Tahmima Anam - The Bones of Grace

I stare down at my food. ‘Want it?’ I say. ‘Have.’

He grabs my plate. ‘What happened to you? Whisky got you?’

‘Megna’s dead,’ I say.

He keeps eating. ‘Shit.’

‘And she was a whore. Worked at that place.’

‘Nothing wrong with being a whore.’ He’s chewing fast, as if someone’s going to steal it right out of his mouth. ‘Whoring never killed anyone.’

I go for his face. He crashes to the dirt floor, holding his jaw. Then I’m on the floor too, my arms around him, touching his blood, and I’m bleating like a goat while the other guys stand around and stare.

Dulal’s nose is broken. I say I’m sorry but he waves me away. ‘Man’s gotta do sometimes,’ he says. Later, we’re about to bed down and he has rags stuck in his nostrils. He asks what I’m going to do now.

I’ve been asking myself this question all day. I say, ‘I wait to die. Nothing left for me. I lost my money, my wife, my kid. Now this girl’s blood is on my hands. I die, then God sends me to Hell, that’s all.’

‘Motherfucker,’ he says. ‘Shit wasn’t all your fault. But you’re in a hole, I can see that.’

One of the other guys is smoking a biri, I can see the little orange light. I close my eyes and wait for sleep, wait for death, cursing the blood that flows stubborn in my veins. I think, God made us hard to kill. It takes a knife, a bullet. Your heart breaks, you still go on living.

Dulal’s got an idea. We’re carrying a piece of the ship from the beach to the road, a big piece of metal that cuts into our shoulders. Ten of us on each side of the metal, Dulal right behind me, guy at the front counting our steps.

‘We gotta go back to the whorehouse,’ he says. ‘The madam, she knows something.’

‘Can’t do that,’ I say. ‘No way.’ Also, I don’t tell him, I spend all my days thinking about what Megna had to do. Men she had to fuck. All the ways she had to fuck them. It’s a sex cinema in my head, except nobody’s getting hard, I’m just making myself sick. And worse. At night I’ve been going back to the whorehouse. I don’t go in, I just hang around outside. Lights go on, go off. Sometimes from the street you hear the women laughing.

I put these people into my picture. This guy with the long arms, he held down my Megna, he forced it into her mouth. These two guys, sharing a cigarette, they took turns with her while the other one watched. All day I think of this, and at night I fill my picture in a little bit more. I don’t tell Dulal about the poison in my head.

‘I’m not going back in there,’ I say. ‘I’ll kill that woman if I see her.’

‘Let’s kill her, then,’ he says. ‘Cut that bitch’s head right off.’

‘I’m tired. I can’t fight any more.’

‘That’s a lie, brother. You broke my nose.’

I almost laugh, but the weight of the metal is killing me.

‘Nothing left for you but your kid,’ Dulal says.

‘Kid’s probably dead too. Nothing left for me.’

‘Don’t be an asshole. Madam’s gotta know who she left her kid with. Where she sent the money.’

It makes sense. But so many times I thought, I’m close, this is it, and look where I am, I’m nothing. Lots of guys looking for their people in this town. They all have a story, some sad tale of getting separated at a mela, or their kid ran away and got mixed up with the wrong people. Happens all the time. I’m just one sorry bastard in a city of lost people. Nothing special about me. I didn’t love Megna any more than the other people looking for their lost ones. The kid doesn’t even belong to me, never even clapped eyes on it. So why should I keep looking? What makes me think I’m going to find my girl when everyone else’s girls are lost too? I don’t deserve it, that’s for sure. No doubt about that.

Dulal presses me. ‘What’s it to you?’ I finally say.

We’re almost to the machine now, the one that flattens the metal. We take a few more steps, and then the man at the front calls out, and like a dance we all let go of the metal at once, jumping back as it crashes to the ground.

‘Same shit here every day,’ Dulal says. ‘Ship comes, we take it apart. Sometimes a guy dies, or one of us gets cut, loses a leg. It’s black. So if you have a chance you take it.’

We head back to the ship for another piece of metal. ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘But don’t think we’re gonna find that kid. Nothing good is ever happening me to me again.’

It’s late on a Friday and the place is busy. Men coming in and out, the smell of sweat and horny everywhere. I ask for the madam. When she comes out she doesn’t recognise me, but when she sees Dulal, she says, ‘Eid, I remember. You want more?’ She’s chewing her paan again, little bits of green and orange on her mouth.

I let Dulal talk. On the way over here, I said, ‘This is your party. You want something to do, you do it.’

The scars on my chest are itching. Guy brushes past me and I swear I’ve seen him on the ship. They probably all come here. Boss too. Maybe his whores are more high class, maybe not. You never know with richies, they always surprise you by being more perverted than the rest of us.

‘We’re looking for someone,’ he says. ‘Megna. She used to work here.’

‘No one like that.’ She spits her paan into the gutter. ‘I’m busy. If you don’t want a girl, get lost.’ She turns. Dulal grabs her, arm so soft he looks like he’s squeezing a loaf of bread.

‘Bitch,’ he says. ‘We know she worked here. We know you worked her till she died. No use lying.’

She looks him up and down.

‘Yes,’ she worked here. ‘But nobody killed her, ask anyone. She got sick, I even paid for the doctor. Now you know, so get out.’ She points to the alley.

But Dulal’s just getting started. ‘Tell us about the money.’

‘What money?’

‘The money she borrowed.’

His fingers get tighter on her arm. Now her face is red and puffed up.

‘Listen, you son-of-a-bitch. Get your dirty hands off me. I know where you work. I’ll tell everyone. I know you like boys — you want people to know? Bokul here, all dressed up pretty, has a surprise between his legs, and you almost sucked it right off him, you sick little bastard.’ She laughs, her mouth slick with spit.

Dulal lets go of her arm and looks at me. I shrug. I don’t give a shit.

‘Listen, I say,’ coming between them. ‘We’re not here to spoil your business. Just tell us about the kid — we know she had one.’

She’s rubbing her arm, about to turn away, and for a minute I think she’s just going to keep laughing and tell us to fuck off, but she stops and turns to me.

She breathes deep. ‘The kid was here. I’m only telling you because she’s more trouble than she’s worth.’

She. A girl. My heart stops. I die, right there in front of her. ‘But that other whore told me she was somewhere else.’

Madam laughs. ‘They tell you what I want them to tell you. You think I would let a girl go? A girl who’s going to carry me when I’m old? I’m going to starve with so much stupid.’

‘Where is she?’

The bitch smiled like she was enjoying torturing me. ‘She’s gone.’

‘What did you do to her?’

She spits. ‘I was getting rid of her. She was too much trouble, always crying over her mother. And there was a man, had his eye on her.’

She waves her arm.

‘He was going to keep her, I don’t know what she was complaining about. Then, yesterday, she cuts all her hair off. Fuck knows where she got the scissors, but she looked like a bald chicken, the little cunt.’

I double up over myself and gag into the street.

Madam spits at my feet. ‘Get out of here, I don’t have anything for you.’