Tahmima Anam - The Bones of Grace

We get to the bus stop she doesn’t let go of my hand. Something’s stirring in me; it’s so strange I don’t even know what it is at first but then I get it. It’s my blood, pumping on the inside. Hard now, my chest hurts from it, my legs too. On the bus there’s only one seat and I stand over Shathi while she sits. It’s dark and the bus pulls away. I see the ships in the sea, standing still, but my hand is moving, holding the back of Shathi’s neck, here is her ear, here her jaw. Here is where her skin ends and her hair begins. I’m not looking at her, I’m staring out the window and reading all the shopfronts, but I’m seeing her for the first time, with my thumb, my rough thumb, her cheek, MOHONA BIRYANI AND KEBAB HOUSE, her jaw, KAZI BROTHERS CEMENT, the fold of her lip, SHAMMI RESTURA, her chin, NAVEED NAPITH (GENTS), and lower, as I get bold, the blood is booming in me now, the skin between her breasts is soft as milk, and suddenly I remember something, and with my thumb still on her skin, I squat down and I whisper, ‘Please, wife, forgive me. I don’t deserve it, but if you can, please try.’

Then I jump off the bus while it’s still moving, and I hit the pavement with a crash, crying out in pain, and after a few minutes someone helps me up, I dust myself off, I walk towards the barber-shop, remembering the phone call from a few weeks ago, telling me that Megna had stayed here, on the way to Patenga Beach, at a barber-shop with a rhyming name.

Naveed is shaving the armpits of a guy who is obviously about to get married. He smells like coconut oil and everything’s shiny about him. I get straight to the point with Naveed. ‘I’m looking for Megna,’ I say. ‘Is she here?’

He holds the blade up and looks me over. ‘You her people?’

‘Yes.’

He pulls the blade up, collecting foam, wiping it on a towel draped over his shoulder.

‘She stayed here for a few months. When she came to the city, I let her stay.’

‘With who?’

‘With no one. Just here.’ He points to the floor, between the chair and the wall. He wipes the groom’s armpit, moves to the other side. The groom lowers one arm, lifts another. Naveed starts to lather.

‘What happened to her?’

‘How the hell should I know? Stayed here as long as she paid me. She was lucky, too. People talked, wife wasn’t happy. Girl like that.’

‘Did you see the child?’

‘No. But my wife said she was in a bad way — had to go to medical.’

‘You haven’t seen her.’

‘Not since then.’

He’s done. He examines his work, runs his finger along the smooth armpit.

It’s dark now and the kerosene lamps are all on. I miss Shathi already — no way she’s gonna take me back now. I find a shop and sell the phone, they give me seven hundred for it. I paid five thousand. Now I can’t even call home.

I need to eat. I need money, a job, food. Can’t believe I’m back to this after everything, and my mind flashes to when I was a kid, always hungry, rooting around my mother’s ankles for a scrap of something.

But here I am. No point getting sentimental. Naveed says best thing is to ask around the shipyards. ‘Nah,’ I say, ‘I’m a builder, not a breaker.’ I find a construction site and the foreman hires me. Fifty taka a day, rice in the afternoon, a place to sleep. The building’s almost finished, they’re doing the floors now. He gives me a pair of rubber gloves, says to pick up the piles of bricks the old women are breaking by the side of the road, bring it over to where it gets mixed into concrete to make the mosaic, chunks of brick mixed in with the sand to keep it solid.

The women sit in a line with their legs spread and pound the bricks with their little hammers. Their faces are covered in dust. Some, the clever ones, have strips of tyre around their fingers. I’m feeling sorry for them, out there in the hot sun, beating on their own fingers, but I don’t go up, don’t say, hey, baking out today, can I bring some water — because I’m new and I know everyone’s looking. Plus what do I care about a couple of old hags anyway.

I pick up their broken bricks, haul the basket on my head, make my way across the site to the mixer, unload and go back for more. My chest is still bandaged but it’s scabbed up and I can see where the scar will be thickest, right up near my neck. If I ever wear a shirt again, proper one with buttons and a stand-up collar, it’s going to show, like if I was one of those people who had an operation on my heart.

I don’t make friends. I make a small place to sleep by hanging up my lungi, keep to myself, eat my rice away from the rest of them.

I work on Naveed, finally he lets me ask his wife if we can find out about Megna at the hospital. I tell him everything, about Megna, the baby, how I’m trying to make it right after all these years. I’ve got nothing left to lose, no need to spin a story. He’s got some hard lines around his eyes from looking into people’s faces and pulling the blade over their necks, but when I tell him that, whole sad story, lift up my shirt and show him the lines from fatty cop’s buckle, his faces goes soft and I think, maybe he’ll help me, maybe not, but at least I told the truth.

V I Find Megna

When I first got to the city I was getting my footprints all over the place and wearing out my sandals with the picture of Megna in my hand. Down the roads with my head swivelling all around, staring into the faces of all the women, catching the long of one’s hair here, the small hands of another. They would look back, sometimes like they were angry, other times almost grateful, like, no one looks at me like that, a look without any kind of want or danger, just a frank glance, and I thought, women deserve to be given eyes into their eyes, and I wonder when was the last time, if ever, I gave Shathi that sort of a human thing. Probably never. But by the time I got to Naveed’s I’d given up, you know, stopped staring at every living thing like if I stared hard enough they might turn into my girl.

But then, I see her. The whole real-as-flesh girl of her, standing right in front of me like a wrapped-up gift from the heavens. It’s evening and I’ve finished my shift and I’m on my way to Naveed’s. She’s with another woman, a foreigner, but I don’t notice that at first, I just stand there like I’m hit by a stone. She’s right in front of me, not more than an arm’s length away. It’s her. Hair like a pile of electric wires, eyes tilted up, and so beautiful I can’t breathe, and then she’s gone past me, and I call out to her. ‘Megna. Megna.’ She keeps walking like she doesn’t know her own name, and I try again, louder, even the back of her head is known to me, because I held her there, I held her everywhere, and when she keeps walking I say, ‘It’s me, don’t you know?’ Other people turn around. I run after her. She sees me and she stops. I don’t recognise the look on her face. I’m waiting for a string of curses to come out of her mouth, but instead, she says, ‘Who are you?’ Like she never saw me in her whole life. ‘It’s me,’ I say again, and I think it must be the dark street, so I put my hands on her shoulders and she’s wriggling out of my hands and that’s when I get it. She’s pretending. Ha ha, very funny, I think, don’t be that way. She’s twisting around and I have to let go. Even then I just stand there while she turns away from me, disgusted, and then, finally, I see the foreigner beside her who is saying something in English. They both start screaming. Megna’s turning away and Naveed comes out of his shop. I’m running behind her and he grabs my arms and holds them behind my back. He’s stronger than he looks, and I can’t get out of his grip. ‘Sorry, madam,’ he’s calling out to Megna, and she turns and I notice her clothes, nothing like what my Megna would wear, not in this life, and the smell of her that’s rubbed off on my hands is a smell from somewhere else. Not her. I’m going crazy, seeing my Megna in the face of another woman, and when I look again, she’s nothing like my girl, nothing at all, and I squat right there, right there on the pavement and cry into my hands, because even God is playing tricks, teasing me with the sight of her, which is only in my head, which is where she only ever is.