Tahmima Anam - The Bones of Grace

My phone had found a signal and I read: Fly Me to the Moon .

When the flight to Dhaka was announced, I said goodbye to Bart and Jimmy at the gate. It wasn’t until I entered the bridge that I realised the dig was really over, that we would never get Diana out of the ground or discover her true age, that there was a man in a cell somewhere and that we were leaving him to his fate. And to you I replied: Nobody Loves You When You’re Down and Out .

Zamzam’s mother stood outside the Quetta Press Club for sixty-seven days after his arrest with a photograph safety-pinned to her dress. Then she went in front of the High Court. In Islamabad, she set up camp with other parents of the disappeared. Jimmy sent me links to the articles that had been written about her, mostly by local papers. They called her ‘the Mother of the Missing’. Then, years later, after we had long given up on knowing what had happened to him, Zamzam was returned to his family, his face barely resembling the portrait she had carried around, his face barely resembling a face at all. But somehow, from wherever he had been, before he died, Zamzam had managed to get a message out. And someone had received this message and through the network of people who had known about the dig, they had arranged to commit this last act of rebellion, sending me Diana, bone by bone. I want to believe it was his father, a powerful man now with nothing left of his son but this last wish. I want to believe he was sorry for wanting a different sort of child, one who would take on the mantle of a fighter, and that it was he who had sent out the order to retrieve Diana from the ground, to pack her up and send her to me. I do not claim to be this man’s only act of resistance, but perhaps his most idiosyncratic, the one that makes the least amount of sense but reminds his comrades that there are scientists as well as revolutionaries, and both of these are men of the soil.

Anwar told me that it wasn’t until he almost died that he realised he needed to find the woman he had once loved. I’ve thought about that a lot in the last few years, that if Anwar hadn’t worked on that building site, he might never have gone looking for Megna, and if he hadn’t done that, I might still be in the dark about my past. I’ve only ever been a hair away from being utterly alone in the world, Elijah, and it was Anwar who shone a light where once there was only darkness.

I now have a confession to make (another one? But yes). This isn’t the first time I have been back to the place we met. Not the first time I’ve stalked these streets, hoping to run into you. I was here last year for Bettina’s graduation. Early summer and the streets pink with fallen apple blossoms. Everything looked the same. Bettina had accepted a job at Stanford, and I helped her pack our little apartment into a U-Haul she was going to drive all the way across the country herself. When I expressed some concern, she assured me she was equipped with addresses of a carefully curated series of men she could call on the way — an insurance broker in Hartford, an engineer in Las Vegas, a creative writing professor in Iowa City. I waved as she drove away, holding on to the first edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude she had given to me as a parting gift. That was last year. When I wrote to tell her I was coming back, she offered to let me rent the place. I pay her a fraction of the sum she could get elsewhere, but she insisted and I don’t have the will to refuse. I bought a futon and taped a photograph of Nina Simone on the wall above my head, but otherwise it is completely empty.

You don’t care about any of this. The present is full of mundanities. What happened next, Elijah? The dig ended and I had to go home. My parents came to collect me at the airport. I was quick to regress to childhood patterns and greeted them meanly, keeping most of the episode to myself, already smothered by their worry.

On the plane I had sat next to a man who repeatedly asked me if I was Japanese. I had closed my eyes and pretended to sleep and seen Zamzam’s face and wondered whether his anger at his father had made some part of him long to be caught. Zamzam’s father wasn’t unlike my own father, who had joined a movement to break away from an old country. My father was called a freedom fighter because his side had won and now he had a passport and a parliament and a vote, none of which Zamzam would ever have. Zamzam would die in that prison, and the world would remain divided between people who had countries and people who did not.

‘My baby’s home,’ my mother said.

‘I don’t want to talk,’ I murmured, depressed at the sight of her.

My message to you was: Baby It’s Cold Outside . And, a few minutes later, you replied: You Go to My Head .

I folded myself into the front seat and leaned my head against the window, immune to the sight of my city, the airport road flanked on either side by fields of paddy, electric wires dangling low across the highway, and the watery air making everything heavy and indolent. ‘Rashid said to phone him when you land,’ Ammoo said.

Rashid had already sent me several text messages. I begged him not to come. ‘Not today,’ I said. ‘I’m tired and I look terrible. I’ll see you tomorrow.’ He appeared in the early evening. I had struggled to wash the sand out of my hair, so Bashonti, our cook, was putting olive oil on my scalp.

‘I told you to wait,’ I said.

‘You’re full of shit,’ he replied.

Bashonti released my hair. ‘Bhaiya, look at this mess.’ She pointed to my face, the rings of sunburn around my eyes.

Rashid was wearing a waistcoat over his shirt that emphasised his slim frame and the bulk of his upper arms. He had cut his hair short and changed his aftershave, but the rest of him was the same, his square forehead, his deep-set eyes and slightly flared nostrils. Looking at him, I remembered he’d had a bar installed over his bedroom door, that he pulled himself up on it every morning before going downstairs to eat breakfast with his mother. I was comforted by the sight of him, and I thought about resting my head against his shoulder, forehead to clavicle, and how reassuring that would be, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Zamzam, and Diana, and the end of my life as I’d known it.

‘Tell me everything,’ he said.

Outside, I heard the sound of a neighbour scolding someone, a child perhaps or a servant. The blood pumped against my scalp where Bashonti had been aggressive with the brush. I’ll never be a palaeontologist, I wanted to say, but I knew he wouldn’t be able to pretend convincingly that this mattered to him. ‘One of the people on my dig got into trouble and they had to shut it down,’ I said.

We ate dinner together, Rashid and my parents and my flattened hair, Bashonti piling rice onto his plate. Rashid spoke mostly to Ammoo, telling her about the new factory he and his father were opening out in Savar. After dinner my parents claimed they were craving ice cream and made a point of letting us know they would be gone for an hour.

When I was twelve we went to Thailand with Rashid’s family. My father’s business hadn’t yet taken off, so we stayed at a modest hotel across the street from the beach, even though Rashid’s parents could afford much better. Rashid spent the entire holiday watching a Test series between the West Indies and Australia while I lay in the hammock under a tree beside the kidney-shaped pool. One day, while I was staring up at the sky and thinking about Sylvia Plath’s suicide, Rashid nudged me with his foot and said, ‘Let’s go swimming.’ And, even though I had been waiting desperately for him to notice me, I knew there was nothing I could say that wouldn’t embarrass me later, so I ignored him, picking at the jute fibres on my hammock. ‘C’mon,’ he said again, tapping the top of my head, ‘it’s so fucking hot.’ It was thrilling to me that he would say the word ‘fucking’ out loud, and to me. ‘I don’t know how to swim,’ I said, still not able to look at him. ‘It’s okay,’ he said, ‘you can just float.’