Tahmima Anam - The Bones of Grace

The driver opened the car door and I got in beside Ammoo. As we were about to pull away, we saw the waiter rushing towards us. He tapped on the window. ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘I’m very sorry, but bill was eight hundred and sixty taka. You only gave five hundred.’ He held his hands behind his back while Ammoo counted out the money and passed it to him through the car window.

We were silent until we reached the Gulshan roundabout. ‘So you’re telling me that Dolly and Bulbul brought you a baby and you didn’t bother to find out where I’d come from?’

‘It was a mercy,’ Ammoo said, wiping her face with the end of her sari. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

Outside, it began to rain. Abul Hussain turned on the wipers.

‘You don’t know what it’s like to want something so badly, to try, and keep failing. Your father and I — we couldn’t bear it. Thank God for Dolly and Bulbul.’

‘I’m in love with someone else.’

Ammoo threw herself back against the seat of the car and put her hand over her eyes. ‘I’m not listening to this.’ And then: ‘It’s that American boy, isn’t it?’

‘Elijah. His name’s Elijah.’ Where had she heard of you? I thought for one paranoid moment that Rashid had told Dolly and that it was all over the family now, but then I realised I had spoken about you soon after I’d returned from Cambridge, using any excuse to say your name aloud. Ammoo had probably suspected something and decided to ignore it.

For a moment I thought Ammoo was going to slap me, but she was defeated, staring up at the roof of the car. ‘Rashid knows.’

‘Oh, God.’ I could almost hear my mother thinking, my poor boy.

‘I’m sorry. It was my fault. I take responsibility for everything.’ After the roundabout, the traffic came to a halt. A boy with an armful of white roses knocked on the car window, pleading with me to buy a few flowers.

‘You take responsibility, but at the same time you want to blame us for not talking to you about this — this adoption thing?’

‘I’m not blaming you, I’m just saying, a little transparency would have gone a long way.’

‘What’s wrong with Rashid?’

‘I can’t stand being in that house. I can’t breathe. They’re just like any other rich family. The kind of people you taught me to laugh at.’

‘I don’t recognise my own daughter. Why are you talking like this?’ She pulled out her phone. The little boy knocked again, and Ammoo waved him away. ‘I’m calling Dolly.’

‘I don’t want to talk to her.’

She put her phone away. ‘Do what you like, but please, don’t tell her about this other boy, it will break her heart. And she’ll never forgive me.’

The traffic eased and we pulled away from the little boy and his flowers, passing the market and turning left at the park. The collective disappointment of everyone I knew pressed down on my chest and made it difficult to breathe. And yet at this news of my adoption — could it be true? Was it really all Dolly and Bulbul? — I felt a small lifting. Now that my mother and Rashid knew, even though things were messy and they were all about to gang up against me, at least it was out in the open, and things that should have come out many years ago were finally being said. I would ask Dolly for the whole story. I hadn’t given up my right to know.

When it came to it, I didn’t have the courage to confront Dolly. I woke up every morning and promised myself I would ask her at breakfast, but then Bulbul would be at the table, or Rashid’s brother would walk in just as I was about to bring it up. I saw her ordering the servants to tidy up the garden or organising menus for dinner and decided she looked tired, or busy, and I would put it off. The questions gnawed at me, but my mother’s look of disappointment reverberated in my mind, making everything seem impossible.

Sally came over one day with her baby, her second (as she had predicted herself, she’d had two in quick succession). They had named the girl Nadia. She passed him to me as soon as she walked in the door, blowing on her freshly painted nails. ‘I just got a manicure,’ she said. ‘I think of that as winning. Today is a winning day.’ She had tried to cheer up her skin with a heavy coat of make-up, but underneath her eyes were dark and sunken.

‘I’m so fucking tired,’ she said. I offered her a coffee. ‘I can’t drink caffeine,’ she sighed. ‘It goes into my milk.’

The baby stirred in my arms, batted a hand against my chest, and fell back asleep. I lifted his head to my face and kissed the mellow indent at the top of his head. He smelled fragrant, yet unperfumed, a kind of sweet loaminess that came from deep within his skin. I inhaled and inhaled.

‘There’s a rumour you and Rashid are on the outs,’ Sally said, leaning back and putting her head against the rounded armrest of the sofa.

‘People are always trying to break us up,’ I said. ‘Remember a few years ago, when there was a rumour he was sleeping with you?’

Sally blew on her fingertips again. ‘Assholes.’

‘And then there was another story about him and some Indian girl who worked in garments.’ I was getting a little agitated, remembering all the rumours about Rashid and other women.

‘So there’s nothing to it?’ Sally said.

The baby stirred again, his mouth opening and closing, so I stood up and shifted my weight from one foot to the other. I considered telling her everything, wondering whether she would laugh it off and declare me finally — finally — human, capable of making mistakes like everyone else, or whether she would hold it against me for ever, even if she pretended to take my side. ‘No, there’s nothing,’ I said. ‘Just the usual. Marriage isn’t easy.’

‘You’re telling me. I married a man who still calls his mother every night before he falls asleep and tells her what he ate and how many shits he did.’

I laughed. ‘Seriously?’

‘No fucking joke.’ She sat up, pulled a cigarette out of her bag and clamped it between her teeth.

‘You’re smoking?’

‘No I’m not fucking smoking. I’m just holding onto my brain by chewing on a Benson’s.’

The baby screamed. I swayed more aggressively but I was ineffective, so I passed him back to Sally. She swivelled around to check that no one was looking, pulled at her kameez, and guided a dark, enormous nipple into the baby’s mouth.

‘Yes, I know. My tits are fucking incredible, but Nadeem won’t even touch them. He says they’re for the baby and that creeps him out. I’m so horny I could screw the driver.’

‘It was never true, was it? About you and Rashid.’ My eyes were lemony with tears.

Sally drew the baby closer and looked up at me, the unlit cigarette still dangling from her lips. ‘I’m going to tell you something honestly. Don’t be mad.’

‘Okay.’

‘I would have. Seriously, I would have. We’re all a little bit in love with Rashid. You know that.’

I did know that. Everyone, my mother and my friends and random people I had never met, telling me how wonderful he was, what a perfect man. The baby suckled fiercely, his cheeks pulsing as he swallowed.

‘Did you do it?’

‘No. But not because of you. Because he wouldn’t. He would never touch anyone but you.’

I let out a breath, letting the tears fall freely against my cheeks. We didn’t speak after that. Sally held her baby upright until he burped wetly and softly on her shoulder, and then she left, leaving behind the fragrance of curdled milk and tobacco.

That night, I examined Dolly as she ate, careful to open her mouth just wide enough to prevent her lipstick from smudging. Bulbul was narrating a story about a telecommunications secretary who had asked him for a bribe that morning. ‘Nowadays they don’t dance around the subject,’ he said. ‘They just put out their hands and tell you how much.’ Rashid complimented the lamb chops, and Dolly said it was all down to the meat, which she had procured at great expense from the German butcher. Who by the way, Rashid interjected, now sells bacon. Bacon? The eyes of the assembled group widened, even mine, more out of surprise than horror. ‘What’s the country coming to?’ Dolly lamented.