Tahmima Anam - The Bones of Grace

Rashid and I sat in one place while people came up one by one and congratulated us. We ate fried bread and sour potato curry. Sally, who had pinned her sari under the swell of her pregnancy, came to tell me I looked beautiful but also like I had been given a cancer diagnosis. ‘What’s wrong, bitch?’ she said. ‘Supposed to be all happiness and sugar.’

After most of the guests left, dinner was served in the dining room. Dolly’s sister Molly, her husband, their son Faisal and their daughter Eliza were there, as well as Bulbul’s mother. Everyone hugged each other again and said congratulations. The long mahogany table had been laid out in red and gold. Bulbul took the head of the table and invited my father to sit at the other end. ‘Oh no,’ Abboo said, ‘I couldn’t,’ so Rashid took his place instead, leaving me between Molly and her son, who had the habit of drumming on whatever surface he could find, in this case moving between his knee and the gold-trimmed plate that he found in front of him. Having accepted my father’s invitation to get stoned, I was extremely hungry. It occurred to me that this may, in fact, be a regular habit for Abboo — how else did he manage to appear so relaxed under any and all circumstances? Yes, of course, he must be a habitual smoker — why hadn’t I seen it before? Good for him, I said to myself, he deserves it, it’s not as if he gambles or stays out late or is ever mean to anyone. I looked over at my father and gave him a meaningful wink, then tuned into the conversation. Bulbul was making a toast, welcoming us into the family, and then we all raised our water glasses.

‘So,’ Molly said, ‘Rashid told me you study physics.’ She had applied orange nail polish to every other nail, and French-manicured the ones in between.

‘No, not really — I’m a marine palaeontologist.’

‘It’s all the same, no? Microscopes and all that.’ She picked up her fork and dipped it into the salad that had just been served by a waiter in white gloves.

‘Sure,’ I agreed. I looked over at Ammoo, who was sitting next to Bulbul. She was flanked on her left by Rashid’s uncle. After the salad we were served roast duck, followed by mini tarte Tatins, which were warm and delicious. I kept myself entertained by asking Molly about her beauty regime, which consisted of daily facials with various fresh fruits and vegetables, a weekly wash and blow-dry, and special treatments such as bleaching her face and neck when she had somewhere in particular she needed to be. ‘I used to go to Dazzle,’ she explained, ‘but the girls were getting too smart. They know everyone by name. I said na, none of this friendliness. So now I go to Neelo’s.’

I nodded. From across the table, Dolly called out to everyone, ‘I’m getting another daughter!’ She curled her hand around her mouth so her words would travel to the other side of the room.

‘Poor Dolly, always wanted more girls. I tell her, boys are better, no talk-back. My Eliza, she has such a mouth. But Alhamdulillah, she is a good girl.’ Molly, like a lot of women of her stature, used religious words like punctuation. When someday Molly’s children got older and started taking drugs, or if she ever had a health scare, or her husband started fooling around, she would start peppering more of her speech with God words, Alhamdulillah, Mashallah, Inshallah, etc.; then she would start praying conspicuously, tucking a mat under her arm whenever she went to a party, then maybe she would take a five-star holiday to Mecca, uploading photographs of herself smiling in a burkha, to which her friends would comment, ‘Mash’Allah’, using the apostrophe in the appropriate place to show that they too understood God’s punctuation. My father, still an atheist, had explained this to Ammoo and me numerous times, and we had all giggled about it, sitting around the table on the balcony and wondering what people would say if they could hear us. I let out a small laugh now, but Molly didn’t notice, she was telling me how well Eliza was doing in school, that all the teachers loved her and that she had even received a prize for attendance.

After the tarte Tatin, the waiter passed around small dishes of ice cream while taking everyone’s order for coffee or tea. I looked around the room. Abboo was in conversation with Molly’s husband, who owned three garment factories and always wore a Bluetooth earpiece. Ammoo was concentrating on her ice cream, and Rashid was showing Eliza something on his phone. After the waiter retreated, Rashid stood up and called everyone to attention. ‘I have a gift for my future in-laws,’ he began. From behind his chair, he produced a rectangular package wrapped in brown paper and passed it to my father. ‘Be careful,’ he said, ‘it’s fragile.’

We gathered around as Abboo tugged at the jute string that held the wrapping together. He pulled the paper away. The framed photograph was an enlarged black-and-white, showing two young men with their arms around each other. They looked at the camera and smiled. They were dressed in matching drainpipe trousers and one of them wore a bandana around his forehead and held up two fingers in a peace sign. In the background, grainy and grey, was the ornate façade of Curzon Hall, the science faculty where they studied. When Abboo looked up, his eyes were filled with tears. ‘Where did you get this?’

‘I met an old freedom-fighter friend of yours, and he had this photograph in his collection.’

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I never took many photographs with my brother. I will cherish this.’

A hush fell across the room as my parents embraced. ‘Thank you,’ I mouthed to Rashid. He winked at me and I felt a wave of affection for him. And then Bulbul led us in a round of applause, and the tea arrived, Molly’s phone rang, and everyone leaned back in their chairs and allowed the evening to come to an end.

And that is how, dear Elijah, I was engaged to be married to someone other than you. I sent you a message without encryption that evening: I am engaged , it said, and, seconds later, you replied: I Hold No Grudge .

Dolly convinced my mother to take a few days off so we could do the wedding shopping in Calcutta. Ammoo had spent the weeks after the engagement party in Sirajganj, where she had met a group of Birangona women who had been kept in rape camps during the war. The women were in their sixties now, but they still lived together in a shelter that had been set up for them just after independence. She went at first for one night, and then decided to stay for a week because two of the women had recently died of ovarian cancer and she wanted to set up a screening clinic with the local health department. She called and said she might try and persuade the Health Minister to come down. Did you know (her sentences often started this way), the Pakistan Army used to shave their heads because they might use their hair to hang themselves. I did know this, she had told me many times.

In college, after taking a class on Feminism, Selfhood, and Subjectivity, I had read Andrea Dworkin and decided that I had been the product of rape. My father had raped my mother and my mother had given me up for adoption because the sight of my face made her want to be sick. I walked around with this heavy, sludgy feeling in my bones for a few weeks. I practised saying to myself in the mirror that I was the product of rape, wondering how I might introduce such a subject in conversation, deciding it would most definitely give me some cachet with certain types of people. Sometimes I felt like taking a little razor to my skin, maybe my arm or the inside of my leg. I tried it a few times, but I was disgusted by the sight of my own blood, and the relief was only temporary, and eventually I returned to the thought less and less, reminded only when my mother brought up the subject of rape, which she did more often than you would imagine a person does in the course of ordinary conversation.