The Bones of Grace

Return to Grace

Abul Hussain came to collect me the next morning, but at the airport, there were no flights to Chittagong. ‘Sorry, ma’am, due to bad weather all flights are indefinitely postponed,’ the girl behind the counter said, wearing a surprisingly tight red-and-grey suit.

‘When is the next flight?’

‘Scheduled for tomorrow morning, ma’am, but that also may not depart.’

I thought about going home, but now that I had set my mind on returning to Sithakunda, I couldn’t turn back. I ducked into the car. ‘Abul Hussain, can you drive us to Chittagong?’ It was a five-or six-hour drive; Dolly and Bulbul had done it regularly in their jeep before the domestic terminal was refurbished.

Abul Hussain glanced at me in the rearview mirror. ‘We would have to tell sir.’

‘Baba won’t mind, I’ll call him now.’

‘There isn’t enough petrol.’

I rifled through my bag, failing to find any money. ‘Stop at a bank, I’ll get some cash.’

We drove through the city again, going south from Mohakhali to Mohammadpur. Abul Hussain parked in front of a shopping mall, where a uniformed guard opened the door to a tiny air-conditioned cubicle that housed an ATM machine. I had always found it strange that in America the cash machines were exposed, as if there was nothing remarkable about being able to take money out of a cavity in the wall. At the shop next door, I bought a packet of Uncle Chipps and a few bottles of water. Then I remembered I hadn’t really eaten anything since the night before, which felt like a lifetime ago now, so I hunted through the mall for a restaurant, finally settling on a place that sold fried chicken. I bought a box for myself and one for Abul Hussain.

In the car, I sent a text message to Abboo. Ok if Abul Hussain drives me to Chittagong? Urgent business. Then I gave Abul Hussain a hefty tip and passed him the fried chicken. ‘You can stay the night and drive back tomorrow.’

He selected a piece of chicken from the carton, taking a bite and then placing it on his knee, where it remained as he negotiated the traffic. In Mohammadpur he picked it up again and took another bite, leaving an oily stain on the leg of his trouser. I offered him a napkin, guilty for making him drive all the way.

After Mohammadpur the traffic cleared and the dense tangle of the city gave way to low-slung buildings and carts piled high with vegetables, and then, acres and acres of brickyards, everything red, dotted with tall, narrow furnaces that churned smoke into the sky. Eventually, the view turned to farmland, chequerboard patches of land planted with rice as far as the eye could see, everything flat and green to the horizon. I closed my eyes, willing sleep to come and cut out the hours until I arrived at the beach, to Mo and Gabriela and Grace.

My phone rang, but I ignored it, knowing it would be my parents or Rashid. I recalled now that Ammoo had slapped me once, when I was eleven, for stealing her make-up bag and wearing lipstick to school. The principal had telephoned, and after a wordless ride home Ammoo had hit me softly across the cheek with a bewildered look, as though her arm had acted of its own accord. When I finally locked myself in my room and Ammoo had called out repeatedly. When I finally opened the door I found her curled up on the sofa. She hadn’t seemed sorry as much as surprised. The phone kept ringing. Eventually I decided to answer. It was Abboo.

‘Your mother is very upset. Dolly also called a few times. And there’s a storm coming.’

‘I know, that’s why I’m driving.’

‘They’re saying it’s going to be bad.’

‘Please, let me go. I know you did what you thought was best. But I can’t rest. I can’t work, I can’t do anything. I can’t be at peace.’

‘You were just a baby, a few weeks. A tiny thing in my hands. The most beautiful thing I had ever seen.’

I hung up so he wouldn’t hear me cry. Last night, when I couldn’t sleep, I had written an email to Rashid. It was full of regret for all the things I had allowed myself to do, that there was no excuse for the way I had behaved, but that, perhaps, if he tried very hard, he would see that there would have been no way for us to go ahead if I hadn’t at least made an attempt to piece together my past. I had gone over it again and again, but I had been unsure how to finish the message, whether I could tell him now that it was all over and we could begin again, but as a pale baby bird of a sun crested the horizon, I had decided not to send it.

I closed my eyes for a moment, and when I opened them the wipers were on and I could hear the sound of water above and below, rain on the car’s roof and on the road. I checked the time and it was only noon, but the rain clouds had smothered the light. We drove on, slowed by the darkness and the dense sheets of water. Abul Hussain switched on his headlights and bent over the wheel, holding on with both hands.

I called the Shipsafe office but no one answered. I asked Abul Hussain to turn on the radio, and the reception drifted in and out. I rifled through the magazines my father had left in the car and found a recent copy of Outlook India. There was news about Bollywood, a corruption scandal in the Indian Army, a recipe for Urad Dal. For a stretch of the highway, the sky cleared momentarily and the rain thinned, and I could make out the trees on either side of the road, the landscape changing from flat to gently rolling. Abul Hussain pointed to a sign. ‘Apa, can we stop for tea?’

He parked in front of a squat concrete building. I waited in the car while he ordered tea from a young boy sitting in front of a large kettle on a propane stove. When the tea was ready he passed me a small clay cup through the window. After a few minutes the sky thickened and it began to rain in earnest, and after Abul Hussain retrieved my cup, we set off again, seeing very little in front of us except the road ahead and the grey outlines of the hills in the distance.

The shops along the highway to Sithakunda were all closed. The car stalled, water sloshing around the tyres. Abul Hussain switched off the engine, then revved it again, propelling us forward, and we covered the last few miles at a crawl, the sound of the wipers beating back and forth. An hour or so later we reached the Shipsafe office.

The front door was locked. I borrowed a key from the caretaker, who informed me that everyone had gone home early because of the storm. I concentrated very hard on remaining downstairs instead of rushing up to the apartment and crawling on my hands and knees in search of a last fragment of you. Even down here at the office, I felt your presence, your footsteps burdening the air above me.

I switched on the overhead light. There was my desk, the glass chipped and taped together, the ancient computer, the corkboard with edge-curled newspaper clippings, Bilal’s battered armchair with the striped towel draped across the back, the smell of tea and biscuits. I had only been away a few months, but I realised I had left long before that, that the moment you arrived I hadn’t cared much for any of it. I remembered the feeling of being around you, which is that you swallowed all the air in the room, though perhaps it wasn’t you at all, but the strength of my feeling for you. In any case, I had been a poor volunteer; I had not done well by the pulling crew. And Mo I had let down altogether.

I glanced over the transcripts of the interviews. Without sentiment, I began to read. The words were flat on the page, one sad story following another, each starting with its same moment of fracture — an illness, a bad crop, the death of a father — and the long journey south, the bag of things they carried, the tiny pocket of hope, and then arriving at the shipyard and finding the acres of steel and rust, and Mr Ali, the dormitory, the long dark nights, carrying iron on their shoulders to the sound of chanting. I felt nothing, no sorrow, no jolt of recognition as the words I had heard and recorded appeared in black and white.

Then I came to the story of Shahed, a young man we had interviewed together. I remembered the way you held his gaze because he had refused to look at me. He had been sent here only a few months before, and was living not at the dormitory but in a room he shared with a few other strays. Ali had taken him on as an apprentice, and he had yet to be paid. He ate, he said, by begging on the highway at night, and during the day, when the others saved him a few mouthfuls of rice. He had a cut on his arm that looked raw, which we only discovered when you put your hand out to touch him and he flinched, the thin fabric of his shirt sliding from his shoulder. You dressed the wound yourself, telling me later your father had taught you first aid in the days when you’d lived in the house in the mountains and there wasn’t a doctor around for miles. Now, reading Shahed’s words, and imagining in the pauses your fingers unrolling the bandage, splashing alcohol on the wound, and all the time Shahed not flinching, not making a sound, his lips parting as you finished, wanting to kiss the hand that touched him with as close to a caress as he had known since saying goodbye to his mother in the winter, she with a touch of her palm on the top of his head, you with a careful tap of the surgical tape.

I went upstairs to the apartment to face Gabriela. I assumed she had built up a catalogue of things to say; I had left without a word to her and ignored her many phone calls and messages, and, worse, I hadn’t even asked after Mo or any of the other men on the beach.

Inside, the place had been stripped of its last traces of you. Gabriela had cleaned everything up. The grey mosaic floor was spotless. All the dusty corners of the flat, the empty bookcase and the window grilles, had been washed. Even in my bedroom the blanket had been folded and the sides of the mosquito net pulled up so that it formed a flat grey canopy over the bed. As soon as she saw me Gabriela said, ‘Where the fuck have you been?’ and I braced myself, but she laughed and put her arms around me. I began to explain, starting with your name, but she said, ‘First, we drink. Then you can grovel.’ We repeated the ritual of my first night at the apartment, though this time the tequila went down easily, and after two big gulps from the bottle I didn’t even feel a little bit drunk.

I asked after Mo. Gabriela told me that he had continued with his duties, cooking and cleaning and looking after her. I had thought, for just a whisper of a moment, that wherever you had gone, you had perhaps taken him with you, but I knew this would be impossible. You would have wanted to leave right away, and Mo didn’t have a pair of shoes, much less a passport. You would have left him behind, though you would not have abandoned him as roughly as I had. And you would not have abandoned me at all.

‘The only thing is, he seems to have run into some trouble with Ali. I’m not sure exactly what — Ali always pretends he hasn’t the faintest clue what I’m saying when I try to talk to him.’

‘I’ve fucked everything up,’ I said, the alcohol finally hitting me.

Gabriela laughed. ‘I was married once too, you know.’

I had never asked her. She had taken the studs out of her top two piercings, and her shirt was loose and fell several inches below her hips. She looked more normal now, yet somehow diminished.

‘I should have taken better care of you,’ I said.

She waved her hand. ‘Don’t worry, darling,’ she said. ‘I could see you were preoccupied.’

‘He was — is — a childhood friend. A childhood sweetheart.’ This is how I had always described Rashid. A childhood connection. ‘So romantic,’ my cousins used to sigh. ‘So sweetly old-fashioned.’

‘I met Elijah at a Shostakovich concert. Out of the blue. Lightning and thunder and all that.’

Gabriela nodded. She pulled a packet of cigarettes out of her handbag, a foreign brand in a dark blue box. ‘I didn’t know you smoked,’ I said.

Gabriela inhaled. ‘I never needed to before.’

‘And what about you?’

She scraped a match against a rough wooden box. ‘We were children, we didn’t know what we were doing.’

‘I sort of feel like that. But that’s not an excuse. I mean — for me.’

She laughed. ‘He’s the director of the film. We’re still close friends.’

‘What happened?’

‘I cheated, he forgave me. I was the one who finally left. Now he’s married, he has three children. The terrible thing is, I’m probably still in love with him.’

Something in her face reminded me of Ammoo. Not that Ammoo herself regretted anything, but she was in constant fear that I would have regrets, that if I didn’t marry Rashid, for instance, that I might carry around the expression that could be seen on Gabriela’s face right now, the sense of having allowed a chance at happiness to pass me by. Ammoo wanted, more than anything, to mitigate disappointment for me. I wasn’t sure what to say to Gabriela, and what would it be like for me, ten, twenty years from now? Would I pine for Rashid, for the familiar rituals of our togetherness, being able to anticipate so many of his gestures — would I miss the safety of that or, as now, would I be tired of knowing so much, would I continue to long for otherness, for the pleasures of the alien?

The door opened, and Mo entered carrying a shopping bag. His smile when he saw me was so wide, so undiminished, that I stood up and walked over to him and lifted him up in my arms. He was heavier than he looked, and smelled of sweat and iron.

‘Did you hear about the piano?’ he said.

I hadn’t.

‘It’s going to America. Elijah is going to fix it.’ The sound of your name in Mo’s mouth was the first time I had heard it uttered aloud since you left, and it struck me with great force. Mo didn’t know the details, but he had heard Ali saying that the American who had been visiting had somehow arranged for the Steinway to be transported to Boston, where it would be restored, and then presumably sold on. I stood frozen as the tears gathered in my eyes, my ears still humming to the sound of your name, and beyond, to the notes you had played on Grace.

I wanted to hug Mo again but I didn’t. My arms were suddenly without feeling or energy. I asked after the others. ‘How is everyone?’ I asked him.

‘Russel is still looking for his brother,’ he said.

‘And Belal?’

Mo kept his eyes trained on his feet. ‘Belal has gone home.’

‘Why?’

‘Mr Ali said he was making trouble.’

‘Did he do something?’

Mo shrugged. ‘I can’t say.’

Again I was pierced with guilt for having abandoned them. I tried to remember if there was anything about Belal that stood out. He didn’t strike me as the type of person who would get under Ali’s skin. Ali had told me once that he would periodically encourage a turnover so that the workers would remember who was keeping their bellies full. I recalled it now, and the way Ali had said it, as if it was nothing to exchange one man’s labour for another’s. ‘You stay out of trouble,’ I said to Mo.

‘Mr Ali won’t leave me,’ he said. His belief that there was some security in his life made him seem all the more fragile. I was about to ask him why, whether there was some particular reason Ali would keep him around, but he disappeared into the kitchen, declaring he would make the best spinach curry I had ever tasted.

‘Did you practise the letters?’ I called out. ‘Every day!’ he replied, and in those words, in that voice, there was a small measure of consolation.

When I stood up to leave, I was suddenly dizzy, and I had to sit down again.

‘You sure you don’t want to sleep here?’ Gabriela asked.

‘I promised Rashid I’d stay in town.’

‘Under lock and key, are you?’

‘The errant wife.’ And, with that, I asked Abul Hussain to take me to the villa, where Komola was waiting at the door, her hands soft against my face.

In the morning, when the car stopped inside the gates of Prosperity, I watched for a long time as a cutter made his final pass and a large piece of Grace came crashing down onto the sand. I was wearing sunglasses, a pair I had found in the bedside drawer of my room and had probably belonged to Dolly, and through the sepia-tinged frames I saw the people I had so carefully come to know appearing as vague shapes against the broken silhouette of Grace. A tanker had arrived while I was away. Now it was wedged between Grace and a half-demolished container ship in the neighbouring lot. Grace had been pared down. Her foredeck and bridge had been sliced off, large panels of steel cut away from her hull. She was all gloom now, empty of the footprints of happy people.

Ali was waiting for me in the Prosperity office. ‘Welcome back, Miss Zubaida.’ He pulled at his beard, which appeared fuller and longer.

‘Thank you, Mr Ali. It looks as if you’ve made a lot of progress,’ I said, gesturing towards the beach.

‘By the grace of Allah, we are ahead of schedule with the cruiser.’

He didn’t ask me to sit down, but I took a seat opposite him anyway. ‘I heard also that you have sold the piano.’

‘To your friend, the American. He was very persistent.’

‘Yes. He’s a difficult man to refuse.’

‘And you have come back. Will you stay long?’

‘I would like to continue with the interviews,’ I said.

‘We are always pleased to act as your hosts,’ he said. ‘And you are entitled to employ who you wish, of course.’

It took me a moment to realise he was referring to Mo. He tapped the desk with the end of a pencil. ‘As long as the boy completes his duties, he is free to live where he finds a place, but you will understand that it may cause some disturbance among the other men. As you have taken such an interest in the boy. I hear you are teaching him to read.’

‘He didn’t get a chance to attend school.’

‘Neither have any of the others.’

‘Have they complained?’ I wasn’t sure where he was going. He obviously didn’t care if my favouring of Mo had caused problems with the workers.

‘Not exactly. But I’ve known them a long time, and they don’t take to change very well.’

‘We won’t be here long.’

‘That’s precisely the issue, madam.’ He continued to tap on the desk with the end of his pencil. It was mid-morning and work was going at full tilt on the beach. ‘After you go, things will have to return to normal. That is the way here. We have been operating for many years.’

‘I’m not sure I understand.’

He smiled again, raising his hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘Nothing to worry about, madam. All is up to the Almighty. Now I must go, I have some business to attend to.’

Ali appeared to dismiss me. I wasn’t sure what had just happened, but I guessed the conversation had sounded different to Ali’s ears than to mine. As I turned to go, he said, ‘Please give my regards to your father.’

‘You know my father?’

‘Sir is a respected man, a son of Chittagong. Of course we all know him.’

He was talking about Bulbul. ‘Yes, of course.’ And I turned to go, still confused by the exchange. Outside, a large sheet of metal was being pulled up the beach. The cutters would come soon with their tools, trimming the sheet down again so that it could be dragged to the equipment at the northern edge of the beach, where it would be rolled and flattened and eventually transported. I looked for Mo, but couldn’t find him, so I made my way to the office. As I passed the dormitory, I saw Gabriela coming out of one of the side doors. I wondered what she was doing there, but she swept past me before I could call out to her.

I allowed myself to consider for a moment what would have happened if I’d gone away with you. Hopped on a plane. Goodbye, everyone. Sending Rashid and Ammoo an email, perhaps the same one. I’m on my way to America, it would have said, with Elijah Strong. They would have considered it a joke. Called me, and then each other. Would they have been any angrier with me than they were now? I laughed to myself, because I knew now that losing you was scarier than any of it, and since I had done that and was still here, it meant I could probably do anything. I wish I had discovered that about myself before it was too late.

When I returned to the dormitory for an interview session that evening, I found Gabriela already there, passing around tea and bowls of puffed rice to the men. Mo hung back, dodging me as I entered, and none of the others stopped to say hello. I guessed I had offended them with my abrupt departure. Only Russel seemed happy to see me, asking after you. You were in America, I said. I told him about the piano, but word had already spread. ‘Can we smoke?’ Russel asked, and there was a small commotion as the biris and the matches were passed around, and after everyone had lit up, small conversations bloomed around the edges of the group. No one seemed in any particular hurry to start talking.

‘So,’ I began, ‘we are almost at the end of our interviews, but there are a few of you who have yet to tell me your story. I am sorry for the break—’

‘Will it be on TV?’ Russel interrupted.

‘Yes, in my country,’ Gabriela said.

‘In foreign,’ I translated.

‘What about Bangladesh?’ someone asked from the back.

‘We will try,’ Gabriela said.

‘We don’t know,’ I said. ‘But you don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.’

Someone raised his hand from the back of the room. ‘Apa, what about the other place? Can you take the camera there?’

‘Don’t worry,’ Gabriela said. ‘We won’t leave anyone out.’

‘We are only getting interviews from the pulling crew,’ I said. ‘The film will focus on your group.’

‘I mean the other pullers.’

‘She’s not supposed to meet the other pullers,’ Mo interjected.

‘What other pullers?’ I glanced at Mo, at Gabriela. I looked around. ‘Where’s Belal?’ Belal, who had lost his wife and his daughter.

A man stood up. I didn’t recognise him — a heavy, powerful face, square shoulders. ‘As-salaam alaikum Apa,’ he said. ‘My name is Selim.’

‘Selim has just arrived from the north,’ Gabriela said.

‘I was here last year,’ he explained. ‘My father died, so I went home for the winter.’

I was struggling to keep up. Something about the equation between us, and the workers, and Ali, had fundamentally altered in my absence. The group appeared charged up, lacking in the tired resignation that had dominated our previous conversations. I remembered what Bilal had said about not trusting Gabriela, her inability to get the workers to speak with her. And now, the warm, almost intimate way she was sitting among them, passing them mugs of tea, using Selim’s cigarette to light one of her own.

I took Gabriela aside. ‘What’s this about the others?’

‘I was going to tell you,’ she said. ‘There was an accident here last week.’

‘On Grace?’ No one had said anything to me. ‘Does Rubana know?’

‘They hushed it up. Ali’s hiding the wounded workers.’

‘That doesn’t sound right. Where would he hide them?’

‘There’s a place down the road. He paid them off, doesn’t want them in hospital.’

The sound of conversation rose around us. ‘Don’t you want to see them?’ Selim asked.

I looked around the room, lit by Gabriela’s camera and the solitary bulb that hung from the ceiling, and replayed the conversation I’d had with Ali that morning. I knew they were waiting for me to say something. I dialled Rubana’s number but there was no reply. I remembered Dera Bugti now, and being inches away from Ambulocetus, and having to put all that earth, all its history, back in its place, its secrets packed away for someone else to discover. I gestured to Mo and asked him, first of all, why he hadn’t said anything to me. Mo stared down at his feet, and I had to put my fingers under his chin and force him to look at me. ‘I didn’t want you to be hurt,’ he said, and I took this to mean that he was afraid I would get into trouble with Ali. It’s you who will be hurt, I wanted to say. And I won’t be able to protect you. Again I will betray you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I turned to Rashid. ‘Ali?’

‘Uncle Harry owns the shipyard,’ Rashid said.

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

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

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

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

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

‘What are you talking about?’

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

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

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

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

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

Komola and Joshim greeted us gaily at the door. The rest of the family would arrive soon. ‘Go upstairs,’ Komola said, ‘dress up for your mother-in-law.’

I went upstairs and saw that Komola had laid out my clothes. A green silk sari, the matching blouse and petticoat were all ironed and on the bed. Rashid was still steaming over our argument. ‘I’m going to play golf,’ he said, changing into shorts and a polo shirt. ‘I’ll be back in time for dinner.’

I showered, trying to put aside the sight of the injured workers, but there was too much there, Mo and Gabriela and you, always you hovering at the edge of my thoughts. I lay back on the bed, my hair blotting the bedcover.

When it was time to get dressed I realised I needed help putting on my sari. Komola wasn’t in the living room or kitchen. I made my way to the back of the house to the servants’ quarters. A narrow cement staircase led to the rooms above the garage. The washing — a checked lungi and a red petticoat — hung between two metal pegs at the top of the stairs and created a barrier over the open door. I called out and waited, heard nothing in return, and was about to turn back, already feeling like an intruder, when I heard shuffling from inside. Komola came out, fiddling with the soft cotton folds of her sari.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m disturbing you.’

‘I was praying,’ Komola said.

‘How long have you lived here?’ I asked, catching a glimpse of her cluttered room, the trunks stacked up against the wall, clothes folded in an open shelf, a small round mirror nailed to the wall.

‘Since I was a girl,’ Komola said, pinning her hair with a quick motion of her wrist. ‘Before you were born.’

I was about to ask her more, about where she had come from, where her people were, but Komola was uncomfortable, closing the makeshift curtain behind her.

‘Can you help me with my sari?’

She followed me back inside and up the stairs. I changed into my blouse and petticoat and started on the sari, but Komola took it from me, searching for the correct side, controlling the long, liquid fabric. I thought about how she always looked at me slightly indirectly, her head tilted down or to the side, but she was bold now, folding and tucking. ‘Apa, there’s something,’ she said. ‘I heard you crying in your room. Why?’

Had I been crying? I couldn’t remember. ‘It’s nothing; don’t trouble yourself.’

She made pleats, holding the end of my sari between her teeth. ‘I knew you when you were a baby, you know.’ The words came out narrow.

I took a moment for this to sink in. It wasn’t unlikely — my parents had brought me here as a child to visit Dolly and Bulbul. Perhaps she had seen me then, peeling leaves off the banana plants. I swallowed the lump in my throat. ‘You’ve been here a long time,’ I said.

She passed the anchal behind me and over my shoulder. Then she crouched down and took hold of the pleats. I looked down at her and I could see the wide parting of her hair and the grey streaks that fanned out on either side. This was the head of a woman who had been parting her hair the same way her whole life, committing the same rituals, washing, oiling, braiding. Perhaps, as an occasional indulgence, she had once or twice bought herself a clip.

When she was finished with the hem, she took a safety pin from her own blouse and started attaching my anchal. Her touch was light, her fingers papery, their lines deep and serrated. ‘Tell me,’ I whispered, ‘did I seem all right?’ What I meant to ask was, did I seem different, as in, different from the rest of them, born fully into privilege, but I couldn’t quite get the words out.

‘You were a sweet child. Maybe a little lonely.’

She was finished. I sat down on the bed. My hands started to shake and Komola took them between hers.

‘I feel lonely now.’

‘God has blessed you.’

The breaths came so sharply out of me that I could hardly speak. ‘My mother — was she — did she love me?’

Komola put her arms around me, her body as soft as a whisper. ‘She followed you like a hawk.’ She kissed the top of my head and retreated. I had embarked on what I must have thought was a heroic journey, but all I had done was wound the people I loved, starting with my mother, that wild bird who had been tamed and chastened by her desire for me.

An hour passed. I waited in the bedroom, draped in the green silk, until I heard Dolly and Bulbul at the door, and then I descended the stairs to the living room.

Komola and Joshim had gone to great trouble with the house. The furniture was primped; the glass cabinets that housed the family’s baubles — the porcelain shepherdess that Dolly had collected on a trip to the Wedgwood factory, the blown Venetian glass, the gold painted Thai woodwork — were dusted and polished so that their contents gleamed from within.

The formal living room was opened and I was able to see it for the first time. It was such a large room that Dolly had made four separate seating arrangements within, each with its own colour scheme and design. There was the leather suite on the eastern side, where the coconut trees cast their narrow shadows; the blue sofa and loveseat looked west; along the north — south axis of the room, a grey corner unit and a French-looking suite with carved wooden armrests faced each other. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did, in the peculiar way of excess. When I entered the room, I asked myself how Dolly chose between one sofa and another. Did she enter the room and think to herself, I’m going to enjoy the sun on the leather settee today, or today I want to pretend to be Marie Antoinette so I’ll make myself at home on the gold-tipped chair? Now Dolly was sitting upright on the blue loveseat, and when I entered the room, not for the first time I was a little afraid of her. She was heavily made up, a pair of thick gold bangles wrapped around her wrists, reading the newspaper with her Pomeranian, Clooney, draped across her feet.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘How was your flight?’

‘Fine. But your father-in-law is exhausted, he went to take a nap.’ She folded her hands on her lap. ‘Tea, darling?’

‘All right.’

Dolly pressed a button on a small rectangular object — her calling bell — and Komola appeared. ‘Bring bou-ma her green tea. And snacks.’

‘Aren’t we having dinner?’

‘It’s early,’ she said, looking at the slim gold watch on her wrist. ‘Baby Babu isn’t even home yet.’

Dolly watched me lift a roast-beef sandwich from the trolley. ‘You skipped lunch, didn’t you, sweetheart? I told you, you have to eat.’

I nodded, taking a large bite.

‘And I’ve heard all about your … friend.’

The white, crustless bread swelled in my mouth. I remembered reading a story about how several people die every year in Japan while attempting to eat mochi rice cakes. I had tried mochi once, and found it quite disgusting. I wished now that it had killed me.

‘I thought you looked a little unsettled. So I made a few phone calls. Everyone knows everything, my dear. You should have been more careful.’

I felt the sting of tears behind my eyes. ‘I’m sorry.’ How many times had I said that?

‘Does Rashid know?’

I took a sip of tea. The lump of sandwich travelled slowly, painfully, down my throat. ‘Yes.’

Clooney shifted, raised himself up, and reapplied his torso over Dolly’s feet. Dolly lowered a bangled hand and scratched behind his ear. ‘Poor Baby Babu.’

‘I didn’t mean to—’

‘Of course you didn’t. But you did.’ She sucked in her lips, redistributing her lipstick. ‘People warned us, you know. But I told them there was no way you would disrespect Rashid, or us.’

Lately there had been a few stories in the papers about how Bangladesh was built on a major fault line. That the apartment buildings in the big cities were too close together, put up without any regard for safety, and even a tiny tremor would be catastrophic. If ever there was a time for an earthquake, this would be it. The house would slide down the hill and this conversation would end. The rest of the sandwich sat in my hand. ‘It was a mistake,’ I said, using my free hand to wipe my mouth. For a few minutes, there was only the sound of me sobbing, and the rustle of my sari as I shifted to find a tissue on the side table.

Dolly summoned Komola again. ‘Take the trolley away,’ she scolded. ‘Can’t you see she’s finished?’

When the tray was cleared, she turned to me again. ‘I’ve been trying to protect you all these years. Making you feel it didn’t matter where you came from. Treating you like you were my own daughter. But you have disappointed me. And I can only assume it’s your bad background.’ She dropped it in casually, like a cube of sugar into a warm mug of tea. I looked up to see if she regretted the words as she uttered them, but she looked at ease with herself as she always did.

I was emboldened by this revelation of fact and prejudice. ‘If it was so bad, why did you agree to the marriage?’

Dolly ran her hands up and down the armrest of her chair. ‘You’re not a mother, you wouldn’t understand.’

It would be easy to assume she had hated me all along, but I knew this was not the whole truth. There was loyalty in her acceptance of the match, a genuine regard for my parents, and not a small amount of affection for me. I had squandered all of this.

‘Anyway, what’s done is done. I don’t know if Rashid will forgive you. That is between you. But you will never be the same to me. And I’m no longer willing to protect you.’

I wasn’t sure what she meant; I could only assume she would speak openly and publicly about who I was, so that if word got out about what I had done, or if Rashid and I were to break up, she would have an easy explanation.

‘I had a servant girl,’ she continued. ‘She heard us talking about your parents — we talked about it all the time, the tests, the doctors. They tried so hard. This girl came to me and told me a girl in her village was — that she needed help. We went to Mymensingh, we met the girl. The husband had abandoned her. She had no money, nothing. We paid her twenty thousand.’

‘You bought me?’

‘Don’t be naive. The girl needed money.’ It was hard — impossible, really — to imagine myself at the centre of this drama. That money would have exchanged hands. And then, me, a salve for my mother’s wounds. Komola appeared at the periphery of my vision, switching on a lamp in a corner of the room. I heard the distant rumble of thunder. In a few minutes, I would hear water pounding the trees and the lawn. Dolly shifted; she was going to get up and leave me there in the dark room with my red face and the sandwich still in my palm. ‘And there was one more thing,’ she said, pointing her toe. ‘I haven’t wanted to mention it, but like I said, I don’t consider you mine any more, so you might as well know. The girl didn’t tell us at first, but when we got to the village, there were two babies.’

The breath stopped in my chest. ‘Twin girls,’ she said. ‘Everyone in the village was talking about it, two babies and not one of them a boy.’

‘That’s impossible,’ I said. Surely if I had been a twin, I would have known it. I would have felt an emptiness, like a phantom limb, throughout my life. There would have been the imprint of this womb-sister, a voice inside my voice. My loneliness would have multiplied; my loneliness would have been halved. Dolly was lying.

‘We wanted to take both, of course. But she refused. So stubborn. Insisted on keeping one of them. We argued but there was no persuading her. Idiot girl. What could we do? We couldn’t tear the child from her arms.’

‘Did you tell my mother?’

‘Of course we didn’t. She’d been through enough.’ Dolly turned away, dismissing me, and now it began to rain, dark sheets of water pouring off the guttering, and the sound, a hush, like a mother trying to quiet her baby. I smoothed the folds of my sari and got up, feeling myself crumble from within. I turned to leave. ‘Please can I go now?’ I whispered.

Dolly regarded me for a minute, looking me up and down with naked distaste. ‘Poor Baby Babu,’ she said. ‘Ruby was right.’ And then the door closed behind me.

I went upstairs and lay on the bed. I should pack a suitcase, I thought. Call the driver and ask to be taken to the airport. But I couldn’t move. I stared up at the track of lights on the ceiling. The blouse of my sari was tight under my arms and around my chest. I thought of the pair of Shakoor paintings that hung in the bedroom in Dhaka. Two similar-looking women, strong faces, big noses, bands of primary colour across the top and bottom edges of the frame. A parrot sat on the head of one, a flower adorned the hair of the other. Twins. I hardly allowed myself to think about what might have happened if my parents hadn’t adopted me. Of the life I might have had. Hunger and cold. Want and lack. The absence of comfort. But now not only was it possible to imagine this life, there was actually someone out there living it, someone who looked exactly like me, same curly hair and wide mouth and long, elegant fingers, fingers that may have never known the gentle weight of a pencil. I wondered, if I lay here, very still, without moving, if this new knowledge might disappear from my mind, in fact, history itself might be altered, so that all of this truth telling could be reversed. I might stay here until there was no longer a twin, no longer a woman who took money for one child so she could raise another, but time moved in only one direction, though I wished it were not so, wished it could be anything but so.

It rained and rained, and the sky grew darker until it was night, and still I lay there. After a long time I heard the door opening and footsteps approaching. A warm, dry hand was cupped over my forehead, and I saw the cufflink and smelled the familiar scent of leather and aftershave on his sleeve. Rashid.

‘I’m leaving,’ I said, pulling myself upright.

‘Don’t go,’ he whispered into the dark. He leaned over me, pressing my face into the collar of his shirt. My sari rustled as the fabric collapsed between us.

‘I’ve ruined everything.’

‘Stay with me. Stay and don’t leave my side.’

I was comforted. He held me tighter and I considered falling asleep in his arms. But I wondered how he could be so easily duped, that he could imagine me returning to him and continuing with our lives as if nothing had happened. Erasing you from our history. How naive he was, how foolish.

‘What time is it?’

‘Nine thirty. Are you hungry? I can have something sent up.’

‘I have a sister. Did you know that? A twin sister.’

He sighed. ‘This again.’

I sat up. ‘A sister, Rashid. There is a woman out there in the world who looks just like me. And your parents never told me.’

‘You know everyone was just thinking of you. What’s best for you.’

‘Your mother said I had a bad background.’

‘She’s upset.’

‘I should at least know for myself. How bad it really was.’

He released me. I went to the bathroom and splashed water on my face, and when I returned he was calling someone. ‘Here,’ he said, handing me the phone, ‘your father wants to talk to you.’

‘Putul,’ Baba said, ‘what’s going on? You don’t answer your phone.’

The tears came back, fresh and bitter. ‘Dolly’s angry. She hates me.’

‘Come home, sweetheart, we’ll talk.’

‘Did you know about my sister?’

I heard him take a deep breath. ‘A sister? What do you mean?’

‘Dolly said there were two of us. Twins.’

A pause. Maybe he was wondering if I’d gone mad, whether I was making the whole thing up, but he didn’t let on if he did. ‘I didn’t know, sweetheart — your mother and I — we would have never kept something like that from you.’

‘I want to say sorry to Ammoo.’

‘Please don’t cry. Take the first flight, I’ll pick you up at the airport.’

‘I don’t know. Let me think about it.’

Rashid extinguished his cigarette and went into the bathroom to brush his teeth. I suddenly felt the need to be anywhere but in that room, in that moment, with the rain outside and the smoke inside and Rashid with his face puffed up with forgiveness. I looked out the window, and I was angry now that I couldn’t just go outside and take a bus or walk on the pavement, because I didn’t come from the sort of place where someone like me could open the gate and let the dust of the road onto my shoes. I wanted to be somewhere else, not just away from this house, but from this country. What if I had been adopted from some other country? China, perhaps. Or Vietnam. Anywhere was better than here. I lay back on the bed and closed my eyes, trying to imagine the next few days, the silence around the table, the words ‘bad background’ echoing in my ears, and later, if we patched things up, living with Dolly and Bulbul and hoping she wouldn’t run into me on the stairs, wondering idly if Rashid had ever considered building a separate entrance for us, or if we might, at some point, move into our own place, or if he just assumed I would live with his parents for ever, eating Friday breakfasts around the big table, entertaining guests in a living room with four sofas.

Finally I fell asleep, only to wake a few minutes later with an image of my twin, a beggar on the street, her palm out, her lips drawn tight around a mouth that had never known anything of pleasure, not a kiss, or a teaspoon of sugar. I told myself I was assuming things, that perhaps she had enjoyed a perfectly all right life — maybe not a life of privilege, but a comfortable enough life. Maybe she had a home. A pond. Laying hens. A vegetable patch. Maybe it wasn’t so bad. She would have at least known her own mother, which is what I, with all the money in the world, had never had. This is what kept me awake, long into the night, as thunder pounded the sky overhead.

In the morning I packed my bag and went downstairs to see if Joshim would drive me to the beach. It was pouring as I stepped out onto the terrace, and I watched for a few moments as the lime tree and the bougainvillaea danced with the weight of the rain. When I turned back, my hair plastered against my forehead, I found Bulbul lying back on an old rattan armchair in the living room.

‘Come here,’ he said, waving his hand.

He was holding a small tumbler of whisky. I sat down on a chair as far from him as possible without seeming impolite. He pointed his drink at me and held my gaze for a few moments. Then he said, ‘Your mother was a shit-poor woman from nowhere. And now you are the daughter-in-law of this house.’

I smiled, delighted by his rudeness. ‘Lucky me.’

‘We were worried you would turn out ugly. Or a darkie. Who knows who your father was — he could have looked like anything.’

I had burned my bridges with Dolly and there seemed little left to lose. And he would probably not remember any of this tomorrow. ‘I hate you,’ I said.

‘But when the girl brought you to us, we all fell in love with you. Me, Dolly, your parents. Sweetest baby anyone had ever seen. How does a woman like that have a baby like this? It’s one of God’s mysteries. And two of you.’

There it was again. My sister. ‘Did you see her?’

Bulbul put his drink on the flat wooden armrest of his chair. ‘We did. Spitting image.’

‘And what did you do? I asked, my voice shaking, ‘Choose one?’

‘Something like that.’

Again I questioned my own ignorance. I knew all the clichés about twins, how they sensed one another’s presence, how if one was injured, the other would feel pain. I had never felt anyone’s pain but my own — did this mean my sister had lived a life as untrammelled as mine? I knew this could not be. There had been pains and wounds and injuries: I had just been ignorant of them. And what about my mother — what did my mother do? Try and love one child as if she was loving us both? Put one mouth to her breast and imagine the other mouth on the other breast? Take some comfort in knowing that one would never go hungry, while the other would know her love?

‘Did I have a name?’ I asked. ‘Did she?’

He slid further down the chair. I could see the roof of his mouth when he spoke. ‘Your name was Mohona,’ he said. ‘And her name was Megna.’

Megna and Mohona. Mohona — Megna. Mo and Meg. Megna.

‘Megna what?’

‘Oh, people like that don’t have surnames. Of course your mother wanted to choose a new name for you, so then you became Zubaida. Our little Zubaida.’

Mohona. Megna. Where had I heard that name before? I couldn’t remember. Megna — Mohona. Then I did. Shouted across a street by a stranger. Could it be? No. It was a common enough name. A common mistake. But he had been so sure. He had looked at me and seen someone else. I tried to remember his face, but it was getting dark and I had just wanted to get out of there, afraid of his heavy hands on my shoulders, the way he looked at me, hungry, as if he knew something about me, something buried. Perhaps he did. Perhaps he had seen the me that was in someone else, a me that had been lost until this very moment. No, it couldn’t be. But what a thought. What if I were to run into this man again — ridiculous to think that he had known my sister, but what if? I imagined myself clinging to a window ledge, my fingers slipping, and this man holding out an arm, a small gesture of hope. I would never find him again, I knew, and even if I did, the chances were — well, they were minuscule. But if no one had kept track of my mother, if none of the people who were responsible for my life had thought that I might someday want to know something more about my past than simply that I had been saved, my only chance was to do something for myself, to go somewhere I might have a scrap of hope.

I turned to go. Bulbul’s eyes were closed. I almost felt sorry for him, seeing for the first time the smallness of his life, how he was hemmed in by the legacy of the rich father who had built this house and founded all the businesses he so diligently managed, that every time he entered a warehouse, or factory, or office building, he would be watched by the framed portrait of the patriarch who had started it all. I left him there with his hand still curled around the tumbler, the tiny blossom of possibility springing up inside me, giving me hope, that most mercurial of things. ‘Thank you,’ I whispered to his sleeping form.

The barber was squatting at the entrance to his shop with his lungi hanging down between his knees. He had a pile of peanuts on his lap, and, as he gazed out onto the street, he picked up a peanut, smashed the shell between his fingers and tossed the kernel into his mouth.

‘As-salaam walaikum,’ I said.

‘Walaikum as-salaam.’ He looked at me apologetically, gesturing to the peanuts that prevented him from getting up.

‘I’m looking for a man,’ I said. ‘A man who attacked me a few months ago. Do you remember him?’

He shook his head. ‘No.’

‘It was right in front of your shop. You came over, argued with him. You pulled him away.’

He sifted through his lap, pulled out another peanut and smashed it against the floor with the heel of his hand. ‘You must have got the wrong street. Lots of barber-shops around here.’

It had stopped raining, but the air was packed and humid and I could see sweat gathering in droplets through his thinning hair. ‘You don’t remember me?’

He gazed up and stared into my face, as if to be absolutely sure. ‘Forgive me.’

I stepped back so I could read the sign above his shop. NAVEED NAPITH, that was it. I was so sure. If Gabriela had come with me, she could have confirmed it, but I still hadn’t been able to get hold of her. I paced back and forth to the shops on the left and right. There was a cigarette stall a few feet away, an electrical shop selling batteries and bits of wire, and a tailor’s. No one remembered me. I crossed the road, silently mocking myself for making the trip, ready to give up, when someone called out for me to wait. When I turned around I found a woman in red heels and a kameez dotted with sequins. She had short hair, a pointed chin and bright, clever eyes, a face that seemed out of place on this street.

‘I know who you want,’ she said. ‘My husband won’t tell you because he thinks you’ll call the cops.’

I grabbed her wrist. ‘You know him? What’s his name?’

She snapped her head back. ‘Why d’you want to know?’

‘I need to speak to him. It’s important.’

She tossed her chin towards the barber-shop. ‘Anwar. Keeps looking for some girl called Megna. All day long he’s saying Megna this, Megna that. And also a kid.’

My heart dropped several inches into my stomach. ‘He has a child?’

‘He’s not a reliable type. He comes and goes. One day he’s working in construction, the next day he’s a shipbreaker. Lost a lot of money too, I heard.’

‘What’s he doing now?’

She crossed her arms in front of her. ‘He disappeared a few weeks ago. We haven’t heard anything. You related to him?’

The back of my shirt was plastered with sweat. ‘Something like that. Where was the last place he worked?’

‘You don’t look related.’

‘Not exactly related. Did you say shipbreaking?’

She took my arm and pulled me back towards the barber-shop. ‘Let’s ask Naveed,’ she said.

Naveed was brushing the last of the peanut shells from his lungi. ‘I remember now,’ he said, looking his wife up and down and chewing the inside of his mouth. ‘It was Chittagong Shipbreaking.’

Naveed’s wife wove her arm through his. ‘There’s no such place as Chittagong Shipbreaking. Now tell this poor lady the truth, can’t you see she’s not going to snitch?’

‘I won’t,’ I said, ‘I won’t tell anyone, I won’t get him into trouble. Please.’ There was a rough breeze coming from the shore, and I was almost shivering now as my skin dried and cooled.

Naveed was still chewing his lip when he said, ‘It’s DhakaSylhet Shipbreaking partners,’ he said.

Chittagong. Dhaka. Sylhet. He was just naming cities. ‘Are you sure?’

‘He’s sure,’ the wife nodded. ‘He wouldn’t lie in front of me.’ And she grabbed his cheek between her index and middle knuckle and pinched hard.

‘Okay. Thank you.’

‘Give us a name,’ she said as I turned to go. She pointed to her stomach, which I could see now was protruding. She must have been six or seven months pregnant.

‘Mohona,’ I said, already speeding down the lane, pulling my phone out of my pocket to see if I could find a number for Dhaka-Sylhet Shipbreaking.

*

‘Where have you been all day?’ Gabriela said when she saw me.

It took me a moment to realise what she was talking about. Oh, yes, the injured men — we were supposed to meet them again today. ‘Sorry. Something came up.’

‘Were you with Mo?’ she said. ‘He said he’d be there, but he didn’t show up either.’

‘No, I was — I was trying to find someone.’

‘They’re saying there might be a cyclone tonight.’

‘Do you remember that guy, the one who came up to me near the beach?’

‘You mean the guy who thought you were someone else?’

‘I was looking for him.’

She tugged on her shirt, impatient. ‘We need to finish the interviews before we get those men into trouble.’

I wasn’t in the mood to hear a lecture, so I let my thoughts drift, trying to remember Anwar’s face, trying to remember exactly what he’d said to me. ‘He called me Megna, right?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose so. You understand what I’m saying?’

I nodded vaguely. Then suddenly she was very agitated about Mo, and said we had to go and find him immediately. ‘If Ali finds out he’s been helping us, it’s going to be a fucking disaster.’

It had started to rain. I tried to convince Gabriela to wait a while, until the weather improved, but she wanted to leave right away. It was getting dark, and usually you could see the light of the cutters’ blowtorches from the bedroom window. I looked now but it was impossible to make anything out, thick sheets of rain covering everything, and no moon.

‘You can’t even see anything.’

‘I have this bad feeling.’

I was tired. I leaned over the dining table and rested my face in the crook of my elbow. ‘I’m sure he’s fine, Gabi. He’s been here longer than any of us, and they have storms here all the time.’

‘Please,’ Gabriela said.

I closed my eyes and leaned back on the sofa. I was hungry. In the fridge, there was a bowl of chicken curry covered with a plate. I fished out the chicken with my fingers, eating it cold. Mo would have cooked it. I thought of his arms, those delicate elbows, leaning over the stone pestle.

‘Let’s go to the beach,’ I sighed. ‘We’ll find Ali and he might have some idea.’

I found an umbrella in one of the closets, and we set off on foot. It was only a few yards between the apartment and the Prosperity gates, but in the dark and the rain our progress was slow. Gabriela was trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t hear her. We locked arms. The gates were closed, but there was always a gap between the gate and the wall, and we had squeezed through before. Gabriela had wrapped a scarf around her head and face, but I could feel the rain pounding my exposed shoulder and splashing onto my neck. Passing through the gate, we saw a light on in the Prosperity office, but when we stepped inside, it was empty, the chairs pushed under the desks and Ali’s computer switched off. The wind picked up, tossing a scattering of sand against the office windows.

I told Gabriela we should wait. ‘Maybe Ali’s gone to check on everyone. It’s unlocked, he might come back.’

Gabriela unwrapped her sodden scarf and draped it against the back of a chair. ‘Mo was trying to tell me something, but I didn’t understand the Bangla,’ she said. ‘Something about a girl.’

‘What girl?’

‘That girl he tried to tell us about before, you remember?’

I wandered over to Ali’s desk. I knew he kept food in his drawer, and I rifled through his desk, fishing out a packet of Marie biscuits and offering them to Gabriela. ‘He never said anything after that day.’ Mo hadn’t confided in me — of course he hadn’t. I couldn’t be trusted. I bit down on the dry biscuit, the flavour of butter and nigella seeds flooding my mouth.

‘He came home the other day with a cut on his face.’ Gabriela tapped her eyebrow. ‘Just here. So I asked him what happened and he said “Ma”. That means mother, right? His mother?’

We waited to see if Ali would show up. I tried him a few times on his mobile, but the lines were down.

‘Isn’t there someone we can call, the police maybe?’ Gabriela asked.

‘There are so many stray children,’ I said, repeating something I had heard my mother say many times.

‘I want to check the dormitory,’ Gabriela said. ‘Come with me or I won’t be able to talk to anyone.’

They would find it strange, two women turning up after dark with wet hair and clothes. I thought about explaining this to Gabriela but I knew I wouldn’t get anywhere. Outside it seemed the rain had abated somewhat, though we still had to duck forward against the strength of the wind. We made our way as quickly as we could, our feet making impressions on the sand. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I caught glimpses of Grace’s truncated hull.

All the dormitory doors were shut. ‘Upstairs,’ Gabriela shouted into the wind. I heard the dull clap of thunder in the distance, and the rain came down hard again, pouring over the concrete steps as we attempted to make our way up. I banged on the first door. When there was no reply, I travelled down the corridor and tried the other three, pounding my fists as hard as I could. Gabriela too. They probably couldn’t hear anything. We went back to the first door and tried again, shouting to be let in. It finally opened and we were ushered inside before the rain followed us in. Tube lights illuminated the room, windowless except for a small opening near the ceiling, which was criss-crossed with metal bars. Rain was coming in through this opening, and someone had placed a bucket and a few bits of clothing underneath.

There were maybe twenty men in the room. I didn’t recognise any of them. ‘Mo?’ Gabriela said. ‘Mo?’

‘Have any of you seen the boy?’ Zubaida asked. ‘We’re looking for him.’

‘Who sent you?’ someone asked.

‘No one. But he’s been missing all day and we can’t find him.’

Someone offered me a dry cloth. I wiped my face and passed it to Gabriela, who did the same. ‘Could he be somewhere in the building?’ I asked.

‘Could be.’ Two men offered to search, ducking out into the rain. It was awkward, looking around for something to do while we waited.

‘Are the storms always like this in summer?’ I asked one of the men.

‘Worse,’ he said.

‘Which crew are you?’

‘Cutting,’ he said.

I nodded. The beds were bunked three high. Underneath the beds and against the walls their things were jammed together, battered trunks and plastic buckets and cups and plates made of tin. A clothes line, heavy with lungis and gamchas, hung between the beds. Some of them had photographs of wives and children pinned to the side of their bunks.

‘How long has Mo been on the beach?’ I asked. ‘Does anyone know?’

‘Was here when I came,’ someone said. ‘That was three years ago.’

‘They tell me he was born here,’ another chimed in.

Again, I was struck with how little I knew. How few questions I’d asked. ‘Doesn’t he have any people?’

The door opened again. The two men who had gone in search of Mo reappeared. ‘No one’s seen him,’ they said, water pooling around their feet. ‘Boss sir says you should go back.’

‘Mr Ali is here?’

‘In the office.’

‘We’re going,’ I said to Gabriela.

‘Can you tell him,’ one of them said, ‘that you came to look for the boy? He doesn’t like us to walk around.’

Gabriela said to give them my phone number. ‘In case Mo turns up.’

I obeyed, writing it down on a piece of paper, knowing they didn’t have mobile phones, and that they probably couldn’t read anyway, but it made me feel better too, because now I was also starting to worry. I had never known Mo to be anywhere but on the beach or at the apartment. Sometimes he shopped for our food at the market. But the market would be closed now. I wished again that he had told me more about this girl, his friend. The guilt pricked at me again, but there was no point in staying here. I was wet and cold. We would explain everything to Ali and then go home.

Ali was calling someone on the landline when we struggled back through the storm and into his office. I was aware of the clothes sticking to me, and of Gabriela, whose pale blouse was showing the outline of her bra. Ali gestured for us to come in, listening to someone on the other end. ‘Yes, sir. Of course. We will do all the accounting, of course. Storm came without warning, sir.’ It must be Harrison. ‘Very sorry, sir. Yes, yes. I will do it immediately, of course.’

‘Something the matter?’ I asked when he’d hung up. I noticed we had neglected to return the biscuits to his drawer.

‘It’s the storm. We are trying to assess the damage.’

His phone rang again. He excused himself and wandered into the corridor, speaking in a low voice. ‘Forgive me,’ he said when he returned. ‘Sir is very concerned. Please, sit down. You were looking for me? In this storm?’

‘We are in search of Mo,’ Gabriela said. ‘Have you seen him?’

I didn’t have time to signal to her. ‘You came out in this storm to look for the boy?’ Ali was confused, almost offended, that we would make such an effort and put ourselves in an embarrassing situation just for the sake of Mo.

I rolled my eyes and lowered my voice. ‘It’s her,’ I said, glancing at Gabriela over my shoulder. ‘She’s become … attached.’

Ali nodded knowingly, as if foreign women came to the beach and took people under their wing all the time. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘But I’m afraid I can’t help you.’

‘You could send out a search party,’ Gabriela said, putting her damp palms on his desk. ‘We haven’t been able to find him anywhere.’

He moved his eyes to his lap, to the other side of the room, the ceiling, anything to avoid looking at her. ‘Please don’t worry, madam. The boy is used to these types of storms. You will see, he’ll turn up tomorrow, grinning from ear to ear. I assure you, he’s perfectly safe.’

Gabriela shook her head, looking as if she was about to cry. ‘I have a bad feeling,’ she said again.

‘Gabi,’ I said, ‘Mr Ali knows what he’s talking about. Let’s go home. Maybe Mo’s come looking for us. And if he’s still missing tomorrow, we’ll make some calls.’

‘Yes,’ Ali said. ‘If he hasn’t turned up by morning — which I’m sure he will — we will investigate further.’

I led her away. ‘Thank you, Mr Ali.’

‘Shall I escort you home?’

‘No, really, it’s not far.’ At the door, I paused. ‘What are you doing here so late yourself, Mr Ali?’

He waved his hand in front of his face. ‘There is the matter of your friend’s piano. We are going to transport it first thing tomorrow morning. Sir has ordered an air-conditioned truck to carry it to Dhaka. But the storm has made it difficult. Nothing to worry about. Please, go home.’

Outside, the darkness was thickened by rain. We paused for a moment, as if by standing there we would find a trace of Mo. Gabriela suddenly broke away and started running towards the sea. I followed her, and after a few paces I almost knocked into the group of men gathered on shore. I could hear Gabriela’s voice asking, in her awkward Bangla, for Mo. More men crowded onto the beach. Through the dense sheets of water, I could make out a milky moon, and as I was forced further towards the water’s edge, I saw lights illuminating the breached hull of Grace. The crowd grew around me, pressing against me, water falling from above, and, it seemed, also from the sides and from below, and very quickly my hair was plastered against my face and I was soaked through. I felt a hand grabbing my elbow, and when I turned around Gabriela was gesturing for me to bring my ear close to her mouth. ‘They’re angry about the piano,’ she said.

I looked around at the workers. They had pulled themselves into a semicircle, and in the middle was the man with the heavy forehead who had taken me to see the injured men. He raised his arm up now, throwing his voice into the crowd.

‘The chair is coming!’ someone said. I lost sight of Gabriela. My eyes adjusted to the half-dark, and I made out a crude wooden ramp laid against the side of Grace. A few minutes later, a knot of men came out, balancing something very large and heavy on their shoulders. The crowd around me shifted, raising their voices higher. The men on the ramp started to move. It was a large rectangular crate. There were three men at the bottom, while the others pushed from above. Everyone started shouting as they made their way, inch by inch, down the ramp. I stood transfixed, understanding now that it was the piano — your piano, Elijah — that they were trying to manoeuvre out of the ship, and every second seemed to stretch as we waited, and they were halfway down and the shouts of anger turned into cheers, as if it had gone from being a protest to a crowd at a cricket match. I heard laughter. Then, it happened: one of them hesitated, broke the pattern, his arms going down when they should have been up, and everything moved very quickly after that: the crate rolling over on its side, pulling everyone to the edge of the ramp, the leader telling them to hold on, hold steady, but from where I was standing, I could see there was no way they were going to save it, so I ran towards them and shouted for them to let go, let go, save yourselves, it doesn’t matter, telling everyone to stand back, because it was going to fall and they would be crushed beneath it, and they rushed back and allowed it to fall, twenty, thirty feet below them, the crate breaking open like an egg, and the sound, a thousand notes being played all at once, the clap of every hammer against every string, the rain a drone of accompaniment, and then the rip of breaking wood, a tearing, ugly sound, and the instrument spilling out from inside, in pieces of black and bone, and then, a flash of colour, a human cry among the sound of breaking, a body, falling and then another, tumbling together and matching the cries of the piano as it shattered above and below them, and finally we saw, pinned under a piece of the crate and the heavy lid of the piano, their arms around each other, a pair of children. And before I blacked out, I heard a voice. ‘My girl,’ the voice said, ‘my girl. My girl.’