to do here anyway.

The men that Mo had chosen for our film were the lowest and poorest on site, the ones who took whatever scrap of metal was peeled off the ship and dragged it up the beach to the smelter. The pullers came from the north of the country, where there weren't any jobs and the threat of famine hung over them every winter. The men that Ali had introduced me to were locals; they were given their jobs in exchange for permission to use their land. They had clout with Ali, setting their own price and acting as supervisors to the other workers. But these men – boys, really – from up north were recruited in the winter, paid by the hour, and sent home at the end of the season, their pockets only a little fuller than when they arrived.

Before they would agree to speak to me, I had to answer a few of their questions. Mo pointed to a young boy, older than him but not by much, and said, ‘Shuja wants to know if you are married.'

The others covered their mouths and giggled.

‘Yes, I am.'

‘Do you have children?'

‘No.'

‘What is your father's name?'

‘Farhan Bashir. His nickname is Joy.'

‘How many brothers and sisters?'

‘None. It's just me.'

‘Hai, Allah!' Shuja said. ‘Are they dead?'

‘Shut up motherfucker,' Mo said.

‘My father was a freedom fighter,' I said.

Shuja asked to see a photograph of my parents. I handed him my phone, and he passed it around. He turned to Gabriela. ‘Is that the real colour of your hair?'

‘Yes,' she said, emerging from behind her camera.

‘Why did you come here?' Mo said.

‘Because we want to know about your lives,' Gabriela said.

This seemed to satisfy him. Here, in this room, Mo was in charge, putting himself beside me, gesturing with his hands for the others to talk or be quiet. ‘All right. You can start now.'

By the third week, I had memorised everyone's names, and they had started calling me ‘Apa' instead of ‘madam'. We met in one of the bigger rooms in the dormitory, the boys crowding onto the bunks, me sitting among them with the microphone, Gabriela behind the camera. The sessions began in the evening, after the shift had ended, and went on for several hours into the night. Mo kept a close watch on me, sitting beside me and directing the conversation, saying, this one has something important to tell you, or ask that one about his village, where the water is full of arsenic, yes, you cunt, she wants to know about the arsenic too. The whole story is what she needs. We hadn't said this to him specifically, but somehow he knew that we were there to get under the surface, to hear all the little details that made up the people that made up the shipyard. He hadn't needed a class in ethnographic field methods to know this, he just knew, because Mo was like that, a kind of effervescent psychic, reading our minds and telling other people what we wanted them to know.

One night we started late. The cutting crew had taken a huge piece of metal off the oil tanker that sat next to
Grace
.
The pullers had tried to fix their ropes to get this piece of the tanker up the beach, and as the light had faded they had just about given up, but Ali had pushed them to try again, and they had spent several hours trying to manoeuvre it without success. The cutters would have to break it into smaller pieces the next day, and they would try again.

When I arrived, the boys were tired, their bodies slumped forward as they balanced on their heels in front of me. Mo had come up with the idea that each of them would tell me the story of where he had come from, about his village, his family, the people he had left behind. Last week, there was a boy, Russel, who said his brother had come to the beach to work as a puller the year before. He had sent money, just as he'd promised, but eight months later the money stopped coming. They tried to contact a relation, the cousin who had set him up with the job, but no one could find either of them. So they sent their second son to find his brother, but when Russel landed in Sithakunda he realised how futile the search would be, the locked gates in front of each of the shipyards, the miles and miles of lots. They hadn't even known the name of the company, or the foreman in charge. So Russel just stayed, lucky to have been recruited as a puller for Prosperity, which was one of the better employers. He hadn't been home in two years, just sent the money to his parents, as his brother had done before him.

Now it was the turn of one of the older ones. He cleared his throat and shifted the weight on his feet. With slow deliberation, he pointed his mouth at the tape recorder, anticipating the nods and the shakes of the head that would accompany his speech, the men who knew what it was to be him, the ones who had suffered like him, seen the things he had seen, tasted the bitter things he had tasted. ‘It was
the Monga, seven years ago,' he began, referring to the famine that grips the north of the country between harvests. ‘We thought we had enough rice. It was my mother and my father, my wife, three children, another coming.' I knew what he was about to say, and so did the others, but we all trained our eyes on him and listened. It was two months before the harvest that the rice ran out. He went to sell his labour, but there was no work going. His father walked into the fields one day and didn't come back. But still there wasn't enough. He had a daughter, three years old, and she was the first to go. Then winter set in, and, with it, a fever that spread through the village. The man wiped his face again and again with his right hand, telling the story with his left hand. As he came to the death of his wife, he put his head down between his knees, shaking his arms back and forth, as if he could wipe the story from his memory. Now he works to feed the two remaining children, left up north with his brother.

‘Say your name into the tape recorder,' Mo said.

‘Belal,' he said.

I asked the men to tell me what had happened that day, and they said that the cutters would sometimes take enormous chunks from the ships, pieces they knew the pullers wouldn't be able to haul up the beach. ‘They do it to torture us,' one of them said. The pullers would waste time trying this or that to get the piece to move, knowing all the time that it wouldn't work. Then they would be forced to wait while the cutters split the large pieces into smaller ones. The managers knew what was going on, but they didn't interfere. There was an order on the lot, a hierarchy that had to be maintained and obeyed, and the pullers from the north were at the very bottom.

I passed around a flask of tea. They sipped in silence, gazing
into the kerosene lamp. Gabriela and I took our leave, promising to return the following week. We stepped out into the darkness with Mo. The moon was weak but we could still see the outline of
Grace
. Small fires illuminated the darkness as the night shift worked on the remaining sheets from the oil tanker. We passed through Prosperity's gates.

Mo had to return to the beach to finish something for Ali. ‘We'll be all right,' I told him, ‘it's not far.' He said he would walk with us but I insisted and Gabriela told him to go on, that we would see him the next afternoon when he came to cook dinner. The stories went around and around in my mind. As I was listening to Belal I had made every attempt to remain impassive, but, now that I was no longer in his presence, the depth of his loss slowly sank in. It was quiet and I could hear the sound of the water hitting the shore. Gabriela and I walked in silence until we were home. I almost ran the last few steps because I felt a strange sensation, like someone was following me. At the apartment Gabriela wanted to talk about the meeting, but I was rendered mute by the memory of Belal's face, his thin, sad lips mouthing the story of his daughter's death. Gabriela suggested we go out. There was nowhere really for us to go at that late hour, so I called Komola and asked if I could come over with a friend, and of course she said yes and asked what we wanted to eat.

Gabriela borrowed the Shipsafe car and we drove into the city with the windows rolled down, and immediately I felt better. I was embarrassed when we entered the house; Gabriela looked everything up and down and I could tell I was being cast in a new light, but Komola brought us a tray with ice cream and tinned fruit, and the heaviness that had lodged in me started to dissipate.

‘There must be something we can do for them,' Gabriela
said, putting a spoonful of cubed fruit into her mouth. ‘How can you stand it?'

‘We're doing something. You're making this film.'

Her spoon clattered against the side of the bowl. ‘A film seems like a pathetic response. Is there any more of this?' she asked, gesturing to her empty dish.

‘I'll ask Komola.'

Downstairs, Komola said there wasn't any more fruit, but that there was some leftover rice pudding in the fridge. She had been chewing betel, and her mouth was lined with red. She reminded me of Nanu, not that Nanu chewed betel – she didn't – but in the way that she regarded me, with a love that she expected to flow in only one direction.

In the morning Komola made us omelettes and we sat in the garden with our tea cups. I was thankful to Gabriela for not asking me to explain about the house or my marriage. Neither of us wanted to go back to Prosperity, so we had Joshim take us on a long walk around the estate. After lunch, Gabriela sketched out a few ideas for the film while I read over my notes from the night before. Finally, reluctantly, we prepared to return to Sithakunda.

It was dusk by the time we set off, carrying plastic tubs of leftover chicken curry and dal. A cool breeze rustled the tamarind trees as we walked down the path to the car. I was feeling refreshed; Belal's story would make it into our film, and though it wouldn't bring his daughter back, it would be something. I was finally making some headway, not just with this project but with my life. The film would be no replacement for Diana, for Zamzam, nothing against the death of Belal's daughter, but at least I could chalk up one small accomplishment, one attempt at making a dent in the world.

As we drove south to Sithakunda, I spotted a clearing in the highway. There were a few cars parked on the side of
the road, and beyond, a stretch of beach. ‘That must be Patenga,' I said. ‘Shall we stop?' Gabriela was thrilled at the possibility of a swim, though disappointed when I told her she would have to go into the water more or less fully clothed. ‘You can roll up your trousers a little,' I said, ‘but don't go above your knees.'

The beach was crowded by women in shalwar kameezes who dangled their babies over the water. We lay on our stomachs and let the tide nudge us gently towards the shore. In the distance, we heard the sound of a flute among the cries of the gulls and the shrieks of the children. ‘This isn't so bad,' Gabriela said, her shirt ballooning beneath her. ‘The water is delicious.' As the sun neared the horizon, we climbed onto a large rock on the shore and waited for our clothes to dry. ‘I never want to leave,' I said, and Gabriela nodded.