Tahmima Anam: The Bones of Grace

I caused a stir as I moved through the crowd. A cheer went up from somewhere in the kitchen. Bettina, larger than me in every way, bones and height and volume, enveloped me in a smothering hug and passed me a plastic cup of sangria. ‘So what happened?’ she asked, pulling her thick hair into a ponytail.

I plucked an orange segment out of my cup. ‘It was so strange. I was listening to the music, and there was this guy there, and then I started to cry.’

‘It was bound to happen,’ Bettina said, fanning her face. She liked to act as if nothing could surprise her when it came to men. I took a large gulp of sangria and followed her into the living room. Bettina and I had met a few weeks into my first fall at Harvard, when I had decided to take a shortcut through Tozzer Library on my way to the Museum of Comparative Zoology. I entered the building, expecting an ordinary arrangement of books, but instead came upon a very dark room, and, when I dove further in, the lights suddenly came on and illuminated a totem rising two, three storeys into the gallery. I was terrified and let out a small yelp, which Bettina, a few feet behind me, witnessed and found hilarious.

We started talking and she mentioned she was looking for a roommate. At the time I was living in a tiny room in one of the dorms off Kirkland Street, and the walls were so thin I could hear my neighbour, a doctoral student in Political Philosophy, clicking her retainer into her mouth at night. It turned out Bettina’s first choice, a law student whose boyfriend lived in New York, so she would only have been there a few days every week — absence being the holy grail of roommate desirability — had backed out at the last minute.

Our first weeks together were awkward, because Bettina seemed to inhale all the oxygen in the apartment, but it didn’t take long for little tendernesses to grow between us. One day I offered to make dinner, and Bettina fell in love with the one dish I could cook competently, which was dal with spicy omelette. And then, in the first cold snap of the year, I caught the flu, and Bettina made ginger tea and introduced me to TV I’d never seen before, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Gilmore Girls . After that, we shopped at Trader Joe’s on the weekend, went to the occasional movie together, and even sat in on each other’s classes. (I accompanied her to Homi Bhabha’s seminar on melancholia, and she came to my Analytical Palaeontology course. She claimed I got the better deal, and I had to agree.)

Bettina’s parents had helped her buy the apartment, a two-bedroom flat on Trowbridge, when she had started graduate school. I brought back a few things from Dhaka after the first winter holiday, a clock made out of recycled paper, a length of cloth studded with small round mirrors creating a partition between the living room and the kitchen. We found a battered sofa on the street and dragged it inside with the help of Bettina’s boyfriend, a master’s student at the Ed School, who was dispatched a few weeks later when she grew bored of him. We named the sofa Edvar, after him, and the armchair, donated by an aunt of Bettina, Maude. The apartment was warm and more like home than I had ever imagined I could be in America, and, looking around, I realised it would be a long time before I had a place of my own again.

‘The palaeontologists are hanging out by themselves, as usual,’ Bettina complained, collapsing on Maude.

‘The anthropologists are doing their best to look intimidating.’

‘And failing.’

I took another sip from the plastic cup and felt the warmth of wine and sugar spreading through my body. I wanted an excuse to talk about you. ‘So this guy, I haven’t seen him around campus before. Turns out he’s a Philosophy grad.’

‘What’s his name?’ Bettina asked.

‘Elijah Strong.’

Bettina rolled her eyes. ‘Seriously?’

‘Seriously.’ A thought suddenly occurred to me. ‘Unless he gave me a fake name. Do you think he gave me a fake name?’

‘Definitely. In the meantime, there’s pie.’

I replayed our conversation in my mind and decided no, you hadn’t lied, Elijah Strong really was your name. Later that night, I would look you up and find a photograph taken before you’d grown your beard and made you look very young, and for a moment I thought it wasn’t you, but of course it was. ‘Pie?’

‘As American as. I turned the oven on in this crazy heat to lure you back to our shores.’

We had been debating for months about whether I should return to Cambridge after my fieldwork. In the end, I had decided I wouldn’t. I could just as easily write my thesis in Dhaka, where I could be closer to the dig and closer to Rashid. I had decided this despite knowing the world was full of doctoral students who never finished their degrees. My ambivalence was compounded by my lack of determination to stay in your country — I’d never dreamed, like others I knew from back home, of living in America. When I was a teenager, I had once visited New York with my parents. My father had a cousin on Long Island, and we stayed in the guest-room of a two-storey house off the highway. I recalled an impressively fluffy wall-to-wall carpet and large rooms that smelled of onions. I had wondered why all the women covered their heads and why there were framed Arabic inscriptions on the wall above every doorway. When an alarm clock belted out a canned Azaan, I had not been able to stop myself from laughing. My mother had scolded me, but I knew she was secretly judging too, that in her mind an immigrant was someone who had abandoned their country.

That was all I had known of America before landing in the small college town I had chosen for my undergraduate degree — it was before my parents’ fortunes changed, and it was the only place that had offered me a scholarship. Those four years were spent in misery, frigid winters and lonely weekends, marooned among other international students with no car. It wasn’t until I discovered palaeontology, and the whale, that it began to crystallise in my mind, the prospect of making a life for myself, here where people cared about the bones of animals that had lived far before memory or human ambition. Still, I couldn’t shake the image of that house on Long Island, the way all the people from home clung to each other. To my parents and to Rashid, I said nothing about the allure of living here; to my friends, like Bettina, I explained that there was no way I would settle anywhere but Dhaka. My parents were there, I was an only child, and they had lived through a war. To construct my loyalties in any other way would constitute a betrayal, and I was, above all things, aware of my commitments.

I spotted Kyung-Ju and Brian, a boy from my cohort, and pushed through the crowd to them. My lab partner was drunk, her thin, bluish-black hair sticking to her forehead. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Ready for your big dig?’

‘You had enough to drink?’

Kyung-Ju clawed the air. ‘I’m the Asian tiger. I’m the Asian tiger.’ The slight animosity that had rippled through the lab when I had been chosen over the others to work on the dig in Pakistan had turned brittle over the course of the spring. Underneath it all was the implication that I had been chosen because I had a Muslim name and spoke a few words of Urdu. No one had been allowed near Dera Bugti since the start of the war in Afghanistan in 2001, but somehow the leader of the expedition, Professor Bartholomew Jones, had been granted permission to dig around the Western Suleiman. If we were successful, we had a chance to make a significant discovery in the field.

All the graduate students in my department had applied for the place. I had waited until the last day to submit my application, uploading the essay with minutes to spare. And, instead of describing all the technical skills I would bring to the team, I painted a picture of the world as it might have appeared to Ambulocetus : the landscape of the Early Eocene Era after the extinction of dinosaurs, home to the whale who both walked and swam, an amphibian that was also a tetrapod, a creature embracing its duality, its attraction to both the lure of the seas and the comforts of land. I had sent off the essay and decided to think very little of it, telling myself I would have to do my thesis research in a library while secretly believing they would choose me, not because of my name, but because there was poetry in Ambulocetus , and she demanded someone who would understand that. Kyung-Ju had congratulated me after the announcement, but I knew it was particularly difficult for her. She worked harder than me, had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Eocene, and answered to parents who, unlike mine, took a daily interest in her progress.