Tahmima Anam - The Bones of Grace

Before I departed for Cambridge, I called Anwar. I had been thinking of his story — in particular the moment he had been betrayed by his friends. What did he think of them now, I asked. Was he angry with them for giving him hope and then snatching it away, or did he forgive them? And he said, for a long time he’d harboured fantasies of taking revenge on them. Not just them, but also the foreman in Dubai, and his uncle, who had persuaded him to leave Megna in the first place. He said he had sometimes lain awake at night and counted all the ways they might go. But now that time had passed, he had decided to keep his memories of those events at a distance, to tell himself the whole thing had happened to someone else. And now that it was going to be put down in black and white, he could say this: he was grateful to them, because one thing leads to another, and on balance, he had won. It wasn’t a religious thing, he was careful to say, he wasn’t lying down in front of his fate. But, he said, you can’t be angry at the past. Not for ever.

I wish I could be as sanguine as Anwar. I wish, as I wrote down our story, that I could be grateful it existed at all, that I fell in love with you and discovered there was something beyond, something grander than the mystery of my origins, something bigger than the little life I had imagined for myself. But I am greedier than Anwar, and I want more, and anyway it was me, you see, who had taken you away. I had no one else to blame, no one to murder in my sleep.

IV I Go to Jail

Someone throws a glass of water in my face and I wake up. My head, heavy as an elephant’s, tells me I’ve been here a long time, but a small window shows me it’s still light out. It’s still today. That means no time has passed and the worst is yet to come.

The policeman, the fat one, hawks a wad of spit into my face. I try to brush it away but my hands are tied behind my back. The spit and the water stay wet on my face. The policeman heaves himself up, and I curl into a ball, waiting for him to kick me. He’s not wearing a uniform. The other guy, who I see now has marks on his face — maybe he got the pox too old — he’s there too, standing by the door. It’s dark but I can see a little more now, a cot in the corner of the room, a bucket on the other side. A metal door with no handle.

The two of them talk to each other but no one says anything to me. Then the pox guy comes over and pulls me up by my armpits. I make myself heavy and he struggles. Fat one unties my hands — are they letting me go? They don’t talk; I’m afraid to ask.

As soon as I’m untied, I feel metal where the rope used to be. Fat one is breathing close to my ear, and the other is pulling something, and before I know it my arms are going up, like a puppet, and they’re stretched tight like that, like I haven’t seen someone in a long time and I’m opening my arms wide to grab them, and like that I’m frozen, can’t move.

Finally the fat one talks. He says, ‘You’ve pissed yourself.’ I look down and he’s right. My lungi is soaked. The money, of course, is gone — I can feel it straight away.

I’m scared but I’m also angry. ‘You stole my money,’ I say.

‘That’s right, country bastard.’

‘Then why am I here?’

‘We don’t like little rats coming from the country and finding their slutty girlfriends.’

‘She’s my sister.’

They look at each other and laugh.

‘You think we bought that, even for one day? Shit, been laughing about it for weeks.’

‘So what,’ I say, ‘you got my money. You skinned me. Why bring me here?’

‘Couldn’t just let Shumon do his job — you had to follow him. You had to see all of us. You think we wanted that?’

I get it now. I dirtied their clean job. They would’ve disappeared, no one would have believed me, but now I knew where they lived.

‘What happened to Shumon?’

‘Bastard brought you all the way to us, didn’t he. We took care of him.’

‘Good.’ So he was dead. ‘You gonna kill me too, or what?’

‘We could,’ he said, ‘or we could leave you in here to rot. No one would notice. You know the cells next door? Hundred, hundred-fifty men in each one. Soon you all start to look the same, you’re all as dirty and piss-your-pants stink as each other. No one will even know you’re gone. Or —’and he looked at me like he could mean anything.

I try to think of what would be the worst bad thing. He could beat me some more, that would be bad. I remember the tooth that fell out after foreman kicked me in the face, shit hurt for weeks and I couldn’t eat anything. But it healed up and I got used to a little stiffness in my jaw, nothing big. Worse, he tortures me, filmi-style, pulls out my fingernails, something like that. I shudder. But then I think, not like he’s trying to get some information out of me, so what would be the point? No, they won’t do that. But they would teach me a lesson. I want to roll my eyes to the back of my head so I don’t have to look at whatever he’s going to do. I don’t want to be in the room with him and me and the cot and his pockmarked partner. He’s talking now about all the ways he can fuck me up, his words running right along with my thinking.

He starts to unbuckle his belt. I’m looking at him. There’s a slick of sweat on his lip, and he has to try hard to pull the belt off because it looks like it’s holding up the whole top half of his body and if he takes it off his body’s going to melt off him like syrup.

He pulls off his belt and he’s holding it in his hand and for one second that feels like a year it comes to my mind that he’s going to do something else, something like sex to me, which is worse, much worse than anything I had thought of and my legs start to go, they go, and I’m just hanging there by my arms, and when I finally feel it, the knot of the leather on my chest, buckle cutting deep, I cry out with the pain, but also with relief, because it’s not the worst, worst thing, until the second lash, and the third.

I don’t know where I am, nothing, just the fire on my chest, for what I can’t say, days maybe or even a week. I think someone’s coming in, putting something on the fire, fat cop or pox cop, fat or pox, pox or fat, putting something cold on me, but I can’t be sure, I’m just in and out, and when I’m in I want to be out, leave me to my dreams, I don’t want to know the square of light in the window, and the hard of the cot, and the feeling of my own shit curling out between my legs and staying there, stamping the truth on my nothingness, a person with no people and no pride, a piece of trash.

It’s Shumon. He’s pouring water over me, and everything hurts like I’m being hosed with salt, and then he covers me with a bandage, and puts a blanket over me. Then he goes through the door without saying anything. He’s talking to someone on the other side, and then I hear him walk away, and then the door opens again and there’s food in front of me, dal and rice. I’m surprised to find that my hands still obey, and I eat, then I fall asleep again, like someone has crushed a pill into my rice.

Shumon’s back the next day, and the day after that. When I feel a bit stronger I mouth a bunch of curses at him. He doesn’t say anything. I reach my hand over to slap him but it comes out soft, like I’m giving him a sweet one on the cheek.

‘You need to get more money,’ he says.

‘Fuck off.’

‘They’ll let you go, they told me.’

‘They told me they took care of you.’

He lifts up his shirt, bandage all across his chest. ‘Lucky my father took me to hospital,’ he says.

‘I’m not so lucky.’

‘No.’ He looks down at his hands.

‘They want two lakhs.’

‘I don’t have it.’