The Bones of Grace

The Testimony of Anwar I How I Got Everything

Foreman likes to hoist the new ones up, see what they’re made of. Some of them have never climbed higher than a tree in their village. Back home the place is flat, flat. I’m here nine years, I know what’s what, so I tell them, don’t look, don’t look. Hold the torch in one hand, like this, and keep your eye on one screw at a time. From here to here, I show them, holding my fingers apart an inch, maybe an inch and a half. Your eye will see this much, no more. Understand?

I don’t tell them the whole story. Whole story is this: you look down, you die. You see the world has shrunk below you. You call God but no one answers. You recite the Kalma. You see God is not there. You piss your pants. No one is watching. No one cares about your shitty speck of a life. The people below are specks and you are a speck. God looks down and sees nothing but tiny ants below Him. You choke. You move your legs. You scream. The building shifts, it moves, it throws you up, it throws you over. You’re done for, a chapatti. They scrape you off the pavement; they don’t even write to your family. Months later, someone will go to your village and tell the news to your people. And that will be the end of your life.

All this I don’t say. I say only what is useful.

This new kid won’t listen. Came in with a swagger — I spotted it right away, the way he moved his legs and his trousers hanging, his head loose on his shoulder, nodding, doesn’t look down when foreman is talking, raises his head and gives two eyes to the boss. Eye for an eye. Foreman smiles. I know that smile; it means I’ll take that two-eyed look right out of your skull. Soon you’ll be like the rest of them, giving me the top of your head and mumbling into your shirt.

‘I have schooling, sir,’ the kid says. ‘Intermediate Pass.’

Foreman says, ‘Crane will take you to the top.’ And the kid says, ‘Yessir.’ as if he’s been given a gift. All that school, he doesn’t even know when his ass is being strung up.

Later I ask the kid where his people are. We’re on the same sleeping shift, starts two in the afternoon, the shed hot as an animal’s mouth. You can’t touch the metal rails on the bunk, you just jump on the mattress and pray for a breeze.

He says he’s a Pahari, says it with a little edge, like, I’m a Pahari, you gonna fuck with me? I’ve never seen such pride in a tribal, and I say, ‘So what, no one cares here.’

Army took our village, so I had to come here, make some money. He shrugs like he doesn’t mind but I can see when he closes his eyes he’s going to dream about college, hearing his name in the roll-call, getting his degree and spending his life in a shirt with buttons and getting some respect. Someday, someone might even call him ‘sir’. Buy a scooter and get himself a salty wife.

But now he is here. ‘Shit,’ he says, ‘it’s like a fry pan inside.’

It’s only March. Wait a few months, I tell him. Then you’ll see what hell feels like. Then I give him my two paisa little bit of advice. I tell him, ‘Stay away from foreman and keep your mouth shut. And when he hauls you up, whatever you do, don’t look down.’ The kid nods, but I know what he’s thinking, thinking it’s not going to be him at the end of a rope.

I go to my bunk and try to sleep. This month I’m in the middle. We take turns, Hameed, Malek and me. Top bunk is hottest, but there’s a breeze, if you can catch it, from a small window out of the side of the shed. Bottom bunk is cooler, but closer to the ground and the toilet stink is strong. Middle is the worst, like being sandwiched between two asses, especially because this month I’ve got Malek on top. He makes the springs creak as he pleasures himself to sleep. I’m used to the steady rhythm of it, I don’t say anything. A man has his needs, out here in the desert. Myself, I can’t do it. I reach down and Megna’s face comes into my head. She won’t let me sleep. I see her little tears and she’s asking me to stay — ‘What will I do when the baby comes?’ And I’m saying no, I’m shrugging. I’m calling her a slut, even though I know it was her first time, and I’d told her I loved her and meant it, except my uncle is there too, and he’s telling me, ‘Dubai, Dubai, son, it’s like paradise, shopping malls and television and air con. Marry my daughter and the ticket is in your hand.’ ‘You’re a slut,’ I tell Megna, and I swivel around and leave her there, except I don’t leave her, because whenever I try to get myself a little something, like a piece of sleep or a full stomach, she comes out and she comes out strong. I want to know what she did to the little seed I planted in her, where does it live, does it know me, and does it have the eyes of its mother? I’m in the dark and I can’t sleep. Malek sighs, rolls over, and the room gets hotter and the stink rises.

Too quickly the sleep shift is over and it’s time to get back to the site. Pahari kid is about to get his first kick in the head, but he doesn’t know it, he just pulls on his uniform like he’s the sheikh himself. I have to throw water on Malek’s face to wake him up. He curses me and jumps down. The floor vibrates. Next shift is already waiting outside — it’s dark, and starting to cool down, the lucky bastards.

The bus drops us at the canteen. Hameed sits at the end of the table so people can bring him the letters. He’s the only one who can read. We pay him a few dirhams to tell us the news from home. He reads me letters from my darkie wife, she says, ‘Take care don’t forget to eat and does it get cold do you have a shawl?’ The others are always laughing — ‘She’s going to tell you how to wipe the shit from your ass,’ they say. I laugh with them. Stupid girl. I don’t write back.

Hameed says sometimes he changes the letters, because there’s only so much a man can take. Last week he read that Chottu’s mother had died. Poor bastard’s only been here a month, still cries every time he has to stand out in the baking hot, carrying bricks on his head. So Hameed told him his mother was well, much better, in fact, since he started sending money for her asthma medicine. Later, when Chottu gets hard like the rest of us, Hameed will tell him the truth. And by then he won’t even stop to take a breath.

The canteen manager is Filipino, so stingy we get a piece of bread, dal and a few vegetables, and even that they cut from our pay. Eid comes he gives us meat, but only bones and fat. One thing my uncle said was true — as much Coke as we want, straight out of a spout.

‘Tareque Bhai,’ Hameed says, ‘your sister has given birth to a healthy baby boy.’

‘Mashallah,’ Tareque Bhai says. Tareque has been here the longest and he has gone the religious way. Two ways a man can go here, in the direction of God or the direction of believing there is nothing up there but a sun that will kill you whether you pray five times or not.

We wash our hands and head to the site. They’ve turned the lights on, the buildings are winking. We come to the Mall of Dubai, which Tareque Bhai remembers was only a few years ago a pile of rubble, and Pahari kid says, ‘Why don’t we walk through here?’ And we all look at him like he was born yesterday. Even dumber than I thought.

‘You can’t go in there,’ I say.

‘Why, is there a law?’

‘Doesn’t have to be a law.’

‘I’m going in,’ he says, loose, like it’s the easiest thing in the world. ‘Anyone coming with me?’

I think Hameed’s going — those book-learning types always stick together — but it’s Malek that breaks off and joins him and I’m cursing myself for not grabbing him before it’s too late, telling him, don’t even smell that, it’ll kill you.

The rest of us make tracks, shaking our heads. This month, Hameed and me are in the hole. Two buildings going up side by side. We call them ‘Bride and Groom’. Bride is almost finished, Groom still in foundations. ‘Fifty-fifty,’ they tell us, fifty storeys for Bride, fifty for Groom. Who knows what they’ll name it once it’s finished? Burj-al-Arab-al-Sheikh-al-Maktoum-al-kiss-my-ass. Shit, if I said that aloud I would be finished. I giggle to myself and Hameed swings his arm around my shoulder, laughing with me even though he hasn’t heard the joke.

Bride and Groom make me think of darkie wife. She was the skinniest, ugliest girl I ever saw. I took one look at her and I swear a few tears came to my eyes. To this girl I was going to be tied for life? ‘Just do it,’ my mother said, ‘you won’t even see her for years. Who knows what will happen between now and then? But give us a grandchild, something to keep us company while you’re gone.’

I did my duty. Girl started to cry and I even felt a little sorry for her, though I was also thinking, two times I’ve done it and both times the girl has burst into tears — something wrong with me or what? Next day I took her to the cinema, but even Shah Rukh Khan couldn’t wipe the sad from her face.

We climb down and the bright lights make the hole turn blue-grey. The diggers are awake and we start to haul the dirt around, everything dry and sucked of life.

I pick up a basket. I wonder if Malek and Pahari have made it out of the mall without getting their eyes pulled out, and just as I’m imagining what it must have looked like, two guys in their blue jumpsuits staring at those diamond-necked swans of Dubai, I feel a jab in my side, and there’s Malek, laughing so hard I can see the gap where he lost a tooth last year after biting down on a piece of candy he bought from the Filipino. ‘Worth it,’ he’d said, ‘I never tasted anything so good.’ Now he’s telling me about the mall, the cold air that made your sweat dry to salt, and the high ceilings, and the women, the women, didn’t cover their legs, no, or even their breasts. ‘Breasts, man, like you wouldn’t believe.’ He slaps me hard on the back, shaking up my basket so I can taste the dirt. ‘Go to work,’ I say, but he’s too busy talking, and now some of the other boys, Hameed and even Tareque Bhai, have joined in, and I can see them all thinking it could be them next, them in the ice-cream cold of the mall, gaping and staring and taking a little slice of heaven back to the hole to chew over.

Worst of all, Pahari kid got hauled up to the top of Bride and nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. He swung like a monkey and laughed his way through the shift. Turns out those tribals like floating on top of buildings, hitched up so the whole world is spread below them.

For the next two weeks, every day, Malek and Pahari pass through the Mall of Dubai on their way to the site. They take their jumpsuits in a plastic bag and go in wearing trousers and T-shirts. One day Malek comes over to my bunk with a pair of sunglasses draped over his eyes. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘I’m James Bond now.’

I keep my head down. I have debts to pay, I can’t take the chance.

Once, only once, I am tempted. They are going to the cinema — not the cheap, rundown place by the camp, I’m talking a brand-new theatre, air con, seats like pillows. Pahari knows this guy at the ticket stall, been wooing him since day one, going up and talking about home, saying yaar this and my friend that. And finally the guy gave it up, late show on Monday nights usually empty, come in with the cleaning crew and sit at the back. Four people, max. Don’t get me fired or I’ll tell the cops everything, even about the girl.

Pahari has a girlfriend. Not even a darkie or a chink, a proper fair-faced blondie, a shopgirl who sells perfume. He leans over the counter and she smiles like she’s seen a film star. We huddle close to Pahari, trying to catch a whisper of that girl’s smell.

While we’re heaving bags of sand to Groom, Pahari and Malek start arguing about what to see. Malek says it has to be the new Dhoom. But our boy wants to see an English film. ‘What you’re going to do with an English film, you little shit?’ But Pahari’s not thinking about himself, he’s thinking of his girl, moving his hand in the dark, cupping her knee, fingering the edge of her skirt, and what’s going to make her open up, a movie with mummy-daddy and fake kissing and chasing around trees, or real humpty-dumpty, tongues and blonde hair and New York City?

Pahari has a point, but I’m just hauling the sand, keeping my head low. Wife has sent another letter. April and the waters are going up, up. Last week my brother, who works at a weaving mill, came home with a bad leg. Needs an operation. Can I send money? I shove the letter under my mattress.

Send money, send money. All anyone ever wants. I have to ask for an advance, so I crawl to foreman. He’s got a toothpick hanging from the side of his mouth, and he twirls it around and around. ‘You Bangladeshis,’ he says, ‘can’t hold on to your money, na. Look at this.’ He points to a big black book, lines of names. ‘Everyone borrowing, nobody saving. You’re going to drown, all of you.’

He opens his mouth, toothpick falls out, frayed and shining with spit. Should I pick it up? I stare at my feet.

‘How much you want?’

I don’t know why, but I don’t say anything for a long time. Pahari and Malek are going to the movies tonight. He’s going to lean back on that chair and swing his arm over his girl. He’s going to sip Coke through a straw and the music will breeze through him, free and liquid.

Then I say, ‘I have been loyal, sir.’

Foreman leans back. Chair squeaks like a dying mouse.

‘Sure, you never stole.’

‘Yes, sir. I always do what you say.’

I lift my chin a little and he knows what I’m talking about, the little cover-ups, taking a few bags of cement off the truck, losing a little cash. The boss, the sheikh with three wives, always wearing a prayer cap and telling us to call him Master Al-Haj because he goes to Saudi every year and kisses the Prophet’s grave — he wouldn’t miss a few things here and there. A sack of rivets, a few pots of paint were nothing to him.

So you’re telling me what, na, that I should be grateful? Fresh toothpick in his mouth. Now I’m thinking about Megna, her crazy thick river of hair, how she smelled so good and told me I should be a proud man. Nothing to be proud of, I always said.

‘Yes, sir,’ I find myself saying. ‘Loyalty like that, it doesn’t come easy.’

‘And I suppose you want something for your trouble?’ He’s getting up, he’s coming towards me, he’s going to give me something, a little money and a slap on the shoulder, friendly like. You have to ask for it, I think. All you have to do is ask. Foreman’s close now, he takes my chin in his hand, lifts me up so we’re eye to eye, and for a minute I see him staring at my lips and I think he’s going to kiss me. He opens his mouth. And then he spits, toothpick flying out of his mouth, right there on my face.

‘You stinking bitch, fuck off. You blackmailing me?’ He makes a fist, sends it to my cheek. I fall, cursing Megna, her hair and her stupid wisdom. I try to make myself small. He kicks me. I feel his shoe in my stomach. I double up, he kicks me again. My face explodes. A tooth comes loose. I taste blood.

‘Who pulled you out of the shithole you call a country?’

‘You.’

‘Louder!’

‘You!’

‘Who gave you a job when you came crawling?’

‘You.’

‘Say it.’

‘You!’

And then I make the begging sounds, tell him about my brother, about his leg, how they make him sit in those clay pits for eighteen, twenty hours a day, feeding silk into the loom, the cold grabbing his thighs. ‘Please, foreman,’ I say, ‘forgive me.’

‘Piece of shit. Get out.’

Pahari and Malek come back from the cinema with smiles so big I can see their back teeth. I show off my broken face.

‘What happened to you?’ Malek asks.

‘Foreman. What you get for thinking big thoughts.’

‘You?’

‘Ya, me. Surprise.’

Pahari’s looking at my face, my swollen eye.

‘Uglier than ever,’ I say, trying to laugh.

He’s shaking his head. ‘That’s not right. They can’t do that.’

‘They can do whatever the fuck they like. It’s their country.’

‘We’ll go to the police. He can’t just beat you.’

He makes me cheerful with his baby talk. ‘It’s nothing,’ I say. ‘Sit. Tell me about the cinema.’ I pat the bunk. ‘Come, Malek.’ But he’s pacing the tiny corridor between our beds.

‘Bastard, bastard,’ he mutters.

I turn to Pahari. ‘So what did you see?’

‘English film,’ he says, raising his eyebrows. ‘Lots of shooting.’

‘Your girl enjoyed?’

He lies back on the bunk, raises his hands to his face. ‘Shit, man.’

I could almost remember that feeling, the first time I tasted a woman’s mouth. ‘Be careful,’ was all I could say. ‘They put you under a spell and then you’re finished.’

‘So what you’ll do about your brother?’ Malek is squeezing himself onto my bunk.

‘Brother will have to wait.’

‘Let me give you the money.’

‘What do you have?’

‘I have, I have.’

‘No, brother. I won’t eat your rice.’ I can’t help it, my tongue keeps going to the missing tooth, the gap made of jelly. Malek tries to press me but I can’t take his money.

‘Oh, I almost forgot, brother. We brought you a gift.’ Pahari takes a packet of candy out of his pocket. I chew with my good side.

‘Sleep now,’ I say to them both. ‘It will last longer if you dream about it.’

Next day, foreman comes to the camp. ‘I have a job,’ he says.

Bride is almost finished, she just needs her windows cleaned. Sheikh Abdullah Bin-Richistan is coming to cut a ribbon and everything has to be perfect. ‘We’re running out of time and job needs to be done in a hurry.’ ‘I’ll go,’ Pahari says, even though it’s higher, much higher, than he’s ever been, but he wants to take his girl out, proper restaurant this time, with people smiling and asking if he wants ice in his Coke and bringing plates to the table.

‘I want double overtime,’ he says. Foreman smiles and says, ‘All right,’ and then, because I see something in the boss’s eye, I raise my hand too, and before you know it, Malek is watching us drive off in a truck. Foreman takes us into Bride’s lobby, empty and shining, and I give myself a little smile, because I know I put this thing together with my own hands, me and Malek and the other boys, working through the devil’s breath of summer. Pahari is looking around, dreaming of when he’s going to own the whole place. They’ve taken off the elevator on the outside, but there’s another one at the back of the building, where all the cooks and cleaners and guards will come and go, and we’re going up, up, all the way. ‘Wear this,’ foreman says, handing us a pair of hard hats. Then he slides open a big door, and we are on the roof of the building, flat and open to the sky. I wonder if Pahari’s thinking it wasn’t such a good idea after all, but he’s not one to admit it. When I put my hand on his back he shrugs it away, moving with speed to where foreman is pointing, to a little balcony hanging over the edge of the building.

Clips and ropes fix us to the sides of the balcony. ‘I’m going to lower you all the way down,’ foreman says. ‘You do one floor at a time, slowly. Then you push the button, and you go up.’ He shows me how to work it. I see there isn’t anything holding us to the side of the building; we’re only attached at the top. It’s going to sway. I look over at Pahari again, wondering if I should cut out of the whole thing, but he’s grinning like it’s Eid. ‘Don’t worry,’ foreman says. And he winks.

On the way down Pahari hangs on the edge and makes a strange, low sound which I think is panic but then he turns around and says, ‘FLYING!’ The bastard is laughing, holding his arms out and shaking his shoulders around like he’s hero in a filmi dance sequence. The windows are like mirrors, we can see our reflections. He puts his arm around me and we are floating down, angels from heaven, Superman and God and people who don’t eat shit for a living.

Every window we clean, we go up one more flight. We’re shining up that Bride and she’s looking good. There’s a wind up here, the balcony moves a little, then a bit more as we move higher. Now we’re holding on with one hand and cleaning with another. We wash, I push the button, we go up. Wind gets stronger.

‘I’m going to marry her,’ Pahari tells me.

A man marrying for love. Too good for me, but nothing’s too good for Pahari. He wants everything.

‘Do it,’ I say. ‘Is she going to convert?’

‘I’m Christian, you idiot.’

All this time, and I didn’t even know. That was my problem. I thought everyone was the same, but it didn’t have to be that way. Even I didn’t have to be the same. I could be different. The wind dies down and we have a moment of quiet so I can think about all the ways I could be different. And then, before my dreaming starts making me big, wind picks up again. This time, it comes with sand. Minute later the air is thick with it, so thick I can only just make out Pahari on the other side, holding on with both arms. ‘It will pass,’ I shout, swallowing a mouthful of the desert. ‘Don’t worry. Hold on.’

We wait, turning our backs to the wind, becoming small, small as we can. I crawl to Pahari and I grab his jumpsuit, put my arm through his arm. We groan as the sand comes into our ears, into our clothes, the devil’s spit. The balcony lifts, higher on one side and then another. I pull the lever, but we can only go up, not down. Only one way, so I climb us up, slow as I can. Close to the top and suddenly it shudders to a stop, and I push and push but nothing happens. I crawl to the other side, see if I can make the ropes move. I can’t. I ask myself if this is the time to start praying, but no God was going to hear me now, not after all the curses I had sent in His direction. ‘It will pass, it will pass,’ I keep saying, but Pahari can’t hear me now, he’s on the other side, and the wind is too high, and before I know it, we’re going back and forth like a swing, and it’s everything I’ve got to keep my arm around the bars of the platform, and I do just like what I teach those boys when they first get here, just focus on a small piece of the building, not the tall of it falling away below me, just this little piece in front of me, and I will the moment to stand very still, and then I see Pahari, his arm has come loose, and the ropes that tie him to the machine are floating free, and the sound of him falling is swallowed by the hiss of the desert, that shape-shifting snake.

I’m home now and I’ve got everything. Because Pahari’s dead and they paid me off. I’m the greedy bastard now. I’m the one who isn’t the same. The old me would’ve stayed, maybe made sure Pahari got his proper burial, maybe I wouldn’t even have taken their dirty money, maybe I would’ve made a stink about it, but soon as they handed me that envelope I was gone. Malek told me the sheikh was getting rid of foreman. We shouldn’t have been up there, not without better safety equipment. It’s not something they can cover up, like the boys who jump because they miss their mamas and can’t take another day. We were up there for an hour; lots of people saw, real people who matter. ‘We can make our demands,’ Malek said, ‘ask for better pay, overtime and a good place to sleep.’

But I didn’t care about any of that. Because when I was going to die, when I was hanging up there with the storm in my face, all I could think about was my kid. My kid, walking around with no memory of a father, a kid who would look at himself in the mirror and not know where his face came from. Who knows what Megna had told him, though if she said bad, it would all be true, because I was a bastard for letting it come into the world without a name. Now I want it all, I want my fridge and my socks and my name and Megna, my little piece of heaven, and I’m coming to get it.

II I Am a Doorway Man

I am a doorway man. I sit in the doorway and people come. In the morning, they tell me the gossip. So-and-so’s wife left him. Lost all his money gambling and she buggered off. Cup of tea and we talk politics. I’m a big man now, the parties are after me — who will I join? Awami League, BNP? They want me, they want my money, my sway with the village. I sit in the doorway while they kiss my ass. I tell the mollahs to go to hell, none of that fake Goddery. I’ve seen God, I tell them. He’s made of sand and he spat right in my eye.

My story gets bigger with every lip it crosses. First I’m up fifty storeys, then a hundred. Two hours up on that balcony. No six. Ten. Hanging by a rope. Upside down. His forehead was lucky, otherwise he would’ve been dead like the other guy.

Even Morshed is sucking up. Morshed, who took two acres from my uncle to export me to Dubai, lining his pockets with the money of every SOB who wants to go to foreign. Fat from the stink of the desperate. Now he says, let’s be partners, I’ll give you ten per cent. If I haggle with him, I can get fifty out of him, no problem. But I’m not going to dirty my hands any more. I didn’t even answer the letters from the gang, Bride and Groom both finished, now they’re building a golf club on a fake island, sand they’re getting from the sea. That life is over. Pahari’s dead and I have his blood money, and now I’m gonna sit here in my doorway and let the people come to me.

After all the visiting in the morning, I take a walk around the village. I see the chillies like red lipstick around the borders of people’s houses. I see the rice, dark green, then yellow. I walk around the mosque but I don’t go inside; if it’s there to bring me peace, I don’t deserve it.

I walk to the market to take a look. It’s winter now and all the interesting things are out of the ground. Things I could only have with my eyes before, now going into my belly. Wife is thrifty, she doesn’t like it. I gave her some of the money — only a little — and instead of having a party like I told her, invite everyone and slaughter a goat, she bought a heifer and a bull. There’s milk in my tea every morning. Rest of the milk she sells on, and the bull she’s fattening — Eid comes she’s going to sell it and buy two more. I rile her up, say I’m going to slaughter it myself, what she’s gonna do? I’ll feed the whole village, the beggars will come to me for scraps, I’ll be the king, no more dreams of hanging by my fingers to that balcony, Pahari about to marry his Christian girl, falling like a pebble from the sky.

After lunch, I sleep. No one bothers me, telling me feed the cow, fetch the dinner, dig out the vegetables. I sleep for two, three hours. When I wake up they’re at the doorway again, telling me how brave I was, how lucky.

Only my mother isn’t happy. ‘A son,’ she keeps on saying, ‘it’s nothing without a child. No, I won’t stop nagging. Divorce that darkie, you don’t need her any more. Find another one. Fair, young. She’ll give you a son by next spring and I can die in peace.’

I won’t. At night after she gives me the dinner, Shathi listens from outside until my plate is clean. Then she comes, pours a bowl of water over my hands, passes me a bar of soap. She dries my hands with the end of her sari. Then she eats alone. In the bed I can hear her breathe, her sigh as she rolls from one side to another, trying not to disturb me while the blood stirs in her. She wants to be touched. Even though she’s skinny and from the looks of it there’s nothing but bones to her, I know she has blood, I know her blood wants to be moved, circled around, so she knows she’s a woman. My hand reaches out to touch her, but I whip it back. There’s nothing for me in that body, no comfort. My hand moves again, floating across the valley between us. I reach out and put my hand on her hip. She lies very still but I can hear a tiny breath escape from her lips. My hand gets heavy on her, like it’s going to stay there, and then I can feel myself about to shift, nudge myself a bit closer to her, and Pahari and Megna come back to me, and the moment is poisoned. I push her, rough. ‘Move to your side,’ I say, soothed when I am cruel, then I turn around, I ignore the deep breath she is trying to suppress, the tiny moonsliver of a cry.

Friday and I’m walking around the village and this time I think I’m not going to avoid the mosque. Too early for the prayers, grounds are empty. I go around the side and enter the small door at the back. This mosque was built a long time ago. It was tiled in blue and white, once, before people picked off the tiles and stuck them above their own doors. There was a tiny room at the back where Megna had lived with her mother. The mosque-cleaner and her daughter. They came to this village when Megna was a just a baby. I go inside now, pulling away the thin curtain over the door. I’m waiting to see the cot, the calendar of Ganesh her mother hung under the window. She had wandered into the village and said her husband had died, there was no one to take care of her, and the imam at the time took her in, said the room was empty and she could have it.

What did I expect to find? Megna’s mother, the room exactly as I remembered? It’s empty, not a mattress or a scrap of clothing. Damp on the walls and ceiling like it’s gonna fall down. I put my hand on the wall and paint comes off easy. The way Megna had opened her legs for me, the little slut. My mind goes back to all the things we did in that room while her mother was out sweeping the mosque or planting beans in the small plot in the front. At night, I would knock on the window and she would crawl out of the bed she shared with her mother and we would lie down under the tamarind tree and touch each other like it was the end of the world.

I’m dreaming so hard I don’t hear the mullah until he’s clearing his throat and spitting a big one just next to my foot. I turn around and he’s pulling his beard and looking at me, and next thing I know he’s holding his arms out for me and I guess it slipped my mind everyone’s sweet as candy to me now, so I don’t know what to do, then I remember, I play my part and we do the three-time hug you only do on Eid with your brother. I’m a big man now, everyone wants to be related. Now he’s looking at the patch of paint that’s come off on my hand and he’s saying, Shame, that, mosque in such bad shape, you remember this place used to be much nicer. Take a cup of tea with me, son.’

We go to the tea stall, and the tea-wallah pulls out his best stool. I offer it to the mullah and I squat on my heels. We drink. ‘Village is changing,’ he says. ‘Boys are going out, they’re not coming back.’

‘Everybody wants to go to foreign,’ I say, already tired of squatting.

He slurps his tea with a loud sucking sound. ‘They leave the women behind and that’s no good, is it?’

‘I suppose not.’

‘Times like this, mosque is what keeps a village together.’

I nod, thinking, how much longer will I have to stay here? It takes him five minutes maybe to finish his tea, slurping and sucking, slurping and sucking. Finally he finishes and he stands up. I stand up too, my knees complaining. Then he says, ‘Mosque was a place you spent a lot of time in, son.’

He looks at me and for a long time he doesn’t say anything, and then I realise he’s telling me he knows I used to sneak in here, knows about me and Megna, then he says, ‘We have a fund, you know, mosque fund. Been saving for six years, all the gone-away boys have been sending money.’ Then he holds his hands behind his back like he’s being arrested and I know what I have to do. I say, ‘I’ll pay. Whatever’s left, I’ll pay.’

I let him grab me again, even harder this time, so I can smell the flower oil in his hair and feel the sand of his beard. ‘Sobhan Allah! You are a true son of the village.’ Then he says, like I just asked him a question: ‘That woman who used to clean here, she died. Typhoid, I think. Daughter disappeared, too.’ I’m thinking, the bastard was waiting to tell me that. He knew all along that’s what I wanted, some information about Megna, but waited till I’d coughed up the money, and then he dropped it on me.

I can’t sleep that night. For the first time I wonder exactly what happened to Megna after I left for Dubai. Like a film I’m seeing it: I leave, I don’t even say goodbye. Her stomach starts to give up its secret. She tells her mother. Disgusting girl, her mother says. And then what happens? They leave the village together? They pack up their things and take a bus — where? Who will take them in? Who can I ask, I don’t know.

The next day, early, before the mullah has called the village to pray, I pack a bag. Shathi watches me, doesn’t say a word. I show her where I put the money, locked in a trunk under the bed. Key is on a string around my neck, hanging next to my heart. I take the string, pass it over her head. Like we’re getting married all over again, garlands and all that. She touches my feet. She’s like a wife in an old movie, black and white, doesn’t say anything or ask any questions, just accepts I’m a bastard and doesn’t flinch.

I still have to face my mother. I can’t think what to say, so I tell her the truth. ‘I’m going to look for Megna,’ I say. She slaps her forehead, like I knew she would. ‘I told you find a new wife, not dig up a girl you threw away.’

I stand quiet, knowing she has to get her words out before I can explain. She stands up. I think she’s about to hit me, like before when I was always getting into the sugar, when my father was working in the railroad and we had sugar. ‘Do you know where she could have gone?’ I ask, thinking, if she’s going to hit me anyway, I might as well get some information out of her.

‘Girl disappeared the day you left for foreign, no one saw her again.’

Her mother?

‘Dead. They said she swallowed rat poison.’

‘Mullah told me she caught the typhoid.’

‘Same thing, whatever. You’ll never find her.’

‘Megna told me her father’s people were from the south. Near Chittagong.’

She shrugs. ‘I don’t know,’ she says, but then she looks down at her feet and I know she’s lying.

‘You know something. Tell me. Tell me.’ I’m raising my voice.

She puts up her hand up like she’s going to slap me and then she says, ‘Village is called Chondonpahar. She had an uncle. Rest I don’t know.’

I’m sorry for shouting. I’m going to touch her feet, ask for forgiveness. Then she says, ‘You going to leave me with that darkie again?’

For a change I decide to do something nice. I grab my mother’s hand. I take her across to Shathi, who is putting straw into the fire. ‘I’ve given the key to Shathi,’ I say. ‘Go on, show her the key.’ Shathi takes the key out of her blouse and holds it up but she looks away, so that Amma can’t see the grain of smug on her lips.

‘You see? She holds the money. The food, everything. You need something, you ask her. You need medicine, she gets it for you. If she wants, she can throw you out. Remember that.’

Amma is so shocked she doesn’t notice I’m touching her feet and then I’m gone.

Before I go I take some money out of the trunk and leave it with the mullah. A deal is a deal, even if I didn’t get shit in return.

It’s late by the time I leave. I take a rickshaw to the bus station on the other side of the market. Bus will take me to the ferry, ferry to the other side of the river.

*

On the road either side of me, all the paddy fields are flooded. Why, I ask the boy sitting next to me on the bus. He’s hungry, I can tell by the way he stares at my throat, like he wants to take a bite out. I haven’t seen winter rice for ten years, but I know what it looks like, yellow and brown and green. And it’s dry by now, January when it’s cold and there’s no rain. ‘That’s not rice,’ the boy says, with a big sag of his shoulder. ‘It’s shrimp.’

I look closer. The water’s dark. I try to smell it. The little worms are crawling around in there like a giant itch.

The bus stops and the boy gets up. ‘I work here,’ he says. ‘Lot of money in shrimp, if you want I can talk to my boss.’

I was wrong. Boy wasn’t hungry, he was looking at my throat thinking, this old bastard needs a job.

I ask a few other people about the shrimp. They say the water’s gone salty because the shrimp like it that way. I wonder if that’s why Shathi’s been complaining about the water in our well. I don’t believe her. I think it’s as sweet as ever. I tell her, you want to know salty? Stand out in the desert with a basket of sand on your head, then you’ll know what salty tastes like — your sweat will make your lips shrink from your teeth. Salt is the sea pounding against the shore, mocking you when you’re so dried out you can’t swallow and there’s an hour to go before the lunch bell. Salt is the tear that humiliates your cheek when you want a woman and you can’t go home.

But maybe she’s right, maybe the village water is salty and my tongue doesn’t know the difference. Another thing those bastards took from me.

An old woman sits down next to me, smelling of mustard oil. After Bagerhat the road is smooth. She takes out a triangle of paan and stuffs it into her mouth. A few minutes later she’ll be leaning over me and spitting out the window. Bus speeds up and I’m feeling the wind in my cheeks, and definitely I think I’m gonna find Megna. Somewhere out there she’s been waiting for me with my kid. I’m thinking this and I drift off with my head against the top of the window until sure enough, the old woman wakes me up, sticks her head out into the road, and hacks a mouthful of orange sludge into the shrimpy winter air.

I reach Barisal and from there I take another bus. We cross the Meghna on a ferry in the middle of the night. It’s cold and I’m wrapping my arms around myself. I fall asleep with my bag tied around my leg, and when the sun rises, I see the land is different, the trees clumped together, the road going up and down, dark hills on either side. I get off the bus and climb into a rickshaw and head for the village. Now it’s early morning and there’s a thin fog making everything sad, and for the first time I wonder if I won’t find her after all, or, worse, if she’s married to some other bastard and he’s raising my kid.

Here I come, I say to her. I’m your hero. Bollywood chorus follows me everywhere I go. Clapping and an army of dancers. I’ll give you all my money, my sins will be forgiven, we’ll live together in peace with our little magic seed.

The village is at the end of a narrow dirt road. A cluster of houses in a circle, mud and tin shacks. Villages like this all up and down the country. I’m noticing now the things wife does to make it nice at home, the little border of henna bushes and the pattern she drew on the frame of our door. Without it, a place can look empty, like no one’s ever loved it, just used the land for food, the cheap air to keep you from death, the water to drink and clean behind your ears so you can pray to God without filth in your folds.

I ask around for Megna’s people. Two or three can’t help me. A kid points me in the right direction. Then I’m standing in front of an open doorway and clearing my throat. A man comes out, old man, long arms and a weak chest, a shawl wrapped around his head and shoulders.

‘I’m looking for Fatema Ansar’s people,’ I say, ‘from this village.’

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m her cousin — from the other side.’

‘Khulna side?’

‘Yes, Labonchora.’

‘Come in, come in,’ he says. Waving me inside to a room so dark I have to close my eyes for a minute. When I open them I can see a bed, a stove, and a pile of cucumbers on the ground. He squats, peels one, and offers it to me. It’s bitter but I don’t mind. I haven’t eaten since last night and I’m hungry as a goat.

‘Labonchora,’ he says slowly. ‘You came all this way?’

I had prepared an answer. ‘She owned some things there, a cow, a small piece of land. After she died the land has just been there, so I’m looking for her people. I want to buy the land, make sure whoever is owed is paid.’

‘She owned a piece of land? How much?’

‘A katha. Field next to my own. Wife thinks we should plant sesame, you know how women are. Won’t let me forget it.’

He picks up another cucumber and I’m hoping he’s going to offer it to me. He looks at me strangely and I know what he’s thinking, why don’t I just take the land, plant whatever I want on it, who’s going to say otherwise? She’s a woman, and she’s dead.

‘Thing is,’ I say, ‘people tell me she cursed the land.’

He looks up at me and nods slowly. ‘I can see she might have been a witch.’

‘So if I till it, nothing’s going to come up. I’ll break my back and only rocks. Waste of my sweat.’

‘You won’t get a single grain of rice out of it.’

‘Not a sesame seed.’

He hands me the cucumber and it disappears into my gullet.

‘You’re looking for the daughter,’ he said. He stood up and took a few steps towards the bed. ‘She’s her only people.’

I don’t say anything. I’m holding my breath.

‘That girl killed her.’

I’m waiting for him to get his piece out.

‘Took the life out of her skin.’

I mutter something he expects me to say, ‘God’s will’ and all that. He wipes his eyes, cloudy anyway.

‘What happened to her, the daughter?’ I’m trying to ask it slowly.

‘We weren’t going to have her, not with another mouth coming. She came, but we said no. Sent her away.’

‘Back to Khulna?’

‘Tried to convince me. Said she’d work hard, take a job anywhere.’ He rubbed his hand over his jaw, as if she was still in the room, trying to get him to say yes. ‘Chittagong, she said. I gave her the bus money.’ Maybe he was feeling sorry for her now. Then he said, ‘Carrying around someone’s bastard. Couldn’t have that.’

‘Yes, you never know with women like that.’ The mud floor is freezing and I want something real to eat.

‘Take up with anyone.’

‘No morals.’

‘Whore.’

When I heard him call her that, I wanted to break his arm, but it was only the word I was using myself all this time. Calling her a slut whenever I wanted to forget her, pull her face out of my dreams. So I thought, maybe this is the word people use when they love someone they’re not supposed to, and with that I left him, said my farewells and gave him a bit of money, and he took it without saying a word, maybe because he was desperate, or because he could smell I was hiding something, and we both knew that if he took the money, if anyone asked, he would be obliged to tell them nothing, only that a relative of the dead woman had come to pay his respects.

‘Plant a jackfruit tree,’ he said, just as I was ducking my head through the sad doorway. ‘They come up hardy.’

Chittagong. It made sense. Big city, she could disappear. But where would she go. And how would I find her? I use my mobile and call Shathi.

‘I’m not coming back right now,’ I say. She doesn’t ask me where I am, or why, and for a second this irritates me, but then I just tell myself to be relieved because here is one less person I have to lie to. But she says, ‘What do I tell your mother?’ And I feel a little bad, so I say, ‘Give her the phone.’ I can see my mother holding the phone with two hands. ‘Amma,’ I announce, ‘be nice to Shathi. I’ll be back when my business is finished.’

She grunts at me and I know it won’t make a difference, she’ll still torture my wife by making her pick the grit out of the rice, and she’ll make her walk three times a day to the well, and cook her dal fresh every morning even though I bought a fridge that keeps everything cold. Why am I feeling bad? She’s a woman, that’s what they do, eat shit from morning to night, they must not mind it, they must know it from the minute they’re born. When you know what to expect, things aren’t so bad. This is what I tell myself as I wait at the station.

III I Go to the City

My bus pulls up to the station and I think, it’s not such a big city. Compared to Dubai, compared to Dhaka, it’s a village. No way I could miss Megna in this town. Only so many streets. I could walk each one, go into each house. Not the first time I fancied myself a hero, nice song to accompany me, bursting through doors and raising my face to the sun, shoulders jiggling, singing, ‘I’m gonna find my girl, whole world be damned.’

First thing I do, I find myself a hotel, somewhere I can put my feet up. I want somewhere nice, so when I bring Megna in, and the kid, I can tell them: here I’ve come, look, a room to myself, a sink in the corner, electric fan, tube light, I’m your daddy come to rescue you, everything you ever wanted. I even think about a room with AC, but even in my Bollywood dream that’s too much. I find it near the station, Hotel Al-Noor. It’s clean, a place you can bring a woman and she’ll think, man has made something of himself, man is a man, not some kid who ran out of the country like a scared goat. There’s a bathroom at the end of the corridor so I wash. Then I go downstairs I eat something at the restaurant, where I share a table with a few other men, not unlike me, I think, until one of them calls me ‘uncle’, and I think shit, I look older than am, or at least, older than I feel.

‘Uncle’ he says, ‘what’s your business in Chittagong?’

I made up a story on the bus ride. ‘I’m looking for my sister,’ I say.

I have their attention. Five or six men — boys — with their fingers in rice and dal. ‘Something happened to her.’ It’s the same story, the real story, except I tell it like I’m not the villain. ‘Guy from my village, we all knew him, lived just on the other side of a few fields — said he was going to marry her. But kids these days, all scoundrels.’

‘So what happened, they went secret to the Kazi?’

‘No. Said he would. But then he ran off. Got a ticket to foreign and left her cold. I heard she came here, so I’m looking.’

‘Why’d she come here? You have people here?’

I finish eating. Lick my fingers and the dal is drying on my fingernails. There’s one guy at the table who’s a bit older than the others, reminds me of Hameed. Actually the whole thing, men at a meal after a day of work, and for the first time I am having a missing twinge for my boys, Dubai, the sandpit, Bride and Groom.

‘There was a child. So she came here.’

Now they know the whole story. I can see them thinking she was a slut because she opened her legs.

I don’t know why I give a damn what they think, but I do. ‘I think he forced himself,’ I say.

‘Son of a pig,’ one of them says.

‘You have a photo?’

‘No.’ I could hardly even remember her face. I saw it every day but I’m thinking now how much I wish I did have a picture, something I could show around the streets here.

The older guy points to one of his friends, a shiny little guy with a scar from his nose to his lip. ‘Shumon here fancies himself an artist. Why don’t you draw a picture of his sister.’

The others nodded. ‘He’ll do it. He’s good.’

They were all rickshaw boys. Lived in a row of shacks behind the hotel. Tonight they were celebrating because the ban on rickshaws had just been lifted on the main road and they had made a bit more. Shumon had a wife, three kids, his parents, two younger brothers living with him. The other guy, Salam, was getting married but he still had to send money to his people back in the village. And the older guy was Awal, arms like twists of rope, grey on his beard, five daughters and another kid on the way.

To make a little money on the side, Shumon painted the backs of rickshaws. Women melting in the arms of their lovers, pink faces and tits like mountains.

‘He’ll make your sister look like a film star.’

Not sure if I want a picture of Megna looking like that. Maybe, I say.

Next day I go to the train station. Girl comes into town, she’ll be at the bus station, the train station, or the ferry ghat.

All this time I haven’t tried to think about what Megna’s been doing for these ten years. In my dreamworld she was somewhere nice like in garments or a beauty salon. All the other things she could be doing, like begging on the street, I didn’t think about. Still I go to the train station because if she’s a beggar she would definitely be there. Before I go I call Shathi on the mobile. She answers on the first ring, like she’s been holding the phone in her hand. ‘I’m in Chittagong,’ I tell her.

I can hear her breathing on the other side of the phone. ‘Good,’ she says.

‘Are you crying?’

‘No.’

‘What happened, my mother did something?’

‘No. She hasn’t been well, she’s mostly been lying down.’

‘What is it?’

‘I had a dream you were never coming back.’

All day while I’m at the train station I think about what Shathi said. I tell my story to all the beggars at the station. People hold out their hands and beg to me, and I think it wasn’t long ago I was begging myself, to a foreman to lend me some money for my brother’s leg. Now brother is doing fine, he even had a son, boy walks around the village like a little white prince. No one knows Megna. An old woman says, yes, I saw her, give me a few paisa and I’ll tell you where. Her eyes are clouded, she’s got the cataracts and I know she’s lying. I throw her a few coins I don’t bother to hear what she’s telling me. I think Shathi’s right, if I find Megna I’ll never go back, I’ll just stay at the Al-Noor forever, looking up at the ceiling fan all day with my head in her lap.

I find Shumon’s place behind the hotel. There’s a whole world back there, tin and paper shacks all stuck together. ‘Come,’ I tell him, ‘get the others, we’ll have dinner. I’ll pay.’

We meet the hotel owner, friendly guy. He asks me how long I’m staying, I say a week, ten days, that’s it. He nods over at a table at the back, where a pair of cops are ordering tea. Word’s gotten out about my sister. Everyone knows the cops won’t help. They’ll put those RAB guys on you and next thing you know, you’re the one in jail. Guy owes me a favour, hotel owner says, pointing to the one on the left. Bald circle on the top of his head. ‘If you tell him I sent you, he’ll do what’s right, won’t jerk you around.’

I nod but I don’t believe it. But I tell Shumon to do his drawing. Just the face, I say. ‘I’ll pay you.’

‘No payment,’ he says, looking around at the others, who nod. ‘Brother to brother.’

The next day he comes with his paints and a piece of paper. I tell him what Megna looks like, the small, dark eyes and the crazy hair. I can’t really remember her nose so he just draws whatever nose he wants. I come up with a few other things I didn’t even know I remembered, like a small dip in the middle of her chin, and also that her face was more long than round. When he’s finished, he shows it to me and I’m surprised because it’s not exactly her but it’s not too far either, and there she is, a little pink but it’s her, staring out at me. I can’t believe it.

‘I’m going to start looking for her right now,’ I say. ‘Thank you, brother.’ I give him some money, just for the paint and the paper, and he takes it.

Rickshaw boys say, let’s photocopy the drawing, right, put it up around town with my mobile number. I like this idea. I spend fifty paying for everyone’s khichuri, another twenty on the copies. Before they can start asking where my money’s come from, I say, ‘Our parents, as in me and my sister’s, are worried, so they sold a bit of land so I could come here and look for her. All this time they were angry because she ran away, but now they’re old they’re saying let past be gone, and anyway it wasn’t her fault, bastard forced himself on her, everyone knows he was the bad egg, went off to foreign and never came back. Parents are soft now, just want to know where she is, what happened to the kid. So they sold a tiny patch of land and sent me.’ I’m telling the story and it feels so good I start to believe it, even manage to get a few tears onto my cheeks. Boys are patting me on the back and promising to put the drawings up all over town. ‘You’ll find her, brother,’ they say. ‘It won’t be long now.’

Shumon and the rickshaw boys put Megna’s picture everywhere. Two calls I get on my mobile, saying they know where she is. ‘She’s working at a shop in Tiger Pass,’ the first one says. ‘Meet me there.’ But when I go it’s just a guy asking for money. ‘Please,’ he says, ‘I need it for my father’s operation.’ I give him ten I tell him to get lost. Second time it’s a woman, and my wish is so strong I think it sounds like her. When she says ‘Hello?’ I say, ‘Megna?’ And she says, ‘The girl you’re looking for, I saw her sitting in front of a barber-shop. She looked just like the picture.’

I ask for more but she just gives me the address. Naveed Napith, on the way towards Patenga. ‘What was Megna doing?’ ‘Nothing, just sitting there.’ I don’t believe her, the barber-shop wasn’t even in town, it was near the beach, and why would she go there? I hang up.

The very next day my luck changes. Shumon comes back from work and we’re sitting with a cup of tea. ‘No charge,’ the hotel owner says. ‘You’re my regular customer now. Tea is free.’ I’ve already paid for the week up front, so he knows I’m good for it. In the morning I’m gonna pay for another week.

Shumon bounds up to the table. ‘You won’t believe it,’ he says. ‘We found her.’

‘What?’

‘Me and Rajib, we’ve been asking around, you know.’ The boy who sits at the front of the hotel with a giant vat of oil has just fired up the gas on his burner. ‘We went to Dewanhat.’

‘I told you she’s not there.’ It was a slum, the biggest one in the city. All week Shumon’s been telling me to check it out and I’ve been saying ‘Na, not Megna’s sort of place. She would never have ended up somewhere like that.’

‘She’s not there, brother. We just know the big boss at Dewanhat.’

‘What kind of boss?’ The oil is sputtering now, and the boy is popping his little samosas in there and watching them dance.

‘A guy who knows things. A guy who can find out. That kind of guy.’

I can see who he’s describing: cigarette, shirt open to his crotch, everything oily. ‘Don’t want to get mixed up with a guy like that.’

But Shumon’s grinning so big the scar on his lip disappears. ‘We showed him the picture and he says he knows where she is!’

Now the kid’s making jilapis, holding a bag of dough and drawing circles with his arms.

‘Did you hear what I said? We’re going to find your sister.’

I’m afraid to be happy. ‘What exactly did he say?’

‘Said he knows where she is, she’s right here in Chittagong.’

‘Been here the whole time?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘He gave you an address or what?’ It’s starting to hit me now, like something climbing up my legs. I’m going to get the girl back, I’m actually going to find her. It will be like the last ten years never happened. Shit. God is Great. God is Great. The words come out of my mouth before I even know what I’m saying, and then I realise that, for some people, God doesn’t just come in the bad moments, like when you’re hanging hundreds of feet from the sky, but in a moment of bliss, when you get everything you want and you can’t believe your luck, and you think, there must be something else behind this, some force that gave me my wish — it couldn’t just be that I wanted something for ten years and then I finally got it, that would be too good, too kind of the world and we all know it’s not that sort of world, at least, those of us who really know it — and I want someone to thank, or at least I want to feel like someone did this for me, to put peace in my heart. ‘Thanks be to God,’ I say.

‘So where is she?’ I can smell the jilapis now and they are floating in their sugar bath. I order us a plate and eat one straight away, burning my tongue. ‘Give me the address.’

‘Thing is,’ Shumon says, putting his hands on the table, ‘this guy, he doesn’t do anything for free.’

I push the plate of jilapis towards Shumon, but he doesn’t take one. I’m ready to say no, but already I’m wondering how much money I can scrape together. ‘How much?’

‘How much do you have?’

‘I have.’

He takes a breath. ‘Two.’

It’s more than I’ve got. ‘I’ve only got one-seventy.’

Shumon looks around the room like he’s going to find the other thirty in a corner somewhere, then he says, ‘Okay, I’ll see what I can do.’ And he gets up, pops a samosa into his mouth and leaves me with the sugary taste of Megna on my lips.

That night I stay up in bed and think about what to do. I stare up at the ceiling fan, which is off because it’s chilly at night now, and I can see a dark streak of dust on the blades. I’ve been putting off a particular question this whole time, which is, what I’m gonna do with Megna when I find her. My wish being says I’m gonna take her somewhere nice and we’ll run away together, holding hands and dancing between the trees, that sort of thing. But I know what it’s like to be away from home, what it’s like to be without people, and I won’t do that again. After so many years, Megna’s not going to want that life any more either.

So there was only one thing to do. Bring her home with me, not just to the village, but to my house. As my bride this time. Bring her home and tell everyone the whole truth. The child I would claim, and they would both have my home, my name, and Megna would finally get some respect. People in the village would have to swallow all the shit they said about her and kiss up to her just like they did to me. She would get mine. That was it, that was the only way. I owed her.

Now there was just the matter of Shathi. For a long time I thought, when Megna came back I would send her back to her father. Talak, talak, talak, that sort of thing. But, when it came down to it, when it came time for her to take sides, she chose me against her own. Looked after my father till he died. Right now she was keeping my rice, the key of the trunk around her neck, taking care of my mother. She should get something for that.

I could give her some money and send her on her way, but where would she go?

And then I went to the thought I had avoided. I was the big man in the village now, I could have two wives. Two wives, two beds. I had never touched Shathi, and I never would. She could keep living in my house, though, she could tend her vegetables and fatten her cows.

I know this can’t work because Megna wouldn’t have it, not if she was the same girl I knew ten years ago. But it’s the best I can think of. I’m uneasy but decided. I’ll call Shathi in the morning and tell her everything.

I’m awake. Can’t sleep thinking what I’ll say to Megna when I see her. She’ll be angry, that I know. I tell myself, be ready for that. Maybe she won’t see my face and I’ll have to go back three, four times. But she’ll melt soon enough, and who knows, maybe the years made her a little softer, maybe she can see that I was young and drunk on the thought of foreign — nothing anyone can do about that when it hits them. I got a chance and I took it. And, see, I made good, got some money in my pocket now, something to show for the last ten years, a home, fridge. What’s she got? Well, she’s got my kid, for one thing. Raised that kid right, I bet. School and all that.

I’m up and dressed before the sun, folding my towel on the rail and making it all neat, in case a miracle happens and she comes with me tonight. I go downstairs and I can hardly stomach my own saliva, it’s bitter and foul in my mouth. Downstairs the hotel owner is waiting for me, hot cup of tea in his hand. He wants to chat but I’m in no mood, I barely swallow the tea he gives me. I just want to sit quiet with my thoughts. Soon enough Shumon comes in, sits opposite me. ‘You got the money,’ he says, no hello, no nothing.

It’s tied up in my lungi, all one hundred seventy thousand of it, a trick I learned from my uncle. He used to fold his wages into the knot of his lungi, a few notes at a time, folding and knotting, folding and knotting. Then he would wear a loose shirt over it, and just look like one of those men with a paunch, maybe a lazy guy, someone who liked eating the fatty parts of the cow.

‘Ya, I got the money,’ I say to Shumon. ‘Take me to her.’

‘You stay here, I’m gonna give him the money, come back with the address.’

Something about the way he says it, I don’t like. That scar over his lip is looking all twisty-curvy, and all of a sudden I’m not so willing to just hand it over.

‘No, I’ll come with you. That way when he tells us where she is, I’ll just go over.’

‘You don’t have to do that.’

I order a glass of water and pass it across the table to Shumon.

He looks down at the glass. Takes a sip.

‘Why don’t we do this: I’ll give him the money, then when he tells me I’ll call your mobile?’

‘Yaar,’ I say, all friendly-like, ‘I’m coming with you, that’s that.’

‘Okay, let me make a call.’ He takes a mobile out of his shirt pocket and goes outside. For a second he disappears, then I see him talking again, holding the phone to one ear, bending over to close out the street noise.

I’m starting to get restless now, I can’t wait to see Megna, my stomach is high up where my heart should be, everything tight, I can’t breathe. I down another cup of tea. The hotel owner comes in again, tries to catch my eye, but I can’t talk to him now. Shumon comes back and Awal is with him.

‘Okay,’ I say, ‘let’s go.’

Awal puts his arm on my shoulder.

‘Brother,’ I say, ‘no rickshaw pulling today?’ I know how much his family needs the money. One day out and they’re over the edge.

‘Important day for you, brother. I’ll do the night shift.’

I’m glad Awal’s here. If that guy from Dewanhat tries to pull anything, there’ll be three of us. Awal and me get into Shumon’s rickshaw, and he turns the cycle around, taking us down the main road. Traffic isn’t too bad, we only stop at a few lights. Shumon’s legs are young and quick. I toss a coin to an old woman at the intersection. This way I’m sending a message to God I’m not ungrateful for what’s about to happen. She reminds me of my mother, who still isn’t well. Shathi told me this morning when I called to tell her I needed more money. Not a lot, just enough to get me through a few more days here. Did I tell her what I decided last night? No. In the morning it seemed like the worst idea I ever had. Better to just bring Megna home and deal with it later. Nothing anyone can do when you just show up and say what’s what. Maybe I felt sorry for Shathi. Maybe I was a coward, who knows. She would find out soon enough, let her wait.

The slum is behind a new shopping mall. Shopping mall makes me think of Pahari, but I quickly push him out of my mind. We leave Shumon’s rickshaw and enter an alley behind the mall. We cross a bridge over a canal that’s just an open drain, and then we’re inside the slum, rows and rows of shacks and a lot of stink. Dark rooms with skinny cats and children and piles of rotting garbage.

I’m following Shumon as we go deep into the stomach of Dewanhat. I can’t see the sky because there are wires strung up everywhere, between the houses and over the tin roofs. Dewanhat has electricity. Awal tells me some of the shacks even have cable TV. ‘Lucky bastards,’ he says. I don’t think so. I’m the lucky one. I never had to move to the city. Out there in the village, no matter how hungry you are, you wake up every morning and you smell paddy, you smell mud and earth and dung. Dung is roses compared to human shit. We rule the world but our shit smells worse than any animal’s — we had to get brains, big brains, just to find ways to cover up our own stench.

At the end of another long row, we stop and Shumon ducks his head inside. He comes back and he says, ‘Okay, now give it to me.’

I’m better than these people. I have the sun in my face and a house and a little patch of land. I’m even thinking, time for me to go back to earning a wage. Blood money’s not gonna last for ever, its gonna dry out, and anyway I want to be working again, sweating over something so my days have a start and a finish. All this I’m thinking while we’re walking, so when Shumon asks me for the money I’m not ready to hand it over.

‘I want to meet this guy,’ I say. ‘I want to make sure he knows my Megna.’

‘He knows, he knows,’ he says.

‘What about the kid?’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘If he knows where Megna is, he knows where the kid is. What does he say about the kid?’

Shumon comes up real close to me now. ‘You’re going to kill this whole thing,’ he says. ‘He knows about the kid. The girl and the kid are together, just give me the money and he’ll tell you where they are.’

Awal turns when he thinks I’m not looking, so I push past Shumon and before I know it I’m inside the shack.

It takes a minute for me to take it all in. Then I see them all, the hotel owner, the rickshaw boys, the kid making the samosas. All of them.

They’re in a room with a table and two chairs. There’s a tube light fixed to the tin wall and everything’s bright. I’m about to call them by name, and then I see the hotel owner’s got an orange stain on his lips. In fact, now I notice they all have orange lips. They’ve been sitting here and chewing paan and waiting for me.

I start to shout. Words are coming out of my mouth I’m not sure what they are. Curses. Bad words. Threats. They all sit there and stare at me, not moving, all looking me in the eye, and for a second I think, am I crazy? Are these people really sitting here and staring at me? Or is it a trick of my mind, actually nothing is happening and after all these years of not finding Megna, nothing is worse than a bad thing, so I am hallucinating a bad thing, wishing for it — actually these men are really my friends, and in a moment we’ll sit around and drink tea and laugh at something rude. I hear a sound behind me and it’s two more men — I’ve seen them before too, the policemen from the hotel, the fat one and his sidekick. They raise their sticks and just before the pain blinds me and I black out, I think, at least I am not crazy, at least I have that.

Before I departed for Cambridge, I called Anwar. I had been thinking of his story — in particular the moment he had been betrayed by his friends. What did he think of them now, I asked. Was he angry with them for giving him hope and then snatching it away, or did he forgive them? And he said, for a long time he’d harboured fantasies of taking revenge on them. Not just them, but also the foreman in Dubai, and his uncle, who had persuaded him to leave Megna in the first place. He said he had sometimes lain awake at night and counted all the ways they might go. But now that time had passed, he had decided to keep his memories of those events at a distance, to tell himself the whole thing had happened to someone else. And now that it was going to be put down in black and white, he could say this: he was grateful to them, because one thing leads to another, and on balance, he had won. It wasn’t a religious thing, he was careful to say, he wasn’t lying down in front of his fate. But, he said, you can’t be angry at the past. Not for ever.

I wish I could be as sanguine as Anwar. I wish, as I wrote down our story, that I could be grateful it existed at all, that I fell in love with you and discovered there was something beyond, something grander than the mystery of my origins, something bigger than the little life I had imagined for myself. But I am greedier than Anwar, and I want more, and anyway it was me, you see, who had taken you away. I had no one else to blame, no one to murder in my sleep.

IV I Go to Jail

Someone throws a glass of water in my face and I wake up. My head, heavy as an elephant’s, tells me I’ve been here a long time, but a small window shows me it’s still light out. It’s still today. That means no time has passed and the worst is yet to come.

The policeman, the fat one, hawks a wad of spit into my face. I try to brush it away but my hands are tied behind my back. The spit and the water stay wet on my face. The policeman heaves himself up, and I curl into a ball, waiting for him to kick me. He’s not wearing a uniform. The other guy, who I see now has marks on his face — maybe he got the pox too old — he’s there too, standing by the door. It’s dark but I can see a little more now, a cot in the corner of the room, a bucket on the other side. A metal door with no handle.

The two of them talk to each other but no one says anything to me. Then the pox guy comes over and pulls me up by my armpits. I make myself heavy and he struggles. Fat one unties my hands — are they letting me go? They don’t talk; I’m afraid to ask.

As soon as I’m untied, I feel metal where the rope used to be. Fat one is breathing close to my ear, and the other is pulling something, and before I know it my arms are going up, like a puppet, and they’re stretched tight like that, like I haven’t seen someone in a long time and I’m opening my arms wide to grab them, and like that I’m frozen, can’t move.

Finally the fat one talks. He says, ‘You’ve pissed yourself.’ I look down and he’s right. My lungi is soaked. The money, of course, is gone — I can feel it straight away.

I’m scared but I’m also angry. ‘You stole my money,’ I say.

‘That’s right, country bastard.’

‘Then why am I here?’

‘We don’t like little rats coming from the country and finding their slutty girlfriends.’

‘She’s my sister.’

They look at each other and laugh.

‘You think we bought that, even for one day? Shit, been laughing about it for weeks.’

‘So what,’ I say, ‘you got my money. You skinned me. Why bring me here?’

‘Couldn’t just let Shumon do his job — you had to follow him. You had to see all of us. You think we wanted that?’

I get it now. I dirtied their clean job. They would’ve disappeared, no one would have believed me, but now I knew where they lived.

‘What happened to Shumon?’

‘Bastard brought you all the way to us, didn’t he. We took care of him.’

‘Good.’ So he was dead. ‘You gonna kill me too, or what?’

‘We could,’ he said, ‘or we could leave you in here to rot. No one would notice. You know the cells next door? Hundred, hundred-fifty men in each one. Soon you all start to look the same, you’re all as dirty and piss-your-pants stink as each other. No one will even know you’re gone. Or —’and he looked at me like he could mean anything.

I try to think of what would be the worst bad thing. He could beat me some more, that would be bad. I remember the tooth that fell out after foreman kicked me in the face, shit hurt for weeks and I couldn’t eat anything. But it healed up and I got used to a little stiffness in my jaw, nothing big. Worse, he tortures me, filmi-style, pulls out my fingernails, something like that. I shudder. But then I think, not like he’s trying to get some information out of me, so what would be the point? No, they won’t do that. But they would teach me a lesson. I want to roll my eyes to the back of my head so I don’t have to look at whatever he’s going to do. I don’t want to be in the room with him and me and the cot and his pockmarked partner. He’s talking now about all the ways he can fuck me up, his words running right along with my thinking.

He starts to unbuckle his belt. I’m looking at him. There’s a slick of sweat on his lip, and he has to try hard to pull the belt off because it looks like it’s holding up the whole top half of his body and if he takes it off his body’s going to melt off him like syrup.

He pulls off his belt and he’s holding it in his hand and for one second that feels like a year it comes to my mind that he’s going to do something else, something like sex to me, which is worse, much worse than anything I had thought of and my legs start to go, they go, and I’m just hanging there by my arms, and when I finally feel it, the knot of the leather on my chest, buckle cutting deep, I cry out with the pain, but also with relief, because it’s not the worst, worst thing, until the second lash, and the third.

I don’t know where I am, nothing, just the fire on my chest, for what I can’t say, days maybe or even a week. I think someone’s coming in, putting something on the fire, fat cop or pox cop, fat or pox, pox or fat, putting something cold on me, but I can’t be sure, I’m just in and out, and when I’m in I want to be out, leave me to my dreams, I don’t want to know the square of light in the window, and the hard of the cot, and the feeling of my own shit curling out between my legs and staying there, stamping the truth on my nothingness, a person with no people and no pride, a piece of trash.

It’s Shumon. He’s pouring water over me, and everything hurts like I’m being hosed with salt, and then he covers me with a bandage, and puts a blanket over me. Then he goes through the door without saying anything. He’s talking to someone on the other side, and then I hear him walk away, and then the door opens again and there’s food in front of me, dal and rice. I’m surprised to find that my hands still obey, and I eat, then I fall asleep again, like someone has crushed a pill into my rice.

Shumon’s back the next day, and the day after that. When I feel a bit stronger I mouth a bunch of curses at him. He doesn’t say anything. I reach my hand over to slap him but it comes out soft, like I’m giving him a sweet one on the cheek.

‘You need to get more money,’ he says.

‘Fuck off.’

‘They’ll let you go, they told me.’

‘They told me they took care of you.’

He lifts up his shirt, bandage all across his chest. ‘Lucky my father took me to hospital,’ he says.

‘I’m not so lucky.’

‘No.’ He looks down at his hands.

‘They want two lakhs.’

‘I don’t have it.’

‘Call your father.’

‘My father’s dead.’

‘Everything you said was lying?’ Says it like his feelings are hurt, the bastard.

‘At least I’m not a thief.’

‘It wasn’t my idea.’

I turn my face away. ‘Fuck off.’ And he goes.

He nags and nags. Holds up his mobile and says, ‘Call someone, get the money. They’re going to move you to the blocks; then I won’t be able to get you out.’

A few days later and the fire on my chest is starting to fade. It still hurts but mostly when I try to sit up, or cough. I start to think about getting out of here, and when Shumon comes I take the phone and dial the only number I know. Shathi picks up on the first ring.

‘Wife,’ I say, ‘I’m in trouble.’

‘Are you alive?’

Before I can tell her what a stupid question that is, I feel a swell of grateful that she would ask this, as if she didn’t care about a single other thing.

‘Ya,’ I say, quiet like.

‘Sobhan Allah.’

‘I need money.’

‘How much?’

‘Two.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Shumon,’ I say, ‘where am I?’

He tells me. I tell her.

‘I’ll send your brother.’

‘There isn’t two in the trunk. Where will you get the rest?’

I hear her breathe on the other side of the phone, little cat breaths. ‘Don’t worry, I will get it.’

‘I gave money to the mosque. Get it back, talk to the imam.’

‘Okay.’

I hang up and I start to cry. Like a baby. Like a girl. A girl baby. A suckling goat.

Guard gives me a bucket of water. I pour it over my legs, rubbing my feet together. Even on the cement floor, I can see the water runs black from my body. I’m disgusted by my own dirt, the smell that’s coming off my body. My fingernails are long; I chew them; I tear off the extra, scraping my fingers against the rough walls to smooth out the ragged. I go behind my ears, the back of my neck.

Then I sit on the edge of the cot. I wait. Dal and rice come so I know it’s lunchtime. Sun sets. My brother’s not coming. I tilt myself back onto the cot, killed by another day.

I wake up to the door opening. Shumon. I don’t even lift my head.

‘You’re out,’ he says.

‘Not going anywhere with you.’

He hovers over me, little scarry lip pressed right up on my face. ‘Your money came.’

‘Where’s my brother?’

‘He’s not here.’

I can’t be sure if this is another trick. I could even be dreaming the whole thing. Or I’m dead and stuck between earth and hell and this is what they make me do, see if I’m still as stupid as I was when I breathed.

Shumon gives me clean clothes. I recognise the shirt, the lungi. ‘Where did you get those?’

‘Your wife. She’s waiting outside.’

I follow him out the door, through the corridor. Nobody stops us, no one even asks, we just stroll through like we’re ghosts. Maybe I am dead. But then I see Shathi and she’s holding a bag with both hands, so when I go up and hug her she just stands there like a stone.

Shumon gives me something. It’s my mobile phone. I snatch it from his hand and walk away as fast as my beaten legs will let me, Shathi beside me, and we don’t turn around to see what happens to him, we just keep walking like we have somewhere to go.

Shathi has a cousin who has a friend who owns a sweetshop on Halishar Road. We can stay with him tonight, and tomorrow we’ll take the bus home. Wife and I don’t say anything to each other. She hails a rickshaw and helps me climb in. She takes a packet out of her bag and passes it to me. She holds me steady over the bumps in the road and I eat, remembering the village.

We get to the sweetshop and the cousin’s friend takes us upstairs, to the room he’s got above the shop. His wife is as unsmiling as he is. She asks about Shathi’s father. She gives us each a chom-chom. It’s so sweet I’m gagging for a glass of water. She pours me one in a tin cup. All I want to do is lie down but there’s no bed for us — we’ll sleep downstairs, once the shop is closed.

Shathi opens her bag and takes out an eggplant, a handful of tomatoes and a pumpkin. The wife seems pleased now with her vegetables from the village. Then she tells me I should take Shathi around the city, show her the sights, which is her way of saying bugger off till after dark, I’m not feeding you.

We cross the road and Shathi bargains for a guava with the fruit-seller. We sit on the edge of the pavement with our feet hanging over the drain, passing the guava back and forth. ‘My chest hurts,’ I tell her. ‘Pain,’ I say. ‘Pain, pain.’

Someone comes and shoos us away. This is his place — he’s going to set up his chotpoti stall. We start to walk. I take the phone out of my pocket. ‘I’ll get something for this,’ I say. ‘Maybe a thousand.’

‘Okay.’

‘Where did you get the money? Did you go back to the mosque like I told you? Did the Mollah give you the money back?’

‘He spent it already.’

‘Bastard.’

‘Mosque will have a new roof, everyone will think of you.’

‘What I left you wasn’t enough, where d’you get the rest?’

‘The bull. I sold it.’

‘That much?’

‘It was a big animal.’

I’m thinking about all the times she hauled herself out of bed in the morning to cut hay for that bull. And I had complained about it, saying it made her stink too much of the village, and why couldn’t we smell different, like city people, now that we had some money?

‘What did my mother say?’

‘She was crying about the fridge, and the TV.’

Shit. Of course the bull wasn’t enough. ‘Let’s go to Patenga,’ I say.

People are sitting on the big rocks and eating things and looking out into the sea. I look too and see a couple of ships far out. Shathi lays out the end of her sari and sits down. I’m noticing how everything she does she does slowly, like she means to. No accidents with her. She pulls her knees up to her chest and like that, all squashed together, she’s even more like a doll.

‘Tell me what we’re gonna do when we get home,’ I say.

‘We’ll plant mustard.’

‘And?’

‘There’s the vegetables to pick.’

‘Tell me the vegetables.’

‘Eggplant, gourd, cauliflower. Beans. Spinach.’

‘What else will happen?’

‘Nothing. It will go on like before.’

I’m thinking of before, what it was like when I didn’t have any money, when I hadn’t gone to foreign. I’m thinking of my mother’s face, and how many times a day she’s gonna tell me I screwed my life up. It’s all playing out in front of me, I’m pissed off every time I wake up by that stupid mosque with its new roof and shiny paint, and whoever has bought my TV, I’m hearing that too, across the compound, when I’m trying to sleep, and the voice in my head telling me I should never have taken that money in the first place, no, not without thinking of Pahari and his family.

‘I can’t go home,’ I say.

She get up and starts walking towards the water, skipping over the rocks. I go after her.

‘It’s not what you think.’

She stops, looks at me. ‘I’ve never asked you for anything.’

True. She had never even said my name. ‘I can’t go home,’ I say. Ask me something else. ‘You want to stay here with me?’

‘Someone has to look after your mother.’

It’s starting to get dark and the crowd is thick now, the light the colour of stones.

‘I want a child.’ She looks at me again and I’m getting that she has thought about this. And that what she’s really saying is that she wants more than a kid, that she wants to be a wife, a real wife. I wonder if I can give her this. My dream of Megna will have to go. I’ll have to kick her out like I did the first time; then again, I’ve shed blood for her. That should matter, should open the door a crack for the rest of my life. For Shathi. I reach over and hold my wife’s hand and we smell the waves, and the ocean smell reminds me of that water that fell from me when I bathed, only yesterday. We walk away from the sea and past the people, laying out their picnics, scolding their children, cracking open boiled eggs.

We get to the bus stop she doesn’t let go of my hand. Something’s stirring in me; it’s so strange I don’t even know what it is at first but then I get it. It’s my blood, pumping on the inside. Hard now, my chest hurts from it, my legs too. On the bus there’s only one seat and I stand over Shathi while she sits. It’s dark and the bus pulls away. I see the ships in the sea, standing still, but my hand is moving, holding the back of Shathi’s neck, here is her ear, here her jaw. Here is where her skin ends and her hair begins. I’m not looking at her, I’m staring out the window and reading all the shopfronts, but I’m seeing her for the first time, with my thumb, my rough thumb, her cheek, MOHONA BIRYANI AND KEBAB HOUSE, her jaw, KAZI BROTHERS CEMENT, the fold of her lip, SHAMMI RESTURA, her chin, NAVEED NAPITH (GENTS), and lower, as I get bold, the blood is booming in me now, the skin between her breasts is soft as milk, and suddenly I remember something, and with my thumb still on her skin, I squat down and I whisper, ‘Please, wife, forgive me. I don’t deserve it, but if you can, please try.’

Then I jump off the bus while it’s still moving, and I hit the pavement with a crash, crying out in pain, and after a few minutes someone helps me up, I dust myself off, I walk towards the barber-shop, remembering the phone call from a few weeks ago, telling me that Megna had stayed here, on the way to Patenga Beach, at a barber-shop with a rhyming name.

Naveed is shaving the armpits of a guy who is obviously about to get married. He smells like coconut oil and everything’s shiny about him. I get straight to the point with Naveed. ‘I’m looking for Megna,’ I say. ‘Is she here?’

He holds the blade up and looks me over. ‘You her people?’

‘Yes.’

He pulls the blade up, collecting foam, wiping it on a towel draped over his shoulder.

‘She stayed here for a few months. When she came to the city, I let her stay.’

‘With who?’

‘With no one. Just here.’ He points to the floor, between the chair and the wall. He wipes the groom’s armpit, moves to the other side. The groom lowers one arm, lifts another. Naveed starts to lather.

‘What happened to her?’

‘How the hell should I know? Stayed here as long as she paid me. She was lucky, too. People talked, wife wasn’t happy. Girl like that.’

‘Did you see the child?’

‘No. But my wife said she was in a bad way — had to go to medical.’

‘You haven’t seen her.’

‘Not since then.’

He’s done. He examines his work, runs his finger along the smooth armpit.

It’s dark now and the kerosene lamps are all on. I miss Shathi already — no way she’s gonna take me back now. I find a shop and sell the phone, they give me seven hundred for it. I paid five thousand. Now I can’t even call home.

I need to eat. I need money, a job, food. Can’t believe I’m back to this after everything, and my mind flashes to when I was a kid, always hungry, rooting around my mother’s ankles for a scrap of something.

But here I am. No point getting sentimental. Naveed says best thing is to ask around the shipyards. ‘Nah,’ I say, ‘I’m a builder, not a breaker.’ I find a construction site and the foreman hires me. Fifty taka a day, rice in the afternoon, a place to sleep. The building’s almost finished, they’re doing the floors now. He gives me a pair of rubber gloves, says to pick up the piles of bricks the old women are breaking by the side of the road, bring it over to where it gets mixed into concrete to make the mosaic, chunks of brick mixed in with the sand to keep it solid.

The women sit in a line with their legs spread and pound the bricks with their little hammers. Their faces are covered in dust. Some, the clever ones, have strips of tyre around their fingers. I’m feeling sorry for them, out there in the hot sun, beating on their own fingers, but I don’t go up, don’t say, hey, baking out today, can I bring some water — because I’m new and I know everyone’s looking. Plus what do I care about a couple of old hags anyway.

I pick up their broken bricks, haul the basket on my head, make my way across the site to the mixer, unload and go back for more. My chest is still bandaged but it’s scabbed up and I can see where the scar will be thickest, right up near my neck. If I ever wear a shirt again, proper one with buttons and a stand-up collar, it’s going to show, like if I was one of those people who had an operation on my heart.

I don’t make friends. I make a small place to sleep by hanging up my lungi, keep to myself, eat my rice away from the rest of them.

I work on Naveed, finally he lets me ask his wife if we can find out about Megna at the hospital. I tell him everything, about Megna, the baby, how I’m trying to make it right after all these years. I’ve got nothing left to lose, no need to spin a story. He’s got some hard lines around his eyes from looking into people’s faces and pulling the blade over their necks, but when I tell him that, whole sad story, lift up my shirt and show him the lines from fatty cop’s buckle, his faces goes soft and I think, maybe he’ll help me, maybe not, but at least I told the truth.

V I Find Megna

When I first got to the city I was getting my footprints all over the place and wearing out my sandals with the picture of Megna in my hand. Down the roads with my head swivelling all around, staring into the faces of all the women, catching the long of one’s hair here, the small hands of another. They would look back, sometimes like they were angry, other times almost grateful, like, no one looks at me like that, a look without any kind of want or danger, just a frank glance, and I thought, women deserve to be given eyes into their eyes, and I wonder when was the last time, if ever, I gave Shathi that sort of a human thing. Probably never. But by the time I got to Naveed’s I’d given up, you know, stopped staring at every living thing like if I stared hard enough they might turn into my girl.

But then, I see her. The whole real-as-flesh girl of her, standing right in front of me like a wrapped-up gift from the heavens. It’s evening and I’ve finished my shift and I’m on my way to Naveed’s. She’s with another woman, a foreigner, but I don’t notice that at first, I just stand there like I’m hit by a stone. She’s right in front of me, not more than an arm’s length away. It’s her. Hair like a pile of electric wires, eyes tilted up, and so beautiful I can’t breathe, and then she’s gone past me, and I call out to her. ‘Megna. Megna.’ She keeps walking like she doesn’t know her own name, and I try again, louder, even the back of her head is known to me, because I held her there, I held her everywhere, and when she keeps walking I say, ‘It’s me, don’t you know?’ Other people turn around. I run after her. She sees me and she stops. I don’t recognise the look on her face. I’m waiting for a string of curses to come out of her mouth, but instead, she says, ‘Who are you?’ Like she never saw me in her whole life. ‘It’s me,’ I say again, and I think it must be the dark street, so I put my hands on her shoulders and she’s wriggling out of my hands and that’s when I get it. She’s pretending. Ha ha, very funny, I think, don’t be that way. She’s twisting around and I have to let go. Even then I just stand there while she turns away from me, disgusted, and then, finally, I see the foreigner beside her who is saying something in English. They both start screaming. Megna’s turning away and Naveed comes out of his shop. I’m running behind her and he grabs my arms and holds them behind my back. He’s stronger than he looks, and I can’t get out of his grip. ‘Sorry, madam,’ he’s calling out to Megna, and she turns and I notice her clothes, nothing like what my Megna would wear, not in this life, and the smell of her that’s rubbed off on my hands is a smell from somewhere else. Not her. I’m going crazy, seeing my Megna in the face of another woman, and when I look again, she’s nothing like my girl, nothing at all, and I squat right there, right there on the pavement and cry into my hands, because even God is playing tricks, teasing me with the sight of her, which is only in my head, which is where she only ever is.

Naveed feels sorry for me and convinces his wife to take us to the hospital. We pick a Friday and I buy some clothes, a clean pair of trousers and a T-shirt so I don’t look like a total bastard. I’ve got some things at the hotel, but no way I’m going back for it. If I see those rickshaw boys my cuts are all going to split apart open and start bleeding again.

Naveed’s wife is tall and pretty, skin pale as new milk, and she does him like he knows she should’ve married better. He’s nervous around her, telling her how nice she looks, all assy-kissy, and she puts it all away like notes down her blouse. I’m polite and thank you-ing as much as I can stomach, and secretly I’m glad she looks so fancy, because no village wife is gonna get us anywhere at the hospital.

I’m thinking about Shathi, my own village wife. Hard to sleep at night knowing there’s two women out there who hate you. I’m so out of sorrys I don’t even try to call her, but she’s in my dreams now, right next to Megna. I’m remembering her on the beach, the smell of her hair on the bus. She deserved better, little bird.

We take a bus across town. On the way I tell them everything I know about Megna, whatever will help to find her. Her name, age. Naveed’s wife helps me count the months and we figure when she might have been there. The bus stops and we walk the rest of the way. It’s the medical college, no fancy people here. Already at the entrance you can see it’s the poor man’s place, there’s sick people lying in the corridor, or curled up by the stairs, they reach out and grab your ankles, starting a long story and begging for a few paisa. Shit. Naveed’s wife knows her way around, end of the building, up some stairs that smell like piss, down another corridor full of people squatting on the floor and pointing to their rotting limbs, aching stomachs, waiting to see someone, crying for a doctor or a nurse, anyone in a white coat.

Naveed’s wife spots a nurse and she goes up all haughty and clapping on her heels, and they talk for a minute. Then she comes back and holds out her hand to me. ‘Give me some money,’ she says. I’ve heard this line before, it sends the crazy to my blood, but I knew it would be this way, so I hand over all I’ve got, minus a little for food. She twirls around and disappears down the ward.

Naveed wanders off to buy cigarettes. I look around. There’s a man with a little girl. Kid’s in her father’s arms, all limp and tired-looking, then she coughs, goes stiff, then quiet again, leaning her head against his chest. I look over at him and he nods at me. ‘TB,’ he says. I’ve heard of that, took some people in my village a few years ago. I got the letter in Dubai, sent some money.

‘She got medicine?’

‘We fed her the pills for six months. But she’s getting worse.’

I look at the girl. She opens her eyes, sleepy-like, and gives me a slow smile. ‘Hello,’ I say.

‘You got kids?’ the father asks me.

‘Yah,’ I say. ‘Nine years old. Lives with her mother.’

He nods. The girl starts coughing again, and he hugs her close, putting his hands on her forehead. Then I see his lips move. He’s praying.

Naveed comes back. He opens the packet, offers me a smoke, and we light up together. I ask him about his wife. ‘I can’t believe it myself,’ he says, ‘why her people said yes. I guess I was a handsome kid.’

‘Not any more,’ I say, and he nudges me in the ribs. I wince, it’s still a bit sore there.

Time passes, we sit down in the corridor like everyone else. Naveed offers me another smoke and I take it just to pass the time. We’re thinking of going out for a cup of tea, leaving a message with the kid’s father, but Naveed’s wife comes back, folding her hands across her chest when she sees us sitting on the floor.

‘It’s filthy here, let’s go.’

‘Did you?’

She stops, looks down at us. ‘No.’

‘What happened?’ I say.

‘I’ll tell you when we get outside. This place is full of sickness, get me out.’ And Naveed’s on his feet in a flash, clearing the way so she can pass through without touching anyone.

As soon as we get downstairs I stop and make her tell me everything. Outside, it’s hot and my eyes are swimming in the sun. Naveed’s wife makes fists and puts them on her hips. ‘You look like a crazy bastard,’ she says, ‘but inside you’re just a worm like everyone else.’

She’s not telling me anything I don’t know. ‘Did you find the doctor? What did he say?’

‘You think they have all their papers in a neat little pile and whenever someone comes off the street and asks them, they just tell you what you want to know?’

I’m looking at Naveed, then at his wife. My tongue’s gone dry and heavy. ‘You didn’t find him.’

‘Of course I didn’t find him. No one would even talk to me.’ She runs her hands down her kameez like she can’t believe anyone would turn down a woman who looked that good.

My head goes so low I think it might fall off and roll around on the ground. Naveed puts his hand on my shoulder. ‘We tried,’ he says.

We shuffle over to where the rickshaws are waiting. Naveed helps his wife get in and I wave them away. ‘I’ll walk,’ I say, my feet as heavy as ships.

VI The Shipyard

All the time I dream of my kid, dark hair like her mother’s. She has my nose and Megna’s little eyes. And maybe my lips. Nice lips I’ve got, at least that’s what Megna used to tell me. Who knows what’s left, I haven’t looked in the mirror in a long time.

The building on Chowrasta is finished. Carpenters coming in to do the doors, kitchen marble going in. Foreman pays me my last week’s wages and I’m out again in the street.

I wander from one building to another but there are no jobs. Or maybe there are, but when they look at my face and see the life stamped out of me, they say no. My money runs out quick. Naveed says I can sleep in the shop, so I make my bed there for a few days. I want to ask Naveed’s wife if she’ll teach me a few letters, but I haven’t seen her since that day at the hospital. Can’t believe I went this long without learning a single damn thing. She called me a worm, and she was right — a stringy little insect that crawls through the dirt and eats everyone’s shit.

I’m hungry but when Naveed offers me his rice, I say no. My stomach goes soft and achy when I’m alone in the shop at night with the smell of soap and the little hairs Naveed can’t catch with his broom.

In the day, when I’m not looking for work, I look into the shops along the highway, and I see strange things. In one, giant metal lanterns, long lengths of chain. Clocks and brass instruments. Shopkeeper tells me it’s all from the ships that get broken further down the beach. They sell all the bits and pieces here, the cheap stuff. Everything else goes to Dhaka. He’s is a nice guy, old, he has a lot of time on his hands. Tells me there used to be nothing here, then a storm and ship that got washed up and stuck in the sand. There was a foreigner, a Captain, he started the whole thing. I don’t believe him, just let the old man talk — what’s left when you’re old except the ears of the young? I can’t call myself young any more but I do, I do because I messed up so bad I still have so much I haven’t finished, like bringing a kid into this world and raising him right, teaching him to respect his elders and listening to their stories, no matter how long or made up.

‘You looking for work?’ he asks me.

‘You know anyone?’

‘Always something in shipbreaking. I could put in a word. Guy’s coming to sell, I’ll ask him. Come back tomorrow.’

I tell him I’m grateful.

‘It’s hard work,’ he says, ‘dangerous too.’

‘I don’t mind,’ I say.

Next day I scrub up as best I can and wear the trousers I bought for the hospital. When I show up at the shop, shopkeeper tells me to wait at the back. There’s a guy with a van on the street, piled high with junk. All I can see are metal legs, cables, things that used to work but now they’re just broken parts.

At the back of the shop there’s a bunk bed with metal bars, reminds me of our dormitory in Dubai. Wonder where those boys are now, who’s building and who’s gone home.

I sit down on the bed and wait a long time, then I hear steps coming in my direction and I sit up, straighten out my shirt.

Shopkeeper comes in. ‘Here’s the one I was telling you about.’

The guy is squat and has a nose like a dog, all squashed up against his face. He’s breathing hard and sweating like fat people do. He looks at me like I’m a chicken he’s thinking of buying. ‘You done construction work?’

‘He’s used to working hard,’ the shopkeeper tells him.

‘I worked in foreign, in Dubai,’ I say, hoping that will sway him. People are always impressed with talk of foreign.

‘You got any schooling?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Pity. I could use an assistant. But never mind. You come tomorrow, I’ll put you on the ship. We got some tankers that need finishing up. Give this to the man at the gate, he’ll let you pass.’

He gives me his card. Before I can ask him about the pay, he’s out the door, his doggy breaths getting faster as he walks away.

When I was a kid my father made me dig out the latrine. It was supposed to run to the river, but two, three times a year it got stuck, all the shit clogged and flowing up to the ground. He sent me in with a shovel, said nothing, just pointed to the river. The stink was so strong I gagged for weeks after just thinking about it. I hated my father for making me to do it, but I see now that I should’ve waited, because I’m hanging off the side of a ship with a flimsy rope around my waist, and I realise, this is hell, not the latrine, not the desert, not even up there against the glass with Pahari. But this is what I deserve after all the bad I’ve done. This work at the end of the world.

I do what they say. Tell me to climb to the top of a broken ship and hang there like a tree-snake, I do it. Tell me to tie a rope around my waist and cut the flesh of a metal beast, that’s me. No word, no talkback. Pahari, if he was here, he’d be ashamed of me. What he wouldn’t say about the pathetic road I chose, all coward and no brave. What could I do, Pahari? After you died and scared the shit out of me for ever the only thing I could think was, I just want to hide in Megna’s sari, and my kid, just want to protect my kid. All coward and no brave. In my head Pahari says, I died for nothing, and I tell him, people like us always die for nothing. And he’s shaking his head, loose, like he used to, as if he didn’t get his bones ground to dust, as if every wish he ever had hadn’t disappeared into the desert like a drop of water on a leaf.

Now every day is latrine day. Every day I fall to sleep with poison in my blood. I get one day’s teaching from a guy who hands me a blowtorch and says, ‘When I tell you to cut, you cut.’ Today I’m up on the east side of the ship. Rope’s around my waist, goggles for my eyes that’s getting cut from my pay. Sparks come out of the blowtorch and land on my legs like a line of ants, sun burning my back, and all for a scrap of money. For that little scrap I’m all cut up from the metal, arms about to fall off from carrying it, and so hungry I’ll eat anything, sleep anywhere, thirsty like I’ve never known, not even in jail.

There’s a row of shacks behind the yard and they offer me a bed for a sum I guess is about half my pay. I don’t have a choice so I take my things and sign up. Mostly I decide to keep to myself, but after a few days I let myself make one friend. His character is black and he’s a real bastard of a guy, which tells me at least he’s honest, no tricks at the last minute thinking he’s a winner and then realising he’s out to cut my throat.

We share the hut with four others. The first day, he points me to the pallet by the door, says, ‘That one’s for you. It’ll break your back but nobody gives a shit about the new guy.’

He’s from the north, where there’s never enough food. ‘You’ll die on this beach,’ he says. ‘Something will fall on your head and you’ll crack open like an egg. Or fire. Or poison.’

‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘No one will miss me, so.’

‘Yah, another miserable son-of-a-bitch with no one to love him. Plenty of us around here, na?’

The others ignore him.

‘You’ll die alone like the rest of us. But at least we won’t be happier than you.’

He climbs onto his bed, farts in my direction, and goes to sleep.

My bed isn’t broken, it’s slanted. I sleep with my feet a few inches lower than my head. Next day, I find a piece of wood and I fix it. My friend, Dulal, is impressed. Tells everyone what a useful guy I am, soon I’m fixing all kinds of things. The leaky tap at the end of the row of huts where we line up to brush our teeth; a broken ladder. I’m not an expert but I know my way around. All this I do at night. During the day, I’m on the shitty little rope, the blowtorch, giant squares of metal dragged down the beach. We chant as we heave, ‘Hei-yo, hei-yo, hei-yo.’ Look, we’re taking out the trash. Feet sink into the sand, grey and oily. ‘Hei-yo, listen up, nobody in this world for me.’

I think about going home, but no way I can do that. Shathi’s not going to open the door for me, not now. And there’s the fingernail of hope I’ll still find Megna and the kid. But how? I’m so tired from the ship I can hardly move my legs at the end of the day. I haven’t even seen Naveed since I went to tell him I wasn’t going to sleep at the shop any more.

It’s going to be Eid next week and they’re giving us a day off.

I go back to the beach. I’m hollowed out now, I’m done. Thought when I started, I could look for them for years, my hair would turn grey and still I’d be on the hunt. But my bones are dead. I’m stupid and my luck is over. I have to give up. I’m an even bigger fool if I don’t see that my girl and my kid are never going to be found, that the world swallowed them up and I’ll never see them again.

The hut is quiet. Everyone else has somewhere to go. No one’s going back to their village — too far for most. But they’re not here. I crawl onto my pallet. Now I wish it was still slanted, because I can’t stand the sound of blood pumping to my heart.

I close my eyes, wishing for sleep. Maybe I drop off for a minute, because someone’s beside me, breathing on my face. I smell booze. I open my eyes and it’s Dulal, drunk, his face inches from mine and grinning like a fool. I’m so fed up with my life it’s like I’m drunk too, so I say, ‘I don’t even know if it’s a son or a daughter.’

He nods, serious, not like he’s laughing at me, and then he shows me what’s in his hand and it’s a bottle. I take a swig, it goes down hot and burning, right to my stomach. In five minutes I’m drunk. Thank God. My tongue is loose and he’s not listening anyway, so I tell him the whole stupid story. He comes in sometimes, saying things like ‘You fool’ or ‘Shit, brother, you had that coming’, but mostly he’s quiet, and when I’m finished he repeats some of the stuff I’ve just said, like ‘poor bastard Pahari’ or ‘Policemen, they’re all crooks’.

After I’m done, he stays quiet for a long time and I think he’s asleep. I think I should sleep too, it’s getting late, and I’m about to head to the toilet when he sits up in his bed and shouts, ‘I’m a genius!’ And then: ‘There’s one place open on Eid day.’

He jumps up, pulling my arm so hard I have to give his hand a good slap.

We go downstairs and throw ourselves into the empty street, not a rickshaw or a cigarette-wallah to see us as we walk crooked. Everything is quiet, all the shops closed, everyone at home with their fathers and children. ‘The street is sadder than the hut,’ I tell Dulal. I want to go back, but he’s saying, ‘Don’t worry brother, you’re going to thank me,’ and he’s passing the bottle back into my hands, and it’s going to my blood, so I just follow him. Who cares anyway, I think. I carry the sad inside me, one place is the same as the next.

We go around a corner and walk for what feels like a long time, though I’m not sure, everything is moving around. Dulal’s talking the whole time about Eid, and there’s blood on the street from the cows they’ve just slaughtered. Shathi had to sell her bull, maybe it came here, nice fat one for a rich guy’s table. He’s eating its liver now, the bastard.

Finally we get there. I see a broken-down building, two floors with a veranda upstairs, saris hanging on the washing line. We go inside and there’s a chair with a few women sitting around, wearing clothes like they might be going to a wedding, except if you look close, it’s all cheap. Eid Mubarak, they say.

I know what it is. I’ve been to one when I was a kid, before Megna, brother and me and a couple of boys from the village. I told them all I’d done it, pretended I was a real man, but I couldn’t. I was shit scared of the woman, her sex staring at me like a little cat. I can’t remember what she looked like, except I know she laughed at me, in a bored sort of way, like she sees that sort of shit all the time. Probably a lot of guys couldn’t make it happen at the last minute. It’s harder than it looks.

Even through my drink I can smell perfume. Dulal slaps me on the back. ‘What I said! Only place open on Eid day!’

The madam, bloated arms with paint all over her face, looks us up and down and says, ‘Money first.’

Dulal makes me pay. After I get my cash out, the madam is all smiles. There’s a line of girls and she says to choose one. Last time I can’t remember them being so young. Maybe it’s the drink but the whole thing’s making me gag — kids, perfume, madam and her fat arms. But this time I’m not going back. You’d think I was Jesus for all the sex I haven’t had. I look at Dulal. I look at the madam, laughing now, teeth at the back all orange from chewing her Eid paan. I’m not going back. I stare up at the girls, find one who doesn’t remind me of anyone. Dulal’s already picked his, a tall girl, skinny, they’re arm in arm like he’s known her since his village days. I’m getting mine and he pokes me with his elbow. ‘Just like your Megna, eh brother? Arre, Megna, your hero’s coming! Megna! Megna!’ He says her name like she might appear if he says it loud enough. If only. He takes another swig from his bottle and he’s gone behind one of the curtains.

Girl takes me up to her room. I try to get turned on by the look of her ass swaying in my face as she climbs the stairs. We go behind a curtain and the bed’s narrow and bare, just a sheet and a few long pillows. There’s a calendar and a mirror with a broken corner. We lie down. She pulls down my zip and takes my dick out of my trousers. I put my hand on her head. She puts it in her mouth. I look up, I see lizards hiding in the tin roof. I feel good. I pull the girl’s hair and she climbs on top of me. Her face isn’t pretty but it’s not mean. I’m sliding into her, easy, like it hasn’t been ten years I’ve been hating my own cock. When it’s going to be over, I grab her and pull her face close to mine, so I can’t see anything, only eat the lipstick off her face and taste the sex in her mouth, and I hang on to her like I’m falling out of the ship and she’s going to save me, a little dinghy in the hard boil of a river.

After, she says, ‘I had a friend called Megna.’

Madam comes in, says, ‘Your time is up.’ I take out the last of my money and buy another hour. Girl keeps talking. It’s her. Megna was her friend, a good friend. Always sharing her rice. I’m patient, I don’t try to rush her. The men didn’t always like her, she had a mouth. But she never complained, always said this was her fate.

Girl says, ‘We all took a little bit, here and there. Sent some home. But Megna, she was paying off a big debt. Everything eaten, never had a paisa put aside.’

‘By who?’

‘Madam, who else?’

The debt meant that Megna had to do whatever. The perverts. Old men. Policemen who got freebies so they left madam alone.

I want to tear the skin off my face. Sun’s rising through the door. I don’t have long, so I finally ask, ‘Did she say anything about a kid?’

Girl looks around at the broken mirror like it’s going to tell her something. ‘I don’t know what happened to the kid. But kid’s why she owed madam all that money.’

Madam comes in again. ‘Out,’ she says. ‘Come back when you have more money. And get your friend out too.’ She stands there till I drag myself out. Girl comes down with me. Dulal made a mess. I clean him up, throw a handful of water on his face. ‘What happened to her?’ I say again, heaving Dulal up, putting his arm over my neck. ‘What happened to Megna?’

Girl keeps talking while we drag Dulal to the door. ‘The sickness took her,’ she says. ‘Died last year.’

My arms go limp and Dulal slips to the floor.

‘Ei,’ says madam, ‘I said get out.’

Girl helps me get Dulal up again. ‘Did you bury her?’ I whisper.

Madam is watching, hand splayed across her hip. We drag Dulal out on the street.

‘We took her out and put her in the water,’ girl says.

‘Which water?’

She points in the direction of the sea. ‘We borrowed a dinghy. We all went, every girl.’ And she runs back inside, her footsteps as light as a rat’s.

I call Shathi. ‘She’s dead,’ I cry. Shathi listens, quiet. ‘Come home,’ she says. She’s right. That I still have a home is a miracle. I should go, start all over, pay my penance somewhere else. Is my kid dead, too? I’ll never know. If I could just see Megna’s face one more time. There’s no face like hers in the world, no eyes dancing like that, hair like she rode with her head out of a car window. Just one more time. I think about the time I thought I saw her, that woman with the fancy clothes who played tricks on my mind. All this time, she was dead, fish-eaten, not even a grave to rot into.

Dulal and me, we have the morning shift. No way he’s going to make it, so I go to the Boss and make an excuse. Diarrhoea. Boss gives me words on cutting Dulal’s pay and then I’m back in my harness. My eyes are cloudy, I can’t see through the goggles. My torch burns through the metal. I’m remembering my Qur’an, saying a prayer for Megna. Died of the sickness. The sickness of paying off a big debt. She was a whore after all, but only because I made her one. All the stories I had dreamed up for her life, new start in the city, kid going to school — none of that was ever going to happen. Shit like that doesn’t happen to people like us. Any chance she had of a life, I took from her.

Sun beats down hard on me. No wind, everything so still, and me baking in the hot, now with a dead girl around my neck.

I don’t know how the day passes. Later, we’re eating a few scraps together. Dulal’s up, he gives me a wink when I sit down next to him. He’s telling me about the girl he did, how luscious she was, best Eid he ever had. ‘They should make it part of the day,’ he says. ‘You kill a few cows, roast their livers, then go fuck a few cheerful women — everyone’s happy. I should be Prime Minister.’

I stare down at my food. ‘Want it?’ I say. ‘Have.’

He grabs my plate. ‘What happened to you? Whisky got you?’

‘Megna’s dead,’ I say.

He keeps eating. ‘Shit.’

‘And she was a whore. Worked at that place.’

‘Nothing wrong with being a whore.’ He’s chewing fast, as if someone’s going to steal it right out of his mouth. ‘Whoring never killed anyone.’

I go for his face. He crashes to the dirt floor, holding his jaw. Then I’m on the floor too, my arms around him, touching his blood, and I’m bleating like a goat while the other guys stand around and stare.

Dulal’s nose is broken. I say I’m sorry but he waves me away. ‘Man’s gotta do sometimes,’ he says. Later, we’re about to bed down and he has rags stuck in his nostrils. He asks what I’m going to do now.

I’ve been asking myself this question all day. I say, ‘I wait to die. Nothing left for me. I lost my money, my wife, my kid. Now this girl’s blood is on my hands. I die, then God sends me to Hell, that’s all.’

‘Motherfucker,’ he says. ‘Shit wasn’t all your fault. But you’re in a hole, I can see that.’

One of the other guys is smoking a biri, I can see the little orange light. I close my eyes and wait for sleep, wait for death, cursing the blood that flows stubborn in my veins. I think, God made us hard to kill. It takes a knife, a bullet. Your heart breaks, you still go on living.

Dulal’s got an idea. We’re carrying a piece of the ship from the beach to the road, a big piece of metal that cuts into our shoulders. Ten of us on each side of the metal, Dulal right behind me, guy at the front counting our steps.

‘We gotta go back to the whorehouse,’ he says. ‘The madam, she knows something.’

‘Can’t do that,’ I say. ‘No way.’ Also, I don’t tell him, I spend all my days thinking about what Megna had to do. Men she had to fuck. All the ways she had to fuck them. It’s a sex cinema in my head, except nobody’s getting hard, I’m just making myself sick. And worse. At night I’ve been going back to the whorehouse. I don’t go in, I just hang around outside. Lights go on, go off. Sometimes from the street you hear the women laughing.

I put these people into my picture. This guy with the long arms, he held down my Megna, he forced it into her mouth. These two guys, sharing a cigarette, they took turns with her while the other one watched. All day I think of this, and at night I fill my picture in a little bit more. I don’t tell Dulal about the poison in my head.

‘I’m not going back in there,’ I say. ‘I’ll kill that woman if I see her.’

‘Let’s kill her, then,’ he says. ‘Cut that bitch’s head right off.’

‘I’m tired. I can’t fight any more.’

‘That’s a lie, brother. You broke my nose.’

I almost laugh, but the weight of the metal is killing me.

‘Nothing left for you but your kid,’ Dulal says.

‘Kid’s probably dead too. Nothing left for me.’

‘Don’t be an asshole. Madam’s gotta know who she left her kid with. Where she sent the money.’

It makes sense. But so many times I thought, I’m close, this is it, and look where I am, I’m nothing. Lots of guys looking for their people in this town. They all have a story, some sad tale of getting separated at a mela, or their kid ran away and got mixed up with the wrong people. Happens all the time. I’m just one sorry bastard in a city of lost people. Nothing special about me. I didn’t love Megna any more than the other people looking for their lost ones. The kid doesn’t even belong to me, never even clapped eyes on it. So why should I keep looking? What makes me think I’m going to find my girl when everyone else’s girls are lost too? I don’t deserve it, that’s for sure. No doubt about that.

Dulal presses me. ‘What’s it to you?’ I finally say.

We’re almost to the machine now, the one that flattens the metal. We take a few more steps, and then the man at the front calls out, and like a dance we all let go of the metal at once, jumping back as it crashes to the ground.

‘Same shit here every day,’ Dulal says. ‘Ship comes, we take it apart. Sometimes a guy dies, or one of us gets cut, loses a leg. It’s black. So if you have a chance you take it.’

We head back to the ship for another piece of metal. ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘But don’t think we’re gonna find that kid. Nothing good is ever happening me to me again.’

It’s late on a Friday and the place is busy. Men coming in and out, the smell of sweat and horny everywhere. I ask for the madam. When she comes out she doesn’t recognise me, but when she sees Dulal, she says, ‘Eid, I remember. You want more?’ She’s chewing her paan again, little bits of green and orange on her mouth.

I let Dulal talk. On the way over here, I said, ‘This is your party. You want something to do, you do it.’

The scars on my chest are itching. Guy brushes past me and I swear I’ve seen him on the ship. They probably all come here. Boss too. Maybe his whores are more high class, maybe not. You never know with richies, they always surprise you by being more perverted than the rest of us.

‘We’re looking for someone,’ he says. ‘Megna. She used to work here.’

‘No one like that.’ She spits her paan into the gutter. ‘I’m busy. If you don’t want a girl, get lost.’ She turns. Dulal grabs her, arm so soft he looks like he’s squeezing a loaf of bread.

‘Bitch,’ he says. ‘We know she worked here. We know you worked her till she died. No use lying.’

She looks him up and down.

‘Yes,’ she worked here. ‘But nobody killed her, ask anyone. She got sick, I even paid for the doctor. Now you know, so get out.’ She points to the alley.

But Dulal’s just getting started. ‘Tell us about the money.’

‘What money?’

‘The money she borrowed.’

His fingers get tighter on her arm. Now her face is red and puffed up.

‘Listen, you son-of-a-bitch. Get your dirty hands off me. I know where you work. I’ll tell everyone. I know you like boys — you want people to know? Bokul here, all dressed up pretty, has a surprise between his legs, and you almost sucked it right off him, you sick little bastard.’ She laughs, her mouth slick with spit.

Dulal lets go of her arm and looks at me. I shrug. I don’t give a shit.

‘Listen, I say,’ coming between them. ‘We’re not here to spoil your business. Just tell us about the kid — we know she had one.’

She’s rubbing her arm, about to turn away, and for a minute I think she’s just going to keep laughing and tell us to fuck off, but she stops and turns to me.

She breathes deep. ‘The kid was here. I’m only telling you because she’s more trouble than she’s worth.’

She. A girl. My heart stops. I die, right there in front of her. ‘But that other whore told me she was somewhere else.’

Madam laughs. ‘They tell you what I want them to tell you. You think I would let a girl go? A girl who’s going to carry me when I’m old? I’m going to starve with so much stupid.’

‘Where is she?’

The bitch smiled like she was enjoying torturing me. ‘She’s gone.’

‘What did you do to her?’

She spits. ‘I was getting rid of her. She was too much trouble, always crying over her mother. And there was a man, had his eye on her.’

She waves her arm.

‘He was going to keep her, I don’t know what she was complaining about. Then, yesterday, she cuts all her hair off. Fuck knows where she got the scissors, but she looked like a bald chicken, the little cunt.’

I double up over myself and gag into the street.

Madam spits at my feet. ‘Get out of here, I don’t have anything for you.’

It starts to rain, hard like someone’s hurling it out of the sky. Finally the rage devils into my body and I lift up my head and drive it into her stomach. I’m pounding madam’s stomach with my fists, thinking about Megna and Pahari and Shathi and my father who made me dig out the latrine, and my poor little seedling who was in this hellhole all the time, just past my fingertips, until madam slumps against the wall and through the blood bubble at her lip, she says, ‘Go to the beach called “Prosperity”. There’s a kid that hangs around, a boy. Your daughter’s with him.’

VII My Girl Falls from the Sky

Dulal and me run all the way back down the road and the rain feels like fire on my back and my scars are beating with my blood. Dulal slows down, his hands on his knees, but I say, ‘Come on, we have to find that kid.’ I’m not letting myself think about anything except finding him. We go all the way up and down, asking which yard is called ‘Prosperity’ and we’re wetter than dogs by the time we come upon a group of men standing around in the dark and the rain. ‘What’s going on?’ Dulal asks.

‘Do you know what they’re doing, these richies?’ someone’s saying. ‘They’re sending an air-conditioned truck to pick up a piece of furniture. Yep, ship there, there’s a big, black chair, bigger than any chair you ever saw. Owner’s selling it to some rich American, won’t even let the thing come out into the air, wants to take it to Dhaka like a bride, wrapped up and protected from the hot. Can you believe it? A chair’s got a better life than us.’

‘We don’t want trouble, we’re just looking for a kid,’ Dulal says.

‘Someone’s going to die getting the chair out.’

We always die, I think. That’s why we’re here. Even when we live, we die.

Dulal gives up. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

‘We have to find him,’ I say. ‘He’s got to be here.’ I don’t give a fuck about this chair or whatever asshole is taking it to America. ‘A kid,’ I say to everyone I see. ‘I’m looking for a kid who hangs around here.’ No one’s listening. I raise my voice. ‘Ask Selim,’ someone says, ‘he’s in charge.’ He points to the front of the crowd. Dulal and me follow the men down the beach till they turn into an alley.

We walk a few shanties down and go into a long room. Inside, there’s a mess of arms and legs. Everyone got something broken. They show me their stumps and their scars. They have arsenic and all kinds of shit in their veins and all over their skin. So this is how it’s going to be. Even Shathi wouldn’t have me this way, not even she, the saint who forgives everything. You couldn’t love a man broken like that.

Selim’s a big guy with long arms and a chest full of meat. He’s saying they’re going to march onto the ship with the chair and bring the whole thing down. In the morning, holding the chair high above their heads, they’re going to walk all the way from the beach to the town. There’s a foreign girl who’s going to put the whole thing on TV. I keep shouting for the kid. ‘He has my girl,’ I say to everyone. They look at me like I’m bringing all the crazy into the room. I try to push my way to Selim, and when I find him he looks me up and down and says, ‘There’s a boy here, it might be him. Come to the beach with us.’

Soon we’re making our way to the beach, holding kerosene lamps, torches, whatever will get us through the dark. It’s raining so hard everything’s blurry and we can’t see more than a few feet in front of us. The shipyard gates are locked but all we have to do is get out onto the water and cross over. ‘Which one is it?’ ‘The pretty one,’ Selim says, ‘all white like it’s dressed up for a party.’ Selim carries one of the broken men on his back like it’s nothing. We wade through the water, across the end of a tanker, past a pair of propellers on their last cutting, and finally we see it, a pretty little cruise ship half broken.

‘What do we do now,’ we ask Selim. ‘Where’s the kid?’ I say. ‘Hey,’ he shouts, ‘where’s that kid?’ No one’s seen him. We wait for the chair to come out. ‘See — there’s the men, they built a ramp halfway up the ship because the chair’s so heavy.’ We stand around and wait for something to happen. The rain lets up for a few minutes, then hardens and throws bullets of water onto our heads. Soon the sky starts to turn yellow and it’s about to be morning, and just as the light is making its way onto our little piece of the beach, we see something coming out of the ship. ‘It’s here,’ Selim yells. ‘The chair is coming!’

A crate’s loaded onto the ramp. Six men are holding on and one of them’s shouting. Now that it’s light I start making my way to the front to see if I can find the kid. Instead I see a woman. She’s got hair plastered to her back and she’s shouting to the chair guys. ‘Hai, Allah,’ we say. Our stomachs are in our mouths watching this crate like a boulder rolling down the ramp. It’s going fast now, faster than it should, and we’re watching as it speeds up, running away from the men, and then, like a bar of soap, it slides off the ramp, and we’re all running back until we hear a crash, something so loud and crazy we scream back at it like it’s going to eat us alive.

We circle around and I see pieces of the black chair scattered like giant grains of sesame. I see a woman, hair plastered across her face, a trickle of blood coming out of her head, and there’s a boy pinned under the crate, and then another kid, head shaved clean, and that’s when I start to cry, ‘My girl, my girl, my girl,’ because even without the curl of her hair, I know she’s mine, that face, that blessed face I thought I’d never see again.

You see now why I had to tell you, Elijah — or rather, why he had to tell you? I wasn’t the only one in Chittagong in search of a self. I wasn’t the only one who felt like the loneliest person in the world. The whole time I was there, as I made friends with Mo and got to know the workers on the beach and fell in love with you, he was right beside me, carrying around my secret like a talisman dangling from his neck.

It’s time to turn now to the matter of us, to your days on the beach, that perfect bubble of bliss I couldn’t help but shatter.