The Bones of Grace

Prosperity Shipbreaking

And now we come to the time when you arrived at the beach and our lives turned to face one another again. The year I lived in the shadow of Grace and watched that great leviathan stripped down to her very bones. The year I broke your heart. I love this part of the story, not least because you are in it, but also because those few weeks we were together tell me everything I need to know about the rest of my life. Sure, it paints a picture of me that I am loath to remember, much less resurrect. But in order for us to come crashing down so decisively, we had to climb to those heights. We had to be those people whose fingertips brushed the atmosphere. I will always be grateful for that.

It is a year after the wedding. Rashid and I have been living in his parents’ house with the swimming pool on the roof and the locked bedroom doors. Anwar, in the meantime, is back in his village, carrying his secret, which is also my secret. He hasn’t begun to search for Megna, and he hasn’t yet arrived in the city where we will eventually meet. How I came to be there myself has to do with blood. My period was late. I had been assigned a car and a driver by the stern-looking man who managed Dolly’s household. The driver was young and skinny, and sank into his seat so that all I could see from the back was the sleeve of his shirt and his elbow as he manoeuvred the gearshift. I asked him to take me to the pharmacy in Gulshan 1, the one under the ice-cream parlour. The shopkeeper was standing behind a glass counter that was crammed with sanitary pads, and while I was searching my mind for the Bengali words for pregnancy test, I found myself re-annoyed by the fact that all the pharmacies were arranged in this way, and that if you wanted something embarrassing you had to ask someone to pull it down from a shelf or to open a cardboard box hidden in the back room. I decided my people were all terribly indiscreet. You couldn’t walk down an aisle and pick up condoms or tampons or haemorrhoid cream. The shopkeeper took my money and wrapped the rectangular box in a brown-paper bag. And then I went home and the two blue lines appeared immediately and I thought I would explode with rage.

Instantly I experienced an onset of symptoms. I felt a sharp pain in my abdomen and my legs were heavy and I wanted to devour a hamburger. I also had the overwhelming sense that my body had betrayed me by allowing this little seed to take root. What an ignorant little thing it was, didn’t it know that nothing had been right since the wedding, or earlier, since I agreed to marry Rashid, maybe even before that, when I had decided against the possibility of love — didn’t it know that it shouldn’t commit this one act, this act that had been denied my mother, and summed up an equation that had remained unsolved within me?

I sat with it for two weeks. Every morning I willed it to be over. Every morning I cursed this being whose provenance was more sure, within the first moments of life, than mine would ever be. I ate like the proverbial pig, ate everything, was repulsed by nothing except the little cluster of cells with my name on it. Every time I went to the bathroom I stared down at my blank, perfectly clean underwear. I contemplated dangerous acts, such as excessive drinking or jumping from high places, but I had never been courageous that way and I wasn’t about to start now. Dolly threw a party one day where everyone was asked to wear black and white and she put a tent out in the garden and hung strands of tiny lights from the trees, and I took a full plate up to my bedroom and ate what felt like an entire side of lamb.

The television was switched to the Discovery Channel and there was a programme on algae. Algae, the building blocks of life. At that moment, with the meat sitting densely in my stomach, I developed an attachment. I thought about meeting a person who was related to me by blood, something that had never happened to me before. Kin. I clutched my belly and took back all the things I had whispered to it. In the background an animated male voice said, The giant kelp is a large brown alga that may grow up to fifty metres in length, and I smiled and smiled to myself at this strange accident.

I told Rashid.

I don’t know how he had experienced the first year of our marriage. He seemed always upbeat and cheerful, and we’d had a few holidays together, a honeymoon in Thailand, a week in London, a business trip to Hong Kong to which I had tagged along. He had been right about the travel — it took the edge off of living in Dhaka. There were parties and family dinners and trips back and forth from Dhanmondi to see my grandmother. Sally and Nadeem’s baby was born in the summer, and we had watched them stumble clumsily around parenthood. The months passed. I read a lot of books. A hundred times I watched a YouTube video of Glenn Gould playing the thirteenth variation but that was the only paean to you I maintained. Although I still had had no word from Bart, a part of me was clinging to the possibility that he would suddenly summon me to Dera Bugti, so I didn’t look for a job.

As soon as I told Rashid I was pregnant it was as if I’d crawled into his head and turned on all the lights. He didn’t know how close I’d come to not saying anything, how many times I’d contemplated having an abortion. But it was — and I must tell you this, Elijah, though it will pain you — it was a moment of communion between us. When I woke up the next morning, there was a tray on the bedside table with tea, vitamins, and a bunch of tulips. God knows how he’d procured the tulips. I was thrilled when he agreed not to tell his parents, and we spent the next several weeks on a conspiratorial high. Every time we looked at each other, we widened our eyes and smiled. Every chance he got, he put his hands on my belly. We did things that people have done throughout the ages. We guessed the sex. We argued over names. We made cooing sounds to it, to each other. He told me repeatedly how beautiful I looked. He made love to me with extreme tenderness. It was everything it needed to be, and for the first time in our marriage I experienced a complete absence of dissatisfaction.

And then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the little knot of cells vanished. We were gathered around the top of Dolly’s twelve-seater dinner table, the five of us — Rashid and me, Dolly and Bulbul, his brother Junaid — and we’d just been presented with trifle, Dolly’s favourite dessert, served in a very large glass bowl. Rashid was passing the bowl to me, and as I turned to take it from him I felt a hot, abrupt pain scissoring through me. I grabbed his elbow as the pain intensified, watching in horror as a crimson stain travelled across my lap and towards my knees. Rashid was still holding the trifle bowl, and he set it down. The others were eating, dessert forks clipping against porcelain, custard and Jell-O smudged across their plates.

Rashid stood up and asked his father and his brother to leave the room. Junaid protested, saying he wasn’t finished, but Bulbul saw the look on Rashid’s face and ordered the boy out. When they had gone, I said to Dolly, ‘I’m very sorry, but I’m afraid I’ve spoiled your dining chair.’ The upholstery was stained beyond repair, I knew that even before I stood up, because I was sitting now in a pool of blood, the remnants of that much cursed, little-wished-for, newly coveted being smeared all over the cream-and-navy fabric. Dolly and Rashid pulled me up from that chair, very slowly, and Dolly wrapped a shawl around my waist, and we went up the stairs and into the bathroom, where I climbed quietly into the empty bathtub in my clothes. It wasn’t until much later, the tub filled, swirls of light and dark pink filtering into the water, that I let Rashid pull the kameez over my head. And then I lay there for a long time, swimming with the evaporating atoms of my child, utterly, excruciatingly alone.

It was suggested — after the doctor, and the scans, and the assurance that no irreparable damage had been done — that I should spend a few weeks in the southern port town of Chittagong, where Rashid’s family owned a country house. I had been there twice before — once on a summer holiday with my parents, and again just after the wedding, when Dolly and Bulbul had held a reception for that branch of the family. I agreed easily when the proposal was put to me, but I didn’t want anyone else to come. I thought they might refuse to let me go alone, but I found there was some power in what had happened, and I was allowed to dictate the terms, at least for now.

I also insisted that my parents shouldn’t know anything, especially my mother. Ammoo was preparing for the trial of Hossain Hashmi Kubul, a notorious war criminal who had spent the last forty years bragging about his wartime exploits, daring anyone to prosecute him. He had invested in land just after liberation, then started a cement factory that supplied all the building companies in the capital, and he was a powerful man — in the last government, he had even been given a ministry. Everyone knew he had done things, that he was a Razakar, but the tribunal needed witnesses, and Ammoo had found a family who had known him in ’71, a farmer and his ageing father who had seen Kubul ordering the Razakars to mow down all the men in the area and torch their houses. She was with the lawyers day and night, preparing the witnesses, finding supporting documents, scouring the area for anyone who might back up their story. She couldn’t know about my little hiccup. Every time I saw her I told her how wonderful everything was, and the clouds parted around her face, and I saw that there was no space in her for anything but the lightest of conversations.

I packed a suitcase of my old clothes and took the first flight out on a Wednesday morning. Rashid tried at the last minute to get me to change my mind, but I had to put some distance between us. The spell was broken. I couldn’t stop thinking about the look on his face when he realised what was happening, the slight censure that would have reared itself, and him batting it back, shielding me from the truth: that it would have saved us, and without it, we were once again adrift. He drove me to the airport, promising to fly down on Friday. A driver picked me up at the other end, and the caretaker, Joshim, greeted me at the front door.

Khondkar Villa was a modest, two-storey house built by Bulbul’s father in the 1950s. It had a large living room that opened onto a sloping garden. Outside, the bougainvillaea and its bright, flame-like blossoms dominated the landscape, and beyond the garden there were old trees, and more sloping earth, the cars and asphalt of the city nowhere in sight. Chittagong was a smaller version of Dhaka, with the same kinetic pace, the same political graffiti and billboards for shampoo and long-haul flights and mobile-phone packages. But here, elevated above the streets, the city retained its old character as a hill station, a place where the air was cool and empty and lightened by its proximity to the sea.

In the vacant house, the cook, Komola, reigned supreme. She ordered me to wash my hands and then she brought me a tray and ordered me to eat. I was surprised to find I still had a big appetite. The homemade guava jelly and white bread reminded me of childhood summers, when Nanu used to make big batches from the tree in her garden and I would stick a spoon directly into the pot and burn my tongue on the cloyingly sweet paste. Komola filled the guest bathtub and ordered me to get in, but not before she had given me a thorough massage with olive oil. The oil was warm and Komola’s hands were comfortably rough, and I slept deeply that night and woke up refreshed.

Rashid came on Friday and declared me better. ‘Let’s party,’ he said, jangling the car keys in his pocket. ‘I know everyone in this town.’ Komola stood in the doorway with a bowl of rice pudding in her hands. I told Rashid I wasn’t going anywhere. I know he wanted to help me fix it, to cheer me out of it, but it was obvious, in this case, that whatever was in his arsenal would not be enough. I spooned rice pudding onto my plate and pretended not to see his disappointment.

He went out after dinner and didn’t come back till very late, climbing into bed beside me and running his hands up and down my body. ‘Make love to me,’ he whispered, his breath fragrant with alcohol, and I went through the motions, trying to gain comfort from the closeness of our bodies, but eager for the visit to be over so I could be alone in the house again. What would I say to you, Elijah, if we were still in touch? What song title would communicate, now, the complicated forms of attachment that had been promised and taken away from me? We had stopped sending messages soon after the wedding. The last one I sent was an unencrypted sentence that delivered the news in its blandest form. Married. Happy. Farewell.

Rashid left Chittagong the next afternoon, and over the course of the following week, I slipped into a routine. An early breakfast, then a walk through the estate with Joshim, he holding a long stick and pointing out the names of the trees. After a few hours of reading, I ate lunch in the kitchen with Komola and the other servants. It took some arguing to get them to agree to let me eat with them, but I told them that I was lonely sitting at the long dining table all by myself. There was another cook, a maid, a guard, and a young girl who did the laundry and dusted Dolly’s furniture. In the evening, there was a bath, and more reading, and falling asleep to the sound of the wind through the open window. ‘Bou-ma doesn’t like air conditioning,’ I overheard Komola saying to the others.

I was turning my thoughts to returning home when I received a call from my mother’s friend, Rubana. I had, in fact, been thinking of Rubana on the very day she telephoned, recalling the last time I had seen her. It was a few weeks after my wedding, at the home of one of Dolly’s distant cousins, Sweetie. Sweetie had invited a large and superbly groomed group of friends to her house in Baridhara, and Rubana had stuck out in her plain clothes and lack of makeup. I had known Rubana since childhood and had always been a little afraid of her. That evening she appeared bored, looking often at her phone and wandering out into the garden with her hands around a mug of tea. I followed her and she looked me up and down, a giant red teep punctuating her forehead, and asked me what I was doing, not, what are you doing, dear? But What the hell do you think you’re doing? At least, that is how I heard it. What the hell did I think I was doing, I regularly said to myself. It made me feel a little better in the way that stating something obvious can do. ‘I’ve been thinking about you,’ she said now. ‘I heard you were in Chittagong.’

‘Yes, at my in-laws’.’

‘Oh, yes, the hill. Is Rashid with you?’

‘No, I came on my own.’

‘Escaping already? Wise woman.’ Rubana herself was married, but no one ever saw her husband. I imagined a small, whiskery man who shuffled around in a lungi and didn’t dare raise his voice above a whisper.

‘I know someone who’s working on a project. It’s in Sithakunda, about an hour from you. Have you heard of shipbreaking?’

Shipbreaking. Yes, I knew what it was. Places on the beach where they tore ships apart. Every few months you would read a story in the papers about how one of the workers had died in a fire or been crushed under falling steel.

‘There’s a British researcher who wants to do a documentary, but none of the workers are talking to her. You could go and help her make inroads. Translate. We have some local people there, an NGO called Shipsafe, but somehow it’s not clicking.’

The prospect of someone instructing me to work, to actually make something happen, gave me a sense of what I had wasted. Except Moby-Dick, I couldn’t recall the name of a single book I’d read in the last twelve months. I blamed Bart, the failed dig, but really I had just been stubborn, clinging to my coveted title, palaeontologist, not realising that it had been taken away from me and that I should just accept this instead of becoming one of those people I’d always hated. And why hadn’t anyone said anything? My mother, who crammed every day with a hundred useful, life-or-death activities, had remained silent as I had slept through the better part of a year.

‘I don’t know anything about it,’ I said.

‘Doesn’t matter. Use your wits.’

I mumbled an excuse about not being well, and heard Rubana sigh into the phone. She was weighing me up, judging my temperament, and finding me lacking.

‘Too bad,’ she said. ‘It’s probably not for you anyway. You’d have to move out of that fancy house and into the office quarters — it’s the only way you can have constant access. I don’t imagine you can survive without air conditioning.’ I found myself telling her about Dera Bugti. The overnight bus to Kashmore. Camp beds. Chiselling in the sun. The prospect of leaving this house, not to return to Dhaka, but to go elsewhere, was a possibility I hadn’t dared consider. What would I tell everyone? But if I accepted a job, and if that job took me away from here, then it was out of my hands.

‘You’re a fairy godmother,’ I said to Rubana.

I told Rashid the following weekend, when he came to see me. ‘But I’m here to bring you home,’ he said. He raked his hair with his long, blunt fingers. I was exhausting him, but he couldn’t deny me, not after what had happened. At Dolly’s house, the dining chair would have been removed from the table. I wondered where the chair was, whether it was sitting discarded in a storeroom somewhere, or whether it had been sent back to the shop so that the fabric could be replaced, and who was doing this task, and how it been explained, and did they have to pay extra for the blood, for the workmen’s disgust?

I left it to Rashid to break the news, both to my parents and to his. He tried to persuade me to stay at Khondkar Villa — the driver would bring me back and forth — but I refused, hoping the accommodation in Sithakunda was terrible, suddenly yearning to get far away from the plush, unpopulated spaces of his house. I said goodbye to Komola and Joshim, meaning it when I said I would miss them, promising to return whenever I needed a good night’s sleep or a proper meal.

The next day Bilal, the Shipsafe coordinator, picked me up in a battered jeep. I climbed into the front seat beside him and we sped down the hill. Bilal had recently married, and he flicked through photographs of his wedding on his phone while navigating us out of the city. I commented on the loveliness of his bride. She looked not unlike how I must have appeared just last year, a line of tiny flowers in the parting of her hair. We took a route that skirted the sea. Oil refineries lined the road on one side, and high walls separated the road from the coast on the other, and, out in the water, giant oil tankers and container ships waited to load or dump their cargo. Then we turned inland, getting stuck in traffic almost immediately. Hunched over the steering wheel, Bilal simultaneously complimented his wife’s beauty and complained that Chittagong was no better than Dhaka, now that trade was booming. He pointed to a gate. ‘See,’ he said, as if I should understand. The sign said EXPORT PROCESSING ZONE. Then the traffic cleared and we sped through, leaving the low buildings and overhanging wires of the city behind, turning to a sky that was bright and open.

A few miles into the Dhaka — Chittagong highway, the gentle hills breaking up the horizon disappeared, and we were suddenly confronted with the complicated detritus of broken ships. Bilal gestured to the vast scrapyards of things that looked like they’d been rescued from a warzone: broken refrigerators, oxygen tanks, rows and rows of lifebuoys, toilet bowls, washing machines, metal cages he referred to as compressors, and then a string of antique shops that housed, he told me, compasses and brass trinkets and lanterns and other things that had been found on board. Then, passing a number of furniture shops, open storefronts displaying battered sofas, bunk beds, filing cabinets, office desks, he said sometimes they pretended the stuff came from the ships when actually it was made right there on the road.

Bilal kept casting curious glances my way, because I had hardly made a sound or exclaimed at the strangeness of the landscape, which must have been rare; he was probably used to people talking about how bizarre it all looked, like a glimpse into an apocalyptic future where everything was salvaged and half-broken. But I was numb to all of it, pleased by the sight of something that matched the chaos I felt within me. It was only when we passed through the gates of Prosperity Shipbreaking, and I saw an oil tanker in the final stages of being pulled apart, a felled dinosaur of metal lying on its side with the curved blades of its propeller exposed, that I was unable to hold back from cursing out loud. ‘What the fuck?’ I blurted out, and Bilal smiled, as if he’d just won a bet.

The Shipsafe office was on a small paved road off the highway and just a few steps from the beach. There were just two rooms — one in front with a veranda overlooking a small patch of grass where someone had planted onions and coriander, and another adjacent to the kitchen that served as a small meeting room. I was assigned a heavy wooden desk with a glass top in the front room. There was a caretaker who was in charge of keeping the place clean who did a reasonable fish curry for lunch. In the evenings I would have to fend for myself.

Bilal filled the kettle and we shared a pot of tea on my new desk. I asked him a few more questions about his wedding, and he showed me another photograph, this time of himself sitting on the dais with his bride under a red-and-yellow canopy. Then he brought up Gabriela, the British researcher who I had been brought on to help.

She had recently landed in Chittagong after four years on the Rainbow Warrior, and was here to complete the initial interviews for the film, after which the director and the crew would arrive in several months. She spoke a few words of Bangla, learned in London before she had set off for Chittagong. ‘Why hasn’t it worked out?’ I asked him. I saw him look out into the garden. ‘She’s foreign,’ he finally said, lifting up his shoulder. ‘She asks too many questions.’

‘Isn’t that why she’s here?’

‘Mind if I smoke?’ he said, taking out a box of Benson & Hedges before I could reply. He brought an ashtray over from his desk on the other side of the room, and then he said, ‘I don’t trust her.’ I tried to press him further, but he withdrew into silence, leaning back in his chair and pulling hard on his cigarette. After a long time he said, ‘It’s a cruel industry. For years we’ve been working slowly, patiently with the owners. Suddenly she comes and tells us how terrible things are. A film isn’t going to change anything.’

I didn’t want to get drawn into a debate about the purpose of art. Bilal had a long scar running along his forearm, which he exposed as he flicked his cigarette stub to the ground. I asked him about the scar and he said his father had taken a razor blade and sliced through his flesh once when he was about twelve because he had been caught kissing his cousin. ‘On the mouth,’ he said, putting a finger on his lip. ‘The servant found us and she dragged me outside by my ear. Abba was shaving.’

The story seemed to relax him. He pulled another chair towards us and stretched out his legs.

‘Sometimes people prefer talking to strangers,’ I suggested.

‘Nobody is going to tell that woman anything,’ he said.

The apartment was much nicer than the office, with windows on two sides, one looking onto the road, the other through to the beach beyond. There were two bedrooms and a small sitting area, a dining table, a chair and a few large square cushions on the floor. I took the smaller, empty bedroom. After unpacking my bag and stringing up my mosquito net, I pulled the chair over to the window and ate the noodles Komola had packed for me, listening to the distant whine of the shoreline smelter. Dusk was quickly followed by darkness, and just as I was about to switch off the overhead light and try to sleep, the front door opened and Gabriela entered.

She stopped for a moment, then, realising who I was, bounded over and threw her arms around me. She was fortyish, tall and muscular, with reddish-brown hair. ‘Thank bloody Jesus you’re here,’ she said. I returned her smile. Without sitting or putting down the large bag slung over her shoulder, she began to bombard me with questions. Why were the workers so young? Where had they all come from? Where were their parents? And why on God’s great earth would anyone choose this beach, with its glassy water and buttery sand, to destroy ships, rather than sunbathe and swim and fall in love? She had been there for a month and the workers had refused to talk to her.

‘It’s like their mouths are sewn shut.’

I knew why already, five minutes into meeting her. The way she dressed, for instance. Her shirt was open two buttons too far. She had rolled up her sleeves past her elbows, revealing the articulated muscles of her upper arms. Her jeans were tight and her ass was exposed because she had tucked in her shirt. How would anyone know where to look, much less open their mouths and tell her anything? She had pierced her nose, and three studs up each ear, and there was a small jewel above her lip, where a mole or a birthmark might be. She reminded me of a vintage cigarette advertisement, with the woman flexing her biceps. A cross between that and a hippy and a biker. I was a little disgusted but also thrilled to be in the presence of someone so completely out of context.

Gabriela offered me the bigger room, but I declined. ‘Come and lounge on the bed for a few minutes at least,’ she said. ‘There’s nowhere comfy to sit.’ She opened a bottle of tequila and insisted I take a swig. ‘This shit is the only stuff that keeps me sane.’ I was going to say no, but then I thought, what the hell, it’s not like I’m pregnant. I tipped the bottle into my mouth and it burned a hole all the way down to my stomach. She kept telling me how glad she was to see me. ‘Tell me what we’re going to do. I’m at a dead end here.’

‘I don’t know yet,’ I said, replying honestly. ‘Give me a few days to think about it. Humans aren’t really my specialty.’

‘Really? Rubana told me you were good at this kind of stuff. She said you were unusually perceptive. And she said something else, I can’t remember what.’

‘I’m a palaeontologist.’

‘You’re joking,’ she said, slapping her hand on the bedcover.

‘My subjects are mostly dead.’

‘You’re wasted.’

‘I am, actually. Just a little.’

‘No, I mean Rubana — she said you were wasted. I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I assumed you were in some dead-end job or something. But you’re into dinosaurs, that’s not what I expected.’

I laughed, leaning back on the bed. ‘Well, Rubana and my mother have a very specific definition of a meaningful life.’

‘And you are way hotter than I’d imagined.’

‘I had a miscarriage,’ I said, confessing before I realised what I was doing.

‘Oh shit, I’m sorry.’

She passed me the bottle and I took another swig. I leaned back further and saw the ceiling swimming above me. When I was too tired to keep my eyes open, I made my way to my own bed, my head throbbing, and retreated under the mosquito net.

The next morning Gabriela took me to the beach. It was my first proper sighting of the Prosperity Shipbreaking. You are reading this now and so your image of the place is as fixed in your mind as it is in mine. What I remember thinking, when I first set eyes on it, was that it was a place where I could punish myself as much as I liked without anyone noticing, because it was the least alive landscape in the world, not because it was ugly, but because it was beautiful, and ruined.

The ship I had caught sight of the day before — its name, I was later told, was Splendour — was still lying on its side, its propeller pointing towards the sky. Its bridge was gone, its hull sliced away like meat from a carcass. On the shoreline, the smelter was going at full speed, and the air was thick with the astringent smell of burning metal. I stood there for a long time with a sense of being at the edge of the world, where a person might see, or do, anything. Gabriela pointed out a man in the distance, suspended from the deck of a skyscraper-high ship with only a rope around his waist. ‘Can you believe this shit?’ she said.

The shipbreaking yards consisted of narrow rectangles of oceanfront. From the highway, you could see a high wall with double gates every hundred yards or so. But once you entered one of the yards, you could look across the whole expanse of the bay, at one ship after another in various states of decay. You could look east or west and see a mile-long oil tanker, or a container ship, or a fragment of something that used to be seafaring and was now only a collapsed stretch of metal. And if you looked closer, if you really concentrated, you would see the tiny shapes of people hanging from the ships, breaking them apart with blowtorches and hammers.

My first look at this scene made me profoundly sad. Or, rather, it took the sadness that already existed within me and magnified it. I felt I was made of something unmalleable, something hard and alien. It took me time to realise what I was really mourning, and perhaps I am only coming to an understanding of it now, all these years later. It was the pregnancy, of course. I hadn’t reckoned with my need to be of the same blood as another person — I had never thought about that before, and being presented with the possibility, and having that possibility taken away, made my longing acute in the multiplied hit of a desire for something that is a new, but also very old.

But more than that, I recalled the initial feeling of bitterness when I saw those two blue lines and realised that it wasn’t that I didn’t want a baby, it was that I didn’t want a baby with Rashid. I had allowed myself to be carried away for a moment by the prospect of a child bringing us together, but fundamentally I did not want to be heavy with a being that would bind us together for ever. Rashid was not that man. The knowledge, earned on that first day on the beach, was a little grain of doubt that added, hourglass-like, to everything else. And like all the other little grains of sand, I pushed it aside and went on as before, refusing to add everything up.

Although Gabriela tried to persuade me to meet the workers right away, I wanted to become a familiar figure on the beach before approaching anyone. I spent most of the first week at the Shipsafe office reading through the documents Bilal had gathered on the industry. There were apocryphal stories about how it had all started — a cyclone in the Bay of Bengal, a ship banked on the shore, a group of scavengers, the discovery of steel, and then, eventually, businessmen who turned ill-fortune into profit.

Mirza Ali, the manager of the shipyard, was my first point of contact. He worked out of a narrow building with a corrugated tin roof and windows that faced the beach. Inside, he and his staff drank tea and argued about whatever ship they were taking apart. I waited for Ali to invite me to meet him, and when he did, I knew what do to — my year as Rashid’s wife had prepared me well. I dressed in a sari and sipped tea with him, setting him at ease by complimenting him on his operation. Ali reeled off statistics of how many tons of steel his yard had sold to the construction industry. I listened politely, taking in his long white tunic and his prayer cap, the shiny bruise on his forehead that marked him as a man who prayed five times a day. He asked me repeatedly if I was comfortable, hinting at the unsuitability of the accommodations in the Shipsafe flat, but I smiled and assured him all was well. I could see why Rubana had sent me here, and it was of course because of class, because Ali would be flattered by my presence, his natural suspicion averted, and I would ease Gabriela’s way onto the beach.

My arrival coincided with the purchase of a new ship called Grace, and soon Ali was inviting me to witness the ship’s arrival. ‘The beaching of a ship is a unique experience,’ he said. ‘A combination of skill and God’s will.’ He invited me to come and see it for myself, agreeing reluctantly to let Gabriela accompany me. ‘As your guest,’ I said, knowing that Ali would want to appear hospitable in my eyes.

On the morning of Grace’s arrival, Gabriela and I were instructed to wake up an hour before dawn and make our way to the shore. Outside my window all was black, except for a few bursts of orange from the kerosene lamps of the workers’ dormitory. In the distance I could hear the sound of water swooning towards the bay.

I knocked on Gabriela’s door. There had been a brand-new moon during the night, and the tide had grown higher by the hour. ‘Is it time already?’ she called out.

Grace was a decommissioned cruise ship. At almost a thousand feet, she was the biggest passenger ship ever to arrive on Prosperity’s beach. Ali had shown me a photograph of a white zeppelin with red trim, gleaming decks and rows of tiny windows. It would take them three, maybe four months to take it apart. Passenger ships were few and far between on the beach; a photograph had been passed around the office and there was much excitement around its arrival. For a few days the ship had been waiting in Chittagong Harbour, its customs inspection passed, for the tide to reach its highest peak. The reason they beached ships in this particular location was because the water was shallow for almost a mile out and then suddenly very deep, making it easy for the vessels to wedge themselves firmly into the sand while the tide was high. Then, when the water retreated, the ship would be marooned, ready for the workers to cut into its hull and begin taking it apart. This was the answer to Gabriela’s question that first night.

It was because of Ali’s boss that Gabriela and I had been allowed on site. For years, Shipsafe had been campaigning for a ban on the whole industry. Rubana had won a few injunctions in court, but this had only slowed the work for a few months; soon the appropriate palms were greased, and the court orders were ignored and the ships began to arrive again. When Gabriela and her film crew proposed to tell the story of the shipbreakers, Rubana decided to try a different tack. She went to Prosperity, the biggest shipyard, to suggest a compromise: if Shipsafe was allowed access to the site to observe and report on the working conditions on the beach, she would recommend the grant of a compliance certificate by the environment ministry. As a part of this agreement, the company would allow Gabriela’s team to make a film about the workers.

This proposal appealed to the owner of Prosperity, a man called Harrison Master. Harrison had, from humble beginnings, built a series of industries on the Chittagong coast: garments, cement, natural gas, fertiliser. He had bought a hill at the edge of a lake — a far bigger hill than Bulbul’s — from where he oversaw his empire. He liked the idea of being the only shipyard to be chosen as the subject of a film, swayed by the thought of rising above the other companies in the area, not just in the size of his business (he had already done that), but in the quality of his operation. Which is how I had been given my job: Gabriela and I would interview the workers and report on the breaking of one ship, Grace, and submit our findings. Gabriela would make her film and Harrison would get his certificate.

I knocked on Gabriela’s door again, and she bolted out, her hair packed tightly into a headscarf. I took in her tight T-shirt and jeans that ended a few inches below her knee. I had mentioned something to her about her clothes, but she had somehow taken this to mean that she should cover her head.

Morning was on the horizon, and Ali was waiting for us on the beach. A few of the workers had come as well, and they formed a small party, some with their hands held up to their eyes to see who could spot the ship first. Ali brandished a bottle of non-alcoholic sparkling apple juice, ready to twist it open when Grace’s crew descended. Further along the beach, a tent had been pitched and breakfast was being readied. The captain would weave Grace into the Prosperity yard, making sure she remained perfectly upright as she was beached. It was a particular skill. Ali had explained all of this to me the day before, pointing to a red flag in the water. ‘Once Captain crosses the flag, he’s home safe.’

The light came in as we waited, and then there it was, a sliver on the horizon. We watched as it grew. More of the men arrived, wiping the sleep from their eyes. The curve of the ship began to appear, and now we could see the gleam of the hull, a poem of curves rising out of the remnants of dark, and suddenly it was before us, as if it had turned a sharp corner, white, immense, violent. ‘It will seem to run us over,’ Ali said, ‘but that is just an illusion.’

Grace became audible, her high whine tempered by the rush of water as she approached; then there was a pause for a long minute before the final push to shore, the grunt of the slowing engine, the scrape of metal against sand; and all the while Ali and the others had their hands up in the air as if they were summoning her from the sky; then she banked, parting the shoreline, suddenly immense, her heaviness exposed, tons and tons of steel without the sea to buoy her up. Against Grace’s enormous hulk, we were tiny and frail. Ali muttered a prayer under his breath, then blew the air out of his cheeks, spreading the blessing.

We walked towards her. She was painted so bright we had to squint and shield our eyes. ‘See,’ Ali said, ‘I told you she was pristine.’ The workers gathered three, four deep around the hull. They looked afraid. ‘They’ve done this many times before,’ Ali had assured me. ‘They are experienced, and we will take all the necessary precautions.’ But standing before the ship now, the black trim wedged deep into the sand, so tall, did they wonder how they would ever take it apart? Fewer than fifty of them, with only the strength of their arms against the mass of the ship — a ship put together somewhere else, somewhere with machines and scaffolding and helmets and time-cards and minimum wage — yet it was their job to bring on her death. They would touch every inch of Grace; her heaviness would imprint itself on their hands, and she might, in the course of things, despite their best intentions, take a life or two on her slow way out.

The workers clapped and cheered, sounds to make themselves bigger. After a few minutes a figure appeared on the lip of the deck. He scaled the rim and climbed over, looking as though he was about to throw himself overboard, but really placing his foot on a camouflaged ladder bolted to the side of the ship.

Ali pushed against the crowd, but the workers wouldn’t budge, taking in the prettiest, newest thing they had ever been asked to dismember. Ali told me that Grace had drifted for five days on the Atlantic after the previous captain had died aboard, setting himself on fire in the engine room. Two tugboats were sent to pull her to shore, and a week later she landed in Portsmouth. Then, after a few months, she set sail again, only to be struck by a virus. Grace had stood in the harbour for a month, her passengers quarantined while food and medicine were dropped by helicopter. The owner of the company, a Swede with a superstitious streak, had decided to cut his losses, and Grace was decommissioned, a footnote in the history of unlucky ships.

The captain was helped down by the many arms that reached for him, cushioning his landing. He wore a white uniform with blue-and-gold lapels, tight around his shoulders and thighs. He reached out and shook Ali’s hand. ‘Welcome, captain,’ Ali said.

‘Call me Jack,’ the captain replied, taking off his hat and smoothing down the fine mat of hair underneath, his forehead already streaked with a band of red. ‘Hot here, isn’t it?’

Gabriela rolled her eyes. ‘It’s not an Arctic expedition,’ she said.

The bottle popped. The rest of the crew descended, and Jack introduced a pair of Koreans, an engineer from India, and three Nepalese men who had boarded in Lisbon and been offered a free ride in exchange for cooking and cleaning.

‘So, madam, what do you think of her?’ Ali beamed. The others were already making their way up the beach towards the tent. Gabriela was walking with Jack, her headscarf lifted by the wind, revealing the copper swirl of her hair.

‘It’s hard to believe it will be gone soon.’ I said to Ali.

‘In four months, it will be nothing but scrap.’

I stopped, turned my eyes to Grace, imagining her in pieces, like the Splendour. ‘Is it true that she’s exactly as they left her?’

Ali reeled off the soon-to-be-destroyed virtues of the ship. ‘Casino, cinema, restaurants, swimming pool.’

‘What’s going to happen to all that stuff?’

‘Sold, madam. People coming from Dhaka tomorrow, they’re going to give us a price.’ He crossed his arms over his chest, a satisfied note in his voice. ‘Hotels are interested.’

For some reason, this made me very sad. I kept stopping and turning back.

‘Madam, this is the cycle,’ Ali continued. ‘One ship sets sail, another comes here.’ He looked over at me. ‘You are unhappy, madam.’ He considered me for a moment. ‘What about I take you for a personal tour, you would like that?’

I eyed the narrow ladder to the top. I had always been a little afraid of heights, and the thought of being alone with him on an abandoned ship did not appeal. ‘I don’t know.’

‘I will personally ensure your safety.’

‘I’m not the adventurous type,’ I said, repeating my own catchphrase of defeat.

We ate breakfast in the tent, sitting on wooden chairs at long, rectangular tables. The air was stale inside. Ali insisted I join him at the head table, which was decorated with a red-and-white tablecloth and a small bunch of roses, resembling a shabby version of my wedding. Gabriela was showing Jack how to eat with his fingers, rolling up his sleeves for him and explaining how important it was to get close to the food, to smell it on your hands. Ali opened a bottle of mineral water and filled my glass.

‘Is it true the ship is cursed?’ Gabriela asked Jack.

‘That’s what they say.’ He tore off a piece of bread and dipped it in his curry.

‘Bad luck is finished, now you are on Prosperity Beach,’ Ali said. Then, eager to change the subject, he told Jack that I had lived in America.

‘So what are you doing here?’ Jack asked.

‘We’re making a film,’ Gabriela said.

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Hope nobody dies taking this thing down!’

Gabriela tapped his arm. ‘That’s a fucked-up thing to say.’

Ali took a bite of his bread. ‘Shipbreaking is important for Bangladesh. We need steel. Lot of construction everywhere.’ He pointed south, towards town.

‘Hey look, as far as I’m concerned, you got a giant recycling operation here,’ Jack said. He had finished eating. A waiter was summoned with a bowl of water and a small piece of soap.

‘Will you have sweet, sir?’ Ali said.

‘What?’

‘He means dessert,’ Gabriela said.

‘Oh, yeah. Great.’ The waiter returned with a bowl of rice pudding in a shallow clay dish. Jack looked around for a spoon.

‘Use your hands.’ Gabriela said, indicating to Jack that he should dip his fingers into the clay dish.

‘How about I take you both aboard, one last hurrah before she gets crushed?’

Gabriela’s eyes widened. ‘Really?’

‘Sure, why not? Ali, you game?’

‘Of course, I was telling madam Zubaida just now, we must go up.’

When I peered, at that moment, towards the horizon and saw Grace, how white and still and majestic she was, I felt a tug in my chest, and I knew that the breaking I was about to witness would involve giving something up, because I was used to imagining the lives of things that were long dead, and I would do the very same for Grace. I would imagine not only the lives that had been lived aboard, the trips and holidays, the food that was eaten, the icebergs escaped, barnacles studded to her underside, dolphins following in her wake, but the ship herself, her disappointment at having spent so little time afloat, her sadness at being consigned to the scrapyard, her pain at being taken apart. I felt all of this, and also, perhaps, I had a premonition that Grace would yield more treasures than I could know, that she was a mystery beyond my comprehension. I looked over at Gabriela and allowed her to accept the invitation, a part of me hoping I would maybe slip and fall down that metal ladder and into the warm, shallow water below.

Elijah, I’m on the beach now, and Grace, our totem, has arrived. I am about to meet Mo. And Anwar. Are you starting to love me back? Who am I kidding, of course you’re not. You see how I tease myself, here in the prep lab, and in the empty apartment with only Nina to keep me company, telling myself it’s just a matter of time, and words, before you return to me, knowing, in fact, that the possibility of our ever being together will require an altogether less linear, less knowable set of possibilities, an alchemy of which I am neither the scientist nor the author.

It has been snowing for eighty hours. I have been holed up at the lab, surviving on vending-machine snacks. Nature Valley. Cheetos. Vitamin Water. My tongue is glued to the top of my mouth. Diana accuses me of losing my sense of history. The hands that arrange her bones, that brush away the layers of earth that weighed heavy on her for fifty million years, those hands should be light and unattached, not heartsick, that embarrassing word, not longing for human touch, for the particular grooves of another person’s lifeline, but something else entirely, a pair of moving parts mindful of all that is ancient, and endures. I bristle at her rebuke, knowing she is right.

In the morning Ali had changed his mind. ‘Too dangerous,’ he said, shaking his head. I looked up at Grace and found myself insisting it would be all right. Gabriela and Jack backed me up. ‘It’s nothing,’ Jack said, ‘I’ve been up and down that thing a dozen times.’

‘Let’s be explorers,’ Gabriela said. She had swapped her headscarf for a bandana and tan workman boots, which she wore over her trousers.

Ali passed his hand over his forehead, lifting up the prayer cap, smoothing his hair, and lowering the cap back down on his head again. ‘We have never allowed it before,’ he said, ‘I would not forgive myself if something terrible happened.’

‘Come on, man,’ said Jack, who was wearing a pair of shorts and a baseball cap with a Yankees logo on it. The rumour had spread that a small expedition was going on board, and a few of the workers had gathered around. I was starting to recognise some of them, and when I passed by, they looked down at their feet to acknowledge they knew who I was. It was fully day now, light reflecting harshly off the white hull. It didn’t seem possible to climb all the way up, there must have been a hundred little rungs, narrow and cylindrical and slippery.

Gabriela went first, followed by Jack. They seemed to ascend easily, wind-licked and beautiful, as if on a cable car on a snow-capped mountain. Then it was my turn. The rungs were cold and my legs trembled as I took the first steps.

‘Look only straight, madam,’ Ali called out from behind me.

I started to climb. Rivets. Thousands and thousands of rivets. How would they ever unbraid this machine? A clear sky now, and the sun struck me full in the face, and in the distance, I heard the cry of a lone gull.

‘We have reached halfway,’ I heard Ali say. His voice was dampened by the wind and the growing distance between us. I hadn’t realised it, but I was rushing, putting one step after another in quick succession.

I couldn’t help but glance downwards: a mistake — my stomach lurched. I stalled. The crowd had grown below us. Would they catch me? I believed they would, they were used to rescuing each other, every day on the line with the welders and ropes tied around their waists. I told myself to take one step at a time. My palms were slippery, but I pushed ahead and climbed steadily, one hand over the other, my calves straining to keep a strong foothold, knowing that if I stopped the sensation of falling would overtake me, and finally the ladder curved over the hull and I pulled myself up and over and found myself on a large green square with a circle drawn in white in the middle. A helicopter pad.

The rest of Grace rose above me, three more storeys of staterooms, ballrooms, restaurants, and whatever other delights cruise ships contained. I stepped aside and Ali followed, panting and whispering another prayer under his breath. Jack and Gabriela had already crossed to the other side of the white circle and were leaning over the railing and looking out onto the horizon. Everything was quiet and shining. I felt the skin on my face burn in the reflected light. We followed Jack, who led us across the deck and around the promenade, passing the closed doors of passenger cabins. Beyond lay an empty swimming pool.

‘What does everyone want to see first?’ Jack said, holding his arms out. ‘How about the engine room?’

‘It will be dark,’ Ali said, handing me a flashlight. ‘Please madam, be careful.’

‘Where that captain killed himself?’ Gabriela asked, pulling her bandana down and letting it hang around her neck.

‘Yep.’ Jack took her arm and they began walking to the other end of the ship, passing a bank of lifeboats. Ali rushed to catch up with them, motioning for me to follow.

I lingered behind, peering over the edge. Sea on one side as far as I could see, and on the other, the beach, the tent still there from yesterday’s party, and beyond, the workers’ dormitory, the bamboo shacks that had accumulated around it, and in the distance, the Dhaka — Chittagong highway, the markets flanking it on either side, soon to be adorned with the takings from Grace. I recalled being up high before, behind a wall of glass on the top floor of a new high-rise in Motijheel, or one time when Rashid had come to Boston and we had gone up to the top of the John Hancock building, but this was different, because everything around was so flat, the broken copper sand, the bay with its outstretched arms. Not a living thing in sight, not a gull or a fish breaking the surface of the water, unless you looked down towards the sand, to the men waiting on the beach.

They were still gathered below, in knots of three and four. One of them waved. I hesitated, then waved back. When I turned around, I found I’d lost sight of the others. I walked away from the prow, and back towards the helicopter pad. I found a doorway with rounded edges that led to a stairwell. I climbed down. The stairwell seemed to narrow as I descended. I turned on the flashlight and waved the circular beam of light around but there wasn’t much to see; the walls were white and unmarked except for a few scuffs here and there. I went around a corner and through a passageway and down further, deeper into the ship, where the air was cool and dense and tinged with metal. Finally, on what seemed like the lowest level, I found a hallway with many doors at regular intervals. I stopped and tested one. It was locked, and so were the next three I tried. The forth swung open, revealing a small square room with a low ceiling. There was a bunk bed against one wall. I traced my finger over the chair bolted to the floor. The ship was not meant to be so still. It was meant to move, to sway, to resist a force stronger than itself.

In the top bunk was a sleeping boy, his arm flung over his eyes. I considered waking him up and asking for directions to the engine room, but instead I just held my flashlight over him and saw his chest rising and falling. His hand that was closer to me was curled into a loose fist, and the fingernails of that hand were clean and neatly trimmed. For this reason, I quietly slipped out of the room and closed the door behind me.

I crossed that hallway and another, zigzagging past more closed doors, then went up a few flights. I caught flashes of daylight. Now I was on a promenade deck that circled the ship, and the cabins that opened on to this were spacious, trimmed with metal and glass. I saw deck chairs, fire extinguishers, showers and televisions and refrigerators. I went across and down again. On one of the lower levels, I opened a set of double doors and found a small library of hardbacks arranged alphabetically. Dickens was present in abundance, Anna Karenina, not at all. None of the books appeared to have been touched. I creaked open Robinson Crusoe, hunted, and found, my favourite phrase: ‘For sudden joys, like griefs, confound at first.’

I was going to lean back and read the whole thing from the beginning, fully in thrall now to being lost and on my own, when I heard someone coming into the library and saw that it was the sleeping boy. Upright, he was small and wild, his hair cut very close to his scalp, his shorts torn at the cuffs. I was happy to see him. ‘I’ve gotten lost,’ I said to him in Bangla. He smiled with his mouth, his eyes, his forehead — his whole face — and offered to direct me. I followed him through a door on the other side of the room. We travelled down a flight of stairs, peering through a circular window into an enormous kitchen. Then we were in the passenger area again, a wide courtyard open three storeys to the sky.

His name was Mo. He looked like a lot of the street children I had seen in Dhaka selling flowers or little square packets of popcorn on the street. They smiled at you as if they were going home to air conditioning and train sets. Even when they begged it was with a laugh behind their eyes, a secret only they were privy to, the secret being that if they cried, or looked unhappy, or gave away something of their lives, something you couldn’t possibly stomach, you would walk away without parting with a single taka. Mo had the look of one of those kids who was used to making himself so friendly and indispensable that whoever was passing him little scraps of food or money would decide it was less of a hassle to keep him on than to get rid of him. I didn’t know anything about him, but I knew this: his friendliness was a façade, and behind that façade was a decade or so of terrible things I would never know about.

I couldn’t tell if we were lost, or if Mo was taking me on his own personal tour of the ship, and I wasn’t sure why I was following him, but I wanted to be in his company a little longer. He said, ‘Apa, I would like to tell you something.’

‘My name is Zubaida.’

‘Last night, I climbed the ladder and slept here.’

‘In that little room downstairs?’

‘No, a bigger one with sheets.’

‘Was it nice?’ I asked.

‘I didn’t steal anything,’ he said.

Mo stopped in front of a pair of double doors. At first when I pushed against one, I thought it might be locked, but it was just heavy, opening with a swishing sound. Inside, I found an unpunctuated darkness. ‘Torch,’ Mo whispered. I pulled the flashlight out again, and he plucked it from my hand. The carpeted floor tilted downwards, and we followed it, our footsteps silent, until we reached a small wooden stage. I turned and looked behind me and saw row upon row of upholstered chairs. We followed the lip of the stage and climbed up a few steps. A thick pair of curtains bore the name of the company: HEAVENLY CRUISES. We pulled aside the curtain, weighed down with a thick chain. Mo waved the flashlight into the darkness. I saw a wall of ropes and pulleys. I reached out my arms and felt the polished, satin curve of an instrument, the wood warm against my palm. Mo moved the light slowly over it, revealing its legs, trimmed with brass, bolted to the floor, its castors removed. I reached over, pulled back the lid, the white keys shining and alien, and put my hand over Mo’s thin wrist, guiding the beam of light over the keys, where a piece of paper rested, crumpled by the lid. It was sheet music, the notes crowded together and incomprehensible to me. Over the top was written: Shostakovich: Preludes.

Ali heaved an exaggerated sigh of relief when he spotted me. ‘What happened to you, madam? I have been very worried.’

‘I got turned around,’ I said.

Ali noticed Mo and grabbed the back of his neck. ‘How did you come here? Go back to your group.’

‘He helped me find my way out,’ I said.

‘He doesn’t work here,’ Ali said.

‘Oh, come on,’ Gabriela interjected, ‘we all know that’s not true.’

I complimented Ali on the grandness of Grace. ‘She’s exquisite.’ I told the others there was something they should see in the big auditorium below. Ali released the back of Mo’s shirt.

‘You mean the piano,’ Jack said. ‘It’s really something.’

Ali told us that the hotel owner, Mr Reza, would be inspecting the piano along with everything else on board. But he wasn’t hopeful. ‘No market for pianos in Bangladesh. We are not a cultured people in that way.’

‘Not in Western instruments,’ Gabriela said, ‘but you have a rich musical tradition of your own.’ Last night, at Gabriela’s request, I had outlined the highlights of Bengali culture. Tagore. Nazrul. The language movement. I had even told her about Rokeya and her imaginary utopia. We had huddled around my laptop and read Sultana’s Dream together, and she had laughed at this line: ‘The men should not do anything, excuse me; they are fit for nothing.’

I urged everyone to follow me downstairs and take a closer look at the piano. We returned to the auditorium and gathered around the instrument, our lights casting yellow petals onto its mirrored surface. I felt a rush of pride when someone behind me emitted a gasp. I was already attached.

Gabriela volunteered to play. She pulled out the piano stool and placed her hands on the keys. She wasn’t very good — I thought she might play the Shostakovich, but it was beyond her — yet the sound moved powerfully through the room. We felt the notes under our feet. No one seemed to want to hold up their torches any more, so the scene dissipated, Gabriela herself invisible but for her foot on the brass pedal.

She stopped abruptly. ‘It needs tuning, she said into the darkness, ‘but it’s a lovely instrument — something almost human about it.’ We heard the lid snap shut. ‘You shouldn’t sell it to the hotel, Mr Ali.’

‘We had this guy, this piano player, who loved that thing,’ Jack said. ‘Think he was Hungarian. You should’ve seen the tears when we told him the ship was sold.’

We shuffled back through the auditorium. I tried to imagine the old Hungarian man playing the Preludes as Grace cut through the sea on her way here. I asked Jack what had happened to him.

‘Don’t know,’ he said, blinking against the equatorial brightness as he opened the door. ‘Once you get to shore, everyone goes their own way.’

I am not a superstitious person, but the piano and the sheet music were telling me something. A smoke signal. I hadn’t forgotten about you in the year that had passed, Elijah, but I had found a way to push you out of my mind, because there were already too many complicated things, too much to regret. I got used to the dull feeling of longing I carried around with me all the time, telling myself it wasn’t just you, but Diana too, and Rashid, and the baby I now wanted; my whole life, and somehow this made it easier, spreading the grief around. Occasionally I would look down at my phone and be tempted to dial your number, but I never got past the initial urge: I would have no idea where to begin. There was too much to tell, and I was morbidly full of all those unsaid words, but now the piano was giving me an excuse — a compulsion — so I called you and left a message, struggling to keep my voice steady: hello, it’s me, Zubaida. It’s been a long time, I know, but I was hoping we might talk. Please call me back.

While I waited for you to return my call, I allowed myself to become friends with Mo. He ran with a few other boys in a sort of gang around the shipyard, and though he was smaller than most of them, they seemed to regard him as something of their leader. I once saw him herding a group of six or seven boys into the water, and when they were about waist-high he pushed them in, one by one, like he was launching paper boats, and then he made them hold hands and float on their backs, all in a line, and they squealed with happiness and the tickle of salt water in their ears. I wasn’t sure what work Ali had Mo do, but though he was often rough with him, I believed there was some affection between them, and that Mo’s position, if far from comfortable, was at least secure (on this count, as on many others, I was wrong, Elijah. I wonder if you soften towards me because of my honesty, or if it disgusts you to know how blind I was, not just on my own account, but on that of others).

I couldn’t put off meeting the workers any longer. The first interview was arranged by Ali, and took place in his office. Gabriela set up a camera and a flat mic. In the evening, at the end of a shift, about a dozen men filed through the entrance. They wore helmets and thick rubber boots. Their hands were encased in protective gloves, and over their legs they sported the sort of thick, waterproof waders I recognised from watching television programmes about fishermen. I started by asking their names, and they belted out introductions. Rubel! Suren! Malek! Then they proceeded to tell me how wonderful Prosperity Shipbreaking was, how kind the owners were, that they were always paid on time, and that it was the best job they could hope for, that they were putting their children in school — not just the boys, the girls too — and that they were thankful to God for bringing the blessing of the shipyard to their part of the country.

Gabriela had already told me she had reels of this sort of footage. I talked for a long time, hoping it would warm them up, a monologue about how I had never been to Chittagong before and was looking forward to seeing the sights, Patenga, the hills, Foy’s Lake. They told me a few stories about their families. I asked them where they had come from, and they were all from within a few miles. I saw one of them raise his eyes, and I had a fleeting moment of hope, but he kept going, past my face, and up, fixing his eyes on the fan that was bolted to the ceiling above our heads. After about twenty minutes, I turned to Ali and said, ‘Perhaps this is not the best place to talk.’

‘Ei,’ Ali scolded, looking up from his phone, ‘say something to Apa. She’s come all this way.’ Then they all started talking at once, but just repeating the things they had said in the first place, about the kindness of God and the generosity of their benefactor, Ali.

I stood up. ‘Thank you,’ I said to them, packing away my tape recorder and notebook. I had expected something like this, yet I found it disconcerting. I tried to scan their faces as they left so that I might remember their names, but as soon as Ali dismissed them they were gone, jostling each other on their way out of the office and making tracks towards the beach. ‘You are wasting your time,’ Ali said, making a show of pouring me a cup of tea. ‘Everyone here is happy.’

The last of the men filed away, his boots shuffling on the grey cement. A thought occurred to me. ‘These are not the men that pull those large sheets of metal up the beach,’ I said.

‘No, madam, they are the cutters.’

‘Can I talk to the other men?’

‘Who, the pullers? Madam, those boys are fresh from the village. They don’t know how to talk to a person such as yourself.’

So that’s what they were called. The pullers. I had seen them take apart the last of the Splendour. Everything else was gone and it was just a matter of getting the propeller to a truck waiting on the road. A group of men tied ropes around the blades of the propeller and hauled these ropes over their shoulders. As they dragged their feet through the shallow water, they reminded me of the biblical films my parents had encouraged me to see as a child in which people were tortured and whipped while building pyramids, their bodies thin and mollusced with sweat. These men with their grey faces and mouths pursed so tightly you would think they were incapable of speech until their cries of Hey-yo! Hey-yo! Hey-yo! came punching out of their mouths. They wore their lungis folded up between their legs, their feet were bare, and sometimes, on top of their heads or over their mouths, they had those rectangles of checked cloth that used to be a bright colour but were soiled now by dirt and sand and sweat. Everything smelled of the chemicals thrown up by the ships and the burn of the metal as it was processed, but their faces bore no trace of disgust, no recognition that the very air they breathed was poison. ‘I don’t mind,’ I said.

‘They are uneducated.’

‘I won’t keep them for long, just a few questions.’

‘Why don’t you give me the list of questions? I will ask them and then you will have your information.’

‘It won’t work that way, Mr Ali.’

He gave me a look that was intended to make me feel he was taking me seriously. ‘Of course. I am only trying to be helpful.’

I retreated to the apartment and told Gabriela everything. ‘I told you it was a set-up,’ she said, rummaging in her bag for a cigarette. ‘There’s no way Ali’s going to let us talk to everyone. And even if he did, they’re not going to talk in front of their boss. We have to meet them somewhere else.’

‘It’s not like we can invite them over here.’

‘That’s a fantastic idea,’ she said, lighting up and taking a deep breath. ‘Let’s do that. You could cook.’

‘I am a terrible cook and that’s a terrible idea.’

‘Why not? They look hungry, the poor sods.’

‘No, they don’t. They look quite well fed, in fact. And they’re wearing all the correct protective clothing. Have you ever seen them wear that stuff when they go out onto the ships?’

‘It’s all for show,’ Gabriela said, tapping her cigarette into the sink.

When Rubana called, I had to confess I hadn’t made much progress. She told me to keep trying, agreeing that it was essential to get the men out of Ali’s office, to identify the ones who weren’t just window dressing for the film. ‘Peel back the layers,’ she said.

On a Friday I returned to Khondkar Villa. Komola took some satisfaction at the sight of my dirty clothes. Why hadn’t I come sooner? I sat in the garden and smelled the jasmine, shedding the grime of the last few weeks, remembering the piano, and Mo, and the little bunk beds that sat at the bottom of the ship. I wasn’t so far from the beach now, but it could all have easily been a dream, a vision of a dark past or a dystopian future, far beyond the reach of my imagination, and I wondered, again and again, why you were not returning my call, what was making you take your time, was it another woman, had you fallen in love, or, worse, had you relegated me to the category of a casual acquaintance who did not require an immediate reply, someone you had once known yet with whom the possibility of serious connection had passed for ever? With every day and every imagined reason for your silence, the picture of you grew stronger, like liquor in a cask.

The first thing, Ali informed me, was to get everything on Grace valued and assessed, and then sold. He had three weeks to get rid of all the goods. Once she was stripped, the cutting would begin. I was still at an impasse with the workers, and every time I asked Ali if there were others we could meet, he put me off, saying he would look into it, that a suitable place had not yet been found, all the time smiling and assuring me that my comfort and safety were of the utmost importance. In the absence of actual workers, I began to record the dismantling of the ship and documenting, in detail, what each worker was responsible for doing. So far, I had a list of professions: foreman, salesman, engineer, tank cleaner, cutter, puller, welder, roller. Each crew had its own leader, its own hierarchy, and the teams themselves fell into a sort of order, with the engineers at the top and the pullers at the bottom.

One day I returned to the apartment and found Gabriela in the kitchen with Mo. The two were bent over the stove together, looking at a pair of pooris browning in a pan of oil. I stood in the doorway and watched their easy way with each other, Mo holding a long metal spatula and Gabriela exclaiming at the way the pooris puffed up into perfect little spheres. Something about the scene irritated me. I went into my room and put away my notebook and camera. The smell of oil and fried dough wafted through the apartment.

‘Gabriela,’ I said, calling out from the living room, ‘can you come here for a minute?’

When Gabriela emerged from the kitchen, rubbing her palms along her jeans, I lowered my voice and said, ‘What’s he doing here?’

‘You mean Mohammed? There’s a room and a toilet behind the kitchen, did you know that?’

‘Yes, servants’ quarters.’

‘Well we don’t have servants’ quarters where I come from, so I didn’t know. I offered to let him stay there and he’s going to do some cooking for us. He was showing me—’

‘Pooris, I know.’ I recognised the look Gabriela was giving me, a mixture of naivety and moral superiority. ‘He has a perfectly fine place to live in the dormitory.’

‘It’s filthy.’

‘We can’t change everything and then just leave and go about our business.’

‘Who said anything about leaving? I’m not going, are you?’

‘Not right now, but eventually. Don’t pretend you’re going to be here for ever.’

‘Good, so he stays.’

I wondered what my mother would have said. I remembered once when she had hired an acid-burn victim to work at our house, bringing her out of the kitchen and insisting she serve the guests. Her name was Limi. I remember the fruit cake she made on Fridays, and the way people would stare at her scarred hands when she spooned powdered milk into their tea.

‘Are we going to pay him?’ I asked Gabriela.

‘He needs a family.’

‘So now you want to adopt him?’

Gabriela threw up her arms. ‘I’m not saying that. I just want to — I want to do something. We’ve been sitting on our hands and we’ve done fuck all. Don’t tell me you’re not as fed up as I am.’

When we returned to the living area we found that Mo had set the table, placing the pooris in the middle. He was standing back and admiring his handiwork, the table mats, the glasses filled three quarters of the way with water, a jar of pickles, open, with a spoon inside.

‘Mo,’ I asked, ‘where did you come from?’

‘The food will get cold,’ he said. I noticed that he was wearing a clean shirt with buttons and a pair of trousers, both slightly too big. Gabriela and I seated ourselves around the table. With ceremony, we passed the plate of pooris back and forth.

‘Marvellous,’ Gabriela said. ‘Tell him they are the best pooris in the whole world.’

‘Where did you learn to cook?’ I asked him.

‘Whatever they tell me to do, I do.’

‘Ask him,’ Gabriela said, folding a poori into quarters and stuffing it into her mouth. ‘Does he know the men who work on the beach?’

I translated. ‘I know all of them,’ Mo said. ‘The new boys always come to me first.’

Gabriela clapped her hands together to brush off the poori crumbs. ‘Maybe he can introduce us.’

‘Mo, can you make tea?’ I asked.

When Mo had darted into the kitchen, Gabriela said, ‘We’ve been here almost a month and no one will tell us anything. Maybe he can help.’

This was a much better idea than the one she’d had before, but I was still unsure. For one thing, the others might consider Mo a snitch if they knew he was helping us. I told her so.

‘But if they talk to us, we can help them. We can put them in the film.’

When he returned with the tea, I said, ‘Mo, can we come and meet some of your friends?’

He put down the tray in front of me and passed me a cup. ‘Which friends?’ he asked.

‘Your friends from the beach,’ Gabriela said. ‘We want to make a film about them.’

I repeated the words in Bangla. He turned to me. ‘What film?’

‘A movie about the beach, about the ships and the workers.’

I was sure — and halfway hoping — that he would say no. But Gabriela kneeled in front of him and pulled at his collar, straightening and smoothing. ‘It’s very important,’ she said. ‘Will you help us?’

‘We need to talk to the men,’ I said. ‘Not the ones Ali selects for us — the others.’

‘Do you want to talk to the day shift or the night shift?’ he asked.

‘Which shift are you?’ I said, but he didn’t reply to that, only cleared away the plates and disappeared into the kitchen. I followed him to the back of the apartment, where there was an empty room with a small square window on one side. It was dark, and the cement floor was streaked with dust. ‘Do you want to stay here?’ I asked him, and he said, ‘Only sometimes, when Ali doesn’t need me.’

I looked at him closely. His hair sprouted vertically from his scalp, and when I extended my hand to stroke his head I felt a uniform coarseness, the gentle slope of his crown, and the upright tendons at the base of his neck.

‘Bring your things,’ I said. He nodded and we looked at the room together, the grey floor, the grille crudely fixed to the sill of the window. Mo said he had to go and that he would come by later with his bag. Then he padded away in bare feet, closing the door behind him with a sharp click.

And that is how Mo came to live with us, how he came to be the link between me and the crew of men who worked on the beach. How Gabriela and I came to belong to this place, came to know all the men who hauled the bodies of ships along the metal-flecked sand. Everything that happened in the later chapters of this story occurred because Mo said yes; even you, Elijah.

The dormitory that housed the Prosperity workers was built by Harrison Master’s father. He was an old-fashioned sort of businessman who knew the names of all his workers and asked after their wives and children back home, ordered them off the beach in a rage if they talked back to the foreman or got caught in one of the brothels in town. That is what Dulu, one of the men Mo had lined up to talk to us, told me. But the businessman died and his son inherited the place and hired Ali, which was how they all came to be here, crammed into the dormitory, because the son didn’t believe in expanding the facility, and anyway they were grateful it was there at all, because the men in the neighbouring beaches didn’t get anything, they just lived on whatever ship they were breaking, which was bad news, because if the fires didn’t kill you, the fumes from the tanks would finish you off slowly. Not that there was much living to do here anyway.

The men that Mo had chosen for our film were the lowest and poorest on site, the ones who took whatever scrap of metal was peeled off the ship and dragged it up the beach to the smelter. The pullers came from the north of the country, where there weren’t any jobs and the threat of famine hung over them every winter. The men that Ali had introduced me to were locals; they were given their jobs in exchange for permission to use their land. They had clout with Ali, setting their own price and acting as supervisors to the other workers. But these men — boys, really — from up north were recruited in the winter, paid by the hour, and sent home at the end of the season, their pockets only a little fuller than when they arrived.

Before they would agree to speak to me, I had to answer a few of their questions. Mo pointed to a young boy, older than him but not by much, and said, ‘Shuja wants to know if you are married.’

The others covered their mouths and giggled.

‘Yes, I am.’

‘Do you have children?’

‘No.’

‘What is your father’s name?’

‘Farhan Bashir. His nickname is Joy.’

‘How many brothers and sisters?’

‘None. It’s just me.’

‘Hai, Allah!’ Shuja said. ‘Are they dead?’

‘Shut up motherfucker,’ Mo said.

‘My father was a freedom fighter,’ I said.

Shuja asked to see a photograph of my parents. I handed him my phone, and he passed it around. He turned to Gabriela. ‘Is that the real colour of your hair?’

‘Yes,’ she said, emerging from behind her camera.

‘Why did you come here?’ Mo said.

‘Because we want to know about your lives,’ Gabriela said.

This seemed to satisfy him. Here, in this room, Mo was in charge, putting himself beside me, gesturing with his hands for the others to talk or be quiet. ‘All right. You can start now.’

By the third week, I had memorised everyone’s names, and they had started calling me ‘Apa’ instead of ‘madam’. We met in one of the bigger rooms in the dormitory, the boys crowding onto the bunks, me sitting among them with the microphone, Gabriela behind the camera. The sessions began in the evening, after the shift had ended, and went on for several hours into the night. Mo kept a close watch on me, sitting beside me and directing the conversation, saying, this one has something important to tell you, or ask that one about his village, where the water is full of arsenic, yes, you cunt, she wants to know about the arsenic too. The whole story is what she needs. We hadn’t said this to him specifically, but somehow he knew that we were there to get under the surface, to hear all the little details that made up the people that made up the shipyard. He hadn’t needed a class in ethnographic field methods to know this, he just knew, because Mo was like that, a kind of effervescent psychic, reading our minds and telling other people what we wanted them to know.

One night we started late. The cutting crew had taken a huge piece of metal off the oil tanker that sat next to Grace. The pullers had tried to fix their ropes to get this piece of the tanker up the beach, and as the light had faded they had just about given up, but Ali had pushed them to try again, and they had spent several hours trying to manoeuvre it without success. The cutters would have to break it into smaller pieces the next day, and they would try again.

When I arrived, the boys were tired, their bodies slumped forward as they balanced on their heels in front of me. Mo had come up with the idea that each of them would tell me the story of where he had come from, about his village, his family, the people he had left behind. Last week, there was a boy, Russel, who said his brother had come to the beach to work as a puller the year before. He had sent money, just as he’d promised, but eight months later the money stopped coming. They tried to contact a relation, the cousin who had set him up with the job, but no one could find either of them. So they sent their second son to find his brother, but when Russel landed in Sithakunda he realised how futile the search would be, the locked gates in front of each of the shipyards, the miles and miles of lots. They hadn’t even known the name of the company, or the foreman in charge. So Russel just stayed, lucky to have been recruited as a puller for Prosperity, which was one of the better employers. He hadn’t been home in two years, just sent the money to his parents, as his brother had done before him.

Now it was the turn of one of the older ones. He cleared his throat and shifted the weight on his feet. With slow deliberation, he pointed his mouth at the tape recorder, anticipating the nods and the shakes of the head that would accompany his speech, the men who knew what it was to be him, the ones who had suffered like him, seen the things he had seen, tasted the bitter things he had tasted. ‘It was the Monga, seven years ago,’ he began, referring to the famine that grips the north of the country between harvests. ‘We thought we had enough rice. It was my mother and my father, my wife, three children, another coming.’ I knew what he was about to say, and so did the others, but we all trained our eyes on him and listened. It was two months before the harvest that the rice ran out. He went to sell his labour, but there was no work going. His father walked into the fields one day and didn’t come back. But still there wasn’t enough. He had a daughter, three years old, and she was the first to go. Then winter set in, and, with it, a fever that spread through the village. The man wiped his face again and again with his right hand, telling the story with his left hand. As he came to the death of his wife, he put his head down between his knees, shaking his arms back and forth, as if he could wipe the story from his memory. Now he works to feed the two remaining children, left up north with his brother.

‘Say your name into the tape recorder,’ Mo said.

‘Belal,’ he said.

I asked the men to tell me what had happened that day, and they said that the cutters would sometimes take enormous chunks from the ships, pieces they knew the pullers wouldn’t be able to haul up the beach. ‘They do it to torture us,’ one of them said. The pullers would waste time trying this or that to get the piece to move, knowing all the time that it wouldn’t work. Then they would be forced to wait while the cutters split the large pieces into smaller ones. The managers knew what was going on, but they didn’t interfere. There was an order on the lot, a hierarchy that had to be maintained and obeyed, and the pullers from the north were at the very bottom.

I passed around a flask of tea. They sipped in silence, gazing into the kerosene lamp. Gabriela and I took our leave, promising to return the following week. We stepped out into the darkness with Mo. The moon was weak but we could still see the outline of Grace. Small fires illuminated the darkness as the night shift worked on the remaining sheets from the oil tanker. We passed through Prosperity’s gates.

Mo had to return to the beach to finish something for Ali. ‘We’ll be all right,’ I told him, ‘it’s not far.’ He said he would walk with us but I insisted and Gabriela told him to go on, that we would see him the next afternoon when he came to cook dinner. The stories went around and around in my mind. As I was listening to Belal I had made every attempt to remain impassive, but, now that I was no longer in his presence, the depth of his loss slowly sank in. It was quiet and I could hear the sound of the water hitting the shore. Gabriela and I walked in silence until we were home. I almost ran the last few steps because I felt a strange sensation, like someone was following me. At the apartment Gabriela wanted to talk about the meeting, but I was rendered mute by the memory of Belal’s face, his thin, sad lips mouthing the story of his daughter’s death. Gabriela suggested we go out. There was nowhere really for us to go at that late hour, so I called Komola and asked if I could come over with a friend, and of course she said yes and asked what we wanted to eat.

Gabriela borrowed the Shipsafe car and we drove into the city with the windows rolled down, and immediately I felt better. I was embarrassed when we entered the house; Gabriela looked everything up and down and I could tell I was being cast in a new light, but Komola brought us a tray with ice cream and tinned fruit, and the heaviness that had lodged in me started to dissipate.

‘There must be something we can do for them,’ Gabriela said, putting a spoonful of cubed fruit into her mouth. ‘How can you stand it?’

‘We’re doing something. You’re making this film.’

Her spoon clattered against the side of the bowl. ‘A film seems like a pathetic response. Is there any more of this?’ she asked, gesturing to her empty dish.

‘I’ll ask Komola.’

Downstairs, Komola said there wasn’t any more fruit, but that there was some leftover rice pudding in the fridge. She had been chewing betel, and her mouth was lined with red. She reminded me of Nanu, not that Nanu chewed betel — she didn’t — but in the way that she regarded me, with a love that she expected to flow in only one direction.

In the morning Komola made us omelettes and we sat in the garden with our tea cups. I was thankful to Gabriela for not asking me to explain about the house or my marriage. Neither of us wanted to go back to Prosperity, so we had Joshim take us on a long walk around the estate. After lunch, Gabriela sketched out a few ideas for the film while I read over my notes from the night before. Finally, reluctantly, we prepared to return to Sithakunda.

It was dusk by the time we set off, carrying plastic tubs of leftover chicken curry and dal. A cool breeze rustled the tamarind trees as we walked down the path to the car. I was feeling refreshed; Belal’s story would make it into our film, and though it wouldn’t bring his daughter back, it would be something. I was finally making some headway, not just with this project but with my life. The film would be no replacement for Diana, for Zamzam, nothing against the death of Belal’s daughter, but at least I could chalk up one small accomplishment, one attempt at making a dent in the world.

As we drove south to Sithakunda, I spotted a clearing in the highway. There were a few cars parked on the side of the road, and beyond, a stretch of beach. ‘That must be Patenga,’ I said. ‘Shall we stop?’ Gabriela was thrilled at the possibility of a swim, though disappointed when I told her she would have to go into the water more or less fully clothed. ‘You can roll up your trousers a little,’ I said, ‘but don’t go above your knees.’

The beach was crowded by women in shalwar kameezes who dangled their babies over the water. We lay on our stomachs and let the tide nudge us gently towards the shore. In the distance, we heard the sound of a flute among the cries of the gulls and the shrieks of the children. ‘This isn’t so bad,’ Gabriela said, her shirt ballooning beneath her. ‘The water is delicious.’ As the sun neared the horizon, we climbed onto a large rock on the shore and waited for our clothes to dry. ‘I never want to leave,’ I said, and Gabriela nodded.

Finally we decided it was time to go. Gabriela had parked in front of a small line of shops. The car came into view and she was jostling the keys in her hand when we saw a man walking purposefully towards us. He stopped and said, ‘Megna.’ I thought he was calling to someone behind me, so I brushed past him, but he turned and raised his voice. ‘Megna, Megna!’ Gabriela took hold of my arm and we were almost at the car, but he followed and came right up to my face. I found my voice and I asked him what he wanted. ‘Don’t you know me?’ he said. I shook my head and tried to push him aside, and that’s when he did it. He put his hands on my arms and turned me around and held me where I stood, his fingers digging into my flesh. I shouted at him to let go. ‘Megna,’ he said again, ‘don’t be angry.’ He was saying ‘Megna, Megna, Megna’ and I was trying to wrestle out of his grip, and then a few seconds later Gabriela was shouting too, and when he heard her voice the man let go and looked over at Gabriela, and then he looked down at my clothes, my long-sleeved tunic and jeans, and he stepped back, his hand over his mouth. ‘Allah,’ he said, shaking his head, and he turned around and I watched him sit down, right there on the road. Another man came out and dragged him away, and they disappeared into a barber-shop. I bundled myself into the car and cried as if this man had beaten me, punched me straight in the face and broken my nose.

It was him, Elijah. It was Anwar. I can’t imagine what he must have felt, believing I was the woman he had been searching for, only to realise I was nothing more than a stranger. And he must have been afraid, because I could have had him arrested. In fact, once I was home, I called Rashid and that’s exactly what he told me to do: file a report with the police. We argued; I said the man hadn’t really done anything, and Rashid told me I was foolish for always feeling sorry for people who didn’t deserve it. Then he said he was leaving for a business trip to China and that he’d be gone for a few weeks, maybe even a month. Did I want to see him before he left? No, I said, angry now because he was so quick to throw a man in jail, and perhaps anticipating another, worse argument we would someday have about this very man. ‘I’ll see you when you get back,’ I snapped, and put the phone down.

This is how Anwar jolted himself into my life. By accosting me on the street and insisting I was someone else. I quickly forgot the woman’s name. Megna. Nothing to me, right? Nothing but everything. But that’s for later. Don’t blame me for parsing out the story slowly, Elijah. These things take time, and I seem to have all the time in the world, because you never appear at the traffic lights any more; I’ve sometimes waited at the coffee shop across the street, reading Anna Karenina and looking up every few minutes to see if I’ve conjured you, but there’s no trace of you there or anywhere else in this cold, cold city.

You are about to arrive on the beach, and the very best and the very worst things are about to happen. These memories, if you choose to linger on them, will be the ones that pain you most. The ones that will make you want to stop, burn this letter, and never think of me again. So, before you read on, read this first: another love story, another quest, that of Anwar, a man who both rejected and accepted his fate, a man who protested silently, for his whole life, against the many injustices the world had decided to mete out to him. Read him gently, dear Elijah; let your gaze on this page soften; remember that he had nothing to do with my treatment of you, so regard him with kindness and judge him like the innocent he is.