Tahmima Anam - The Bones of Grace

‘It’s a very precious instrument,’ you said.

Ali motioned for one of his men to clear the plates away. ‘We will do our best,’ he said. The man returned a few moments later with a bowl of water and a bar of soap and we all washed our hands.

‘There was a storm once,’ Sakhawat said, ‘out of season. And the water came in so high it flooded all the ships. There was a whale trapped in one of Haroon’s ships, you remember that, Ali?’

‘A whale?’ I said.

‘It was the cyclone in ’91, a long time ago,’ Ali said. ‘A lot of people died. Strange things washed up on shore. One of the neighbouring shipyards had just bought a cruiser, like Grace , and the thing was trapped in the swimming pool.’

‘What happened to it?’

‘Nothing we could do,’ Ali said. ‘It died a few days later.’

‘People came from all over to see it. It was thrashing around, skin all dried up. Making horrible noises.’ Sakhawat made a gesture with his hands to illustrate the whale’s suffering, pinching his thumb and forefinger together.

I wished Sakhawat and Ali had not told me this story. Sakhawat replaced the gold rings on his stubby fingers and leaned back on the chair with a soft belch. The stranded animal was probably something smaller than a whale, maybe an Irrawaddy dolphin from upstream, or perhaps it was a short-finned Pilot whale. I tried not to imagine the end of its life, the people staring down as it struggled in the shallow water, its blowhole wheezing and squeezing shut. I glanced over at you and found that you were swallowing this story and that it was changing your relationship to this place, making it more terrible, and yet somehow enchanted, a place where people tore ships apart and whales died in swimming pools and tides threw up the trash of the entire world.

That night, you accompanied me to the dormitory for my next set of interviews. The men were happy to see you, shaking your hand and offering you a share of the cigarette they were passing around. You let them light it for you and you took a drag and then you sat among them on their bunks instead of beside Gabriela and me. We set up our equipment and the light from Gabriela’s camera illuminated the room.

‘It’s my turn,’ Mo said.

I was surprised. Mo had avoided all of my questions, and Gabriela’s, about his childhood, only informing us that his parents were dead and that he had grown up on the beach. ‘Tell us,’ I said. ‘Start with where you were born.’

‘Story is not about me.’

‘It’s about his girlfriend!’ Belal said, snapping his fingers.

‘You have a girlfriend?’ I asked. I looked over at you and you kept your gaze steady on Mo. Mo didn’t answer yes or no to the question about his girlfriend, he just said, ‘Her name is Shona. She lives with a man.’

‘What kind of man?’

‘A bad man.’

‘Can you tell us more?’

‘Madam sold her. Now she has to live with the man. He beats her, I saw the cut on her face.’ He drew a finger across his cheek.

‘He’s lying,’ Belal said.

‘He’s always making up stories,’ another of the crew said.

Mo shook his head. ‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘I want to kill him.’ He stood up, made a stabbing gesture. He stood over Belal and pulled at the loose collar of his singlet. ‘I want him to be dead.’ We watched as he made his way from one of the men to the next. ‘Like this!’ he said, his hand wrapped around an imaginary knife, going up, going down.

Once, when I had asked Ali how Mo had come to live on the beach, he said simply that there were worse fates for a boy, and I assumed that meant Ali considered himself to have rescued Mo from somewhere else.

‘Sit down, Mo,’ I said. ‘Tell us about your friend.’

‘Her mother died and left her with the madam.’

‘Did you know your mother?’ I asked.

He stopped, his hand in mid-air. ‘My mother was a whore.’

‘Don’t insult your mother,’ someone said.

‘No one believes anything that comes out of your mouth,’ another one said. ‘Remember that time he claimed his father was an English captain? What, no English ever came to claim him.’

A murmur travelled around the room. Mo stood in the middle of the circle, his hand still clenching the imaginary knife. ‘I never lie,’ he said, raising the pitch of his voice. ‘I never lie!’

At that moment, you stood up, walked over to Mo, picked him up, and carried him out of the room. Gabriela emerged from behind her camera. She wiped her face. ‘I can’t take it any more,’ she said, pulling the camera off the stand. ‘This place is hell.’

I tried to start up the conversation again, but no one wanted to talk, and after a few minutes I shut off my tape recorder and followed you out to the beach. You and Mo were sitting on a small raised sandbank and staring out at Grace , not saying anything. Gabriela and I joined you. The sand was cool and packed tight beneath us. We watched the sparks from the night crew’s blowtorches, listened to the waves breaking and retreating. Finally, I suggested we go home. It was late. You stood up, brushing the sand from your trousers, but Mo seemed reluctant to move. ‘We’ll join you later,’ Gabriela said, taking Mo’s hand, and so we left them together and made our way to the apartment.

When we got home you disappeared into the bathroom. By the time you emerged, I had heated some rice and dal on the stove and brought everything to the table. Your cheeks and your chin were pale and shining. ‘You shaved,’ I said. ‘Why?’

You held both of my hands and directed me to the sofa. ‘Come, sit with me,’ you said. Your face appeared naked before me. I could see everything when you swallowed, the motion of your jaw and your neck and your Adam’s apple. I was amazed by your mouth, which was beautifully pink. You leaned towards me and I closed my eyes, waiting for the touch of your lips, anticipating the heat of your breath floating over my face, but you didn’t kiss me, you just pressed the side of your face against the side of my face. The smell of soap was overpowering. I opened my eyes and saw over your shoulder to the rough metal bars on the windows, the frayed paint on the shutters, the rusted latches. Now your chin was resting on my shoulder, and my chin was resting on your shoulder. Your hair was soft against my mouth. I opened my mouth and took a strand between my teeth. My mouth filled with saliva. ‘Elijah,’ I said. ‘I’m in love with you.’

Later, after I drove you from the beach, after everything had ended so terribly between us, I thought back to that night and remembered everything about the way you held me, and kissed me, and fluted your breath across my fingers, that you traced the line of my jaw with your hand, that your hair swung down onto my skin and touched me before your mouth touched me. I remembered the words we said to each other. Telling you there was nothing in the world except that I loved you. I remembered laughing. I remembered the weight of your palms on my palms. I didn’t remember speaking. I didn’t remember being sad. I remembered crying. When you cried, I licked the salt from your chin. I remembered the edge of your thumbnail, inadequately trimmed, scraping a tender patch on the inside of my thigh. I remembered the inside of my thigh. Hello, inside of my thigh. Hello, Zubaida, Putul, Abbasid princess, orphan, provenance unknown. Hello Mrs Rashid, meet the inside of your thigh, meet your mate, this man, only this man, your only mate in the world, your only relation, because you know no one whose blood matches your blood, well, here is a man whose presence obliterates the need for blood, because you are made of the same things, you are nothing and everything alike, because your taste in his mouth is all the closeness you will ever need, the bed is hard beneath your bodies, the bed of a person who has never left this country, the smell of this country is the smell of the sun on the paddy, were your parents farmers or beggars and were there children after you, sons, maybe, that they kept? You don’t know and you don’t care. You want to find your parents. You want to say sorry to your parents. You want to say sorry to yourself, and to this man, because you loved him from the first moment that you met, but you turned away from this certainty and sank your hopes into history, and now there is nothing except holding him, and kissing him, and fluting your breath across his fingers.