The Bones of Grace (42 page)

The Last True Story

I went to the place of dreams, Elijah, the place of otherness. I want to say I remained in the rational and saw nothing, but I have been unable to wash out the conviction that I dreamed of you the whole time I was unconscious. In the place of otherness, it was your face I saw, you sitting beside my hospital bed, holding my hand so that the pulse at your wrist galloped steadily beside mine, your breath against my skin as you kissed my bruised forehead. It was only a few hours, but, to my mind on the other side, it seemed far, far longer, years, time measured as it was in the age of
Ambulocetus
.

The age of
Ambulocetus
was forty-nine million years ago, after the Indian subcontinent crashed into Asia, creating the Himalayas and sealing off the mighty Tethys. Even then,
Ambulocetus
still clung to her hind legs, allowing her a few hours on shore every day to lie by the sea and catch the sun that beat down on the northern Asian plateau. But it was in the sea that she was at home, unlike her ancestor,
Pakicetus
, who remained in the shallows, her grazing water only knee-deep. And down through the generations,
Ambulocetus
's descendants became bolder, travelling to deeper and wider waters, their snouts elongating, their hind feet becoming webbed, their front teeth narrowing to catch prey underwater.

The story of
Ambulocetus
is the story becoming, of transformation, of leaping between one sort of being and another sort of being, of leaving history behind for the wide swathe of the possible. It is not the story of extinction.
Ambulocetus
is no Mastodon, vanished from the earth with the snap of evolution's hand; no, her story is of the rather slower sort, as, generation by generation, she leaves behind the hoofed foot and short snout of the Mesonychid, over time developing the curved bones in her ears that will allow those who tug at her grave to read her like a hieroglyph: here lies a whale, a creature who lives and eats and breathes by the ocean's heartbeat.

I had been injured by a piece of the crate as it broke apart. It was a knock on the head, stitches, a slight concussion, and a fractured elbow. There would be many tests, back in Dhaka, to make sure there had been no permanent damage, but they would all reveal the same thing: that I'd had a lucky escape, given that I had foolishly rushed towards the piano as everyone else had scattered.

It was not you at my bedside. It was not your voice in my head, crying, ‘My girl, my girl.' That was my father. It was not your hand in my hand. That was my mother. And it was not your breath on my face, kissing my bruised forehead. That was Rashid.

Mo. When I peeled open my eyes, I called out his name, and they said, when you are better, you can see him. I closed my eyes again, willing them to be gone, willing them to be the dream and you the real after the dream. But when I looked again, there they all were, so selfish in their worry for me. I was hardly injured. At least, not in the common way.

I was in a government hospital. The room, the best they
had, was bare except for my bed and the three chairs that seated my family. It smelled of urine and antiseptic. There was no window, only a flickering tube light fixed to the wall.

I woke up again in the darkness and I screamed and screamed until the doctor arrived with a needle and so I pulled out the IV, and then my father said, ‘Let's take her; she has to find out anyway.'

I remember the rest vividly. On the other side of the hospital, in a room with two beds, lay Mo. On the second bed was a girl with a shaved head. They were both sleeping, and unlike me in pyjamas my mother had brought from home, they were in hospital gowns that were too large, their arms protruding like cherry stems. There was a monitor that beeped intermittently. Mo's chest rose and fell.

Their faces, untouched, were perfect.

‘There are internal injuries,' the doctor explained.

‘Can you operate?'

‘Profound injuries,' he said.

I pulled back the sheet. Mo's legs were bandaged all the way up to his thighs, and around his midriff there was a large bloodstain. ‘The dressing needs to be changed,' I said.

‘Profound injuries,' the doctor repeated. Abboo put his arm delicately around my shoulder and I flinched, feeling a wound where there wasn't one. Mo had been smuggling himself out of the country in the crate. (To you, Elijah.) He heard the piano was being shipped to America, and he wanted to go. And with him, in the crate, was a girl. They were trying to locate her family, but no one had heard of her. She wasn't from the beach and she wasn't from the town. Maybe it was his friend, the girl he said he wanted to marry. When he grew up. Which would now be never.

*

On the second day, a man came to the door and said his name was Anwar. ‘You are not Megna,' Anwar said.

I was unmoved. Nothing could surprise me now. A boy had packed himself into a crate to be with you. I had loved you and been loved in return, and yet I was not with you, I was here, in this blue and white room.

‘Who are you?' That was Rashid. I gestured for him to let the man speak, my arm weighed down by a thick padding of bandages.

Anwar approached me, getting closer than a man like him could hope to get to a woman like me, until I could see the ridges on his forehead, the plateaued calluses on his palm as he waved his hand over me, disbelieving.

‘She was my sister,' I managed. Then I was crying. ‘She was my sister.' And he was crying too, his features collapsing together in the middle of his face, covered finally by that callused hand. Someone pulled him away and ushered him out of the room, and I drifted again to the place of dreams, of otherness, of you.

All the time I was lying in that hospital bed, Ammoo whispered into my ear. Telling me how sorry she was to have kept the truth from me, that I was going to come home now and it would all be put right. The silence would be shattered. The unsayable would be voiced. We would find my mother. We would retrace her steps. We would search up and down the country.

On the third day, they let Anwar return. We talked and talked, or rather, he talked, and I listened. Hours passed. I shared a piece of banana bread with him, a gift from Komola. That's when he told me my mother was dead. Before I could grieve for her, which I did with the barest sense of what I was mourning, they told me that Mo had died in
the night. They had switched off the machines. Did I want to see him? I shook my head. I had said my farewell the day before, when I had taken the soles of his feet and pressed them against my cheek and begged him to forgive me because I knew he had only loved you because I had led the way, because I had suggested to him that his wishes could grow that big, out of the beach, beyond the country, to a place of pianos and cold winters and childhood.

The doctor said I should be transferred to a private hospital in Dhaka. I needed an orthopaedic surgeon to set my arm properly. Anyway, I was taking a bed. Someone might need it. I refused to be discharged. They replaced the IV and gave me sedatives and I slept and slept.

On the sixth day, Anwar brought the girl to my bedside, and he told me this girl, whose name was Shona, was Megna's daughter and his daughter. And he told me the story of the woman he had once loved and left behind.

She hid behind his legs so I had no idea if she resembled me. ‘Come here,' I said, my voice like a broken glass bottle. She remained behind her father but she extended her hand to me and I grasped the tips of her fingers. Again I cried. Again my mother whispered into my ear. My mother was dead. My mother loved me. My mother was a shit-poor woman from nowhere. I had a twin sister. My sister had a daughter. My sister's daughter was also my daughter. On the seventh day, these were the words that came to my lips.

‘My sister's daughter is my daughter.' I looked at the three people who were the closest in the world to me. Holding my hand. Blowing prayers over my face. Whispering tender words into my ears. My sister was a prostitute because Anwar had abandoned her to build a skyscraper in Dubai and she had nowhere to go and when she had died, her daughter had been sold and Mo had tried to rescue her
and now here this girl was, hiding behind her father's legs, the father who had abandoned her mother, my sister, the woman with my face who had died of a broken heart.

Dolly, who had pointed out the ugliness of my history, had no idea how ugly it really was.

‘My sister's daughter is my daughter,' I repeated.

Rashid said: ‘She could be anyone.'

‘No.' I shook my head. ‘She's mine. Can't you see?' I closed my eyes and pictured the girl, who had finally emerged from behind her father and stood by my bedside in a cheap blue dress. Through the pain on the side of my head and the ache in my arm and the unbearable pain of waking up and finding that you were not at my bedside, I experienced a sweet, unpunctuated joy. I know who I am now, Elijah. I saw it the moment I looked into her face. I am her, and she is me. The restless being is at peace at last. Rumi said: look inside yourself; everything that you want, you are already that.

‘I want to take her home,' I said. We were alone; my parents had quietly left the room as I had expressed my demand and Rashid his reservations.

‘She has a father,' Rashid said. ‘She belongs with him.'

‘No,' I argued. ‘She's mine.'

Anwar had given the girl to me. He had brought her to me and said that she should come home with us, because he had nothing and we would give her a life. Ammoo and Abboo had looked at each other, Bibles of words passing silently between them, and nodded. Only Rashid pointed out how strange this would make our family.

‘I've decided,' I said.

Rashid had not left my bedside since the accident, and the strain was showing, the lower half of his face obscured by stubble. ‘Wait till you're better,' he said, lightly caressing
the small strip of my skin between my hairline and the bandage. They had shaved my head there, I knew, and put in seventeen stitches.

‘She looks like me,' I said.

‘I hadn't noticed,' he said, his hand resting on my shoulder, running the soft pad of his thumb along my collarbone.

‘You wanted to be a father.'

‘Yes, to our child.'

‘This can be our child.'

He folded his hands on his lap and looked up at the murmuring light of the fluorescent bulb. A nurse entered and checked the level of fluid in my drip. We waited until the adjustment had been made, one bag exchanged for another.

Finally, he said, ‘Zee, it's too much randomness.'

‘Take it or leave it,' I said, refusing to make my case. ‘She comes with me.'

And he said, ‘I choose you, Zee, but you can't expect me to take a stranger into my house. My parents wouldn't have it.'

In that moment, I was free of him. There was no turning back from this: his declaration of her as a stranger was also an objection to me, to the randomness of me. It wasn't that I couldn't love a man who wouldn't take this girl into his heart, but that he was making it clear he could only love the piece of me he could imagine, the piece he could know. The mystery of me, my alienness, would always be at best obscured, something to ferret away in shame.

Perhaps it was already too late for Rashid and me – too late the moment I met you, Elijah. And I should be sorry, perhaps, that this is what it took for me to see that Rashid and I could never be together. But if you are reading this, if I have done my job, you will know that it was never
going to be enough that I loved you. It would have to be that the whole rotation of the world, my world, shifted ever so slightly, so that everything that seemed acceptable, everything that seemed inevitable, would suddenly become loathsome to me. And that is what happened. A bruise on the forehead. A bruise on the brain. A fallen girl who was my girl, my other, bearing the weight of all the missing fragments of my history.

Ambulocetus
was not alone in her day. She had contemporaries:
Takracetus
,
Gaviocetus
,
Dalanistes –
each of these may have been the ancestor of the whale as we know it. Or it could have been another altogether, a genus yet to be discovered. What we do know is that the whale was first a coyote, then a water-curious amphibian, and, finally, the creature that would rule the seas and become the stuff of our myths, our ocean-totems, our outstanding beast, the one who reminds us that long before our time, beings were made on a grander scale, their bones as big as cities. The whale is the fragment of that grandeur, of life writ on a canvas so large it is almost beyond the imagination. And for this to have happened, a transgression had to be committed, an abandonment of limbs, an adventure into water, and the courage to bid farewell to the past, whatever such voyaging may have cost, whatever longings and loves were left behind in the rubble.

Shona and Abboo and Ammoo and I went home together, the four of us a mottled tribe. I said goodbye to Rashid at the hospital. I was hollowed out, numb from all that had happened, so I told him with a dead voice that it was over and he gave me a look of disbelief – it made him feel better, I think, to assume I'd taken leave of my
senses. I saw him a few times after that, but we had less and less to say to each other, and finally, about a year later, in front of the same Kazi who had married us, we signed our names again in the black register and were divorced.

Those first weeks with Shona were the hardest. I thought she would cry, that she would ask for Mo, or her father, or someone from her past, but she didn't speak a word to us on the long ride home, all the way down the Dhaka– Chittagong highway, through the city, and past the gates of the apartment building and up the elevator. When we entered, she only gave a small hint of the vast distance between this place and all the other places she had called home by pulling at her eyelashes, a gesture I would come to know as one that conveyed extreme distress. Ammoo took over the care of her. She knew, instinctively, what to do, putting Shona in the bed with her and making sure the rest of us kept our distance, especially Abboo. In the morning we found them curled around each other like human and cat. A strand of Ammoo's hair was in Shona's fist. I was desperate to question her about Mo, to ask where she had met him and how they had come to be in that crate together, but she could barely look at me, her eyes perpetually sweeping the mosaic floor.