The Bones of Grace (43 page)

Eventually we took her to see a doctor, and there were injuries, ones that pre-dated the accident, that would take their time to heal. It would be impossible for me to accurately describe the recriminations that we all silently carried with us from the moment Shona arrived, all the guilt, responsibility, self-hating that we experienced as we wondered about her life. Shona told us nothing about her mother. She sat at the table and refused to eat. She wet the bed again and again. We made the mistake of putting her
in school, believing the company of other children might do her some good, but she was sent home after the first week, having spat at the teacher and punched another girl.

I had to confront, again, the fact that I would never know anything about my mother. I searched in Shona's face for a sign of myself, and I saw that her lips, the particular angle of them when she was angry, or smiled (rare, that), mimicked my own, and her incisors, like mine, were sharp and slightly crooked. Aside from that, she gave away nothing, said nothing.

Bettina is doing research on a group of transgender environmentalists in Nepal. She says we are in the age of Anthropocene, when humans rule the world, dictate the conditions and possibilities of life, shorten or lengthen the survival of the planet. The erasure of nature is a cynical thing, to be sure, but looked at in another light, we can say that, for a moment, until the world collapses, we live on a planet shaped by humans. Not by nature, not by time, or history, or dinosaurs, but by us.

Bettina has inspired me to write this:

Fatema Ansar, My Mother

Fatema Ansar's dreams were too big for her life. Which is to say, her life demanded a small set of dreams, or, better yet, no dreams at all. If she had been one of those people who accepted her fate without a word of protest, who rationalised her poverty, if she said it had all been written on her forehead before she was even born, so that to rail to against it would not just be futile, but against the natural order of things, she might have lived a happier life. She might have lived. Instead, she had thoughts. She lay awake at night when the moon was full and put her on stage like a spotlight, and she would imagine all
the other lives she might have had. That she might go to school someday, that she might leave the village and go to Mymensingh town, that she might marry and have daughters who would also learn the numbers and the letters, that she might die with a smile on her lips, satisfied she had done something to advance herself in the world. But, modest though this set of possibilities may sound, for Fatema Ansar, they were poison, because Fatema's life happened at the very heel of fate. There was nothing to absorb even the smallest dream for a girl like her
.

It began with some promise. There was no school – her parents were too poor for that – but she did marry a man who by all accounts would have probably turned out to be not so bad, who would have kept her in food and clothes and might even have given her the occasional tender glance as the years softened him, had he not been bitten by a snake a few months after the wedding, which was nothing more than a kazi reciting a few prayers over their heads and the same food they ate every day, and after that first night, when he had made love to her with violence and held her tightly to his chest, telling her he had put a son in her womb, he left for the East, because the harvest was poor and he had sold himself to a farmer in Khulna for the spring planting, and they said goodbye in the hush of the hut they shared with his parents and his three younger sisters. And all through the months of Ashar, Srabon, and Poush, she waited, her pregnancy showing early, and when the news came that he had died where he fell, that the farmer was sorry but his body could not be sent home, the expense was too great, his parents turned on Fatema, and in the eye of their grief, their only son and their only hope dead in the bloom of his life, they said, ‘Go, you are no longer eating our rice.' The heel of fate. And she went home, home to her parents, who had been cursed, as had her in-laws, with an abundance of daughters, one of whom they had sent to
Dhaka to work as a servant, not a choice now for Fatema, because she would be saddled with this fatherless child, and that is when her sister sent word. That there was a family. God had not blessed them with an issue. Would she? Could she? Her parents sat silent over their empty fields and accused her of being hungry, as if the enormous bulk of her pregnancy was the food she was stealing from their plates. When the babies came – yes, there were two – she despaired. Girls. The heel of fate. Would they take them both? Yes, they would. They came to the village in a car, their pockets bulging with money. And, just as she was about to hand them over, as she passed one and was about to pass the other, the smaller one, her shoulders pulled away from the transaction, and she said, ‘This one I will keep.' There were arguments, her parents came out of their hut and pleaded with her, but Fatema's dreams were bigger than her life, and she stood resolute, numbing the pain of losing one with the consolation of the other, imagining a world in which she would never have to give up a child because she was hungry, and she tied the money to her sari and took the smaller one away from the village and to the East, where her husband had died, not knowing if she would find the place he was buried, but pulled there by the force of her will, and the farmer, sorry for her, had offered her to the imam, who had given her a small room behind the mosque, and that is where she settled, a woman alone with a child, dreams too big for her life, the first act of will she had ever committed giving her a small measure of happiness. It wasn't much, but it was something
.

In the absence of knowledge, I choose imagination. I choose to know my mother through my dreams, and the words that come from my dreams. I can draw a picture and then inflate it so that it resembles a life, a history,
something I can hold on to. In the age of the Anthropocene, the human rules, and there is nothing more human than to dream.

Of my sister, I knew slightly more, because of Anwar (and because of me – I knew, had always known, exactly what she looked like). He tells me that when she had believed she was accompanying him to Dubai, she had said she would like to swim in the sea and have her foot brush against a large creature, a timi. ‘Timi' is the Bangla word for ‘whale'. My sister, too, would have searched for
Ambulocetus
. Perhaps we would have travelled to Dera Bugti together, befriended Zamzam together. Perhaps we would have both fallen in love with you. Never mind, I love you enough for both of us, now that I have fallen in love with you twice and lost you twice and had a twin who has died, making my hopes twice that, you see, of a normal person's.

We tried to remain together, but looking back, it was obvious from the start that it would not be enough to try and become a family when all there was to connect us was a desire, however earnest, to make amends for the past. After four months, we called Anwar and asked if he might like to see his daughter. Perhaps she could stay with him for a while, see if it suited her. We travelled back down the country to Anwar's village in Khulna. I was afraid his wife would refuse to take her in, but when we arrived Shona appeared to relax, squatting on a piri and sifting through the rice with Anwar's mother. We left her there with a measure of satisfaction in our hearts, even though the separation was a complicated one. My mother, especially, struggles with the notion that certain barriers cannot be
overcome by will alone. And I had to confront the fact that, even though something of the mystery of my life has now been solved, the fundamental aloneness of it will always be with me, like a scar that flattens and fades but refuses to disappear.

We visit her often. They come to our house for Eid every year and we sit around the table like a family and eat vermicelli and halwa. Anwar's wife tells me she wishes to have a child, but one has not come along yet. I can't say that we are intimate, in the way I imagined we might be. They hold themselves at a distance, expecting, perhaps, that our bond will break apart as abruptly as it materialised. But I live in hope that someday, perhaps when age and circumstance narrow with time, we will achieve an easier connection. I had a small glimmer of this when I asked Anwar to tell me his story. I wanted to know exactly how he had come to be on the beach that day, and he was surprisingly willing. We sat together last winter, and I wrote it down exactly as he told it.

There is the rest of the world, which seems very far away now. If you have read the newspapers, you will know that Ghulam Azam has died, that the country my parents love so deeply is as troubled as it has ever been, but also that it exists in a sort of ecstatic state, an escape artist overcoming, with only seconds to spare, every catastrophe that befalls it.

Shona is twelve now. Mo, whose age I had never asked, would have probably been something of a teenager.

I don't think of you all the time, Elijah. But I remember you on the cusp of every major event in my life. On the day I moved out of my parents' apartment (a scandal, I should tell you, that I should be simultaneously divorced and living alone). On the anniversary of Mo's death. I think about the fact that if I were dying, I would want to be
with you. I would want to know what words you would say to comfort me. How you would love me through something like that. When I look back I realise so much of the time I spent with you was spent thinking about death, yours or mine or my parents' or the seed that perished in my body, or even death on a catastrophic scale – that is, the extinction of the species, like
Ambulocetus
, someday all to be bones in the ground – but that's what happens I suppose when you fall in love, because suddenly there is a thread connecting your life and all the lives that went before you and all the lives that will follow. Even when we were together I was filled with a sense of dread, not for the parting that would inevitably occur, but simply because I had a periscope into life, the vast and intimate sadness of it, for the first time, and that this is why I loved you, because even the worst of the world was there to be discovered together, shoulder to shoulder with you, my beloved stranger.

Diana is incomplete. The parts of her that arrived safely – her ankles, her pelvis, some vertebrae, the upper half of her ribcage – were assembled by Suzanne and I and these fragments lie before us in all their broken splendour. She is about ten feet long, and would have weighed between seven and eight hundred pounds. Her spine, as we had imagined, is semi-flexible; her pelvis tells us that she ventured only so far into the water. I look at her bones and they are my talismans, reflecting the future and the past, the lives of animals that came before and after her, and, more intimately, the people I have loved and lost: Mo, and Zamzam, and my sister Megna, and my mother, and you, Elijah, most of all. Everything that endures is in the atavism of her bones, fifty million years of history encased
in calcium, iron, and sediment. Perhaps my mysterious friend will send me the rest, perhaps not. In his last package, however, he included the handwritten letter from Zamzam that had started it all:

I will not have a burial, comrade. I will die unmarked, and you will only hear of my death in the whispering of trees. You will never gaze on my lifeless form. But, as if you were preparing my body, washing and wrapping me in the white shroud, take these bones which are the echoes of God, and send them to my friend, who will care for them and ensure their proper place in the chronicle of humans and animals
.

Remember, Elijah, how the first words we spoke to each other seemed so arbitrary at the time. Aristotle was an orphan, you said. Well, it was Aristotle, sailing in the Aegean, who first distinguished whales from fish. And later, it was the Arab scholar Jahiz who began to classify animals and hinted at a theory of evolution. I went to London to see Jahiz's book for myself.
The Kitab al-Hayawan is a treatise on animals and the medical properties of the various parts of their bodies, compiled from works of Aristotle and Ibn Bakhtishu
, the caption says. Inside, there is an illustration of a four-legged animal floating in a pool of water. It was probably intended to be a lizard or a salamander, but the image has echoes of
Pakicetus
, the land-loving ancestor of Diana. I looked down at the manuscript and it told me that the connections between us are not spurious or the result of coincidence, but ancient and profound, and yes – even the scientist in me will allow – sacred.

*

I have been putting up flyers. Bart, Jimmy and I are going to display
Ambulocetus natans
at the Natural History Museum next week. There will be a reception for the media, and my small world of palaeontologists will be watching with great interest. Diana is incomplete, but she is magnificent, and there is still much we can learn from her.

I have considered that there is a chance that all of this – Diana's bones being sent to Cambridge, which made me put her back together, which put me at the intersection that day, which made me write it all down – was a ruse, a set of events puppeted by fate to send up a smoke signal to you, Elijah. All so that you would find the flyer tacked to a bulletin board on campus, come to my unveiling, read this story, and collude with me to determine its ending.

My hopes go up and down like paper lanterns in the wind. When I first sat down to write, I thought that if you ever read these words, you would see that although I gave you up, whatever it was that passed between us was no illusion, and here, in black and white, was the incontrovertible truth of it. And then, when I came here and started to piece Diana together, when I saw you on the street and then not again, I lost hope; I no longer imagined you running up beside me as I walked through the Quad, telling me that all was forgiven.

Worse, the more I wrote, the more I realised I couldn't change a thing. I couldn't sand down the rough edges of my words to you, nor make myself turn to look at you with your fingers wrapped around that bottle of honey, because that is how it happened and there is nothing I can do to push my hand back into the black of our past. I have been tempted to bend the truth, to paint myself a little prettier, but I know you hate evasion more than anything, so I have been relentlessly, brutally truthful. I have placed
my ugly, complicated heart within these pages, and although the shame hasn't passed, I tell myself at least I have been able to face it. I have been able to look that woman in the eyes, and say, yes, I was her. I was her and I am her. But this truth telling, in the end, is not for me but for you. To bring you back to me. To give you something in return for the pain that I threw at you like a shower of stones.