Tahmima Anam - The Bones of Grace

I turned to the assembled crowd. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Take me with you.’

I followed Selim and Mo a few hundred yards down the highway. We turned into the market, which was empty now, past the small mosque, then down a dirt alley. Mo gripped my elbow, helping me skirt the flooded potholes, the loose electrical wires, the small pyramids of garbage. We pushed open the tin door of a small concrete shed. The smell of blood and bleach was overpowering; my eyes adjusted to the darkness and I saw three cots laid out in a row. I saw a man without legs, another who was wrapped all around his waist and his chest, his bandages glowing in the dim caramel light. The third man, lying on his stomach, a thin layer of gauze shielding his burnt skin, was Belal. I would not have recognised him if Mo hadn’t whispered his name into my ear.

It wasn’t as if I had ignored the fact that they all had a story of death that followed them around like a shadow — a friend or a brother or someone they had only a passing acquaintance with, a man who shouldered a few inches of the weight they shared — a piece of steel crushing a skull, a chest, an errant metal rope escaping from the winch and cutting a throat. I had heard all the stories; I had read the reports and I knew the statistics, but I was unprepared for this. My stomach revolted from the smell and the soft moans coming from Belal’s bed. I hung back while Gabriela rushed to one, then another, ignoring everything I had told her about approaching people she didn’t know, tracing her fingers over their bandages, holding the hands that were still whole. She had been here every day, knew the progress of every injury, every wound. The amputated man would survive; the man whose chest was split open with the winch that had snapped and struck him would probably not. They weren’t sure what would happen to Belal.

I had spent many years thinking about bones. When I studied the fossils of Ambulocetus and Pakicetus , I told myself the souls of those ancient creatures were in their bones. I knew that the fusing of Diana’s pelvis would produce a smooth bowl shape that would tell us how Ambulocetus had evolved into an amphibian when her ancestors had been terrestrial. But the bones I had studied, pressed down by millennia, were always partial. I would work with fragments and imagine the whole, fill in the parts that had been broken by history, and this was how it should be, because our knowledge of the past could only ever be in pieces, left there for us to put together. But now, confronted by these fragments of people, a room in which the atmosphere had been thinned by the fleeing of hope, my knowledge of bones gave me nothing, no explanation, no prescription. I could not imagine these men whole, no matter how expert I was at putting things together.

‘We have to take them to a proper hospital,’ I said. ‘They can’t stay here.’

‘They won’t go,’ Gabriela said. ‘I already tried.’

‘Ali’s paid them,’ Selim said. ‘Says he’s going to take care of their families.’

The bandaged man whispered something. Mo went to a metal drum in a corner of the room and filled up a glass of water. The man lifted himself up, struggling to reach the glass held out by Mo. I couldn’t bear the sight of him, the tendons of his neck straining towards Mo, his mouth open and dry, his arms pinned down by their bandages, and I ran out of the shed, my foot catching on the raised wooden threshold and flinging me violently into the alley outside.

Gabriela and I stayed up late talking about what we should do.

‘It seems so pointless to make a film,’ I said.

‘Exactly,’ Gabriela agreed, ‘it’s no fucking good.’

We couldn’t go to the police; Ali had already paid them off. And what would we charge them with, if the men themselves wanted to remain where they were? We discussed the possibility of alerting the press, and I left another message for Rubana.

‘My mother would know what to do,’ I said, a surge of feeling for Ammoo coursing through me. The sight of those workers, the ones Ali had gone to such trouble to hide from us, who even Mo had deemed were too dismembered to take part in the interviews, changed what I knew about this world and my place in it. It made everything else shrink — my little quest to find my origins, even the wound of your absence. Ammoo would know what it was to be overcome by the discovery of something ugly, of secrets that are just below your gaze and unnoticed by you until a terrible moment breaks it all open.

Gabriela and I sat in silence, then, for a long time, until it was almost morning. I had to leave — Rashid would arrive in a few hours. We agreed to return to the injured workers’ hut the following afternoon, with Mo, and decide together what to do about the film. I left Gabriela dozing in the brightening day, her arm thrown over her eyes, as if she wanted to go back in time and erase the sight of everything she had seen in the last months.

I went to pick Rashid up at the airport. I don’t know what I expected to feel when I saw him; I was raw from the night before, tired and full of uncertainty, and I thought maybe if I tried to reach out, tried to tell him something about what had happened, we might make a connection. He had just seen me, and we were waving to each other, and I was telling myself I was doing the right thing to let him in, when he stopped to talk to a man in a dark suit. The man put his arm around Rashid’s shoulder and they passed through the gates and came towards me.

‘Darling,’ Rashid said. ‘This is uncle Harry.’

Harry reached out and shook my hand. He was wearing gloves. ‘What a pleasure,’ he said. ‘I have heard so much.’

‘Zubaida’s been staying here. Taking in the Chittagong air.’

I smiled distractedly, wondering how long we would have to stay and make small talk. ‘Yes, I know,’ Harry said. ‘Ali has told me everything.’

I turned to Rashid. ‘Ali?’

‘Uncle Harry owns the shipyard,’ Rashid said.

Harrison Master. Uncle Harry. ‘Prosperity,’ Harry said. ‘My father loved that place. I don’t care for it much, but he made me promise we wouldn’t sell.’ He took a tube of chapstick out of his pocket and smeared it over his lips.

Here was my chance. Gabriela and I had wondered, time and again, what sort of people would own businesses like these — well here was a man standing right before me, and I could ask him anything. How do you feel, sir, about lining your pockets with the broken backs of poor farmers from the north? And was it your idea to take a group of injured men and lock them away for the sake of your business? Of course I didn’t say anything. I even managed a smile as we parted, watching Harry’s companion, a man I hadn’t seen at first, pull a comb out of his pocket and smooth Harry’s hair before they exited the airport.

In the car on the way home, I exploded at Rashid. ‘You couldn’t suck up to him any more if you were a mosquito on his leg.’

‘Oh, hell, Zee I was trying to be nice. For your sake.’

‘That man should be thrown in jail. No, shot by a firing squad.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You have no idea what they do to these people.’ I was angrier at myself than anything else; a lifetime of living with my mother should have taught me better. Of course the stories were worse than they first appeared; of course Ali was hiding the really dark truth; of course there was something dirtier, something more frightening, underneath.

It started to rain. ‘You can’t fix everything,’ Rashid said.

‘Everything? I haven’t fixed a damn thing.’

‘If you want to feel guilty about something, there’s a lot to choose from.’

I had given him a lifetime of ammunition. He would forgive me, I knew that, but I could see now that he would be free to throw it back in my face at any time. Isn’t that what people do, accrue debts they end up paying off for the rest of their lives, waiting for something to happen that will narrow the difference between themselves and the people they destroyed? I couldn’t tell him any of it, I could see that now. We rode home in silence, beside each other in the back seat of his car, and I wondered if I was the only one who felt we were far, far away from each other, or if he, too, felt the distance stretching open between us.