The Bones of Grace

Homecoming

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

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

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

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

‘My baby’s home,’ my mother said.

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

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

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

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

‘I told you to wait,’ I said.

‘You’re full of shit,’ he replied.

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

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

‘Tell me everything,’ he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘When’s the wedding?’

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

‘My cook did it. She’s a genius.’

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

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

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

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

‘You’ll be next,’ Nadeem said.

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

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

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

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

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

‘So why are you doing it?’

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

‘Then what?’

‘I’ll pop out another one.’

‘That’s your grand plan?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You would give me a job?’

‘I could use that Harvard brain.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Oof Ammoo why?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Your father called me,’ he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You think I don’t fit in?’

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

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

‘What’s wrong with Dubai?’

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

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

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

‘Let me take care of you, Zee.’

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

His arms shot up. ‘Yes!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I’m getting married,’ I said.

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

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

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

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

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

‘And what did you say?’

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

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

‘Very nice.’

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

‘Extremely,’ I said.

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

‘I hate cooking anyway.’

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

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

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

I get along without you very well

Of course I do

Except when soft rains fall

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

I’ve forgotten you just like I said I would

Of course I have

Or maybe except when I hear your name

Someone’s laugh that’s just the same

I turned off my phone and stuffed a pitha into my mouth, washing it down with a swallow of cold tea. The cook came to take the tray away, but I waved her off. I bit into an apple. After what felt like a long time, Nanu returned.

‘You won’t believe,’ she said. ‘A car accident, and mother-in-law dead.’

‘She’ll come back.’

‘No. The car was burnt, everything.’

‘You’ll see.’

‘Why are you lying down?’ She put her hand on my forehead. ‘Are you feeling okay?’

‘Don’t worry.’ I looked at my phone. ‘I have to go.’

‘Go, go. Or traffic will eat you.’

‘I’ll come next week.’

‘Come just before prayers, the streets will be empty then.’

She unlocked the door. ‘Bye, Nanu-jaan.’

‘Have you told your mother?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Tell her quickly. You know I can’t keep a secret.’

Diana’s femur is encased in a thick layer of matrix. Suzanne and I have been debating the best way to prepare it, and I have persuaded her to use an acid treatment. She makes a three per cent acetic acid dilution and we slowly lower the femur into it. Then we place it under the hood and wait for the acid to do its work. It has to be watched carefully; as soon as it dissolves the final layer of matrix, it has to be removed, and the acid washed numerous times. We want it to eat through the matrix but leave Diana in peace.

Suzanne continues to pare away at the ankle bone with a tiny chisel. It’s slow work, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She chips away, fragment by red fragment, until we see the white of bone. Then she uses a brush from a make-up bag she never lets me touch to clear the last layer of dust. Every few hours we step back and admire her, and the world that preserved her so perfectly, pristine bones and her exquisite red blush.

Bettina has invited me to spend Thanksgiving with her parents, so tomorrow I will take the bus down to New York. I wanted to stay at the lab but I was afraid that, with Cambridge vacant, I would spend the entire weekend wandering the streets, calling out your name. It is too soon to let my desperation get the better of me. Until you hear the whole story, there’s no point bumping into you on the street and cracking my chest open as you brush past me, or, worse, pretend not to know me at all. I haven’t really even begun, and there is also Anwar, waiting in the wings, with his own story.

Let me tell you, instead, about one of my ancestors. My great-great-uncle Kashiful Muslehuddin Ali, whose nickname was Khoka, had once loved a Jewish girl. All his life the family believed there was something not quite right about Khoka: he was overly sentimental, lamenting the number of indentured farmers that starved when the harvest was lean, that he fussed over the goats when they died of the cold, that he moaned over the waste of food whenever there was a banquet. His mother believed it was because he had spent too long in the birth canal, her most difficult labour, and when Khoka came out, he was blue in the face and didn’t seem to have any life in him. In fact, the midwife had pronounced him dead, and his mother had curled herself onto the bed when she heard a small cry coming from the black-and-white-tiled floor where they had left him. When he came of age and refused to behave like a man, she blamed that blue tone for making her spoil him.

Years later, unmarried and without a vocation, having proven himself unable to handle either the family accounts or the management of the estate, Khoka took a flat in Calcutta, where he purchased a motorcar and frequented the theatre and Firpo’s, a restaurant on Chowringhee Road. It was at Firpo’s that he met Rachel Mosel, a Jewish-American dancer who had come at the behest of the proprietor, Signor Firpo himself, to teach the young women of Calcutta how to dance. The specially sprung floor at Firpo’s, which was much advertised in the newspapers of London, was shamed by the badly executed foxtrots of the women of Calcutta. Even the very modern ones, who came in dresses rather than saris, danced badly; so did some of the memsahibs who had been too long in India — their ankles were graceless, their arms flapped about without purpose. So Miss Mosel, who Signor Firpo had met in New York, was drafted in for this very special and delicate task, and, that is when Khoka met her, and for some reason no one in the family was able to fathom, she chose him from among all the young men who instantly fell in love with her.

When Khoka brought Rachel to the estate in Bardhawan — when it was still at its glorious peak, when the Grand Trunk Road was indeed very grand, and the Howrah — Delhi railroad track was still pristine, before my great-grandfather mortgaged the estate, then sold it, before the family’s fortunes declined swiftly under the influence of gambling and speculation — his mother regarded Khoka and decided that perhaps there was something enchanting about the gentle slope of her son’s forehead and his full-petalled mouth, and that Miss Mosel would have been charmed by the way he noticed every beautiful thing. But this new awareness did not make Khoka’s mother agree to the match. She marshalled the family against him, cut off his allowance, sold his Daimler, and stood over his head while he wrote to Rachel to break off the engagement. I regret to inform you, my dear Miss Mosel, that it will not, after all, be possible for me to marry you. Twelve hours after the letter had been dispatched, Khoka walked to the railway station, removed his neckerchief and lay down on the tracks, letting the 6.05 Delhi train, which was then called ‘the Spear of Kali’, glide over his slight frame like a spoon through Signor Firpo’s famous Scotch broth. And there ended the sad romance of Kashiful Muslehuddin Ali, the only man in the history of my family to have ever ventured beyond the boundaries of his home in search of love.

Although I had agreed to marry Rashid, we would not be officially engaged until we’d made a public announcement, and, before that could happen, we had to have a party. It was decided that we’d have it at Rashid’s house, which was five minutes away on the other side of Gulshan Avenue.

When they first moved to this part of town over twenty years ago, Dolly and Bulbul had built a modest bungalow with a lawn at the front and back. As Bulbul’s business expanded — into steel-making, glass-making, shipbuilding — so did the house. Dolly was constantly renovating, exchanging the shuttered windows for aluminium frames, putting marble floors in place of mosaic tiles. Soon other buildings sprouted up on either side of them, and their rooms were plunged in darkness, so instead of tearing the house down and starting all over again, they simply added to the original building, leaving the lower floors to the servants and poor relations from the village. Bulbul had political aspirations, dreamed of someday using the space to hold district meetings, and to this end, he’d had the floors replastered in red to evoke the wide, colonial-style buildings in which such meetings had been held for generations, peasants squatting on polished cement floors and pleading with the Big Man.

Dolly answered the door herself, wearing a spun-sugar concoction of a sari that seemed to make her seem perfectly round from almost every angle. She was beautiful in an exaggerated sort of way, with big, bulging eyes and a full mouth. Behind her, the hallway was lit by a giant chandelier. She stood back and looked me up and down. ‘Oh, I’m so glad you wore the pink jamdani,’ she said, ‘it goes so well with the set.’ Earlier that day, she had sent over a rectangular red box that contained a pair of bell-shaped gold earrings and a matching necklace, the arrival of which had prompted a trip to the beauty parlour. ‘You can’t see the earrings if you don’t put up your hair,’ Ammoo had said. Dolly led us up the stairs and to the roof terrace on the top floor, where her husband was sipping whisky with his feet submerged in the swimming pool they’d had installed earlier that year. The floodlights and the water enveloped us in a pulsating blue gauze.

Bulbul called out to Abboo. ‘Come, Joy,’ he said: ‘nothing like soaking your feet in this muggy weather.’ It wasn’t muggy at all; in fact, it was almost December and even a little chilly, but Abboo obliged anyway, edging his way to the swimming pool and rolling up his trousers.

‘Zubaida, dear, will you join us?’

‘Thank you, uncle, but I should probably—’

‘You ridiculous man,’ Dolly said. ‘She’ll ruin her sari. Let’s go inside.’ She pointed to a glass-walled room next to the pool, decorated in orange and gold. We sat down on the sofa and I looked up at the ceiling. I had been here before, but the house was strange to me now, all buffed up and shining, flowers wrapped around the banisters and bowls of potpourri on every tabletop. My mood turned sour. Dolly had sprayed the room with a heavy dose of rosewater and it was reminding me of a funeral.

‘I’m so glad we decided to keep it small,’ Ammoo said. She liked to reinforce the fact that she was in the throes of a good decision.

‘I did have a lot of trouble keeping out the crowd,’ Dolly said, ‘but you’re right, I’m glad it’s just us.’ She screwed up her face, delighted, then immediately frowned. ‘Only thing is, my other darlings are not here.’ Rashid’s younger brother Junaid was away at boarding school in Singapore, and his sister Ruby lived in New York.

‘Where’s Rashid?’ I asked. He had sent me a text message an hour ago and signed it Your future hubbs, which had made me feel slightly sick.

‘He’s gone off to get something or other. What will you have? Spring rolls? Fried shrimp? Coke, 7 Up?’

‘Anything’s fine with me,’ Ammoo said. ‘Zee?’

I didn’t reply. I kept my eyes on the ceiling. ‘I’ll have a Coke,’ Ammoo said, her voice high and bright.

‘Are you nervous, my dear?’ Dolly asked me. ‘How about a drink?’ And she winked.

‘White wine?’ I suggested.

‘Zubaida, really,’ Ammoo said, because I had ignored her look. We both knew Dolly didn’t mean it when she offered me alcohol, but I stood my ground, watching while Dolly walked over to a polished wooden cupboard and turned the lock on a small refrigerator, returning with two glasses and a sweaty bottle of Chardonnay. ‘Now, first things first. Do you want Army Golf Club or the Radisson?’

They were going to host a joint wedding reception. I turned to my mother and said, ‘You want me to get married at a golf club owned by the Bangladesh Army or at a five-star hotel?’

Ammoo got up, moved to the seat next to mine and squeezed my elbow. I turned my head away and found myself looking at a cabinet crammed with porcelain figurines. ‘Radisson,’ I said. ‘The food’s better.’

‘Only thing is, they won’t let you bring your own biryani,’ Dolly said, ‘which is so annoying. Hotel biryani is never as good.’

Ammoo nodded vigorously. ‘You’re absolutely right. It’s more expensive too.’

‘Oh, don’t worry about that.’

‘What I mean is, it’s more expensive but it’s not as good. Of course, the Radisson ballroom is very nice.’

I snapped to attention. ‘I hate biryani.’

‘Rashid adores biryani,’ Dolly said. ‘But never mind, we can do it at the Radisson.’

‘Oh, I guess I don’t mind, then,’ I said, pretending as if Rashid’s love of biryani was news to me.

Dolly took a sip from her glass. ‘We don’t have to. We like to be a bit different.’

‘How about an afternoon wedding?’ I said. ‘We can have lunch. Fish, even. That’s different.’

‘Oh I don’t know, darling.’

‘Zubaida,’ Ammoo said.

‘What?’

‘What’s gotten into you?’

‘I don’t want to change my name,’ I said, choosing one of the many things that had been bothering me.

‘But sweetheart, won’t it be nice to have the same last name as all of us?’ Dolly said.

I waited for Ammoo to come to my defence. ‘I suppose it’s my fault,’ Ammoo said, ‘since I kept mine.’

‘Well who knows what my name really is anyway,’ I said. All the sound went out of the room.

A man entered with a tray of fried things. I picked up a spring roll.

‘Of course you don’t have to change your name,’ Dolly said.

I tore my eyes away from the cabinet and found Ammoo struggling to retie the bun at the back of her neck, pulling out and reinserting a series of black pins.

‘Okay,’ Dolly said, smiling. ‘Problem is this. Children should not be involved in the planning of weddings. Why don’t you go and see what the fathers are doing, Zubaida? Babu will be here any minute.’ Dolly liked to call Rashid ‘Babu’ and sometimes ‘Baby Babu’.

Abboo and Bulbul were drying their feet by the pool. ‘Is that wine in your hand?’ Abboo asked.

‘Transgression,’ I said, raising my glass.

Rashid appeared, holding a small rectangular packet and looking pleased with himself. I was struck by his confidence, as if there was no chance of things not working out as they should. For the twentieth, hundredth time that day, I pushed aside the thought of your voice and what you would have said about this party, my pink sari and my lacquered hair. ‘Where were you?’ I asked him.

‘Getting my secret weapon,’ he said, leaning in and kissing me on the cheek. He smelled strongly of cigarettes.

‘So, uncle,’ he said, turning to my father, ‘how’s the garment business?’

‘Good, good.’

‘You know the other factories are always complaining that you pay your people so well you make the rest of us look bad.’

Rashid passed the packet to his father, who unwrapped it carefully. Abboo sat up on his pool chair. ‘You know what a full wage costs? Only three crores more per year. Nothing. It’s the least we can do for taking the sweat from their backs.’

‘You’re still a leftie,’ Bulbul said, rolling a cigarette.

‘Something like that.’ Abboo turned to me. ‘Now I’m mostly handling domestic crises.’

Rashid put on a Beatles compilation and the two older men wiggled their ankles. The cigarette went back and forth.

‘They’re smoking pot,’ I said.

Abboo passed the packet to Rashid. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘you have my blessing.’

Rashid pulled a few leaves apart and shredded them between his fingers.

‘This isn’t going to end well,’ I announced.

‘Don’t worry, be happy,’ Rashid said, turning towards me with a pipe and a lighter. He leaned in, cupping his hand over the pipe and lighting the small brown tangle.

I inhaled. ‘I love you,’ I whispered, thinking I might like to get my feet wet after all.

It was time for the ceremonial part of the evening to begin. Dolly called me back inside and summoned her maid, who appeared with a garland of lilies and roses. The garland glistened, heavy with petals and the water that had been sprinkled on to keep it fresh. ‘Wear this,’ Dolly said; ‘it will make you look like a bride.’ I was intimidated by the word ‘bride’, so I obeyed, dipping my head and allowing Ammoo to drape the garland around my neck. Then Dolly, working quickly, slipped a veil over my head, securing it with a hair pin. We made our way downstairs, the veil and the garland slowing me down, Dolly’s hand grasping my elbow, the rosewater smell fading as we descended.

Downstairs, in the vast living room, I saw both my grandmothers: Nanu, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief, and Dadu, my father’s mother, sitting erect and formidable with a plate of pistachios on her lap. Sally stood up when she saw me, and I gave her a small wave. The other assembled guests were a blur of silk saris and dark jackets. Dolly led me to a sofa and told me to sit down. Rashid appeared beside me. He had changed into a blue kurta, a present from my parents. He kneeled in front of me and held out his hand. I was moved by the tremor in his fingers as he removed the ring box from his pocket. It was the same ring he’d brought to Savar, but I had to wait until the ceremony to start wearing it. Now he held the velvet box in his hand and said, ‘Will you marry me?’ and I nodded, and everyone clapped, and he slipped the ring on my finger, and Dolly handed me a glass of milk with crushed almonds. Then Bulbul led us in a short prayer, which ended with everyone passing their palms over their faces, and Rashid sitting beside me, nudging me with his elbow the way he used to when I was a kid and the thought of touching him made my stomach tighten.

Rashid and I sat in one place while people came up one by one and congratulated us. We ate fried bread and sour potato curry. Sally, who had pinned her sari under the swell of her pregnancy, came to tell me I looked beautiful but also like I had been given a cancer diagnosis. ‘What’s wrong, bitch?’ she said. ‘Supposed to be all happiness and sugar.’

After most of the guests left, dinner was served in the dining room. Dolly’s sister Molly, her husband, their son Faisal and their daughter Eliza were there, as well as Bulbul’s mother. Everyone hugged each other again and said congratulations. The long mahogany table had been laid out in red and gold. Bulbul took the head of the table and invited my father to sit at the other end. ‘Oh no,’ Abboo said, ‘I couldn’t,’ so Rashid took his place instead, leaving me between Molly and her son, who had the habit of drumming on whatever surface he could find, in this case moving between his knee and the gold-trimmed plate that he found in front of him. Having accepted my father’s invitation to get stoned, I was extremely hungry. It occurred to me that this may, in fact, be a regular habit for Abboo — how else did he manage to appear so relaxed under any and all circumstances? Yes, of course, he must be a habitual smoker — why hadn’t I seen it before? Good for him, I said to myself, he deserves it, it’s not as if he gambles or stays out late or is ever mean to anyone. I looked over at my father and gave him a meaningful wink, then tuned into the conversation. Bulbul was making a toast, welcoming us into the family, and then we all raised our water glasses.

‘So,’ Molly said, ‘Rashid told me you study physics.’ She had applied orange nail polish to every other nail, and French-manicured the ones in between.

‘No, not really — I’m a marine palaeontologist.’

‘It’s all the same, no? Microscopes and all that.’ She picked up her fork and dipped it into the salad that had just been served by a waiter in white gloves.

‘Sure,’ I agreed. I looked over at Ammoo, who was sitting next to Bulbul. She was flanked on her left by Rashid’s uncle. After the salad we were served roast duck, followed by mini tarte Tatins, which were warm and delicious. I kept myself entertained by asking Molly about her beauty regime, which consisted of daily facials with various fresh fruits and vegetables, a weekly wash and blow-dry, and special treatments such as bleaching her face and neck when she had somewhere in particular she needed to be. ‘I used to go to Dazzle,’ she explained, ‘but the girls were getting too smart. They know everyone by name. I said na, none of this friendliness. So now I go to Neelo’s.’

I nodded. From across the table, Dolly called out to everyone, ‘I’m getting another daughter!’ She curled her hand around her mouth so her words would travel to the other side of the room.

‘Poor Dolly, always wanted more girls. I tell her, boys are better, no talk-back. My Eliza, she has such a mouth. But Alhamdulillah, she is a good girl.’ Molly, like a lot of women of her stature, used religious words like punctuation. When someday Molly’s children got older and started taking drugs, or if she ever had a health scare, or her husband started fooling around, she would start peppering more of her speech with God words, Alhamdulillah, Mashallah, Inshallah, etc.; then she would start praying conspicuously, tucking a mat under her arm whenever she went to a party, then maybe she would take a five-star holiday to Mecca, uploading photographs of herself smiling in a burkha, to which her friends would comment, ‘Mash’Allah’, using the apostrophe in the appropriate place to show that they too understood God’s punctuation. My father, still an atheist, had explained this to Ammoo and me numerous times, and we had all giggled about it, sitting around the table on the balcony and wondering what people would say if they could hear us. I let out a small laugh now, but Molly didn’t notice, she was telling me how well Eliza was doing in school, that all the teachers loved her and that she had even received a prize for attendance.

After the tarte Tatin, the waiter passed around small dishes of ice cream while taking everyone’s order for coffee or tea. I looked around the room. Abboo was in conversation with Molly’s husband, who owned three garment factories and always wore a Bluetooth earpiece. Ammoo was concentrating on her ice cream, and Rashid was showing Eliza something on his phone. After the waiter retreated, Rashid stood up and called everyone to attention. ‘I have a gift for my future in-laws,’ he began. From behind his chair, he produced a rectangular package wrapped in brown paper and passed it to my father. ‘Be careful,’ he said, ‘it’s fragile.’

We gathered around as Abboo tugged at the jute string that held the wrapping together. He pulled the paper away. The framed photograph was an enlarged black-and-white, showing two young men with their arms around each other. They looked at the camera and smiled. They were dressed in matching drainpipe trousers and one of them wore a bandana around his forehead and held up two fingers in a peace sign. In the background, grainy and grey, was the ornate façade of Curzon Hall, the science faculty where they studied. When Abboo looked up, his eyes were filled with tears. ‘Where did you get this?’

‘I met an old freedom-fighter friend of yours, and he had this photograph in his collection.’

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I never took many photographs with my brother. I will cherish this.’

A hush fell across the room as my parents embraced. ‘Thank you,’ I mouthed to Rashid. He winked at me and I felt a wave of affection for him. And then Bulbul led us in a round of applause, and the tea arrived, Molly’s phone rang, and everyone leaned back in their chairs and allowed the evening to come to an end.

And that is how, dear Elijah, I was engaged to be married to someone other than you. I sent you a message without encryption that evening: I am engaged, it said, and, seconds later, you replied: I Hold No Grudge.

Dolly convinced my mother to take a few days off so we could do the wedding shopping in Calcutta. Ammoo had spent the weeks after the engagement party in Sirajganj, where she had met a group of Birangona women who had been kept in rape camps during the war. The women were in their sixties now, but they still lived together in a shelter that had been set up for them just after independence. She went at first for one night, and then decided to stay for a week because two of the women had recently died of ovarian cancer and she wanted to set up a screening clinic with the local health department. She called and said she might try and persuade the Health Minister to come down. Did you know (her sentences often started this way), the Pakistan Army used to shave their heads because they might use their hair to hang themselves. I did know this, she had told me many times.

In college, after taking a class on Feminism, Selfhood, and Subjectivity, I had read Andrea Dworkin and decided that I had been the product of rape. My father had raped my mother and my mother had given me up for adoption because the sight of my face made her want to be sick. I walked around with this heavy, sludgy feeling in my bones for a few weeks. I practised saying to myself in the mirror that I was the product of rape, wondering how I might introduce such a subject in conversation, deciding it would most definitely give me some cachet with certain types of people. Sometimes I felt like taking a little razor to my skin, maybe my arm or the inside of my leg. I tried it a few times, but I was disgusted by the sight of my own blood, and the relief was only temporary, and eventually I returned to the thought less and less, reminded only when my mother brought up the subject of rape, which she did more often than you would imagine a person does in the course of ordinary conversation.

In Calcutta, Dolly got us rooms with connecting doors at the Grand, and I could hear them talking and giggling while I watched reruns of MasterChef Australia. We sat on velvet stools at fancy boutiques and were shown one sari after another, while the word ‘trousseau’ was whispered among the salesmen. Later, over ice cream, they told me that at university they had one fancy sari between them, borrowing it from each other for special occasions. Of course, the sari was Dolly’s — Ammoo couldn’t afford such luxuries — but that isn’t how they remembered it. I guess that is why, after so many years, they were still best friends. Ammoo had risen to the top of her profession — people addressed her as ‘respected Apa’ — and Dolly, in the meantime, had become a rich man’s wife, nothing but the accomplishments of her children to brag about. Ammoo reminded Dolly of the women they had expected themselves to become, back when the war made their dreams expand out of their little lives, and Dolly was the loyal friend who had seen her through a revolution and its aftermath. I finally understood why they were inseparable, why they had been plotting for years to bring me and Rashid together, because together they formed a single set of hopes, and that is why I had to accept the plot so faithfully, why, in my mind, there seemed no alternative. It wasn’t so much doing what was expected of me, like Chandana’s Tam-Bram marriage. For this was no arbitrary match, it was the culmination of decades of dreaming, an erasure of history as much as a mark of victory, and in its shadow, I was insignificant.

When Rashid and I were in high school his older sister Ruby sometimes helped me sneak into their house, leaving the downstairs door open and ushering me through the unlit corridors to his bedroom. By the time we got engaged, she had changed her mind. I suppose she had calculated the precise number of handsome, rich, decent bachelors in Dhaka and decided her brother, who had never crashed his daddy’s car or spent a fortune on drugs or gambling, was too good for an old love.

Ruby had a tattoo of a camel on her left breast and dressed like she owned the whole world. She once wore pink cowboy boots under her sari. It was Eid and she propped her feet on the coffee table at her house and showed them off, knee-high, heavily embroidered, and with pointy toes that looked like they could commit murder. After college she had married a weak-chinned American and settled down in New York City, coming home on two-week holidays to distribute lavish presents to the entire family. As soon as the wedding date was set, she booked her flight and started emailing me photographs of the sequined saris and lehngas she wanted to order from a Pakistani designer who lived in her co-op. I was never going to wear a lehnga, and this sparked a polite, cool correspondence between us, with Rashid acting as mediator. He always took my side, at least in private, and found a way to get me what I wanted without letting Ruby know she was being turned down. He was expert at this sort of diplomacy, and when I expressed annoyance at his unwillingness to get into a fight with his sister, he would say, ‘Isn’t it better this way? You got your sari, didn’t you?’

Ruby arrived the week before the wedding and we decided to surprise her at the airport. When she came through the gates the first thing she said was, ‘There isn’t going to be enough room for my luggage.’ She smiled and shrugged at the same time, tilting her head to the side, and Rashid put his arms around her and lifted her off the ground. Her hair appeared to be recently blow-dried, and I was reminded of the time she told me she never washed her hair in winter except at the salon. Rashid had had the driver bring a second car, so there was, in fact, enough space for Ruby’s luggage, which followed her out of the airport in three carts. ‘I had to get all the things for your trousseau,’ she said, shrug-smiling, ‘you lucky thing.’

Ruby sat in the front with Rashid. ‘How’s Matt?’ I asked, leaning into the air conditioning from the back.

‘Oh, he’s fine. He’s bringing the kids in a few weeks. I can’t stand being on a plane with them.’ She turned around and winked at me. Then she put her hand on Rashid’s knee and said, ‘Little brother! Never thought you’d actually do it. How are the parents? Is Mummy having a fit?’

‘She’s driving everyone crazy.’

‘Bet she forgot to make my favourites for lunch.’ She twisted around again. ‘See? You’re already ruining my life.’

I was hoping Rashid would offer to drop me off at home, but he drove straight to his house and I stood by awkwardly while Dolly and Bulbul and Rashid and Ruby and Junaid, who was home from boarding school, all hugged and said how good everyone looked, despite the tension of the upcoming wedding. They ordered tea in the garden. ‘Now I can relax,’ Dolly announced, leaning back on a rattan chair. ‘Your father is completely useless and the servants are outdoing themselves with stupidity.’ They exchanged complaints about the staff while Bulbul nodded off, dropping his newspaper onto the grass. Junaid’s phone beeped and he stood up to answer it, nodding briefly at me and loping off.

I was wondering if anyone would notice if I slipped away when Ruby rolled out one of her suitcases. ‘Don’t look!’ she barked. ‘I’m just going to give you a preview. Just one.’ She handed me a shoebox. I peeled off the lid and separated the tissue. ‘Don’t you just love them?’ Ruby said.

Dolly picked up the lid. ‘Ferragamo? Sweetie, you shouldn’t have.’

The stilettos were gold and bronze, with a thin strap across the toes and another around the ankle. ‘Thank you,’ I said, pulling one out. ‘They’re beautiful.’

‘You hate them,’ Ruby said.

‘Oh, no, not at all, they look — very weddingy.’

‘That’s exactly what I was thinking, it’s so hard to find designer shoes that work for our clothes. Ammoo and I are always complaining when we shop in New York.’

‘Very right,’ Dolly said.

‘But if you don’t like them, you should just say. We’re sisters now, after all.’

‘Oh, no, they’re great. I just — you know I’m not used to wearing high heels, so I might have a little trouble walking.’

Ruby nodded enthusiastically. ‘I knew you would say that.’

‘You’re so simple,’ Dolly said.

‘But anyway at the wedding you won’t be running around, you’ll just be sitting there, so it won’t matter.’

‘That’s true,’ I said.

Ruby used both hands to place the shoe in its box. I stood up. ‘I should let you rest, Ruby,’ I said.

‘Oh, I don’t have time to rest,’ Ruby said. ‘We’re going to talk to the biryani guy today, aren’t we, Mummy?’

Dolly rubbed her eyes. Rashid was looking down at his phone and frowning. ‘Daddy, did you hear about the strike?’ Bulbul shook himself awake and they leaned over the phone together.

I took my leave, kissing everyone on the cheek. ‘We have to go to the parlour,’ Ruby said to me, ‘those eyebrows need gardening.’

On my wedding day, I thought of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, who had written a novel, Sultana’s Dream, about a world in which men and women changed places. It was 1905, and Rokeya was waiting for her husband to return from a business trip, and to impress him with her command of English (which he had taught her), she wrote a short novel. Because in Rokeya’s real world, women wore veils and lived sequestered lives, in her imaginary world, it was the men who were trapped, the men who were locked away. The women, led by a benevolent Queen, ruled using science, technology and the wisdom that comes from having something that is hard won.

Rokeya’s story made me think this: how many novels were written to impress a beloved? And: how did she, trapped in her zenana, push her eye to that better place and see all that would someday come to be, and imagine the things we would never have? Rokeya was my mother’s hero. She dropped her name like other people invoked Jesus or Allah. If Rokeya could do it, she said, so could we. Begum Rokeya had done so much with so little. She championed the education of women, started a school, went from village to village to recruit students, gave speeches in parliament, fought her dead husband’s family over her inheritance, and cracked jokes at dinner parties. And she was a widow, having lost that husband early in life. Perhaps Rokeya reminded my mother of her own mother, also a widow, also from that generation when things like going to school weren’t taken for granted. Now, on the wedding dais, I thought of Rokeya, of my mother, and her mother, and all the women who had done what their mothers had told them to do, and those who had flipped the world around, making prisons into meadows.

After the reception we drove to Rashid’s house, which was draped with strands of light that stretched out onto the sidewalk beyond the gate. Inside, Ruby was taking over the whole room, happy because she’d convinced me to wear a gold chain across my forehead and fasten it to my hair with a safety pin, annoyed because I’d refused to wear three necklaces staggered on top of one another so that the ornaments would have started at my navel and ended high on my neck, triumphant because now that I was part of the family she could boss me around and tell me what to wear. In the midst of all this happy/unhappy, Rashid picked me up and stepped over the threshold with the embroidered nagra shoes he wore to match his wedding sherwani, lowering me down so that I could dip my feet into a wide bowl of milk. Then rice was thrown over our heads, prayers whispered and blown over us, already the post-mortem of the reception in full swing — was the biryani a little oily do you think, yes, Reeta S had decorated the hall beautifully, excellent choice of orchids and white roses, doesn’t our Rashid look like a prince — and my parents were nowhere to be seen, because I was theirs now, Rashid and Dolly and Bulbul and Ruby’s, wearing, as tradition dictated, not a stitch of my old clothes, dressed head to toe in things Rashid’s family had given me, right down to the gold thong Ruby had chosen from a New York lingerie boutique, the most uncomfortable, scratchy thing to have ever touched me.

A big show was made of ushering us into the bedroom. I was buried under so much make-up, my sari pinned together with so many safety pins, that it took a full hour for me to undress. I looked at myself in the mirror in my blouse and petticoat, dark streaks across my eyelids where the liner had been difficult to remove. I stepped into the shower to wash out the hairspray, struggling to untangle the complicated bun at the back of my head. When I came out of the bathroom in my old sweatpants and T-shirt instead of the silk negligée I’d been given, Rashid was on the armchair with an opened bottle of champagne. He had removed his shoes and socks, and the top button of his sherwani was undone.

‘What, no sexy nightie?’

‘Sorry. I’m tired.’ I had decided to say it now, because if I waited any longer it would seem as though I was hiding from him, and for all the years that stretched ahead, I wanted it known, as a matter of record, that I had been honest from the very first day. I looked into his face, as familiar to me as my own reflection, his curved nose and flared nostrils, dark, heavy eyebrows, the impressive eddy of ink-black hair. ‘Listen, there’s something I have to tell you.’

He reached under my T-shirt and pulled me towards him. ‘Later,’ he said, his mouth arching towards mine.

I brushed his lips lightly. ‘No, really. It will just take a minute.’

He sighed, folded his hands on his lap. ‘Okay, Mrs Khondkar, I’m all ears.’

‘Don’t call me that.’

‘I’m just saying it out of love.’

‘I’m sorry. Look, we have to talk about this, because we’re married now, and someday there might be children, and these things need to be out in the open.’

‘So serious.’

‘I’m not Ammoo and Abboo’s biological child.’ I took the champagne glass from his hand and drained it. Immediately it made me light-headed. ‘I’m adopted. My parents never told anyone. They only told me once, when I was nine — it was my birthday — and we never talked about it again.’

He reached down to the floor and picked up the bottle. When he turned to me again he was smiling. ‘Sweetheart, I know.’

‘What?’

‘I’ve always known, Zee. My parents told me years ago.’ Rashid was still chuckling as he refilled the glass.

I took another sip and let the words sink in for a minute. ‘All this time?’ I gestured with my hand and a dribble of champagne spilled onto my lap.

‘Listen,’ he said, taking the glass from my hand, ‘it’s nothing. My parents know, and nobody minds. I love you. Everyone loves you.’ He kissed me on the forehead. ‘Now I want my wedding-night fuck.’

Nobody minds. There was generosity there, and something else — forgiveness, maybe. I didn’t know what I had to be sorry for, but I was sorry, and he was telling me it was all right. I tried to imagine the conversation he would have had with his parents — when? — about how to handle the story if it were to get out, if other relatives got involved and questioned the wisdom of forming an alliance with a girl of uncertain provenance. Maybe they had even discussed it with Ammoo and Abboo. What had my parents said? Were they grateful because the Khondkars were willing to stand behind them, to legitimise their daughter by sanctioning the marriage?

Elijah, I thought back at that moment to what you said to me about the longing of the soul. The loneliness of being only in one body, when the spirit wanted nothing but communion. You didn’t try to make me feel better, you made my fears seem unremarkable, just another small instance of the universal need for kinship. But Rashid was trying too, in his own way, pressing his lips against my neck, grazing my breast with the back of his hand. I allowed myself to enjoy his caresses, his hand firm against my back. We kissed. I tasted champagne and the familiar tang of his breath. He passed me the champagne again and I took another swig from the glass, the fizz going all the way to the back of my throat. Our bed was decorated with roses, and garlands were suspended from the ceiling and taped to the wall. Everything smelled pungent and slightly rotting. Rashid peeled back the bedcover and lay me gently on the bed. We made love quietly, both tired from the day, and, although we had done it before in this room, the smell of the flowers and the fresh paint and the lingering heaviness on my face and the thought that everyone else in the house knew what we were about to do weighted and dulled the ordinary gestures of sex, and afterwards Rashid got up to fold his clothes and brush his teeth, and by the time he came back to bed I was almost asleep, so that I was only vaguely aware of his hand on my hip, his breath behind my ear.

In the morning my parents arrived as guests in my new home. The cook piled chicken korma onto my plate, and Dolly gave me the key to the drawer in my closet, telling me to lock my things away in it whenever I left the upper floor of the house, in fact to lock the bedroom door itself because you never did know with the servants. It suddenly occurred to me that though Rashid and I had grown up within a few minutes of each other, so that moving into his house should have felt like little more than moving from one end of my parents’ apartment to the other, it was another world, here in the three-storey building with the swimming pool on the roof, locking doors behind me, korma for breakfast, a fleet of cars in the basement, a suspicion of servants, because you never did know, except that I did know, and what I knew made me bitterly sad, the conversation from the night before grating on me as I remembered the pity and absolution in his voice. It was only the first day and already I felt the depths of the mistake, touching me like the ink from a stray pen in my pocket.

Every night there was an invitation to a relative’s house for dinner, and, the following Friday, a visit to a factory that Bulbul owned. Occasionally there was the thrill of closing the door behind us and sneaking in a quick kiss, and once or twice Rashid played some of our favourite songs on the music system he had set up around our bed, and we held each other under the canopy of drying flowers, and in those moments there was the feeling of being out of context, away from the brocade saris and the thousands of pleasantries that had to float out of my mouth, a sense of it being just the two of us, old friends and childhood sweethearts finally reaching the natural conclusion of something we had started many years before. But then the rest of my life would come into focus, and I would catch a glimpse of the person I used to be, was, in fact, just months ago, the sort of person who would travel across the world to dig whale bones out of the ground, and in those moments I felt as if I was battling a phantom, a woman who haunted my otherwise perfect life.

Then, one day, Rashid went back to work at the factory. He got up in the morning, showered, dressed in slacks and a shirt with cufflinks, pulled on the watch my parents had given him as a wedding gift, and got into the back seat of his car. I watched all of this while still in my pyjamas, leaning out of the second-floor balcony and listening to the car door close behind him with a heavy snap. Then, contemplating the day ahead, I crawled back under the sheets and buried my face in the bed.

I flipped through the books on my shelf and found Moby-Dick, remembering how you had teased me that day at the airport. Moby-Dick got me thinking about Diana, still trapped underground, maybe even desecrated by now if what they said about unrest in that area was true. I imagined indifferent hands lifting her bones out of the ground, disturbing what had lain undisturbed for millennia, and this made me think about time and its inevitable forward march, that I too would be bones in a grave someday, that I would be dead, and then I started counting all the things I would regret if I were dying, and lying in bed on a Monday with nothing to do but read Moby-Dick was not on that list. I would not look back at my life and declare it well spent if this was what I had spent it on.

Again and again I thought of the conversation Rashid and I had had on our wedding night. I wanted to ask him about it again, to find out the details of how he had come to discover my secret, and why they had all — Dolly and Bulbul and Rashid and Abboo and Ammoo — decided never to offer me the comfort of their collective knowledge. But I didn’t want to see him laughing it off again, didn’t want him to reassure me and tell me it was all right, implying in his own way that, somewhere deep within, I owed him a debt for not minding, for treating me as though I were anyone else, a person with a bloodline that people could trace and rely upon. So I kept quiet, repeating the pattern of unsaying that had begun with my birth, and after a few weeks Melville became a friend, and the parties subsided, and I came to an accommodation with the fate to which I had submitted.

I don’t often think about my wedding, Elijah, but I have a photograph I carry around. I even brought it with me on this trip. I look beautiful, in the way of a person who has made an effort to look good for a camera. The sari Ruby and Dolly had chosen was tasteful and suited the copper tones of my skin. I had allowed a make-up artist, a friend of Sally, to paint my eyelids and blow a light dusting of glitter across my forehead. I am not as pretty any more, Elijah — in fact, by the time you arrived on the beach, that particular sheen was long gone — but in your presence, as you know, I was beyond pretty: I was majestic, a sovereign, like the Queen in Rokeya’s story.