Читать книгу The Bones of Grace - Tahmima Anam - Страница 11

Homecoming

Anwar told me that it wasn’t until he almost died that he realised he needed to find the woman he had once loved. I’ve thought about that a lot in the last few years, that if Anwar hadn’t worked on that building site, he might never have gone looking for Megna, and if he hadn’t done that, I might still be in the dark about my past. I’ve only ever been a hair away from being utterly alone in the world, Elijah, and it was Anwar who shone a light where once there was only darkness.

I now have a confession to make (another one? But yes). This isn’t the first time I have been back to the place we met. Not the first time I’ve stalked these streets, hoping to run into you. I was here last year for Bettina’s graduation. Early summer and the streets pink with fallen apple blossoms. Everything looked the same. Bettina had accepted a job at Stanford, and I helped her pack our little apartment into a U-Haul she was going to drive all the way across the country herself. When I expressed some concern, she assured me she was equipped with addresses of a carefully curated series of men she could call on the way – an insurance broker in Hartford, an engineer in Las Vegas, a creative writing professor in Iowa City. I waved as she drove away, holding on to the first edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude she had given to me as a parting gift. That was last year. When I wrote to tell her I was coming back, she offered to let me rent the place. I pay her a fraction of the sum she could get elsewhere, but she insisted and I don’t have the will to refuse. I bought a futon and taped a photograph of Nina Simone on the wall above my head, but otherwise it is completely empty.

You don’t care about any of this. The present is full of mundanities. What happened next, Elijah? The dig ended and I had to go home. My parents came to collect me at the airport. I was quick to regress to childhood patterns and greeted them meanly, keeping most of the episode to myself, already smothered by their worry.

On the plane I had sat next to a man who repeatedly asked me if I was Japanese. I had closed my eyes and pretended to sleep and seen Zamzam’s face and wondered whether his anger at his father had made some part of him long to be caught. Zamzam’s father wasn’t unlike my own father, who had joined a movement to break away from an old country. My father was called a freedom fighter because his side had won and now he had a passport and a parliament and a vote, none of which Zamzam would ever have. Zamzam would die in that prison, and the world would remain divided between people who had countries and people who did not.

‘My baby’s home,’ my mother said.

‘I don’t want to talk,’ I murmured, depressed at the sight of her.

My message to you was: Baby It’s Cold Outside. And, a few minutes later, you replied: You Go to My Head.

I folded myself into the front seat and leaned my head against the window, immune to the sight of my city, the airport road flanked on either side by fields of paddy, electric wires dangling low across the highway, and the watery air making everything heavy and indolent. ‘Rashid said to phone him when you land,’ Ammoo said.

Rashid had already sent me several text messages. I begged him not to come. ‘Not today,’ I said. ‘I’m tired and I look terrible. I’ll see you tomorrow.’ He appeared in the early evening. I had struggled to wash the sand out of my hair, so Bashonti, our cook, was putting olive oil on my scalp.

‘I told you to wait,’ I said.

‘You’re full of shit,’ he replied.

Bashonti released my hair. ‘Bhaiya, look at this mess.’ She pointed to my face, the rings of sunburn around my eyes.

Rashid was wearing a waistcoat over his shirt that emphasised his slim frame and the bulk of his upper arms. He had cut his hair short and changed his aftershave, but the rest of him was the same, his square forehead, his deep-set eyes and slightly flared nostrils. Looking at him, I remembered he’d had a bar installed over his bedroom door, that he pulled himself up on it every morning before going downstairs to eat breakfast with his mother. I was comforted by the sight of him, and I thought about resting my head against his shoulder, forehead to clavicle, and how reassuring that would be, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Zamzam, and Diana, and the end of my life as I’d known it.

‘Tell me everything,’ he said.

Outside, I heard the sound of a neighbour scolding someone, a child perhaps or a servant. The blood pumped against my scalp where Bashonti had been aggressive with the brush. I’ll never be a palaeontologist, I wanted to say, but I knew he wouldn’t be able to pretend convincingly that this mattered to him. ‘One of the people on my dig got into trouble and they had to shut it down,’ I said.

We ate dinner together, Rashid and my parents and my flattened hair, Bashonti piling rice onto his plate. Rashid spoke mostly to Ammoo, telling her about the new factory he and his father were opening out in Savar. After dinner my parents claimed they were craving ice cream and made a point of letting us know they would be gone for an hour.

When I was twelve we went to Thailand with Rashid’s family. My father’s business hadn’t yet taken off, so we stayed at a modest hotel across the street from the beach, even though Rashid’s parents could afford much better. Rashid spent the entire holiday watching a Test series between the West Indies and Australia while I lay in the hammock under a tree beside the kidney-shaped pool. One day, while I was staring up at the sky and thinking about Sylvia Plath’s suicide, Rashid nudged me with his foot and said, ‘Let’s go swimming.’ And, even though I had been waiting desperately for him to notice me, I knew there was nothing I could say that wouldn’t embarrass me later, so I ignored him, picking at the jute fibres on my hammock. ‘C’mon,’ he said again, tapping the top of my head, ‘it’s so fucking hot.’ It was thrilling to me that he would say the word ‘fucking’ out loud, and to me. ‘I don’t know how to swim,’ I said, still not able to look at him. ‘It’s okay,’ he said, ‘you can just float.’

I lay flat on my back, and he put his warm palm on my spine and ran me around and around the pool. We did this for what felt like hours. Later that year, when my parents bought an apartment on the other side of town and I struggled to make friends at the new school, Rashid took me under his wing, not embarrassed to be seen with me in the morning before the bell rang, waving to me from where he stood in front of the wicket, handsome beyond belief in his cricket whites, and when he ran the ball up and down his leg and made pink streaks on his uniform, I thought I would suffocate under the weight of my crush, but I didn’t, I just kept feeling his hand under me, his steady presence, teaching me to swim, to belong, to fit in. I don’t tell you this story to hurt you, Elijah, but to explain that the idea of leaving Rashid was like the idea of leaving behind my childhood, and, because I was a person whose life began with her own life, and not, like you, with a family tree that stretched back generations, I clung to every piece of my past, unable to forget, or let go, of a single thing, and maybe if Zamzam hadn’t been arrested and we had managed to get Diana out of the ground, I would have been able to move through this moment with greater confidence, the confidence to break old threads and strengthen new ones, but now, in the shadow of this spectacular failure, I became, again, an obedient orphan.

Rashid was all over me, kissing my face and my neck. ‘I can’t believe you’re home,’ he said. I leaned my head against him for a moment, but it was not as I had imagined.

I had, a few minutes earlier, received this from you: Ne me quitte pas.

‘Oh, jaanu, don’t be mad. I can’t be happy to see you? What’s the matter?’

‘It’s nothing.’ I looked down at my hands. I didn’t know how to put it, I didn’t even know what I wanted, so I said, again, nothing, and then it was too late: Rashid was rolling down the sleeves of his shirt and buttoning the cuffs, as if he had at some point decided to punch me and then changed his mind. Then he said, ‘Let’s go to Sally and Nadeem’s. You’ll feel much better after a drink.’

Nadeem passed me a gin and tonic and said, ‘What’s new with you, sister?’ and I replied, ‘I’m all fucked up,’ and Nadeem laughed, raking a skeletal hand through his hair. In high school he’d been Rashid’s best friend, but Rashid had left for university in London while Nadeem had stayed behind to join his father’s business. In the summer holidays we would come home to find him perpetually stoned, playing video games or chasing his Pointer around the back garden. There was a quick downward spiral, and a year spent in rehab, and then, much to everyone’s surprise, Sally agreed to marry him, and they moved into a flat and became ordinary.

‘You’re a strange girl,’ Nadeem said to me, tilting his whisky in my direction.

Sally passed around a plate of Bombay mix. ‘So you back for good this time?’ she asked.

Rashid cupped my knee. ‘I’m not letting this girl out of my sight.’

‘When’s the wedding?’

I wanted to lunge at her for bringing it up. ‘Everyone wants to know,’ I said. I noticed a streak of pale hair across her forehead and changed the subject. ‘Did you dye your hair?’

‘My cook did it. She’s a genius.’

The gin and tonic was making me woozy. I felt a surge of revulsion for Sally and realised I had spent my whole life with these people, and I thought again about Zamzam, and Diana, and you, Elijah. Were you thinking of me? What would you make of this apartment, the leather dining chairs, the white baby grand against the sliding doors, Gulshan Lake glittering in the background? My tongue was sweet and heavy in my mouth. I relaxed, allowing the memory of our days in Cambridge to float around in my mind. ‘It’s a bit radical,’ I said, going back to Sally’s hair.

‘Well,’ she announced, ‘I’m fucking pregnant.’

‘Shit!’ Rashid said, slapping Nadeem’s shoulder. ‘Come here, man. Let me hug you.’

I tried to think of something nice to say. ‘Congratulations,’ I managed.

‘You’ll be next,’ Nadeem said.

I would be next. I considered Dhaka, this neighbourhood with big houses behind high gates, this over-air-conditioned apartment, and I was overcome with affection. A part of me was still back on Trowbridge Street, or eating ice cream with the Atlantic summer at my back, talking about jazz and Shostakovich and breakfast sandwiches with you, or out in Dera Bugti with a chisel in my hand. But I was at ease for the first time in months, at ease standing on what I knew instead of the strata of meaning I was capable of imposing on every situation. With these people who had known me all my life and not at all, I didn’t have to talk about Zamzam, or the expedition, what I was going to do with my life, who I was going to become or who I had been.

Sally said she wasn’t going to give up drinking, though she sent Nadeem and Rashid to the balcony to smoke. ‘I’m terrified,’ she said to me when we were alone. ‘My vagina’s going to be the size of a drainpipe, and even my tits will go back to being tiny in the end. What’s the point?’

Sally, whose nickname came from her last name, Salehuddin, had always had a habit of making things sound worse than they actually were; in reality she was an optimist, insisting to her parents that Nadeem would someday grow up and become a good husband. I had attended their wedding, Sally buried under a thick layer of foundation, her parents hovering behind the wedding dais with fixed smiles on their lips.

‘It won’t be so bad. I hear they can be pretty cute.’

‘When they’re not crying all night and vomiting in your face.’

‘So why are you doing it?’

‘Not everybody’s like you.’ I knew what Sally meant, but I let her finish. ‘Perfect boy, everything you could possibly want. This baby means Nadeem stays out of trouble, at least for a few years.’

‘Then what?’

‘I’ll pop out another one.’

‘That’s your grand plan?’

‘I didn’t go to Harvard. It’s the best I could do.’

No one would let me forget I’d gone to Harvard.

Over whisky-laced coffees, we listened to Nadeem strum his guitar. ‘You’re different,’ Sally murmured to me, her chin on my shoulder. Not as different as I could be, I thought. But I said: ‘I’ll be back to my old self in no time.’

I did not return to my old self. Every morning I woke up with a jolt and realised I was no longer in Dera Bugti. This reminded me of what it meant for me to be here, safe, in the arms of people who loved me, that the price for this safety was the life of another man. I was longing for more than the few cryptic messages we occasionally exchanged, but I was so diminished that I was convinced you would find me dull and unworthy of your notice, and anyway, I had still not found the words to describe what had happened, not even to you.

When I wasn’t obsessively Googling ‘whale prehistoric arrest Zamzam Baloch disappeared’, I was lying about the apartment and not answering Rashid’s phone calls. He sent me messages asking if he could come to the apartment, but I never replied and he stayed away, though I imagined him bumping into me when I took long, pathetic walks around Tank Park or pushed a shopping cart under the blue lights at Unimart. I was very hungry and frequently on the verge of tears. My father knocked on my door every morning and asked if I would have breakfast with him. I almost always said no.

My mother was distracted by a new job. I was thankful for this, because I knew that if she turned her attention to me I would be forced to put words to what was happening. In Bangla they refer to women like my mother as dhani morich, because the tiniest chillies are the hottest. My mother is tiny and terrifying. During the war, she drove her ambulance every day to Salt Lake, the refugee camp on the outskirts of Calcutta, where all the exiles were stacked into unused sewer pipes. She gave them vaccines and bandaged their wounds and held their hands as they lost their children to cholera. I believe her whole personality was built in that moment – only seventeen and having to look death straight in the eye – but she must have always been that way. My grandmother paints a picture of a girl who was more stubborn than a trapped fishbone, a girl who tried to cut down the guava tree in the backyard because it had given her a scratch the last time she had tried to climb it. But the war was fundamental, a kind of birth not just for the country but for all the too-young people who had willed the country into being.

My parents are now, forty years later, starting to come to terms with what that war has done to them. All the good things – their marriage, woven with the broken threads of what they lost; the sweetness of knowing their lives have meant something, for they are not, like so many, plagued by the pain of insignificance. And the bad – both their brothers lost, my father’s on the battlefield, and my mother’s, later, to religion; the fear that they may not, after all, have gotten it right, because every time the country falters, they take it personally, as if there was a tainted seed planted then that corrupted all that followed.

Recently they have been given a chance to take account in a trial for the men who aided and abetted the army. The word ‘genocide’ is in my home like the word ‘highway’, or ‘acorn’, may be in yours. My mother has given up her medical practice and she’s helping to gather research for the prosecution, travelling across the country to interview survivors and witnesses. She exists in a shroud of other people’s memories as she gently, patiently coaxes out their stories and writes them down. She is remote and sad and emerges rarely, as if from a deep sleep, and in these moments she is joyful, as if she is discovering, for the first time, that the war was won after all. And then, inevitably, she withdraws into those dark places. My parents whisper to each other at night, out of earshot. They follow the trial, every episode, every motion, every witness. Me, I don’t want to know. I seek the connection, but resist when the opportunity is offered. My heart is a nomad, still, after so many years of being in this country, child to these parents.

Can you ever know, Elijah, the feeling of being from a place you wish you could hate but are forced to love? Can you know what it is like to be from a country that everyone else is trying to escape? It is like running into a burning building. If you ask me, I’ll tell you all the things I love about it – the smell of paperbacks in the winter, the cold-but-warm gust of monsoon air, the burnished wood on the desk I had as a teenager, dark from the oil of my skin, lying under the ceiling fan on my grandmother’s bed, the taste of egg and parathas in my mouth. The love exists, but its domain is small, located in the particular bodies of particular people. My parents fought a war for this country, that is how much in love with it they are. There is a memory at every turn, an affection for every change in season, roots in the ground so deep you would have to tear them apart to separate person from place, body from soil. But not me.

One day my mother returns from the courthouse and she puts her head in her hands and cries as if someone is beating her. I stand a little apart and watch her shoulders sagging. My father goes to her and puts his arms around her and they sit that way for a long time. They see me and we look at each other and I stand there and they don’t ask me to enter or leave and I don’t enter or leave. I have witnessed it before, this thing that passes between them like a current, the knowledge that needs no explanation, and I know that she is remembering something, or remembering it through the story of someone else, heavy with what she knows and what she has recently learned, because it is always worse than she remembers, and every memory takes something away from the rest of her life, because she came away unscathed, and the burden of being who she is – whole – weighs heavy on her. She is a person with guilt at the very core of her being, and she spends her days compensating others for the fortune that brought her a life, a marriage, me. She is a moral economy all to herself, painted in tiny strokes of the past.

Someone had been nearly acquitted that day. They hadn’t been able to make the case against him and he had gotten off with a light sentence. With a change in government, even this small verdict might be overturned, and the man might walk free. On the streets, there were protests, and people painting their faces in green and red, and children with rope around their necks, holding up signs that read HANG THE BASTARD. My parents are not the only ones who want a reckoning.

What would you do with this messy history, Elijah? Your chamomile-scented home, your overfed cat, lemonade in the refrigerator, and that family tree, so august, no mystery blood, no revolutions, Indiana Jones an anchor in your provenance.

That afternoon, your message had read: Don’t You Pay Them No Mind.

‘Your mother and I are worried,’ my father said. Ammoo had left early for a field trip to Barisal, and we were on the balcony overlooking Gulshan Lake. I looked down and saw the green water, the rim of garbage that lapped the shore, the necklace of apartment buildings that sat at the edge of the water on the other side.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ I said. ‘I keep asking myself and I just can’t tell.’ I remembered seeing a drowned cow in the lake soon after we moved in, and I had returned again and again to the balcony, watching with disgusted fascination as its intestines burst out of its body and floated into the reeds.

‘Why don’t you come to the factory? They love it when you visit. In fact, you could come and work for me.’

‘You would give me a job?’

‘I could use that Harvard brain.’

‘Ammoo would have a stroke.’ I found myself laughing with him. After years working for the government, my father had decided to go into business, and it was Rashid’s father, Bulbul, who had lent him the money to open a textile factory. Freedom Fabrics foundered for the first few years, the costs outweighing the little profit it earned, but it rose to success when Western clothing importers realised my father’s factory was one of the few that paid a decent wage and didn’t employ children. They put Fair Trade labels on his clothes and sold them at department stores and boutiques, the price tags printed on crumpled brown paper. By the time I’d finished college, our financial circumstances had changed dramatically, but Ammoo and Abboo remained conflicted about their increasing wealth, because it interfered with their idea of themselves, forged all those years ago during the war. They kept to their Spartan lifestyle, driving their old Toyota, holding on to the battered cane set they had been given as a wedding gift. Their one concession was the apartment in Gulshan, and they had only bought that on the urging of Rashid’s parents, who had themselves made the move across town years ago.

‘I’ll think about it,’ I promised, remembering the last time I had been to the factory, the rows of sewing machines, the smell of kerosene and cotton, women bent over their work, plastic barrettes in their hair. Abboo reached out and held my hand, and I glanced at the stub which was all that was left of the finger he had lost in the war. Then he was looking out at the water, shaking his wrist to loosen his watch. I felt like there had never been a moment such as this one, and I was about to ask him to tell me something about the adoption, something he hadn’t yet told me, something that would break it open and make it all right to talk about. But he cleared his throat and a lone fish broke the surface of the lake and the moment passed without commotion.

Ammoo flew back in time for dinner, strangely elated. We avoided asking her about the trial or the witnesses she had gone to find. Anyway, she wanted to talk about yoghurt. ‘The food in Barisal is incredible,’ she said. ‘I tasted a superlative sweet doi. And the fish was also excellent.’ The fish reminded her of something. ‘Where’s Rashid?’ she asked. It was Friday, and Rashid always came to our house for dinner on Fridays.

Bashonti had made egg curry. I put a piece of egg in my mouth and chewed slowly. ‘I didn’t really feel like seeing him tonight.’

‘Why not? Dolly said we should start thinking about setting the date.’

‘Oof Ammoo why?’

‘Why not? Is something the matter?’ Ammoo peered into my face. ‘Something wrong between you?’ She sometimes liked to act as if my engagement to Rashid was the only good thing in her life.

‘I’m on the verge of a spectacular failure – can’t you see that?’

Abboo reached over and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Okay, sweetheart, you take your time.’

Ammoo poured herself a glass of water. ‘What do I tell Dolly?’

‘All I ever wanted to do was find that stupid fossil,’ I said.

She took a gulp of water and put her glass down loudly. ‘It’s fine,’ she said; ‘you people do whatever you like.’

Your latest message to me was: Trouble in Mind. In my head I still couldn’t resist telling you about every small thing that happened, but I had replied simply: Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood. I played the music you gave me, listening for clues as to whether I would ever see you again, telling myself it shouldn’t matter, but knowing that it did, more than I could admit, and I thought again and again about Zamzam, and all the choices people made about their loyalties, and I knew that, no matter what I did, there would always be that tug in another direction, a headwind that would cast a sweeping and overwhelming doubt.

My father’s village was three hours out of Dhaka and at the last minute I had agreed to accompany him to the wedding of a distant relative. I had played kabaddi with the children, watched my cousins fish in the pond beside the family compound, and finally, with leftover biryani packed into the trunk of the car, we started for home. It was early evening, and we’d had good luck with the traffic, so we were maybe twenty minutes from Chowrasta, the main intersection leading into the city. The light was softening and fading, and beyond the narrow highway and the string of shops were neon fields of young rice. Suddenly the car lurched, then stalled. Our driver, Abul Hussain, switched off the engine, then restarted it. The car whinnied, then shuddered to a stop. Abul Hussain turned around and said, with a tremor in his voice, that we had run out of petrol. He had meant to fill the tank in the morning and forgotten. He eased the car to the side of the road and then bolted out, making for one of the roadside shops to get help.

‘Stay in the car,’ Abboo said, following him. I opened the doors and let the evening air drift in. After a few minutes they both returned. The petrol station was several miles away. Abul Hussain would start walking and hope to find a rickshaw on the way. I got out of the car and wandered over to a vegetable cart, admiring the neat pyramids of gourd, pumpkin, and eggplant. Ammoo would be happy if I brought home some vegetables – she would say, oh, the marrow is so much sweeter outside of Dhaka – so I tried to get the attention of the man selling them. I was about to pay when I heard someone calling my name, and because I was in the middle of nowhere and the sun was about to set, I spun around with an aggressive word on my lips and saw that it was, in fact, Rashid, smiling down at me, a halo of hair framing his face.

He hugged me, his shirt stretched across his shoulders. ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked, my mouth against his ear.

‘Your father called me,’ he said.

I smelled his skin beneath soap and aftershave. ‘Thank you,’ I mumbled. He continued to hold me, unlike him to care so little that people on the street had begun to stare.

That morning, Jimmy had sent me a link: BODY OF DISSIDENT FOUND OUTSIDE OF QUETTA read the headline. Though the man bore marks of torture, the authorities were refusing to tender any sort of explanation. Zamzam’s mother, Jimmy wrote, was still striking outside the Quetta Press Club. Abboo was getting ready for the trip to the village, pulling on his sneakers and ordering Bashonti to pack a bag of oranges for the drive. I asked if I could come with him, and he was of course overjoyed, assuming it was a sign of my recovery from whatever strangeness had gripped me since my return from Pakistan, but the road out of Dhaka, the children swarming around my knees, tilapia in the pond, all these images were meant, if not to erase, then at least to soften the picture of Zamzam, face down in a ditch, as dead as Ambulocetus.

Rashid had sent his driver in search of Abul Hussain – they would soon return with the petrol. He suggested we wait together at a small restaurant down the road. ‘Why did you call him?’ I whispered to Abboo as we climbed into Rashid’s jeep, but Abboo didn’t reply.

We took our seats on a row of plastic chairs in the restaurant, which was nothing more than a long, narrow room jutting out of the highway.

I said I needed to wash my hands, and the waiter pointed to a hallway. The bathroom was disgusting. There was no lock so I leaned against the door and dialled your number. I had 300 taka of credit on my phone, so if you answered I would only be able to talk for a minute or two. After three rings, I hung up. I splashed water on my face. There was no paper. I rubbed an arm over my face and headed back to the others, trying to form the sentences I would have to say to explain it all to Rashid, to appear calm and in control, as if my ignoring him for the past few weeks was part of some premeditated plan.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to take everything so personally. Let’s just focus on the good news, which is that you’re here sooner than we thought, and forget about everything else.’

Forget everything else. How sweet that would be, how wonderfully pleasant. ‘I’m an idiot,’ I said. I examined him closely, his mother-of-pearl cufflinks, the untroubled way he bore himself. At the table he passed around the small glasses of tea, and I heard Abboo sighing as leaned back against the chair and closed his eyes. At that moment my phone buzzed and I thought it might be you, so I pulled it out of my bag. It was Jimmy. It isn’t him, the message said simply.

Rashid and I went out the following night, to a Chinese restaurant we had frequented in high school, and afterwards we went to Movenpick and shared an ice cream in a cup, and he thought to provide two spoons, and I wondered if I was sharing that ice cream with you, Elijah, if we would have shared a spoon with no concern for who was eating more of it, and this thought, for some reason, made me want to shout out to no one in particular that I was being presented with an impossible choice. Then it was Sally’s birthday, and we all took a boat ride together on the Buriganga. On the third evening, Rashid brought up the subject of marriage, and when I asked why, he said, ‘Because that’s what we were always going to do.’ To you I wrote: I Think It’s Going to Rain Today. And you: Cry Me a River.

I deleted your playlist from my phone and humoured Rashid while he talked about moving into a flat. I began to suspect that was an imminent end to my problems, an end to living and reliving a scrap of a week, obsessing about Diana trapped in the ground, imagining the look on Zamzam’s face as he was loaded into the back of that van. The lie upon which my whole life rested. All of it.

In the evenings Rashid and I sat on the balcony and swatted mosquitoes, sometimes sharing a cigarette, staring out at the lake and the scatter of buildings on the other side. Sally’s pregnancy was starting to show, and the four of us went to parties where Rashid mixed cocktails and held me while we danced. I liked that he was a poor dancer and I could look into his eyes as he made jerky movements with his arms. He sneaked into my room a few times, leaving without a trace before morning, not even his scent lingering on the sheets.

Early one Friday morning, when the traffic was thin, we drove out of the city to Savar and stood under the sail-shaped war memorial. He had brought breakfast, a thermos of tea and a pair of stuffed parathas wrapped in foil. It was cold; we huddled together under our shawls. By this point I had stopped thinking about you entirely, or at least that’s what I had told myself, trying to turn it into a happy, light memory, like a preamble to something, but not the substance of life itself. It had been a month since you had written: Do I Move You? And I had not replied.

Rashid and I walked past the memorial, to the rectangular pool at its base. The path was paved in small red bricks. Pink lotus flowers floated on the surface of the water, which was deep green and opaque.

‘So, you going to marry me, or what?’ We were at the far end of the pool now, and I looked over at the memorial, the white folds of concrete rising up to a triangular point, and I remembered once when my parents had driven us out here and I had soiled my pants, and Ammoo had made me stand up in the back seat all the way home. I didn’t often worry that my parents would send me back to wherever I had come from, but that day, somewhere in my mind I feared they might, and I had gripped the seat in front of me in terror, wondering if the driver would be directed to drop me off on the side of the road and pull away because, although Abboo and Ammoo had promised to love and look after me as if I were their own child, I had crossed an imaginary line.

Rashid reached out from under his shawl and took something out of his pocket, and when I glanced down at his hands I saw that it was a small velvet box with an engagement ring inside.

The week before, I had written to Bart to ask if there was any news about Zamzam or the dig, but he hadn’t replied, and now I felt the years fall away – the long episode in America, the evenings of music, the sweet cold of New England winters.

Rashid was directing me to sit at the edge of the pool. ‘We don’t have to live here, you know. We can live in London. And we’ll travel anyway.’

The implication that I was not at home in my own country irritated me. ‘What makes you think I don’t want to live here?’

‘You want to live here? Great. Makes my life easier.’

‘You think I don’t fit in?’

‘It’s fine, Zee, don’t worry about it. I just meant, you know, it’s nice to get out once in a while.’

‘Because you’re rich, so we can take holidays in Bangkok and Dubai?’

‘What’s wrong with Dubai?’

There were a million things wrong with Dubai, and I could start listing them, but if I did I knew we would have to break up, so instead I said, ‘I want to live here.’ The concrete was cold; I tightened the shawl around my shoulders. Rashid passed me the flask and I took a long sip of tea.

‘Okay. That’s settled, then. We live here. Together.’

I took another sip. ‘Did you put whisky in the tea?’ I reached out and held his hand under the shawl. ‘I feel tipsy.’

‘Let me take care of you, Zee.’

I looked up and saw that the sky was greying and thickening. It would rain on the way home, and we might get stuck in traffic. ‘Let’s do it as soon as possible. How about January?’

His arms shot up. ‘Yes!’

So this is how it happened, Elijah. As Rashid and I made our way back to the car, what passed through me was relief, because now we could all stop pretending there had ever been any other future in my stars, and for the first time in a long time, all the ways in which I felt the absence of my mother, the mother that knew the seedling-me – the me that was here before I was here, a flutter in the guts, that voice of knowledge and doubt – was silent and obedient.

At my door, Rashid asked if he could spend the night. ‘Your parents are asleep. And anyway, who’s going to give them a grandson?’ he winked. ‘Gotta practise.’

‘I’m tired,’ I said, evading him. ‘It’s been a long day.’

‘You’re killing me!’ he said, holding my gaze, holding my elbow in his palm, holding every year we had known each other in the outlines of his face. I imagined him turning on his heel and marching back to the stairwell, jiggling the car keys in his pocket, his irritation dissipating within moments of leaving me, so I relented, undressing in silence at the foot of the bed and letting him fall asleep with his back turned to me, and all the time I was thinking of you, and what it might be like to be with you in this bed, whether you would be as serene in sleep as the man beside me now.

The next day, I went to visit my grandmother. The traffic in Dhaka is unimaginably bad, and it took two, sometimes three hours in the car to get to her apartment in Dhanmondi, which left about one hour for playing rummy, gossiping, and eating the vast number of snacks Nanu could conjure up at a moment’s notice. She was waiting for me in a starched blue sari, smelling comfortably of pressed roses and talcum powder. Pithas – sweet steamed rice cakes – were already waiting, covered with a piece of foil to keep them warm. A teapot and a pair of apples joined them on a tray.

‘I told her to make them after you arrived, but she wouldn’t listen,’ she complained, referring to the cook she had recently hired. ‘So stubborn. Let me look at you.’ She examined my shalwar kameez, nodding in approval.

‘So,’ she said, shuffling the cards, ‘you want to bet money, or just keep it friendly?’

‘I’m getting married,’ I said.

She flung the cards aside. ‘Finally! Somebody brings me good news. Is it that boy?’

I bit into a pitha. ‘Yes. Dolly auntie’s son.’

‘Good. Your mother will be so happy. She told me you came back and ignored him.’

‘I did, and then I changed my mind.’ It sounded strange when I put it this way, as if I was returning to a bowl of leftover soup. ‘He’s very sweet.’

‘Your mother used to tell me she would never get married.’

‘And what did you say?’

‘I told her marriage is wonderful, and children are even better.’ She pulled off her heavy glasses. Nanu had been a young bride, and then a young widow, and anytime she mentioned her husband, an expression of such grief and longing came over her that it was as if she had just lost him the other day. And yet, she could have made an excellent case for being a woman on her own. There was a lightness to her, humour and joy, that she hadn’t passed down to my mother. She had a regular bridge date with her friends, and hosted a monthly kitty party, in which her cousins and neighbours pitched in their savings, so that one person could win the whole lot once a month, names pulled out of an old pillowcase and celebrated with sweets. And she spent as many hours reciting from her Qur’an as she did in front of the television, watching old Hindi films and singing along to the musical numbers.

‘Is he nice to you?’ she asked, wiping her eyes.

‘Very nice.’

‘That’s the most important thing. And so handsome.’

‘Extremely,’ I said.

She asked me a few more questions about what kind of wedding I wanted. Winter or summer? Outside or inside? And what kind of a mother-in-law would Dolly auntie be? She advised me to push Rashid to move out of his parents’ house. ‘It’s always better that way, you won’t argue about the cooking.’

‘I hate cooking anyway.’

‘But you would still argue about it,’ she laughed. Then she looked at the clock on the wall and said, ‘Will you wait here? I’ll come back in a few minutes.’

It was six. She was going to turn on the television for her favourite soap, an Indian series about a villainous mother-in-law and her twelve obedient sons.

‘Go,’ I said, ‘I’ll be fine.’ I looked down at my phone and saw: I Get Along Without You Very Well (Except Sometimes). I didn’t know that one, so I looked it up and played it on my phone.

I get along without you very well

Of course I do

Except when soft rains fall

I lay down on the sofa and gazed up at the ceiling. Nanu’s chandelier swam above me. I could hear the crude violin chords of her soap opera.

I’ve forgotten you just like I said I would