Tahmima Anam - The Bones of Grace

‘You see? She holds the money. The food, everything. You need something, you ask her. You need medicine, she gets it for you. If she wants, she can throw you out. Remember that.’

Amma is so shocked she doesn’t notice I’m touching her feet and then I’m gone.

Before I go I take some money out of the trunk and leave it with the mullah. A deal is a deal, even if I didn’t get shit in return.

It’s late by the time I leave. I take a rickshaw to the bus station on the other side of the market. Bus will take me to the ferry, ferry to the other side of the river.

*

On the road either side of me, all the paddy fields are flooded. Why, I ask the boy sitting next to me on the bus. He’s hungry, I can tell by the way he stares at my throat, like he wants to take a bite out. I haven’t seen winter rice for ten years, but I know what it looks like, yellow and brown and green. And it’s dry by now, January when it’s cold and there’s no rain. ‘That’s not rice,’ the boy says, with a big sag of his shoulder. ‘It’s shrimp.’

I look closer. The water’s dark. I try to smell it. The little worms are crawling around in there like a giant itch.

The bus stops and the boy gets up. ‘I work here,’ he says. ‘Lot of money in shrimp, if you want I can talk to my boss.’

I was wrong. Boy wasn’t hungry, he was looking at my throat thinking, this old bastard needs a job.

I ask a few other people about the shrimp. They say the water’s gone salty because the shrimp like it that way. I wonder if that’s why Shathi’s been complaining about the water in our well. I don’t believe her. I think it’s as sweet as ever. I tell her, you want to know salty? Stand out in the desert with a basket of sand on your head, then you’ll know what salty tastes like — your sweat will make your lips shrink from your teeth. Salt is the sea pounding against the shore, mocking you when you’re so dried out you can’t swallow and there’s an hour to go before the lunch bell. Salt is the tear that humiliates your cheek when you want a woman and you can’t go home.

But maybe she’s right, maybe the village water is salty and my tongue doesn’t know the difference. Another thing those bastards took from me.

An old woman sits down next to me, smelling of mustard oil. After Bagerhat the road is smooth. She takes out a triangle of paan and stuffs it into her mouth. A few minutes later she’ll be leaning over me and spitting out the window. Bus speeds up and I’m feeling the wind in my cheeks, and definitely I think I’m gonna find Megna. Somewhere out there she’s been waiting for me with my kid. I’m thinking this and I drift off with my head against the top of the window until sure enough, the old woman wakes me up, sticks her head out into the road, and hacks a mouthful of orange sludge into the shrimpy winter air.

I reach Barisal and from there I take another bus. We cross the Meghna on a ferry in the middle of the night. It’s cold and I’m wrapping my arms around myself. I fall asleep with my bag tied around my leg, and when the sun rises, I see the land is different, the trees clumped together, the road going up and down, dark hills on either side. I get off the bus and climb into a rickshaw and head for the village. Now it’s early morning and there’s a thin fog making everything sad, and for the first time I wonder if I won’t find her after all, or, worse, if she’s married to some other bastard and he’s raising my kid.

Here I come, I say to her. I’m your hero. Bollywood chorus follows me everywhere I go. Clapping and an army of dancers. I’ll give you all my money, my sins will be forgiven, we’ll live together in peace with our little magic seed.

The village is at the end of a narrow dirt road. A cluster of houses in a circle, mud and tin shacks. Villages like this all up and down the country. I’m noticing now the things wife does to make it nice at home, the little border of henna bushes and the pattern she drew on the frame of our door. Without it, a place can look empty, like no one’s ever loved it, just used the land for food, the cheap air to keep you from death, the water to drink and clean behind your ears so you can pray to God without filth in your folds.

I ask around for Megna’s people. Two or three can’t help me. A kid points me in the right direction. Then I’m standing in front of an open doorway and clearing my throat. A man comes out, old man, long arms and a weak chest, a shawl wrapped around his head and shoulders.

‘I’m looking for Fatema Ansar’s people,’ I say, ‘from this village.’

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m her cousin — from the other side.’

‘Khulna side?’

‘Yes, Labonchora.’

‘Come in, come in,’ he says. Waving me inside to a room so dark I have to close my eyes for a minute. When I open them I can see a bed, a stove, and a pile of cucumbers on the ground. He squats, peels one, and offers it to me. It’s bitter but I don’t mind. I haven’t eaten since last night and I’m hungry as a goat.

‘Labonchora,’ he says slowly. ‘You came all this way?’

I had prepared an answer. ‘She owned some things there, a cow, a small piece of land. After she died the land has just been there, so I’m looking for her people. I want to buy the land, make sure whoever is owed is paid.’

‘She owned a piece of land? How much?’

‘A katha. Field next to my own. Wife thinks we should plant sesame, you know how women are. Won’t let me forget it.’

He picks up another cucumber and I’m hoping he’s going to offer it to me. He looks at me strangely and I know what he’s thinking, why don’t I just take the land, plant whatever I want on it, who’s going to say otherwise? She’s a woman, and she’s dead.

‘Thing is,’ I say, ‘people tell me she cursed the land.’

He looks up at me and nods slowly. ‘I can see she might have been a witch.’

‘So if I till it, nothing’s going to come up. I’ll break my back and only rocks. Waste of my sweat.’

‘You won’t get a single grain of rice out of it.’

‘Not a sesame seed.’

He hands me the cucumber and it disappears into my gullet.

‘You’re looking for the daughter,’ he said. He stood up and took a few steps towards the bed. ‘She’s her only people.’

I don’t say anything. I’m holding my breath.

‘That girl killed her.’

I’m waiting for him to get his piece out.

‘Took the life out of her skin.’

I mutter something he expects me to say, ‘God’s will’ and all that. He wipes his eyes, cloudy anyway.

‘What happened to her, the daughter?’ I’m trying to ask it slowly.

‘We weren’t going to have her, not with another mouth coming. She came, but we said no. Sent her away.’

‘Back to Khulna?’

‘Tried to convince me. Said she’d work hard, take a job anywhere.’ He rubbed his hand over his jaw, as if she was still in the room, trying to get him to say yes. ‘Chittagong, she said. I gave her the bus money.’ Maybe he was feeling sorry for her now. Then he said, ‘Carrying around someone’s bastard. Couldn’t have that.’

‘Yes, you never know with women like that.’ The mud floor is freezing and I want something real to eat.

‘Take up with anyone.’

‘No morals.’

‘Whore.’

When I heard him call her that, I wanted to break his arm, but it was only the word I was using myself all this time. Calling her a slut whenever I wanted to forget her, pull her face out of my dreams. So I thought, maybe this is the word people use when they love someone they’re not supposed to, and with that I left him, said my farewells and gave him a bit of money, and he took it without saying a word, maybe because he was desperate, or because he could smell I was hiding something, and we both knew that if he took the money, if anyone asked, he would be obliged to tell them nothing, only that a relative of the dead woman had come to pay his respects.