Tahmima Anam - The Bones of Grace

‘I actually like bacon,’ I said. Rashid swung his knee towards me under the table.

‘Tawba, tawba,’ Dolly said, slapping her own cheeks.

Bulbul pushed his chair back and said, ‘Every time I go to Bangkok, we eat the noodle soup. Then someone told us it’s made of pork.’

‘We had to stop eating it,’ Dolly said.

‘But we haven’t,’ Bulbul said. ‘We had it the last time. And you know the sausages at the breakfast buffet aren’t chicken.’

‘Of course they’re chicken. Five-star hotel is full of Arabs.’

‘Everyone pretends they don’t know what’s in it.’ Then he pointed at me and said, ‘Just don’t go telling everyone your secret.’

After dinner, instead of following Rashid up to our bedroom, I lingered at the table and asked Dolly if I could borrow a necklace. Rashid and I were invited to a wedding the following night and I wanted something to go with my sari. Her annoyance at my pig-eating dissipated and she led me up to her bedroom, where, inside a panelled bank of closets, she turned the combination lock on a safe. ‘Do you want just gold, or some kind of colour? Ruby, emerald?’ Her voice was high and melodic and I realised she was practically giggling with joy. So this was what she had envisioned when she thought of my future in this house, that we would coo over her collection of trinkets, coordinate our outfits, share handbags and earrings. I must have done something to give her the impression that this future was possible, and I remembered now that when she had proposed shopping trips to London or Singapore, I had smiled and agreed, because some part of me wanted a mother like that, a mother who wasn’t tempering every conversation with some new angle on how terrible the world was. Dolly lifted a three-stringed ruby necklace out of its velvet box. A diamond clasp bound the necklace together. I took it from her and held it with both of my hands. Then I said, ‘Ammoo told me that you arranged my adoption.’

Dolly kneeled in front of the safe and pulled out another box. She popped the button and opened it, and inside was a wide gold collar. I was reminded of a National Geographic spread on an African tribe whose women wore thick brass cords to stretch their necks. ‘This story is racist,’ my mother had commented, taking the magazine from me. ‘Don’t read it.’ I shook the memory from my mind and focused on Dolly, attempting to read her expression. I returned the ruby necklace to its box and dabbed at the gold collar. ‘This is nice. It looks old.’

‘It belonged to my mother-in-law.’

‘Ammoo said you set everything up. She called it a mercy.’

Dolly turned back to the safe, so I couldn’t see her face when she said, ‘By then she was desperate. Bulbul and I couldn’t stand to watch her suffering any more.’

I pictured my mother, and found it was easy to imagine her younger, to cast grief upon her features. ‘Can you tell me where it was — where I was from?’

‘Do you want to wear the gold?’

‘I’m afraid it might be a bit formal,’ I said, retracting my hand. Looking closer, I saw how gaudy the piece was, how crudely the jewels had been placed in their setting.

‘You always go simple,’ Dolly said. ‘Weddings are for dressing up.’

‘It’s just — I don’t know the couple very well and we’re just going to drop in for an hour.’ I hated these things, but Rashid said he had promised the groom’s father, someone he did business with.

‘I don’t remember anything,’ Dolly said, closing the box and returning it to the safe.

‘Was it an orphanage?’

‘No, it was a girl. A girl in need.’

‘I’ll wear the ruby,’ I said.

She passed the box to me and then I watched as she put everything back in its place, and I wondered if any of the servants knew about the safe, if they had pressed their hands against the door and tried to guess the combination. ‘You don’t remember anything else?’

‘No,’ she murmured.

I didn’t believe her. ‘There’s no documentation? Birth certificate, adoption papers?’

‘There was. But it was all lost when we renovated the house.’

She sighed, as if she had told me this story a thousand times. ‘Your parents were upset. We did everything we could to make it easier. Bulbul even greased some palms at the registry and put Joy and Maya down as the mother and father.’ She moved to her dressing table, which was crammed with perfume bottles and small cylinders of lipstick, and began to unravel her hair. I was dismissed. As I turned to go, more in the dark than ever, she said, ‘I can’t tell you what to do. But you should stop eating that filth.’

Rashid and I attended the wedding the next evening. I wore the rubies around my neck and tried to hold onto the feeling I had experienced at Sally’s confession. I made light conversation with the other wives and ate biryani with a fork and wondered what, after all, was holding the universe together. Afterwards I fell asleep in the car on the way home and stumbled into bed. In the morning Rashid woke early and I started telling him what his mother had said. The air was heavy with his aftershave. ‘No one will talk to me,’ I complained. He opened his side of the closet and stood there for a moment, sliding a tie from one of the articulated hangers.

‘Did you hear what I said? I’m not getting anywhere.’

‘Maybe they don’t know anything,’ he said. He wrapped the tie around his neck.

‘How can they not know? A baby, a whole live person, appeared out of nowhere. I wasn’t immaculately conceived.’

‘Why don’t you drop it, Zee?’ he said, pulling the silk through its loop.

I peeled the comforter off the bed, ready for a fight, but I was at a disadvantage because he looked and smelled so much better than me, so I folded myself back into the blankets and banged my fist against the pillow. Rashid left with a curt goodbye, reminding me to call Nanu because she was having a check-up that afternoon and I should ask about her sugar level. How did he hold such a catalogue of mundane information in his head? No one loved Nanu more than me, but I was hardly going to keep track of her diabetes. I whispered a curse under my breath as the door slammed shut.

I called my parents — no reply on either phone. I sent them each an identical text message. I waited for what seemed like the entire day, but was probably a few hours. Finally, I went to their apartment and Bashonti opened the door. Ammoo was in the centre of a small tornado of people in the living room and I could smell something frying in the kitchen. I stood on the fringes of the group, catching Abboo’s eye a fraction of a moment before being noticed by a woman — one of my mother’s friends — who smothered me against her chubby shoulder. ‘It’s good you came,’ she said. ‘We all need to be together at a time like this.’ I nodded, pretending to know what she was talking about. Bashonti emerged from the kitchen and passed around a plate of samosas. I couldn’t tell if the moment was a solemn or a happy one, but I was hoping for solemn, because then no one would notice if I looked preoccupied or upset. It was always something I’d hated about people, the way they looked into your face and felt they had to make a comment about your appearance, like ‘You’ve lost weight’ or ‘Are you depressed?’ when I wished they would say ‘Tell me why the sperm whale carries oil on the front of its head’, which would have been a question I was equipped to answer. Not that the location of the spermaceti was an evolutionary puzzle anyone had thus far been able to solve, least of all me. But as a topic of conversation it was far superior to what I was usually offered.

‘How’s your gorgeous husband?’ my mother’s friend asked. So nobody had died, then.