The Bones of Grace

The Arrival of You

Did you know, Elijah, that I was named after the Abbasid princess Zubaidah bint Ja’far, who inspired The Thousand and One Nights? My mother, who everyone calls Maya but whose formal name is actually Sheherezade Haque, was herself named after the narrator of that great epic, the Persian queen Sheherezade, a name given to her by her father, Iqbal Haque, who died of a heart attack when my mother was only six. Zubaidah bint Ja’far herself was not called Zubaidah at birth, but Sukhainah. And my name at birth — well, I will never know that, will I? There was some debate as to whether I should, like my mother and most of the people we knew, have a nickname as well as a formal name. The privilege of choosing the name was given to my dadu, my paternal grandmother. She chose the name Putul, which means ‘doll’, and would not be persuaded to change her mind, even after my mother protested that no daughter of hers could possibly answer to the name Doll.

In an effort to remove the name from its meaning, my parents shortened it further, and Putul became Putlie, Pootsie, Poo, Potla, Potlu, and Potato, until finally only one stuck: Poots. Poots was the girl I was back home, when it was just my parents and me. Poots was what my dadu and my nanu and the servants called me. When my friends came over I went to great lengths to make sure no one would call out to me from the kitchen or accidentally let slip that I had the most embarrassing nickname in the world. In high school I put a ban on Poots, the sobriquet by then completely revolting to me, and my parents obeyed, settling on the diminutive of my formal name, Zee, which is also what Rashid and all my school friends and even some of the people I knew in college and graduate school called me.

It was at some point in the first hours of your coming to Chittagong that I told you my nickname. You said the name aloud to me a few times. Putul, Putul, Putul. Perhaps it was the unfamiliar sound that made it a softer, sweeter word in your mouth, the emphasis on the second syllable, and for you it did not carry the baggage of its meaning in the same way. After hearing you say it, I began to grow fond of the name, and later it even became the way I began to refer to myself. Zee was the girl who married with a gold chain fastened to her head; Putul was the girl who hated the smell of henna on her hands and left home to find a new patch of air among the scrapheap of the world, Putul the bird who flew south in search of a warmer climate and a place to spread her wings.

It was early in the morning when you finally called me back; I was lying in bed and watching the sky brighten through the gauze of my mosquito net. ‘Hello,’ you said. ‘It’s Elijah.’

You sounded distant. ‘How are you?’ you asked, formal.

‘I’m well,’ I said, trying not to cry.

‘I’m sorry it has taken me so long to return your call.’

‘Were you busy?’

‘No.’

The tone of your voice told me everything. You weren’t busy, you were angry. Disappointed. What could I say to you now, knowing that I’d been wrong about you? I started telling you about Dera Bugti, leaving long pauses for you to murmur your sympathy for my failure, for Zamzam, but you didn’t. You let the silence sit between us. Then you asked me what I had worn to my wedding, and I described with shame the brocade sari that had hung so heavily on my shoulders and cut into my waist.

‘Can I see you?’ you asked finally, and we migrated to our laptops and I noticed that you had grown your hair over your ears, and something glinted in the hollow above your collar — a grey, porous stone attached to a leather string around your neck. I was talking to you but I was taking note of all of this, and for some reason I couldn’t understand I experienced this alteration as a betrayal, a sign that time had passed, time in which we had done everything but be together. And of course this was my fault. I had married Rashid — all you had done was grow your hair out and put a piece of string through a rock.

It was late by the time we finished talking. I promised to call again the next day. The next day, I had my speech all planned. The first thing I said to you was: ‘Please come to Bangladesh.’ And you said, ‘I don’t think so, Zubaida.’ I gave you all the arguments I’d prepared: I said it was because of the piano, that you had to hear it for yourself, and that you would never again have the chance to see a piano bolted to the floor of a ship, and then watch that very ship get taken apart. ‘That has got to be,’ I said to you, ‘one of the strangest and weirdest things one could possibly witness.’ The sheet music was still there — I had left it exactly as I’d found it, wedged between the keys and the lid. You would have to come and you would have to play that music on that piano. I have no idea what went through your mind, but you resisted for a long time, for the rest of that phone call and the several others that followed, but I kept pressing you, and finally you relented. When you agreed I thought you might fix a date in the distant future, and I was getting ready to argue again, to remind you that the piano may not be on Grace for much longer, but you said you would be there the following week. I know now that you are the sort of person who can do that, get up and materialise on the other side of the world on short notice, but at the time I remember being surprised, and then deciding, not for the first time — and certainly not for the last — that everything about you was tinged with magic.

At Chittagong Airport, I watched you help a man manoeuvre a refrigerator-shaped box onto a trolley, then lift your own suitcase from the carousel and drag it behind you. You were easy to spot through the panels of glass that separated the arriving people from the waiting people on the other side. You wore a shirt with a round collar and those same loose trousers I had seen on you that first day. You were walking through customs when an officer looked you up and down and motioned you over to a desk. Worried you’d be stopped, I made my way towards you and waved my arms.

You looked up and met my eyes through the glass. The customs officer put his hands deep into your suitcase and began to remove your things. A pair of trousers. A T-shirt. He opened the zippered case of your toiletries bag. Toothpaste. You were beautiful. That’s all I could think as you held my gaze, tilting your head to the side. Smiling hello. A sandal. A square package wrapped in red tissue. You tried to stop him but he shook his head, tore open the gift. Dark blue silk melted out of the paper and onto his hand. Embarrassed, he passed it to you. You turned and held it up, showing it was for me. I smiled. Thank you. Three paperbacks. Underwear. A linen shirt. The other sandal. My heart was exploding in my chest. Shampoo. At the bottom of the suitcase the officer found a heavy container with a green cap. He pulled it out and thrust it at you. You tried to explain. The officer shook his head. You held up your hands. Wait, please. You twisted off the cap. Lifted the jug and poured a little of the contents into the upturned cap. An offering. What’s happening? Wait, please. You gestured to the officer to put his finger into the liquid and taste. He did. You smiling. The officer smiling. Screwing the lid back on the jug. Patting each other on the back. Tucking a strand of hair behind your ear. Repacking your suitcase. A pair of trousers. T-shirt. Toothpaste. Sandals. A silk blouse. Maple syrup. I watched you put everything back in its place, pull the zipper back around the suitcase and start walking towards me.

I had practised again and again what would happen when you arrived. What we would say to each other. I believed the time that had passed had made us both more distant and more intimate, the trick of a long separation and those cryptic song titles. But when I caught sight of you, gesturing to me through the glass, I was struck with the one thing I had not rehearsed, the one thing that was entirely unanticipated. I had practised warmth, I had practised small talk, a little awkwardness, and, yes, also disappointment (a person thought of so often, and used in my imagination in such diverse ways, how could he measure up?), but I had not practised what occurred, which was this: terror. When I saw you, I felt you were coming to me after the separation of war, a feeling at once desperate, pathetic, stomach-churning, want-heavy, and entirely unwelcome. It wasn’t possible, it couldn’t be, to fear someone so much, to be sickened, at the very moment of their arrival, at the prospect of their ever going away again. As you approached me, I thought of being apart from you, that I would never be able to tolerate that again, that the distance between us right now, the several feet, was horrible, and as the space narrowed, as your face came into focus, there was a lightness on the horizon of my vision, the sensation of floating, your image multiplying as my eyes watered from longing to see you more; and then, the collision of our bodies as you hugged me over the railing that divided us.

I was trained in the art of keeping up appearances, and I wonder if you knew, when I greeted you politely, that I wanted to dig my fingernails into your bearded cheeks. I may have told you later that when you leaned over the railing and hugged me that I had the urge to blame you for everything that had occurred in the last year, because if it hadn’t been for you, I would have been a happier person, but that in your presence, happiness was immaterial — you had taken that away from me. But I didn’t say any of that. I believe I displayed all the appropriate reactions, keeping my fists to myself, words hidden under my tongue, fingernails safely away from your cheeks.

‘Hello,’ I said, inhaling your shoulder, the hair tucked behind your ear.

We had to walk side by side for a long time until the divider ended. Then you pointed to one of the plastic chairs. ‘Let’s sit here for a moment. Hello.’ You took both my hands and pressed them together between your palms. I was aware of the size of you, of your physical presence that seemed to make everything else shrink. I pulled my hand away, knowing people would stare, and when I tried to look down at the floor, which was littered with cigarette butts, your eyes followed me. ‘Hello,’ you said again.

We remained on the plastic chairs for a few minutes, not speaking. I passed you a bottle of water and you twisted off the cap and held it for a while before taking a sip. Then you straightened, and said, ‘I wasn’t going to come. I almost turned around at the airport and went home.’

At this moment, Mr Ali walked past us. I stood up and introduced you. He had come to pick up another potential buyer, after the first one, Mr Reza, had commissioned most of equipment on Grace, leaving behind the electrical appliances, the furniture, and the piano. You shook hands. My attention drifted for a moment, then I heard you saying, ‘And thank you for allowing me to visit your ship.’

‘Oh, you are seeing the Grace. Miss Zubaida did not tell me.’

I had wanted to bring it up with Ali slowly, once he’d gotten used to the idea of having you around. ‘Sorry, Mr Ali — I hope it’s all right,’ I said. ‘My friend is a pianist, so I thought he might like to see the instrument on Grace.’

‘Yes, yes of course. You are most welcome,’ Ali said, holding his hands behind his back. ‘But you must give me some time to organise the visit.’ I said of course we would wait for his permission. It was his ship, after all.

I had considered meeting you in Dhaka and showing you the sights: Louis Khan’s parliament building, full of sharp, grey angles, or the bank of the Buriganga, which had once given Dhaka the ambition of calling itself the Venice of the East; and more personal landmarks, the graveyard where my grandfathers were buried, the fancy school I was admitted to when we moved to Gulshan, but I had decided to meet you in Chittagong instead. When I think about it now, it seems unlikely I would have urged you to visit if I had remained in Dhaka, married or not. It was only in this third place that our meeting, and all that followed, was possible.

We stepped into the heavy damp of the morning, pushing through the crowd until we reached the car. I watched you put your bags into the trunk, and you slipped beside me into the hush of the back seat.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘For coming in the end. For not turning around.’ And then, because I didn’t know what else to say, I asked, ‘Did you watch any movies on the plane?’

You pulled a book out of your shoulder bag. Anna Karenina.

I realised, at that moment, that you were always going to come, that you had been waiting, all these months, for my invitation.

The car was held up on the link road out of the airport. You rolled down the window and let the air in, thick and warm. A train, painted a long time ago in ivory and blue, clattered past, passengers standing between the carriages and leaning through the bars on the windows. The car moved and you closed the window.

‘A lot of things happened,’ I said.

‘You got married.’ Your voice was flat.

‘I did. I did.’

The car lurched to a stop again on the turning to Chittagong town. I wanted to sound an apology for rushing into the alliance with Rashid, but if I started apologising I might not be able to stop; I might go on and say sorry for the shabby look of my country, the tacky billboards advertising halal soap and mobile phones and air conditioning, the tangle of the telephone wires that hung between poles on the side of the road, the roads themselves, narrowed by trash and people braiding their edges with their hands out, showing off the empty spaces where their limbs should have been, and the air itself, its smell and texture, heavy with missed chances, everything chipped and messy and never quite beautiful, and I would say sorry for not waiting for you, for not believing in our few days together and assuming it was nothing to you, but if I did that, I would not be able to stop and we would begin and end with nothing but a string of sorrys, and that was precisely why I did not want to be your lover, because everything about my life seemed poor when I looked at it through your eyes.

Instead I sat back in my seat, waiting for the traffic to clear so I could point out some of the landmarks on the way.

As we stopped on the main Chittagong roundabout, I thought about Boils Man, and hoped he wouldn’t show up today. Not because you wouldn’t be able to handle it, the sight of a naked man with small tumours protruding from every inch of his body, but because you would have to see me turn my face away and refuse to look at him, which would tell you too much — everything, really, about my place in this world.

We stopped, the lights changed, horns blaring behind us.

‘Tell me again what happened with your trip to Pakistan,’ you said.

As I recounted the story I felt acutely the distance between the moment I had said goodbye to you in Boston, and this moment, all the things that had crowded into those months coming back to me in a rush. Sitting there in the traffic, I felt that Ambulocetus couldn’t be further away, and when I had been picking at the red sequence in the shale of the Tethys, Cambridge and Shostakovich were only distant memories, and that night when I met you, it was as if my long history with Rashid had never taken place. Every episode of my life seemed to exist in its own articulated space. I wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t started thinking about my adoption, if I hadn’t met you that evening, if Zamzam hadn’t been Didag Baloch’s son. I had always told myself that marrying Rashid was an inevitability, but so much had happened to frame that event, so much before and so much after — Prosperity and Grace and the pulling crew — that it didn’t seem possible that they weren’t all occurring as a result of one another.

On the way home, I thought about my dadu, my father’s mother. Her name was Mehrunessa Bashir and she was born in a village in Trishal, in Mymensingh District, the fourth of seven children. Her father, a munshi, taught her how to read and write, but, though they weren’t poor, no one expected Mehrunessa to remain unmarried past puberty. When she married my grandfather she was thirteen and he was twenty years older, already a practising lawyer. It wasn’t until a decade into their marriage that Mehrunessa showed herself to be an exceptional wife. She demonstrated frugality in the administration of the household expenses, spreading the small sum my grandfather brought home every month to stretch between five sons and the various relations who came to live with them. She oversaw the purchase of a small plot of land in the town and moved the family there so that her boys would not have to grow up in the village, where school ended once help was needed in the fields. A few years later, she insisted they move to the capital, even though they could not afford it at the time, and, for the first few years, when her husband’s clients were few and far between, Mehrunessa found ways to ride out the lean. My grandfather then became well known for a case he fought against a corrupt judge of the Dhaka High Court, becoming the first Bengali lawyer to successfully sue a British lawmaker. The memoir he wrote of that trial, Amar Shikha, was transcribed and typeset by Mehrunessa, who had an eye for typographic detail that her husband lacked. My grandfather died of liver cancer a few months before the war, so he did not witness the destruction and rebirth of the country. He was not there to bury his youngest son, a revolutionary felled by an enemy bullet, his body carried for miles by his fourth son, my father, and buried in an unmarked grave near the village he helped to liberate. He was not there to see the expansion of the family’s fortunes, not there to witness his eldest son become a successful barrister, the house growing to two, then three storeys, and he didn’t see the arrival of the film star Shalaila Mehndi, or the marriage of his other sons and the birth of their children, or the arrival of me from an unknown woman’s arms. That was all Mehrunessa, growing severe in her old age, as if there was work yet to be done, children yet to raise, boys yet to be turned into men. All her life she had brought my grandfather his morning tray and placed it on the table by his bedside so that the smell of simmering tea would wake him up, and she had watered down his dal so that he could afford it at every meal, and she had made sure his shirts were ironed and his children washed and sent to school, and in every way that can be counted, she was ordinary, doing the things that wives do, resolute, undeterred, a woman made entirely of her time and age, and in this simplicity, she was her own life’s magician.

These are the kinds of wives that pre-dated me, Elijah. Invisible, magic-wielding, food-stretching, loyal to the last breath. This is the world you crashed into, not a world with people who behaved exactly as they should — of course they didn’t — but who always exceeded what was expected of them, no matter how small their mandates.

We turned onto the highway and I kept glancing over at you to see if I could discern your mood, whether you were angry, or disappointed, wondering if maybe some part of you had thought I hadn’t gotten married after all, but I knew now that you hadn’t moved on as I’d imagined, that I had betrayed you, and despite all that, here you were, your voice marked by the wound I had inflicted.

I had booked you into a small guest-house near the beach, and I suggested we go directly there in case you wanted to freshen up, but you said you wanted to see the beach first. In the car, I was getting ready to point out the scrapyards on the highway, but by the time we had wound our way out of the city, you had fallen asleep, your head tucked against the bend of your arm, your mouth slightly open.

When we arrived an hour later, I gave you a small nudge. ‘You missed the build-up,’ I said. The car passed through the Prosperity gates, and Grace appeared in her eerily pristine form, all three thousand feet of her, white and regal.

I was nervous as you stepped out of the car, as if I had to prove it was worth your coming all this way. You shielded your eyes against the glare of the sun, taking in the ships in the adjacent lots, some already in their last weeks of cutting, and the workers, scattered and small.

‘This is it,’ I said. Together, we looked at Grace. A few men were on deck, lowering what appeared to be a bathtub to the crew waiting below. The bathtub, fastened with rope, knocked against Grace’s hull as it came down. We watched it hit the sand. The men pulled the ropes away, and then two of them turned it upside down like a canoe and marched it up the beach. They passed us, and I recognised Russel, and called out to him, but he didn’t hear me. In the distance, another large object crested Grace’s deck.

You put your hands behind your head and gazed up at the sky. ‘I don’t know what to say. This place needs a new language.’

‘Deconstruction won’t do?’ I joked. But I was relieved, because you could see it too, the scale of what was happening.

‘No,’ you said. ‘Even Derrida would struggle.’

The tide started coming in and before long the water lapped at our sandals. We agreed we should return later, but you didn’t move for a long time, your eyes going from Grace to me and back again. Then, after a few minutes, we turned together and headed up the beach. ‘My mother said to tell you hello,’ you said.

‘How is your family?’

‘They’re fine. We haven’t seen a lot of each other lately. That’s the thing about big families, no one ever assumes you need company.’

‘When you’re an only child everyone figures you’re lonely, but they can’t do anything about it. No one can be your sister or your brother.’

You told me you had never thought about it that way. You said your brothers were close, that you saw them often, but that you were the only one who had ever wanted to leave the country.

This surprised me. ‘You don’t all share the same restless spirit?’ I asked.

‘They travel,’ you said. ‘But they don’t wish they were somewhere else.’

I had always, I told you, had my adoption to blame on my sense of not belonging. Every time I wanted to do something weird, or if I liked something that my parents didn’t — chocolate, for example, Ammoo hated chocolate — I told myself, my mother would have liked chocolate. Not that she probably ever tasted chocolate.

You told me that biology wasn’t everything, but that it must be hard, not knowing. And I told you I’d never really thought about it till I met you.

It was lunchtime and I invited you to the apartment for something to eat. It was the first time we were alone, and you were careful not to touch me and I was careful not to touch you. I made elaborate moves so that we weren’t in too close proximity to each other. At the dining table I made sure we were across and not beside each other, in case our hands accidentally reached for the same thing and the back of my palm, or a finger, overlapped with the back of your palm or your finger. And yet I thought all the time about what it would be like to hold your hand, to feel the bristles of your cheek against my face. The terror I had felt upon first seeing you at the airport had softened somewhat, but I could still feel it churning away inside me. The more I wanted you the further away I stayed. It wasn’t like before, in Cambridge — I was married now, and there were other people to consider — but I wasn’t guilty. I can’t really explain why, but nothing about it felt wrong, or like I was doing violence to someone else, or that I was breaking a promise I had made. And, anyway, I hadn’t done anything, not yet.

We talked endlessly about the strangeness of the place, its ugliness and beauty, how the effluent had turned the sand dark grey, and I told you about the sound of chanting, like a keening, as the men carried the heavy sheets of steel on their shoulders, and the insults they would hurl at each other in order to make it from the carcass of a ship to the rolling machine without giving up and letting the metal crash to the ground.

As the sun set and the light in the apartment turned yellow, then orange, it became easier to be in your presence, and I felt myself relaxing, laughing with you as you narrated a story about your recent attempt to learn the ukulele. Mo arrived to make our dinner, and the two of you played a card game that went late into the night. I had feared Gabriela might resent your presence, but she took to you immediately, and it was as if you had always been there, as if you had nowhere else to be but with me in that shabby apartment by the sea. After Gabriela and Mo had gone to bed, you pulled the blue blouse out of your bag. ‘I meant to give this to you earlier,’ you said. There was a silk flower on the neckline, and a panel of lighter coloured fabric along the hem. I thanked you, believing it was the most intimate thing anyone had ever given me. I recalled the suitcase full of saris that had arrived from Rashid’s house on the morning of our wedding, the matching shoes and handbags, the six sets of jewellery, each in its own velvet case. It was disloyal of me to compare that experience with this one, but I couldn’t help myself, trying and failing to stop from imagining what it would have been like with you, wedding and gifts and moving in together and sharing a home, copies of Anna Karenina united on a bookshelf.

‘Oh, and the maple syrup,’ you said. ‘Tomorrow I’ll make pancakes.’

It was almost already tomorrow. I could smell the heat of the day approaching. You leaned back on the floor cushions and tucked your feet under you. It was too late now for the guest-house so I suggested you get a few hours’ sleep. I fetched a blanket and draped it over your legs. Your eyes were heavy and you murmured something about how glad you were that you had come, and before I pulled myself towards you, never again to be free, I retreated to my bedroom and tried to sleep.

We spent the next few days waiting for Ali to give us permission to go aboard Grace. The days seemed longer and shorter with you in them; I felt myself doing everything in a hurry and also with a sense of ease, eating meals with you and listening to music on my tiny wireless speaker and watching you make line drawings of Grace. We took long walks along the shore, your skin darkening quickly as we made our way past the half-broken ships in the adjacent lots. Mo followed you around everywhere with an expression of glee on his face, as if he had been reunited with a long-lost friend.

You liked to run in the early mornings, and that was how you met a few of the workers. You became known as ‘Bharmon’, after one of them asked you to tell him what was written on your T-shirt, and not able to pronounce the ‘V’ of ‘Vermont’, he spread the word that this was your name, Bharmon. ‘Bharmon is from America.’ ‘Bharmon can play the instrument in the belly of the ship.’ ‘Bharmon runs all the way across the beach to Patenga.’ Now, when I walked down to the shipyard with you, they gathered around, unafraid of Ali. I don’t know what you talked about, or even how you communicated, but in your mutual hand gestures there was laughter and camaraderie.

They told you stories about the ship that I hadn’t known, for instance, that there had been an ice-skating rink, that three thousand people sat down to dinner every evening and hence there were freezers as big as trucks and pots as big as bathtubs, and that it had all been sold and the only thing remaining was the piano. Nobody wanted it.

Ali telephoned one day to say that one of the buyers was coming to inspect the ship, and they were going to rig a special lift for him, a system of pulleys that would be handled by men from on top and below. We could see the piano, then join Ali and the buyer for lunch. When we arrived at the beach, Ali introduced his guest. ‘Please meet Mr Sakhawat Sakhawat,’ he said with a small bow.

Sakhawat Sakhawat flashed the gold rings on his fingers and shook hands with you. We crowded onto the flat platform and were lifted up along Grace’s hull, the curve of the beach retreating from view, the brackish blue of the Indian Ocean deepening the higher we rose. I noticed little of the scene, however, because your hand was on my elbow and I was aroused by the graze of your knuckle against my rib.

When we reached the top, I held you back and allowed Ali to lead Sakhawat to the staterooms on the top floor. Mo was waiting for us on the promenade deck. He had three kerosene lamps lined up against the railing. I let him lead the way, knowing he would get a thrill from revealing the piano to you. It had been his discovery, after all.

As we made our way across the ship, I noticed a few things missing. All along the deck, the doors had small round gaps in them where the doorknobs used to be. Ali had told me that Harrison Master had asked for a few things from the ship for himself, for a guest-house he needed to furnish on short notice. Perhaps the doorknobs were on that list, or perhaps they were in a hotel in Dhaka somewhere. Grace was already being scattered across the country.

We reached the auditorium and Mo disappeared inside. You held the door open for me and we entered together. There was the navy darkness, and the particular scent of wood and velvet. We held up our lamps. ‘It’s behind the curtain,’ I whispered, but you and Mo were already making your way to the stage. I decided to remain in the audience, choosing a seat in the front row and setting my lamp on the floor. Then I closed my eyes and waited, nervous now in the compressed hush of that big and silent room, and it came, the scrape of the piano stool as you sat down, and the first note, like a question mark.

I realised I had never heard you play, not seriously, and I was glad to be listening without seeing you. When the music began, I knew I had heard the song before, but I could not remember now what it was called. You played softly, the sound muffled by the curtain, and occasionally I heard you stop to press down on one of the notes a few times, testing the sound. I thought I heard you humming along with the song, but I couldn’t be sure.

You played a scale, and then another song. I might have fallen asleep, not because I was tired, but because it was hypnotic and slightly surreal, sitting in the auditorium of a beached ocean liner listening to the sound of a resurrected piano played by the hands of a man who appeared as if from another world. Then you began to sing. Your voice was soft, cloaked in the dark and muffled by the curtain.

All of me

Why not take all of me

Can’t you see

I’m no good without you

It was so quiet I could almost hear the breath that accompanied each word of the song. I matched my breath with your breath, my head light and without a thought.

You took the best

So why not take the rest

Eventually the sound of the notes faded away. I heard the whine of the lid’s hinge, heard the scrape of the stool as you pushed away, heard the curtain part, heard your muffled footsteps coming towards me. You weren’t with Mo and you weren’t holding your lamp. When you sat down beside me, I thought you might say something about the piano, but instead you whispered a story to me about your childhood, something about those two years on the farm, about a rosemary bush your mother had planted outside the kitchen window when you had first moved to that remote part of the country. Sometimes when it rained you leaned out of the window and caught a whiff of that rosemary bush. The house was at the edge of a steep hill, the land falling away from it on three sides, the view of trees and the mountains beyond clear for miles. Then you said, ‘When I started playing that piano, it was like the rosemary bush outside our kitchen window. As far as I can tell, everything about home, everything I can remember, comes from that smell, everything human and amazing and old. I’m so glad I came, Zubaida. Thank you for bringing me. Thank you for showing me this.’

I swallowed away the lump rising in my throat and closed my hand around your hand. I was reminded again of your strangeness, and also of the way you were both more sure of yourself than anyone I had ever known and yet also unmoored, as if you had never managed to find something to attach yourself to. You moved your hand and you were touching my elbow, and then my back. I shifted closer to you, wanting to tell you that, however glad you might be that you had come, you couldn’t possibly be as glad as I was, because, holding your hand now, I was obliterated by feeling.

I wanted to stay in that room forever, the weight and warmth of your hand on my arm. But a moment later I was suddenly claustrophobic, realising we were trapped in a tight, airless bubble, and so I stood up abruptly and led you out and up the stairs, not quite sure where I was heading, following the air and the light until we were back on the promenade deck.

By the time we emerged, the afternoon was in full force, the sun descending brutally, the workers below huddled in the shadow of the ship, seeking a patch of grey among the bright, bright white. You unbuttoned your shirt and your skin shone between the open panels of fabric. I gestured to the men that they should work the pulleys and we floated down as if from a stage, the real world below us in all its ugliness and sorrow.

Something had happened, something I couldn’t name. We walked back up the beach without saying a word. I remembered we were invited to have lunch with Mr Ali. I said maybe I should try and get us out of it.

‘We should probably oblige him,’ you said. But I saw the pulse leaping at your throat.

Ali had laid out a table on the second floor of the Shipsafe office. There were a number of meat and fish dishes, each one topped with a slick puddle of oil. Sakhawat was already seated with a full serving in front of him. Ali piled rice onto our plates and we helped ourselves to the curry. There were no utensils and I saw you making tiny pyramids of rice and placing them carefully into your mouth.

‘Mr Ali, what will happen to the piano?’ you asked.

‘It wasn’t possible to sell it.’ Ali said. ‘No one wanted such a big thing.’

‘What will you do?’ I wondered aloud.

Sakhawat licked the grease from his knuckle. ‘We could give it to one of the shops, see if they can sell it. But it would be very costly to get it out of the ship. There is a chance of damage.’

‘It’s a very precious instrument,’ you said.

Ali motioned for one of his men to clear the plates away. ‘We will do our best,’ he said. The man returned a few moments later with a bowl of water and a bar of soap and we all washed our hands.

‘There was a storm once,’ Sakhawat said, ‘out of season. And the water came in so high it flooded all the ships. There was a whale trapped in one of Haroon’s ships, you remember that, Ali?’

‘A whale?’ I said.

‘It was the cyclone in ’91, a long time ago,’ Ali said. ‘A lot of people died. Strange things washed up on shore. One of the neighbouring shipyards had just bought a cruiser, like Grace, and the thing was trapped in the swimming pool.’

‘What happened to it?’

‘Nothing we could do,’ Ali said. ‘It died a few days later.’

‘People came from all over to see it. It was thrashing around, skin all dried up. Making horrible noises.’ Sakhawat made a gesture with his hands to illustrate the whale’s suffering, pinching his thumb and forefinger together.

I wished Sakhawat and Ali had not told me this story. Sakhawat replaced the gold rings on his stubby fingers and leaned back on the chair with a soft belch. The stranded animal was probably something smaller than a whale, maybe an Irrawaddy dolphin from upstream, or perhaps it was a short-finned Pilot whale. I tried not to imagine the end of its life, the people staring down as it struggled in the shallow water, its blowhole wheezing and squeezing shut. I glanced over at you and found that you were swallowing this story and that it was changing your relationship to this place, making it more terrible, and yet somehow enchanted, a place where people tore ships apart and whales died in swimming pools and tides threw up the trash of the entire world.

That night, you accompanied me to the dormitory for my next set of interviews. The men were happy to see you, shaking your hand and offering you a share of the cigarette they were passing around. You let them light it for you and you took a drag and then you sat among them on their bunks instead of beside Gabriela and me. We set up our equipment and the light from Gabriela’s camera illuminated the room.

‘It’s my turn,’ Mo said.

I was surprised. Mo had avoided all of my questions, and Gabriela’s, about his childhood, only informing us that his parents were dead and that he had grown up on the beach. ‘Tell us,’ I said. ‘Start with where you were born.’

‘Story is not about me.’

‘It’s about his girlfriend!’ Belal said, snapping his fingers.

‘You have a girlfriend?’ I asked. I looked over at you and you kept your gaze steady on Mo. Mo didn’t answer yes or no to the question about his girlfriend, he just said, ‘Her name is Shona. She lives with a man.’

‘What kind of man?’

‘A bad man.’

‘Can you tell us more?’

‘Madam sold her. Now she has to live with the man. He beats her, I saw the cut on her face.’ He drew a finger across his cheek.

‘He’s lying,’ Belal said.

‘He’s always making up stories,’ another of the crew said.

Mo shook his head. ‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘I want to kill him.’ He stood up, made a stabbing gesture. He stood over Belal and pulled at the loose collar of his singlet. ‘I want him to be dead.’ We watched as he made his way from one of the men to the next. ‘Like this!’ he said, his hand wrapped around an imaginary knife, going up, going down.

Once, when I had asked Ali how Mo had come to live on the beach, he said simply that there were worse fates for a boy, and I assumed that meant Ali considered himself to have rescued Mo from somewhere else.

‘Sit down, Mo,’ I said. ‘Tell us about your friend.’

‘Her mother died and left her with the madam.’

‘Did you know your mother?’ I asked.

He stopped, his hand in mid-air. ‘My mother was a whore.’

‘Don’t insult your mother,’ someone said.

‘No one believes anything that comes out of your mouth,’ another one said. ‘Remember that time he claimed his father was an English captain? What, no English ever came to claim him.’

A murmur travelled around the room. Mo stood in the middle of the circle, his hand still clenching the imaginary knife. ‘I never lie,’ he said, raising the pitch of his voice. ‘I never lie!’

At that moment, you stood up, walked over to Mo, picked him up, and carried him out of the room. Gabriela emerged from behind her camera. She wiped her face. ‘I can’t take it any more,’ she said, pulling the camera off the stand. ‘This place is hell.’

I tried to start up the conversation again, but no one wanted to talk, and after a few minutes I shut off my tape recorder and followed you out to the beach. You and Mo were sitting on a small raised sandbank and staring out at Grace, not saying anything. Gabriela and I joined you. The sand was cool and packed tight beneath us. We watched the sparks from the night crew’s blowtorches, listened to the waves breaking and retreating. Finally, I suggested we go home. It was late. You stood up, brushing the sand from your trousers, but Mo seemed reluctant to move. ‘We’ll join you later,’ Gabriela said, taking Mo’s hand, and so we left them together and made our way to the apartment.

When we got home you disappeared into the bathroom. By the time you emerged, I had heated some rice and dal on the stove and brought everything to the table. Your cheeks and your chin were pale and shining. ‘You shaved,’ I said. ‘Why?’

You held both of my hands and directed me to the sofa. ‘Come, sit with me,’ you said. Your face appeared naked before me. I could see everything when you swallowed, the motion of your jaw and your neck and your Adam’s apple. I was amazed by your mouth, which was beautifully pink. You leaned towards me and I closed my eyes, waiting for the touch of your lips, anticipating the heat of your breath floating over my face, but you didn’t kiss me, you just pressed the side of your face against the side of my face. The smell of soap was overpowering. I opened my eyes and saw over your shoulder to the rough metal bars on the windows, the frayed paint on the shutters, the rusted latches. Now your chin was resting on my shoulder, and my chin was resting on your shoulder. Your hair was soft against my mouth. I opened my mouth and took a strand between my teeth. My mouth filled with saliva. ‘Elijah,’ I said. ‘I’m in love with you.’

Later, after I drove you from the beach, after everything had ended so terribly between us, I thought back to that night and remembered everything about the way you held me, and kissed me, and fluted your breath across my fingers, that you traced the line of my jaw with your hand, that your hair swung down onto my skin and touched me before your mouth touched me. I remembered the words we said to each other. Telling you there was nothing in the world except that I loved you. I remembered laughing. I remembered the weight of your palms on my palms. I didn’t remember speaking. I didn’t remember being sad. I remembered crying. When you cried, I licked the salt from your chin. I remembered the edge of your thumbnail, inadequately trimmed, scraping a tender patch on the inside of my thigh. I remembered the inside of my thigh. Hello, inside of my thigh. Hello, Zubaida, Putul, Abbasid princess, orphan, provenance unknown. Hello Mrs Rashid, meet the inside of your thigh, meet your mate, this man, only this man, your only mate in the world, your only relation, because you know no one whose blood matches your blood, well, here is a man whose presence obliterates the need for blood, because you are made of the same things, you are nothing and everything alike, because your taste in his mouth is all the closeness you will ever need, the bed is hard beneath your bodies, the bed of a person who has never left this country, the smell of this country is the smell of the sun on the paddy, were your parents farmers or beggars and were there children after you, sons, maybe, that they kept? You don’t know and you don’t care. You want to find your parents. You want to say sorry to your parents. You want to say sorry to yourself, and to this man, because you loved him from the first moment that you met, but you turned away from this certainty and sank your hopes into history, and now there is nothing except holding him, and kissing him, and fluting your breath across his fingers.

Afterwards, I said, ‘Tell me what to do.’

You turned your mouth towards my ear and spoke so softly I could hardly hear you. ‘I can’t.’

‘Please, love me.’

‘I love you desperately.’

‘Then tell me.’

‘I’m not going to do that, Putul.’

I leaned back and examined your face. There was so much more of you, the skin around your mouth clear so I could see the tiny green flecks where your beard used to be.

‘Why not?’

‘Because it has to be you.’

I closed my eyes again and pressed my mouth against you. You were holding me now, and stroking my hair, and telling me I was the love of your life, and my blood burned when I heard your words, burned under my cheek where I felt your face against mine, and on my shoulder that had housed your chin, and where you had whispered, that place between my neck and my ear, that was scorched too.

Because I was in love with you, I absolved myself of the feeling of wrongdoing, even though I knew I was betraying Rashid with every hammer of my pulse. Because I was in love with you, I told myself things would work themselves out. Or perhaps I didn’t think about it at all, because we created a closed world between us, and there was no one else in that world, not even our other selves who might have raised a finger of doubt.

We couldn’t bear to be apart. We got up to eat and change the music on my laptop. Mo left things for us on the dining-room table, and when he came back they were eaten and there would be some money left for him to go shopping. ‘Let’s go somewhere,’ you said. ‘Okay, let’s go. Let’s go to the Hill Tracts.’ We would hire a car. You need permission to go to the Hill Tracts, Bilal at the Shipsafe office said.

I telephoned Rashid. ‘You sound happy,’ he said. I told him yes, I was. I was eager to get off the phone, but he told me a long story about dinner with his Chinese partners. I would see him in a few weeks, when he was back from Shanghai. ‘Za-jian,’ I said, remembering the greeting from my undergraduate Mandarin class, feeling clever and immortal and like I was on top of the world.

What will you do? You, the other, didn’t ask. Instead, you sent me messages, sometimes from the other room, or from the beach where you were running. Black is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair. And: Feeling Good. And: All the Things You Are. I had trouble replying. Once, I wrote: I Wish I Knew What It Is to Be Free.

I told Bilal I needed a few days off. We went to Foy’s Lake and convinced one of the boatmen to remain on shore while you rowed. ‘I was on the crew team in college,’ you said. ‘What, a hippy like you?’ But you steered the boat expertly, keeping your eyes trained on me as you moved your arms in large, even circles. We stopped in front of a set of stone steps that led out of the lake and into the forest beyond. ‘Shall we get out?’ ‘Of course.’ The dangers of the jungle were nothing against the force of our bond. After a few minutes the trees closed behind us and you kissed me while mosquitoes hummed in my ear. I didn’t care, even this sounded to me like music. ‘Let’s get out of town. We’ll pretend we’re married. Let’s get married.’ I looked down at my wedding ring.

After a week, Gabriela insisted I continue with some of the work we had begun, so I left you at the apartment with Mo while I collated my interviews and detailed the ongoing destruction of Grace. On one or two evenings Mo and I had our meetings in the dormitory with the pulling crew. At night, you and I behaved as if we were free to do whatever we liked, free to kiss in public or marry each other or just do what people did these days, fall out as easily as we had fallen in. We said nothing to each other about when we would meet again, or under what circumstances, but our fantasies carried us out of Prosperity, out of Chittagong and Bangladesh and out of this hemmed-in moment. You insisted on making no plea to me about Rashid. You would say things to me like ‘If you think these pancakes are good, you should sample the ones my father makes. When you come to Vermont, you can try them.’ Or ‘Let’s go to Paris.’ Or ‘Should we have three children, or four?’ And ‘What do you think about a bathtub at the foot of our bed?’ Instead of ‘Why don’t you leave your husband and marry me?’ When I asked, you just repeated what you had said to me that first night, that I had to decide, that everything was up to me. You said I would have to have the will. This terrified me, and I didn’t bring it up again.

There were things about you that I noted would annoy me later. Your feet smelled vinegary. There were towels draped over the backs of chairs and glasses half full of water on the floor by the bed. You would get engrossed in whatever you were reading, or listening to, or you would plug in your headphones and run your fingers along the chipped edge of the dining table, and I would suddenly cease to exist, and because I had been in your orbit just moments ago, this would feel like a slight, and I would be jealous of your book, your headphones, the chipped edge of the dining table. After we undressed, out of habit I reached over to play some music, and you stopped me. Everything was embarrassing to me and nothing to you. You didn’t care if Gabriela could hear us, or if I spied you from an unattractive angle. There was no music to float between us, caulking an awkward moment. And you said things. Out loud. Not loving, tender things, but particular things about the particular act and my particular body and its parts.

There had been no sex education in my life. They didn’t teach us at school, and my mother was prudish on the matter. I thought sex was pornography. Or the other thing, whispering and moaning while the slap and shuffle of bodies was muted by the blanket pulled over your head. Actually, it was the saddest thing in the world. Afterwards, I thought I would die.

Whatever I’d been doing before couldn’t be called sex any more. Or maybe what you and I were doing couldn’t be called sex — I wasn’t experienced enough to know the difference. All the same, things happened. Unbuttoning. The graze of cheeks, one bristly, one smooth. Tongues. Orgasms. But it wasn’t anything like the familiar motions I had made before. It was whatever made all the blood rush to the lower half of my body, whatever made me dream of your mouth, whatever made me want to say the word ‘pussy’, whatever put the scent of you in my head like a song I can’t shake when I am trying to devise a taxonomy for whale bones, whatever that is. Call it love. Call it insanity. Call it coming home for the first time. Call it my mother, living in my blood. I am yours and you are mine. Call it the beginning of the world. The sex was everything and it was nothing, only a small fragment of the whole, magnificent truth of it.

When the weekend came around again we took a bus to Noakhali, crossing the Brahmaputra to Bhola, then on to Khulna, where we found a boat bound for the Sundarbans. It did not occur to me until the moment we boarded that I might be recognised, but there were only tourists: a group of Korean men who worked in a glass factory in Chittagong, an elderly German couple, a Swedish diplomat and his family.

You paid attention to every small thing about me, every scar, every pucker of my skin. We slept together in the lower bunk of the tiny cabin and I felt you breathing into my ear all night and when one of us wanted to turn around we would both have to turn, because the bed was so narrow. You held me and stroked my hair and sometimes, after we made love, you would cry softly into my shoulder. When the boat stopped at the mouth of the Bay of Bengal, we were ferried down a tributary and led through a patch of trees to a beach with black sand. I rolled up my trousers and waded into the water. You tore off your shirt and disappeared underwater. I thought almost constantly of your death, that if you were in a plane crash or if you had a heart attack on your way home, no one would think to tell me. I would have been the closest person in the world to you, but no one would have known it. You repeated this to me every day. You said, ‘You’re the closest person in the world to me.’

We came back from the Sundarbans with plastic bottles of forest honey, promising to write to the German couple. ‘Let’s get an email address,’ you said. ‘That way we can write to people together. As one.’

Despite all of this, you were a stranger to me. When I asked you what the future held, your answers were baffling. You were still not sure if you wanted to return to graduate school. You said you wanted to make a collage replica of the Liberty Bell. A sculpture out of captured air from every country in the world. You wanted to write a piece of music that would sound the same whether you played it forwards or backwards. You wanted to sing a different song to me every morning when I woke up, all beginning with the sentence ‘Your mouth smells like honey.’ You wanted to play the piano for forty-eight hours straight. You wanted to have twelve children and name them after jazz musicians. You wanted to learn Bangla and watch the films of Satyajit Ray in their original language. You wanted to crowdstitch a piece of cloth that went all the way around the world. Your intensity was contagious, and when I was with you I was brighter and smarter and everything about the world was terrifying, because it was all possible, and this made the prospect of parting with you seem violent, and also a little comforting, because who could live like that all of the time, sick with wanting, everything but the two of us dull and irrelevant?

On the bus back from Khulna, I felt a tiredness in my legs, the last two weeks coming back to me in slow motion. Days in bed. The mangrove, the guides pointing out Orcaella brevirostris, the pink river dolphins that swam beside the boat, and the crocodile we saw sunning itself on the bank of a tributary. You had a habit of waking up early, though through silent agreement you were always back in bed before I got up. ‘I went for a run,’ you would say, or ‘I was meditating.’ The hair on the back of my head was matted and tangled. You have a love dreadlock, you said, carefully pulling out the knots with a comb and a small dish of coconut oil.

You frequently mentioned the piano. You believed it was built in a factory in Queens between the two world wars — the best Steinway years, in your opinion; it had a warm, milky tone you had never heard before. Wasn’t there some way we could get the piano out of Grace to restore it properly? With a lot of care, the instrument could be returned to its original sound, the one it was meant to produce, a timbre that contained all of its history, its travels across continents and decades, enduring the tides of oceans and time.

I asked you why you loved me and you said love’s arguments are always teleological. You love someone because you already love them. You love their particular qualities, because you love them in the wholeness of their being. And because you love them in the wholeness of their being, you love the things about them that wound you.

You quoted Rumi: ‘The wound is where the light enters you.’

‘This was a more complicated answer than I bought,’ I said. ‘I was going for the five-dollar answer.’

‘The five-dollar answer is: I don’t know. But I love you despite, perhaps because, you break my heart.’

‘If you had a choice, perhaps you would choose to love another person. A better person.’

‘Maybe.’

One day, I suggested I might be able to meet you in Cambridge in the fall. I could go back and talk to my adviser, figure out if there were some way to write up the Ambulocetus data without access to the fossil itself. We were in the middle of a card game. You threw the cards on the table and I thought it meant the game was over and you had won, but instead you went into the bedroom and slammed the door. When I followed, I found you inside the mosquito net with the sheet pulled over your face.

‘What’s going on?’

‘Get out,’ you said.

‘I haven’t done anything,’ I said. I knew, as the day of your departure approached, that it was getting harder for you. ‘But I’m sorry anyway.’

You dragged the sheet away and sat up. ‘What did you think was going to happen when you made me come?’

‘I don’t know.’ I had taken off my wedding ring and stuffed it into the back of my underwear drawer, but I often caught you glancing at the pale double band of skin that marked where they had been. I don’t know what I thought was going to happen. We didn’t utter the word ‘divorce’. The faces of my parents and Rashid and Dolly and Naveed were all blank, everyone a ghost except you. ‘I just wanted to see you, to be near you.’

‘Don’t ruin it,’ you said.

‘How am I ruining it?’

‘I’m not having an affair with you.’

‘What do you think this is?’

‘This can’t be what we’re doing, Zubaida.’ Your lips were drawn tight around your mouth, and I could tell you were trying to keep from shouting at me. ‘It has to be better than that.’

‘You never propose an alternative. You never say, “Come to Cambridge, we’ll live together on Prospect Street, I’ll play the piano at Ryles, you can teach, we’ll buy brownie mix at Trader Joe’s.” Why don’t you do that? Paint a picture, Elijah. Tell me what it’s going to be like.’

I hadn’t known, until that moment, how much I had resented your not doing all that work for me — making it real, making it comfortable. I was raising my voice now, and for a minute, as you moved inside the mosquito net, I thought you might climb out of there and leave the room and run away from me, but you pounded your fist against the pillow so hard that the whole room seemed to shake, so I went in after you and lay down on top of you while you sobbed, my hands braided through your hair.

We argued again the next day, about Mo. I had seen the way his eyes followed you around the room, the way he mouthed words after you had said them. He arrived to make lunch for us and there was something about the way he held himself that seemed defeated, as if he had just failed an exam or lost his favourite trinket — I knew he liked to hoard things he found on the ships, that he had a collection of tiny objects, a brass compass, the cap of an expensive pen, the broken clasp of a necklace — so I asked if I could help him prepare the food. When he hesitated, I confessed I was a terrible cook, and he relented then and gave me some instructions, showing me how to cut the okra diagonally while he peeled a small pumpkin.

We worked together in silence for a while. Then Mo said, ‘Will you and Bharmon get married soon?’

His delicate elbows were resting against the sink. I said: ‘In foreign, people don’t marry so quickly.’

‘In Desh they do.’

‘You want to get married someday?’

He blushed. He had recently shaved his head, and I saw the colour rising up around his neck and his small, pointed ears. ‘As soon as I can marry her, I will,’ he said. I asked him to tell me who, but he refused. He passed me a bigger knife. ‘Apa, now cut the begun,’ he said, passing me an eggplant. Then he squatted in front of the black stone pestle and began crushing an onion. As I began working on the eggplant, he said, ‘You lived in bidesh?’

‘For a long time, yes. I was a student in America.’

He finished the onion and started on another, passing the heavy black rolling pin over it and pulling it back towards himself, back and forth, till it disintegrated into a pale lilac mush. His eyes watered, and he moved his head so he could brush his face against his shirt. ‘I want to go there,’ he said. ‘Do you think Bharmon will take me?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘He said he loved my cooking.’

I started to understand something. I left the eggplant and crouched beside him. ‘I don’t think so,’ I said, noticing how small his arms were compared with the rolling pin, how narrow his feet as they rested against the stone. ‘It’s very difficult to take people to foreign.’

‘He called me “brother”.’

I wanted to tell him that I knew the feeling exactly, the feeling of being at the centre of your world, that your hunger seemed insatiable and particular, that I too was in its thrall, and also afraid of where it would lead me.

Mo was crying openly now, and I went back to my eggplant to give him a moment of privacy. He leaned forward on the stone, pulverising one onion after another. Then he scooped everything into a bowl and lit the stove, working quickly, not bothering to wipe his face.

I wondered what I might offer Mo at this moment, something to make up for having taken away his trip to America. ‘Do you know reading, Mo?’ I asked. He stopped stirring and turned around to face me.

‘No.’

‘You never went to school?’

‘No schools around here.’

‘I’ll teach you,’ I said. ‘We’ll start tonight.’

He started to cry again. I felt the urge to hug him, but I sensed for some reason that this would not be what he wanted, so I just kept my eyes on him as he finished the cooking and put the curries into bowls and set the table.

The food was very spicy and I could hardly eat it, but you didn’t seem to notice, crowding the dishes onto your plate. I wasn’t hungry anyway. Mo came around and poured water into our glasses. When you thanked him, he slipped into the kitchen without replying. ‘Is there something wrong with Mo?’ you asked.

‘He thought you were taking him to America.’

‘Really? Oh.’ You were getting good at eating with your fingers, mixing, as I had instructed you, each dish with a little rice.

‘What did you say to him?’

‘Nothing. I mean, nothing intentional. But maybe I should’ve been more careful.’ You licked the tips of your fingers. ‘I could, you know.’

‘You could what?’

‘I could take him with me.’

It was just like an American. You had probably never lined up outside an embassy, wondering whether your visa application would be rejected, never listened to your friends plotting the various ways they could get out of the country for good, never had that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach when you produced your green leather passport to an immigration official at a foreign airport.

‘You’d have to adopt him or something.’

‘I know.’

I took a long sip of water. ‘No, you don’t. You don’t know anything.’

You looked down at your empty plate. ‘If you’re trying to tell me I’m ignorant about what it’s like to come from here, you’re right. But don’t doubt my intentions.’

‘You make everything sound so easy when it’s not.’

‘Sometimes we think things are difficult — impossible — but we just have to do them.’

Of course you were talking about me. But how could you know whether it would be easy or hard when no one had ever had any expectations of you, when your parents didn’t mind if you dropped out of graduate school or never had a career or married some strange girl you met at a concert? ‘You don’t know anything about me,’ I said. ‘Not the first thing.’

‘You have more will than you give yourself credit for.’

‘Because I’m a little orphan girl who made her way into the light?’ And this, of course, was my way of telling you what I was really afraid of — not the disapprobation of Rashid or Dolly or Bulbul, but that I would lose my parents, the family I had neither earned nor deserved, everything, really, that my life was based on. But I didn’t say this out loud, I just assumed you knew, and later when there came to be nothing but a thick silence between us, I wished I had made myself clearer. I wished I had told you that I had lived my life in fear that they would somehow take me back to where I was from, return me, that though I’d been loved and cherished by them my whole life, I had never been able to surrender the suspicion that they might, someday, change their minds.

I found you awake in the middle of the night. ‘I can’t sleep,’ you said. ‘You married him. Why did you do that?’

‘Rashid and I were practically married anyway.’

The moon was behind you and I saw the outline of your face but not the expression on it. ‘Fuck you.’

I had never heard you say that word in an angry way, only a loving one.

‘I had a whole life before you, Elijah.’

‘You broke my heart. Back there in Cambridge. I won’t let you do it again.’

‘How am I doing it now?’

‘I shouldn’t have come,’ you said. ‘And we should never have taken it this far.

My instinct was to argue that I hadn’t cheated on you; we had never promised each other anything: my engagement to Rashid pre-dated whatever it was that had happened between us, and that if anyone had a right to accuse me of betrayal, it was him. But that wouldn’t have been entirely honest of me. Of course we had made promises. That day together in Cambridge, walking along Mass Ave, the Glass Flowers, your grandmother’s funeral — it was all one long preamble to a pact. That was why I had vowed to remake myself in Dera Bugti, why I had waited with my heart in my stomach for every message you sent me, why I had taken it so badly when Zamzam was arrested and the dig was cancelled. It was because I knew, from the first note the pianist played after the intermission, that you would become the promise that overcame all my other commitments. I had cheated on you by getting married, and now I had to break everything apart in order to remedy that. I threw my arms around you and buried my head in your neck, your piney scent still lingering on your skin though it was tamped down by the sea, the damp heat of early summer, and I repeated, again and again, how sorry I was to you, meaning also that I was sorry to myself, to the whole enterprise of our togetherness. But there was only one thing I could say that would make it right. ‘I’ll do it,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell him. As soon as he’s back from China, I’ll tell him everything.’

Some part of you didn’t believe me, I know that, but the rest of you wanted to so badly that you accepted my promise and allowed yourself to return my embrace, and for that moment, we were fully together, neither one of us the guilty, neither one of us the wounded.