Tahmima Anam - The Bones of Grace

The Shipsafe office was on a small paved road off the highway and just a few steps from the beach. There were just two rooms — one in front with a veranda overlooking a small patch of grass where someone had planted onions and coriander, and another adjacent to the kitchen that served as a small meeting room. I was assigned a heavy wooden desk with a glass top in the front room. There was a caretaker who was in charge of keeping the place clean who did a reasonable fish curry for lunch. In the evenings I would have to fend for myself.

Bilal filled the kettle and we shared a pot of tea on my new desk. I asked him a few more questions about his wedding, and he showed me another photograph, this time of himself sitting on the dais with his bride under a red-and-yellow canopy. Then he brought up Gabriela, the British researcher who I had been brought on to help.

She had recently landed in Chittagong after four years on the Rainbow Warrior , and was here to complete the initial interviews for the film, after which the director and the crew would arrive in several months. She spoke a few words of Bangla, learned in London before she had set off for Chittagong. ‘Why hasn’t it worked out?’ I asked him. I saw him look out into the garden. ‘She’s foreign,’ he finally said, lifting up his shoulder. ‘She asks too many questions.’

‘Isn’t that why she’s here?’

‘Mind if I smoke?’ he said, taking out a box of Benson & Hedges before I could reply. He brought an ashtray over from his desk on the other side of the room, and then he said, ‘I don’t trust her.’ I tried to press him further, but he withdrew into silence, leaning back in his chair and pulling hard on his cigarette. After a long time he said, ‘It’s a cruel industry. For years we’ve been working slowly, patiently with the owners. Suddenly she comes and tells us how terrible things are. A film isn’t going to change anything.’

I didn’t want to get drawn into a debate about the purpose of art. Bilal had a long scar running along his forearm, which he exposed as he flicked his cigarette stub to the ground. I asked him about the scar and he said his father had taken a razor blade and sliced through his flesh once when he was about twelve because he had been caught kissing his cousin. ‘On the mouth,’ he said, putting a finger on his lip. ‘The servant found us and she dragged me outside by my ear. Abba was shaving.’

The story seemed to relax him. He pulled another chair towards us and stretched out his legs.

‘Sometimes people prefer talking to strangers,’ I suggested.

‘Nobody is going to tell that woman anything,’ he said.

The apartment was much nicer than the office, with windows on two sides, one looking onto the road, the other through to the beach beyond. There were two bedrooms and a small sitting area, a dining table, a chair and a few large square cushions on the floor. I took the smaller, empty bedroom. After unpacking my bag and stringing up my mosquito net, I pulled the chair over to the window and ate the noodles Komola had packed for me, listening to the distant whine of the shoreline smelter. Dusk was quickly followed by darkness, and just as I was about to switch off the overhead light and try to sleep, the front door opened and Gabriela entered.

She stopped for a moment, then, realising who I was, bounded over and threw her arms around me. She was fortyish, tall and muscular, with reddish-brown hair. ‘Thank bloody Jesus you’re here,’ she said. I returned her smile. Without sitting or putting down the large bag slung over her shoulder, she began to bombard me with questions. Why were the workers so young? Where had they all come from? Where were their parents? And why on God’s great earth would anyone choose this beach, with its glassy water and buttery sand, to destroy ships, rather than sunbathe and swim and fall in love? She had been there for a month and the workers had refused to talk to her.

‘It’s like their mouths are sewn shut.’

I knew why already, five minutes into meeting her. The way she dressed, for instance. Her shirt was open two buttons too far. She had rolled up her sleeves past her elbows, revealing the articulated muscles of her upper arms. Her jeans were tight and her ass was exposed because she had tucked in her shirt. How would anyone know where to look, much less open their mouths and tell her anything? She had pierced her nose, and three studs up each ear, and there was a small jewel above her lip, where a mole or a birthmark might be. She reminded me of a vintage cigarette advertisement, with the woman flexing her biceps. A cross between that and a hippy and a biker. I was a little disgusted but also thrilled to be in the presence of someone so completely out of context.

Gabriela offered me the bigger room, but I declined. ‘Come and lounge on the bed for a few minutes at least,’ she said. ‘There’s nowhere comfy to sit.’ She opened a bottle of tequila and insisted I take a swig. ‘This shit is the only stuff that keeps me sane.’ I was going to say no, but then I thought, what the hell, it’s not like I’m pregnant. I tipped the bottle into my mouth and it burned a hole all the way down to my stomach. She kept telling me how glad she was to see me. ‘Tell me what we’re going to do. I’m at a dead end here.’

‘I don’t know yet,’ I said, replying honestly. ‘Give me a few days to think about it. Humans aren’t really my specialty.’

‘Really? Rubana told me you were good at this kind of stuff. She said you were unusually perceptive. And she said something else, I can’t remember what.’

‘I’m a palaeontologist.’

‘You’re joking,’ she said, slapping her hand on the bedcover.

‘My subjects are mostly dead.’

‘You’re wasted.’

‘I am, actually. Just a little.’

‘No, I mean Rubana — she said you were wasted. I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I assumed you were in some dead-end job or something. But you’re into dinosaurs, that’s not what I expected.’

I laughed, leaning back on the bed. ‘Well, Rubana and my mother have a very specific definition of a meaningful life.’

‘And you are way hotter than I’d imagined.’

‘I had a miscarriage,’ I said, confessing before I realised what I was doing.

‘Oh shit, I’m sorry.’

She passed me the bottle and I took another swig. I leaned back further and saw the ceiling swimming above me. When I was too tired to keep my eyes open, I made my way to my own bed, my head throbbing, and retreated under the mosquito net.

The next morning Gabriela took me to the beach. It was my first proper sighting of the Prosperity Shipbreaking. You are reading this now and so your image of the place is as fixed in your mind as it is in mine. What I remember thinking, when I first set eyes on it, was that it was a place where I could punish myself as much as I liked without anyone noticing, because it was the least alive landscape in the world, not because it was ugly, but because it was beautiful, and ruined.

The ship I had caught sight of the day before — its name, I was later told, was Splendour — was still lying on its side, its propeller pointing towards the sky. Its bridge was gone, its hull sliced away like meat from a carcass. On the shoreline, the smelter was going at full speed, and the air was thick with the astringent smell of burning metal. I stood there for a long time with a sense of being at the edge of the world, where a person might see, or do, anything. Gabriela pointed out a man in the distance, suspended from the deck of a skyscraper-high ship with only a rope around his waist. ‘Can you believe this shit?’ she said.

The shipbreaking yards consisted of narrow rectangles of oceanfront. From the highway, you could see a high wall with double gates every hundred yards or so. But once you entered one of the yards, you could look across the whole expanse of the bay, at one ship after another in various states of decay. You could look east or west and see a mile-long oil tanker, or a container ship, or a fragment of something that used to be seafaring and was now only a collapsed stretch of metal. And if you looked closer, if you really concentrated, you would see the tiny shapes of people hanging from the ships, breaking them apart with blowtorches and hammers.