Tahmima Anam - The Bones of Grace

After the reception we drove to Rashid’s house, which was draped with strands of light that stretched out onto the sidewalk beyond the gate. Inside, Ruby was taking over the whole room, happy because she’d convinced me to wear a gold chain across my forehead and fasten it to my hair with a safety pin, annoyed because I’d refused to wear three necklaces staggered on top of one another so that the ornaments would have started at my navel and ended high on my neck, triumphant because now that I was part of the family she could boss me around and tell me what to wear. In the midst of all this happy/unhappy, Rashid picked me up and stepped over the threshold with the embroidered nagra shoes he wore to match his wedding sherwani, lowering me down so that I could dip my feet into a wide bowl of milk. Then rice was thrown over our heads, prayers whispered and blown over us, already the post-mortem of the reception in full swing — was the biryani a little oily do you think, yes, Reeta S had decorated the hall beautifully, excellent choice of orchids and white roses, doesn’t our Rashid look like a prince — and my parents were nowhere to be seen, because I was theirs now, Rashid and Dolly and Bulbul and Ruby’s, wearing, as tradition dictated, not a stitch of my old clothes, dressed head to toe in things Rashid’s family had given me, right down to the gold thong Ruby had chosen from a New York lingerie boutique, the most uncomfortable, scratchy thing to have ever touched me.

A big show was made of ushering us into the bedroom. I was buried under so much make-up, my sari pinned together with so many safety pins, that it took a full hour for me to undress. I looked at myself in the mirror in my blouse and petticoat, dark streaks across my eyelids where the liner had been difficult to remove. I stepped into the shower to wash out the hairspray, struggling to untangle the complicated bun at the back of my head. When I came out of the bathroom in my old sweatpants and T-shirt instead of the silk negligée I’d been given, Rashid was on the armchair with an opened bottle of champagne. He had removed his shoes and socks, and the top button of his sherwani was undone.

‘What, no sexy nightie?’

‘Sorry. I’m tired.’ I had decided to say it now, because if I waited any longer it would seem as though I was hiding from him, and for all the years that stretched ahead, I wanted it known, as a matter of record, that I had been honest from the very first day. I looked into his face, as familiar to me as my own reflection, his curved nose and flared nostrils, dark, heavy eyebrows, the impressive eddy of ink-black hair. ‘Listen, there’s something I have to tell you.’

He reached under my T-shirt and pulled me towards him. ‘Later,’ he said, his mouth arching towards mine.

I brushed his lips lightly. ‘No, really. It will just take a minute.’

He sighed, folded his hands on his lap. ‘Okay, Mrs Khondkar, I’m all ears.’

‘Don’t call me that.’

‘I’m just saying it out of love.’

‘I’m sorry. Look, we have to talk about this, because we’re married now, and someday there might be children, and these things need to be out in the open.’

‘So serious.’

‘I’m not Ammoo and Abboo’s biological child.’ I took the champagne glass from his hand and drained it. Immediately it made me light-headed. ‘I’m adopted. My parents never told anyone. They only told me once, when I was nine — it was my birthday — and we never talked about it again.’

He reached down to the floor and picked up the bottle. When he turned to me again he was smiling. ‘Sweetheart, I know.’

‘What?’

‘I’ve always known, Zee. My parents told me years ago.’ Rashid was still chuckling as he refilled the glass.

I took another sip and let the words sink in for a minute. ‘All this time?’ I gestured with my hand and a dribble of champagne spilled onto my lap.

‘Listen,’ he said, taking the glass from my hand, ‘it’s nothing. My parents know, and nobody minds. I love you. Everyone loves you.’ He kissed me on the forehead. ‘Now I want my wedding-night fuck.’

Nobody minds. There was generosity there, and something else — forgiveness, maybe. I didn’t know what I had to be sorry for, but I was sorry, and he was telling me it was all right. I tried to imagine the conversation he would have had with his parents — when? — about how to handle the story if it were to get out, if other relatives got involved and questioned the wisdom of forming an alliance with a girl of uncertain provenance. Maybe they had even discussed it with Ammoo and Abboo. What had my parents said? Were they grateful because the Khondkars were willing to stand behind them, to legitimise their daughter by sanctioning the marriage?

Elijah, I thought back at that moment to what you said to me about the longing of the soul. The loneliness of being only in one body, when the spirit wanted nothing but communion. You didn’t try to make me feel better, you made my fears seem unremarkable, just another small instance of the universal need for kinship. But Rashid was trying too, in his own way, pressing his lips against my neck, grazing my breast with the back of his hand. I allowed myself to enjoy his caresses, his hand firm against my back. We kissed. I tasted champagne and the familiar tang of his breath. He passed me the champagne again and I took another swig from the glass, the fizz going all the way to the back of my throat. Our bed was decorated with roses, and garlands were suspended from the ceiling and taped to the wall. Everything smelled pungent and slightly rotting. Rashid peeled back the bedcover and lay me gently on the bed. We made love quietly, both tired from the day, and, although we had done it before in this room, the smell of the flowers and the fresh paint and the lingering heaviness on my face and the thought that everyone else in the house knew what we were about to do weighted and dulled the ordinary gestures of sex, and afterwards Rashid got up to fold his clothes and brush his teeth, and by the time he came back to bed I was almost asleep, so that I was only vaguely aware of his hand on my hip, his breath behind my ear.

In the morning my parents arrived as guests in my new home. The cook piled chicken korma onto my plate, and Dolly gave me the key to the drawer in my closet, telling me to lock my things away in it whenever I left the upper floor of the house, in fact to lock the bedroom door itself because you never did know with the servants. It suddenly occurred to me that though Rashid and I had grown up within a few minutes of each other, so that moving into his house should have felt like little more than moving from one end of my parents’ apartment to the other, it was another world, here in the three-storey building with the swimming pool on the roof, locking doors behind me, korma for breakfast, a fleet of cars in the basement, a suspicion of servants, because you never did know, except that I did know, and what I knew made me bitterly sad, the conversation from the night before grating on me as I remembered the pity and absolution in his voice. It was only the first day and already I felt the depths of the mistake, touching me like the ink from a stray pen in my pocket.

Every night there was an invitation to a relative’s house for dinner, and, the following Friday, a visit to a factory that Bulbul owned. Occasionally there was the thrill of closing the door behind us and sneaking in a quick kiss, and once or twice Rashid played some of our favourite songs on the music system he had set up around our bed, and we held each other under the canopy of drying flowers, and in those moments there was the feeling of being out of context, away from the brocade saris and the thousands of pleasantries that had to float out of my mouth, a sense of it being just the two of us, old friends and childhood sweethearts finally reaching the natural conclusion of something we had started many years before. But then the rest of my life would come into focus, and I would catch a glimpse of the person I used to be, was, in fact, just months ago, the sort of person who would travel across the world to dig whale bones out of the ground, and in those moments I felt as if I was battling a phantom, a woman who haunted my otherwise perfect life.