The Bones of Grace (38 page)

‘Russel is still looking for his brother,' he said.

‘And Belal?'

Mo kept his eyes trained on his feet. ‘Belal has gone home.'

‘Why?'

‘Mr Ali said he was making trouble.'

‘Did he do something?'

Mo shrugged. ‘I can't say.'

Again I was pierced with guilt for having abandoned them. I tried to remember if there was anything about Belal that stood out. He didn't strike me as the type of person who would get under Ali's skin. Ali had told me once that he would periodically encourage a turnover so that the workers would remember who was keeping their bellies full. I recalled it now, and the way Ali had said it, as if it was nothing to exchange one man's labour for another's. ‘You stay out of trouble,' I said to Mo.

‘Mr Ali won't leave me,' he said. His belief that there was some security in his life made him seem all the more fragile. I was about to ask him why, whether there was some particular reason Ali would keep him around, but he disappeared into the kitchen, declaring he would make the best spinach curry I had ever tasted.

‘Did you practise the letters?' I called out. ‘Every day!' he replied, and in those words, in that voice, there was a small measure of consolation.

When I stood up to leave, I was suddenly dizzy, and I had to sit down again.

‘You sure you don't want to sleep here?' Gabriela asked.

‘I promised Rashid I'd stay in town.'

‘Under lock and key, are you?'

‘The errant wife.' And, with that, I asked Abul Hussain to take me to the villa, where Komola was waiting at the door, her hands soft against my face.

In the morning, when the car stopped inside the gates of Prosperity, I watched for a long time as a cutter made his final pass and a large piece of
Grace
came crashing down onto the sand. I was wearing sunglasses, a pair I had found in the bedside drawer of my room and had probably belonged to Dolly, and through the sepia-tinged frames I saw the people I had so carefully come to know appearing as vague shapes against the broken silhouette of
Grace
. A tanker had arrived while I was away. Now it was wedged between
Grace
and a half-demolished container ship in the neighbouring lot.
Grace
had been pared down. Her foredeck and bridge had been sliced off, large panels of steel cut away from her hull. She was all gloom now, empty of the footprints of happy people.

Ali was waiting for me in the Prosperity office. ‘Welcome
back, Miss Zubaida.' He pulled at his beard, which appeared fuller and longer.

‘Thank you, Mr Ali. It looks as if you've made a lot of progress,' I said, gesturing towards the beach.

‘By the grace of Allah, we are ahead of schedule with the cruiser.'

He didn't ask me to sit down, but I took a seat opposite him anyway. ‘I heard also that you have sold the piano.'

‘To your friend, the American. He was very persistent.'

‘Yes. He's a difficult man to refuse.'

‘And you have come back. Will you stay long?'

‘I would like to continue with the interviews,' I said.

‘We are always pleased to act as your hosts,' he said. ‘And you are entitled to employ who you wish, of course.'

It took me a moment to realise he was referring to Mo. He tapped the desk with the end of a pencil. ‘As long as the boy completes his duties, he is free to live where he finds a place, but you will understand that it may cause some disturbance among the other men. As you have taken such an interest in the boy. I hear you are teaching him to read.'

‘He didn't get a chance to attend school.'

‘Neither have any of the others.'

‘Have they complained?' I wasn't sure where he was going. He obviously didn't care if my favouring of Mo had caused problems with the workers.

‘Not exactly. But I've known them a long time, and they don't take to change very well.'

‘We won't be here long.'

‘That's precisely the issue, madam.' He continued to tap on the desk with the end of his pencil. It was mid-morning and work was going at full tilt on the beach. ‘After you go, things will have to return to normal. That is the way here. We have been operating for many years.'

‘I'm not sure I understand.'

He smiled again, raising his hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘Nothing to worry about, madam. All is up to the Almighty. Now I must go, I have some business to attend to.'

Ali appeared to dismiss me. I wasn't sure what had just happened, but I guessed the conversation had sounded different to Ali's ears than to mine. As I turned to go, he said, ‘Please give my regards to your father.'

‘You know my father?'

‘Sir is a respected man, a son of Chittagong. Of course we all know him.'

He was talking about Bulbul. ‘Yes, of course.' And I turned to go, still confused by the exchange. Outside, a large sheet of metal was being pulled up the beach. The cutters would come soon with their tools, trimming the sheet down again so that it could be dragged to the equipment at the northern edge of the beach, where it would be rolled and flattened and eventually transported. I looked for Mo, but couldn't find him, so I made my way to the office. As I passed the dormitory, I saw Gabriela coming out of one of the side doors. I wondered what she was doing there, but she swept past me before I could call out to her.

I allowed myself to consider for a moment what would have happened if I'd gone away with you. Hopped on a plane. Goodbye, everyone. Sending Rashid and Ammoo an email, perhaps the same one.
I'm on my way to America
, it would have said,
with Elijah Strong
. They would have considered it a joke. Called me, and then each other. Would they have been any angrier with me than they were now? I laughed to myself, because I knew now that losing you was scarier than any of it, and since I had done that and was still here, it meant I could probably do anything. I wish I had discovered that about myself before it was too late.

When I returned to the dormitory for an interview session that evening, I found Gabriela already there, passing around tea and bowls of puffed rice to the men. Mo hung back, dodging me as I entered, and none of the others stopped to say hello. I guessed I had offended them with my abrupt departure. Only Russel seemed happy to see me, asking after you. You were in America, I said. I told him about the piano, but word had already spread. ‘Can we smoke?' Russel asked, and there was a small commotion as the biris and the matches were passed around, and after everyone had lit up, small conversations bloomed around the edges of the group. No one seemed in any particular hurry to start talking.

‘So,' I began, ‘we are almost at the end of our interviews, but there are a few of you who have yet to tell me your story. I am sorry for the break—'

‘Will it be on TV?' Russel interrupted.

‘Yes, in my country,' Gabriela said.

‘In foreign,' I translated.

‘What about Bangladesh?' someone asked from the back.

‘We will try,' Gabriela said.

‘We don't know,' I said. ‘But you don't have to talk if you don't want to.'

Someone raised his hand from the back of the room. ‘Apa, what about the other place? Can you take the camera there?'

‘Don't worry,' Gabriela said. ‘We won't leave anyone out.'

‘We are only getting interviews from the pulling crew,' I said. ‘The film will focus on your group.'

‘I mean the other pullers.'

‘She's not supposed to meet the other pullers,' Mo interjected.

‘What other pullers?' I glanced at Mo, at Gabriela. I
looked around. ‘Where's Belal?' Belal, who had lost his wife and his daughter.

A man stood up. I didn't recognise him – a heavy, powerful face, square shoulders. ‘As-salaam alaikum Apa,' he said. ‘My name is Selim.'

‘Selim has just arrived from the north,' Gabriela said.

‘I was here last year,' he explained. ‘My father died, so I went home for the winter.'

I was struggling to keep up. Something about the equation between us, and the workers, and Ali, had fundamentally altered in my absence. The group appeared charged up, lacking in the tired resignation that had dominated our previous conversations. I remembered what Bilal had said about not trusting Gabriela, her inability to get the workers to speak with her. And now, the warm, almost intimate way she was sitting among them, passing them mugs of tea, using Selim's cigarette to light one of her own.

I took Gabriela aside. ‘What's this about the others?'

‘I was going to tell you,' she said. ‘There was an accident here last week.'

‘On
Grace
?' No one had said anything to me. ‘Does Rubana know?'

‘They hushed it up. Ali's hiding the wounded workers.'

‘That doesn't sound right. Where would he hide them?'

‘There's a place down the road. He paid them off, doesn't want them in hospital.'

The sound of conversation rose around us. ‘Don't you want to see them?' Selim asked.

I looked around the room, lit by Gabriela's camera and the solitary bulb that hung from the ceiling, and replayed the conversation I'd had with Ali that morning. I knew they were waiting for me to say something. I dialled Rubana's
number but there was no reply. I remembered Dera Bugti now, and being inches away from
Ambulocetus
, and having to put all that earth, all its history, back in its place, its secrets packed away for someone else to discover. I gestured to Mo and asked him, first of all, why he hadn't said anything to me. Mo stared down at his feet, and I had to put my fingers under his chin and force him to look at me. ‘I didn't want you to be hurt,' he said, and I took this to mean that he was afraid I would get into trouble with Ali. It's you who will be hurt, I wanted to say. And I won't be able to protect you. Again I will betray you.

I turned to the assembled crowd. ‘Yes,' I said. ‘Take me with you.'

I followed Selim and Mo a few hundred yards down the highway. We turned into the market, which was empty now, past the small mosque, then down a dirt alley. Mo gripped my elbow, helping me skirt the flooded potholes, the loose electrical wires, the small pyramids of garbage. We pushed open the tin door of a small concrete shed. The smell of blood and bleach was overpowering; my eyes adjusted to the darkness and I saw three cots laid out in a row. I saw a man without legs, another who was wrapped all around his waist and his chest, his bandages glowing in the dim caramel light. The third man, lying on his stomach, a thin layer of gauze shielding his burnt skin, was Belal. I would not have recognised him if Mo hadn't whispered his name into my ear.

It wasn't as if I had ignored the fact that they all had a story of death that followed them around like a shadow – a friend or a brother or someone they had only a passing acquaintance with, a man who shouldered a few inches of the weight they shared – a piece of steel crushing a skull,
a chest, an errant metal rope escaping from the winch and cutting a throat. I had heard all the stories; I had read the reports and I knew the statistics, but I was unprepared for this. My stomach revolted from the smell and the soft moans coming from Belal's bed. I hung back while Gabriela rushed to one, then another, ignoring everything I had told her about approaching people she didn't know, tracing her fingers over their bandages, holding the hands that were still whole. She had been here every day, knew the progress of every injury, every wound. The amputated man would survive; the man whose chest was split open with the winch that had snapped and struck him would probably not. They weren't sure what would happen to Belal.

I had spent many years thinking about bones. When I studied the fossils of
Ambulocetus
and
Pakicetus
, I told myself the souls of those ancient creatures were in their bones. I knew that the fusing of Diana's pelvis would produce a smooth bowl shape that would tell us how
Ambulocetus
had evolved into an amphibian when her ancestors had been terrestrial. But the bones I had studied, pressed down by millennia, were always partial. I would work with fragments and imagine the whole, fill in the parts that had been broken by history, and this was how it should be, because our knowledge of the past could only ever be in pieces, left there for us to put together. But now, confronted by these fragments of people, a room in which the atmosphere had been thinned by the fleeing of hope, my knowledge of bones gave me nothing, no explanation, no prescription. I could not imagine these men whole, no matter how expert I was at putting things together.

‘We have to take them to a proper hospital,' I said. ‘They can't stay here.'

‘They won't go,' Gabriela said. ‘I already tried.'

‘Ali's paid them,' Selim said. ‘Says he's going to take care of their families.'

The bandaged man whispered something. Mo went to a metal drum in a corner of the room and filled up a glass of water. The man lifted himself up, struggling to reach the glass held out by Mo. I couldn't bear the sight of him, the tendons of his neck straining towards Mo, his mouth open and dry, his arms pinned down by their bandages, and I ran out of the shed, my foot catching on the raised wooden threshold and flinging me violently into the alley outside.

Gabriela and I stayed up late talking about what we should do.

‘It seems so pointless to make a film,' I said.

‘Exactly,' Gabriela agreed, ‘it's no fucking good.'

We couldn't go to the police; Ali had already paid them off. And what would we charge them with, if the men themselves wanted to remain where they were? We discussed the possibility of alerting the press, and I left another message for Rubana.

‘My mother would know what to do,' I said, a surge of feeling for Ammoo coursing through me. The sight of those workers, the ones Ali had gone to such trouble to hide from us, who even Mo had deemed were too dismembered to take part in the interviews, changed what I knew about this world and my place in it. It made everything else shrink – my little quest to find my origins, even the wound of your absence. Ammoo would know what it was to be overcome by the discovery of something ugly, of secrets that are just below your gaze and unnoticed by you until a terrible moment breaks it all open.