The Bones of Grace (44 page)

Now that I have pieced together not just the fossil but myself, I must tell you that this forensic approach no longer satisfies me, Elijah. It is no longer enough for me to uncover the truth. I want to make my tracks on the world, leave my own mysterious scratchings on the walls of history. As I put the finishing touches on Diana, placing her bones in their correct order, and as I finished our story, I asked myself what would happen if I cut my tether to the truth. What would happen if I turned to that place of dreams, the one where I can make up the ending of a story? I couldn't do it with ours – I had to tell it exactly as it happened – but I could do it with others. I remembered my grandmother once telling me that her son had hidden a trunk full of rifles in her back garden during the war, and an idea began to take shape in my mind.

I am buoyed by the prospect of changing her story as I write, giving her a pause of happiness in what has been a long and lonely life. I can start with a true story and I can make the rest up, blunt the edges of a tragedy, or perhaps not that at all, perhaps render it even clearer, but this time, this time I will be holding the brush, I will be the storyteller, and everything – history, and the will of other people, and the hard forward thrust of time itself – will be in my thrall, because you see, Elijah, I am no longer a person written and mutely accepted, I am the scribe, the person with her foot on the brass pedal of the piano, and though
you may never love me again, you will always remain the making of me.

I will send this to you now. I am full of those days on the beach when the light was the colour of oranges and the scent between us had mingled so deeply that there was nothing between us but a thin double-layer of skin. It is springtime in Cambridge; I see snow melting on sidewalks and blossoms punctuating the cold. In a few days I will wait for you to come and visit my beloved fossil. You will be late, I know. You will make me lose hope until the very last moment, and then, out of the corner of my eye, I will notice you tying your shoelace or taking something out of your pocket. The moment I see you I will feel myself disintegrating, but you will hold me steadily in your gaze, as you have always done. I have said a thousand sorrys within these pages, and I will say them again, later, but for now, there will be no more words, only eyes. Mine will say: you came back. And yours will say yes, I did, and we will walk hand in hand out of that room – past Diana and the glass flowers and Zamzam and Megna and the war my parents fought, all of our ghosts behind us, and before us the terrible, dark world – belonging only to each other.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to The Society of Authors, who awarded me a travelling scholarship which enabled me to visit the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology in the summer of 2015. Many thanks to Jessica Cundiff for a tour of the collection, including the Agassiz shelves,
Kronosaurus
, and Stephen Jay Gould's writing desk. Thanks to Alice Albinia for introducing me to Usman Qazi, who gave me invaluable feedback on the chapters set in the Suleiman. Mizan Uncle and Jamboo Khan were excellent hosts in Chittagong and Shithakunda, and I thank them for their gracious hospitality. Rezwana Chowdhury and her team at BELA work tirelessly for the rights of workers on the shipbreaking beaches, and I offer them my respect and admiration. Although we have not had an opportunity to meet in person, Phillip D. Gingerich and Johannes Thewissen's work on
Ambulocetus
has served as a great inspiration. Any mistakes or omissions are of course entirely my own.

My personal debts are many. Thank you, first and foremost, to my publishers, Terry Karten and Jamie Byng, who have brought to this book the kind of optimism and enthusiasm a writer can only dream of. Thank you to all my wonderful collaborators at Canongate, HarperCollins,
and Penguin Random House India, all of whom have committed heroics at various stages of the process — Louisa Joyner, Meru Gokhale, Jane Beirn, Jenny Fry, Lorraine McCann, Natasha Hodgson, Jaz Lacey-Campbell, and Vicki Rutherford. Thank you to Sarah Chalfant, who is a friend to my intellect, my heart, and my spirit. Thank you to my friends at the Wylie Agency – Andrew Wylie, Alba-Ziegler Bailey, Jin Auh, Jackie Ko, and Charles Buchan. I thank Anya Serota, who has seen me through a decade of writing life and so much more. Thank you to Abrar Athar and Medium Rare for translating my ‘girl on the beach' idea into reality. Thank you to Joe Treasure, who patiently read endless drafts of this novel. Thank you to Peter Florence for coming to Dhaka and for all the dreaming that followed. I thank Tash Aw, Michael Puett, and the inimitable John Freeman for their friendship and inspiration. Thank you to Auntie Lona for the precious gift of writing time. To the extended ROLI family, especially Matt Carney, Corey Harrower, Kate Enright, Nataleigh Strasburg, Jean-Baptiste Theibault, and Charles Cook, thank you for making this small corner of London feel like home.

I thank the sisterhood for holding my hand through illness, the bruise of early motherhood, and eventual re-emergence into life, reading, and this book: Bee Rowlatt, Kamila Shamsie, Rachel Holmes, Leesa Gazi, Sohini Alam, Sawsan Eskander, and Eeshita Azad. Thanks to my sister Shaveena, who, by telling a small lie many years ago, accidentally gave me the idea for this novel. Thank you to my grandmother, Musleha Islam, who, with her indomitable spirit, is the muse for this entire endeavour. Thank you to my parents for their love, and for embodying these words by the great Rabindranath Tagore: ‘Where the mind is without fear and the head is held
high/Into that heaven of freedom, My Father, let my country awake.'

And finally, boundless gratitude to my partner Roland Lamb: we are twelve years, three books, a baby, a company, and several continents later, yet you are still my romantic hero on and off the page. And to Rumi, who has just begun to discover the magic of words, I thank you for filling every day with grace, love, and laughter.