The Bones of Grace

Looking for Mother

You will, of course, have remembered all of this yourself. But I write it to you now so that you know that it is burned onto my memory, every moment, every word of it. And if, by chance, your regard for me has sunk so low that you have pushed all thoughts of me out of your mind, that you have forced yourself to forget, I am here to remind you. We were in love. We were real. There were witnesses, and I am one of them.

I am at Bettina’s house for Christmas. It’s a modest townhouse in Astoria with a tiny front lawn and neighbours who have known the family since they first moved in four decades ago. From the little guest-room on the top floor, I can smell the malty flavour of the turkey and the bacon that is draped across its breast. Bettina’s mother tells me I need to eat, and I am reassured by this echo of mother talk, the same words I hear from Ammoo and Bashonti when I am at home in Dhaka.

My father lived in New York once. He moved here after the war and drove a taxi and shared a room above a restaurant in Jackson Heights with a Bangladeshi man named Asif who told him never to take a fare above 116th Street. ‘Black people are all criminals,’ he said. My father had been in a war, and this made him unable to take such statements seriously. He soon befriended George, who also drove a cab and sometimes ordered eggs at the counter of the diner where my father picked up his morning coffee (an acquired taste, this, but one he had come to love). George had black and grey dreadlocks down to his waist and wore a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. He lived in Flatbush, in a house he shared with a dozen or so other people. They had a dish rota and read aloud to one another every evening after dinner, which they cooked using vegetables they grew in the back garden. When my father visited, a young woman answered the door and said ‘Namaste’ with her hands folded, and my father was going to explain to her that in his part of South Asia they didn’t say ‘Namaste’ but ‘As-salaam walaikum’, but then he realised, when the doorbell rang again and she greeted another person, this time a young man in a beard, that she used this word to greet anyone, not just someone who looked like he knew what it meant, and he couldn’t decide whether this lack of specificity was good or bad. Later, he read a few stanzas of Nazrul’s Bidrohi to the assembled group, which included an assortment of people who could be loosely classified as hippies.

I am the rising, I am the fall,

I am consciousness in the unconscious soul …

I am the rebel eternal,

I raise my head beyond this world …

Afterwards several people came and hugged my father. This was the first time since he had arrived in America that he had been touched with such affection. The embrace made him cry, because he had never mourned his brother, who had died before his eyes on the battlefield. He considered leaving the apartment in Queens, the smell of cigarettes and homesickness and people wearing too many layers in November. But that night, when he went home, he heard Bangla in the corridors of the building, and he knew he had to stay, so he settled for spending weekends with George, listening to Joni Mitchell on the reel-to-reel, planting a banana tree in the sunny part of the garden. Slowly, the wound of his brother’s death began to heal. He wrote long letters to his mother, composed while stuck in rush-hour traffic, taught the hippies to play cricket, and even brought his roommate, Asif, to the commune, where he sat uncomfortably on the edge of a patchouli-scented sofa and listened while the group chanted ‘Om.’ By now, my father had been in America for four years, and his visa was about to expire. He considered going home, but he was too ashamed to admit that he had done nothing but drive a taxi the entire time he had been in New York. His brother had set up a successful brick-making factory on the banks of the Buriganga, and he knew he would get roped into joining him if he went home without a purpose. He brought the problem to his few acquaintances. George told him to consider the political implications of choosing to participate in the military-industrial complex by remaining in New York. His landlord, the owner of the restaurant downstairs, offered him a share in the new branch he was planning to open in Alphabet City, his first in Manhattan. It was Asif who suggested to my father that, if he wanted to extend his time in America and take advantage of the opportunities in the land of opportunity — which he had not yet begun to do on account of his planting things and teaching people the correct way to bowl a cricket ball — the easiest thing for him to do would be to get married. There were networks for such things, people who knew people who knew people. But my father did not want an anonymous match. He gave himself three weeks to fall in love. He walked up and down the streets and tried to look into the hearts of the women he passed. He glimpsed into the rearview mirror at his customers. He glanced to the left and right of himself on the counter at the diner. But there was no one. No one would look my father in the eye. At the commune, the Namaste girl offered to marry him, and he refused politely. Finally, George introduced him to a friend, a rich Uptown girl who wanted to say fuck you to her parents. They got married in the back yard of the commune, flanked by the banana tree and the upright vines of tomatoes without a single relation on either side. Later, after my father decided he wanted to return to Bangladesh after all, his memories of the war now tamed, he was not saddened by the divorce, or by the letting go of his beloved taxi, or by moving out of the apartment he shared with Asif, but by George, who cried and said, ‘Man, you are a strange kind of people,’ and gave him a copy of Another Country to take with him on the long journey home.

Does this explain my behaviour? No. I did not live above a restaurant in Jackson Heights. I did not drive people around in a taxi and wait tables and save every bit of money I earned. My father erased his history behind him and made everything in my life easy. But, when I thought about it, this story gave me permission to make excuses to myself: I was not the only one who had married to solve a problem.

You wanted to play the piano one last time. ‘Can you take me up on the ship again?’ you asked Mo.

We went to the beach together. Grace was starting to look battered. Her hull had been breached; just that morning, the cutters had sliced off a rectangular section of her starboard side. There was no way Ali would allow us on board now. You and Mo made plans to sneak in. Mo described the exact route — he had taken it many times when scavenging on Grace. Not for the first time I realised Mo had a life beyond our gaze, that I should work harder to find out which of his stories were true and which were made up. But like so much else in my life, it didn’t seem urgent. All I could think about was you, and thinking about you was also thinking of myself, of what I would do with you, and when I look back I think of it as a selfish time, a time when I put myself at the centre of the universe, and perhaps that is what love is, a moment of abnegation as well as a moment of greed, a person at once invisible and fully present to the rest of their lives.

Because one side of Grace’s hull was now cut away, we did not have to be pulleyed up to the deck in order to board her. We followed Mo to a rope ladder that had been hung out of one of the lower elevations of the ship, and once we had climbed on board we followed a complicated route through the remaining corridors and stairways, till finally we crossed what looked like a bridge, but must have been a gangway, into a section that I could recognise as the level that had housed the auditorium. Our voices echoed against the steel, our footsteps clanging like bells. The door to the auditorium was gone — now it was just a hole cut out of the shell of the ship. The chairs had been pulled up, the carpets stripped away. The shape of the proscenium arch survived, but not the wood that had framed it. The curtains were gone, but the stage remained, with the piano legs still fixed onto its surface, as if it had survived a bombing, black and gleaming and the only flash of shine remaining on this canvas of rust.

The piano stool had disappeared so you played standing up, leaning over the keys with your arms outstretched. I heard the familiar notes, the scale rising and rising. Variation 13. Little twists, an error here and there, places where you paused — it didn’t come naturally to you, Bach in the hands of a jazz pianist — but it was beautiful imperfection. Mo stood beside me and I slipped my arm around his shoulders, the music and the dark giving us permission to touch as if we were brother and sister, equal to each other in our love for you.

Even to my untrained ear, I could tell the piano did not sound as it should. In that way, I thought, it was very much like you and me. Every day that passed, we were exposed a little further to the elements, every day we became a bit more fragile, showing how easily we might be destroyed. How much we needed to be saved.

On the day of your departure we looked at the photographs we had taken together. There was an image of you leaning against the knotted roots of Heritiera fomes, the Sundri tree. The dark blue light of the forest cast a deep melancholy on your features, your usually bright eyes half closed, your lips pressed together without a smile. There were happier poses, you holding the oars at Foy’s Lake, you and Mo making sand angels on the beach, you and me up close, just an arm’s length from the camera, that first time we boarded Grace, but that one was my favourite because you were offering to leave a little piece of you in the frame, a glimpse into your darkest fears.

The driver was coming to pick us up at three o’clock. I was going to take you to the airport and then I was going to come back and do one last interview with the workers. Then I was going to go home, wait for Rashid, and tell him I was leaving him. I looked at the time, willing the hour to go by quickly so our goodbye could be over. We got into bed and made love. Afterwards, you covered my face with the palm of your hand. I closed my eyes and thought about what it would be like if I was going with you, packing my suitcase now and saying goodbye to everyone at Prosperity. Telling my parents. I felt a surge of anger at you for not pressuring me to come away now, for leaving it up to me to decide when and how I was going to break with my life.

We got up and started clearing up the last bits of your packing when it happened. I had wrapped the plastic bottle of honey in a bag and sealed it with tape, and I was leaning over your bag and slipping the honey into the side pocket when we heard a knock on the door. Mo went to answer it, and there, on the other side of the threshold, was Rashid.

He did not appear surprised. He walked right up to you and shook your hand, as if he had expected to happen upon his wife packing another man’s suitcase. I felt my legs giving way under me, so I walked over to the window and leaned against the wall and watched the two of you introducing yourselves. ‘I’m Elijah,’ you said, your face lacking a single shred of remorse, and Rashid said, ‘You must be a friend of Zubaida.’ He may have even have said something like ‘Welcome to Bangladesh’, though I can’t recall the exact words because a roaring began in my ears and I was afraid if I opened my mouth I might have to shout in order to drown it out.

I try and think of how a better person would have reacted. A better person would have taken the moment as an opportunity to bring everything out in the open — after all, if I had really meant what I’d said, if I was really going to leave Rashid, what better time than now? A better person would have told the whole story, in calm, unambiguous terms. A better person would have marked out her loyalties — not only to you, the man I was now in love with, but also to herself. But I was not that person, not even in the better light of your presence.

The only sign that Rashid had noticed anything at all was in the slight force of his breath and the way he was lifting up various things and putting them down again, like the jar of pickles on the dining table or the camera Gabriela had left on the bookshelf. I finally found my tongue and stammered something about you coming to visit. You were waiting, I know, for me to say something truthful to Rashid, but I knew from the moment I saw him that I would not. He knew it too. We stood around awkwardly while you both waited for me to act, to set the terms for the conversation we were about to have. I was still holding the bottle of honey, and I walked over to you, Elijah, and placed it in your outstretched hand. ‘Don’t forget this,’ I said. And then I asked Rashid about China, and Rashid said it was a good trip, that it had ended early, that the car was waiting downstairs and if I was ready we could leave straight away. ‘The traffic gets bad in the evenings,’ he said to you, as if you too were planning to drive to the other side of town and spend the night in a frangipani-scented villa on the side of a hill.

‘I met Elijah at Harvard,’ I said to no one in particular.

‘Yes, I assumed that,’ I heard Rashid reply, though my eyes were on you, your back bent over the suitcase, your posture so terribly, terribly sad. It was starting to dawn on you now that I was not going to tell Rashid anything, that I was going to go home and leave you there at the apartment. I noticed Mo hanging around and I was afraid he would say something to give us away, so, with a wave of my hand, I motioned for him to leave the room. It was the sort of shooing gesture I had often seen Dolly make to her servants, and to this day, of all the things I am ashamed of, my gesture to him in that instant is what I regret the most.

You went into the kitchen and I heard you talking to Mo. Then you both came out and shook hands with each other. Rashid and I stood and watched. You slipped a folded-up note into the front pocket of Mo’s shirt. He wrapped his arms around your waist and you had to peel him off. We heard his bare feet on the steps, the movements of a wounded animal.

‘You can collect your things later,’ Rashid said, and I nodded mutely, and turned towards the door and walked through.

And as we parted, Elijah, right there in front of my husband, do you know what I was thinking? Not that I would regret, the moment I left the apartment, the way I trashed everything that had passed between us in the last weeks, not my treatment of Mo, not abandoning you without even a proper goodbye, not the bland expression I gave you as the last image of my face, not the way I allowed Rashid to circle my waist with his arm — no, none of that. All I could think about, as we descended the stairs and stepped into the air-conditioned car, was that if only Rashid had arrived a few hours later, I could have spared him the sight of me gazing at you as if I had just been born, and everything could have gone back to the way it was, and I would have had nothing to explain, no story to tell, no guilt weighing me down like stones around my ankles.

Anna said to Vronsky: Don’t you understand that from the day I loved you everything has changed for me? It did for me, too, Elijah. But not enough. Everything did not change enough, not enough for me to have the courage to tell the truth in the moment that the truth demanded, not enough for me to stand by you and leave behind all the unanswered questions of my life. Too much remained the same. Don’t read this and forgive me — I know you won’t — don’t forgive me yet. There is so much more to the story, you will see; for now, I will only tell you this: I wanted desperately to be the person who would upend everything and thrust myself into the unknown, but the future was not the only thing that was unknown to me, and because I was already unmoored, I could not cut the threads that held me in place. Not yet.

In the days that followed, I was a puppet. He instructed me to eat chicken soup, so I did. Told me I should stop taking walks around the estate with Joshim because the daytime mosquitoes might give me dengue fever, so I spent the mornings inside. He drove us to Patenga, where we dipped our feet in the sea and listened to the sound of gulls and peanut shells cracking beneath our feet. He was patient, solicitous, as if he had found me in the throes of a terrible illness. But at night he kept to his side of the bed and never touched me, not even the barest graze of his knuckle against my skin.

I couldn’t sleep. My body was cold and I caught a whiff of you in the crook of my elbow, as if my arm had brushed a dark and very private part of you. I didn’t shower, afraid the smell would disappear. I lay awake at night, trying to cover over the wound, and every morning, as the day hit my eyes, it would open up like a flower as I remembered everything, the way the light poured through the windows and pooled around our feet that afternoon, and the grate in my voice as I dismissed Mo, and the streaks of dark in the cement of the stairs as I climbed down, because my head had been bowed and I had concentrated on nothing except putting one foot in front of the other.

At the end of the week, we returned to Dhaka. I couldn’t face the beach, or Gabriela. I called Bilal and told him I was sick, that I needed a few weeks off. ‘Is it typhoid?’ he asked. ‘There’s been something in the water in Sithakunda.’ ‘No, it isn’t typhoid,’ I said, wishing it was something measurable like that, something that could be treated with drugs. Maybe I’ll go to Nadeem and ask for some pills. Of course I knew I wouldn’t. There was no point in seeking oblivion now.

In Dhaka, it was my mother’s birthday. My parents came to dinner and we sat around the table while Rashid and his father told us about China, marvelling at the height of the Shanghai skyline and the fact that the electricity never went out. My father was animated by this conversation; as an old leftist, he had a lingering fondness for the Chinese. Everyone was jolly, even Ammoo, though I knew she had recently returned from another trip to visit the rape victims in Sirajganj. When the cook brought out a cake to celebrate Ammoo’s birthday, I realised I’d forgotten to buy her a present and was about to apologise; but Rashid came out with a grey velvet box, inside of which was a necklace of milky pearls. ‘This is wonderful,’ Ammoo said, her eyes shining and wet, ‘this is unimaginable happiness.’

In the morning I resolved to tell him everything, starting with the music and Sanders and the way I’d felt the night before we were married and how I hated being called ‘Bou-ma’, daughter-in-law, by Dolly, as if she had brought home an injured animal from the zoo. But I didn’t. I ate white bread toast and scrambled eggs. I went to lunch with Rashid at the golf club and watched him practise his swing, a solid figure against the gently undulating blanket of green.

You had said something to me about having courage. About my will. But I was nothing but a coward. Just looking at Rashid, the way he twisted his hip as he raised the club, made me afraid.

One day my clothes and books and laptop — the things I’d left behind at the apartment — appeared at Rashid’s house. He must have asked Joshim to pack everything up. I didn’t ask him about it and he didn’t volunteer anything. Among my things I found a T-shirt that belonged to you. ‘Had you left it for me to say, I am still here, I understand, I will be patient, I will wait’? Of course not. Joshim would have found it bunched up at the foot of the bed and he would have folded it into my bag. All the next day I walked around with VERMONT written across my chest.

It was a Friday morning, dull with rain. I was about to get dressed, had just peeled the covers off the bed, when Rashid appeared in front of me, wielding my laptop. He held it high in his hand and then threw it against the wall, making a bright, clapping sound.

When he started yelling, I raised myself off the bed and sat very still at the edge, my feet balanced on a chair (‘What is that fucking T-shirt you wear all the time, and that look on your face like someone just slapped you?’). He was pacing the room, and occasionally stopping and turning to look at me. I concentrated on a small square of marbled floor under my feet. He pulled out a cigarette from the drawer of his bedside table, lighting it with shaking fingers and inhaling deeply. ‘Don’t smoke,’ I whispered, and at this, the first words I had spoken, he shouted, ‘What the fuck?’ And I said, ‘Don’t smoke on my account. I mean, don’t punish yourself because of something I did.’

There was a knock on the door. ‘Breakfast!’ Dolly chimed. On Friday, everyone ate together in the dining room, Bulbul at the head of the table, French toast arriving hot from the kitchen. We looked at each other and called out, in unison, ‘Coming!’ Then Rashid, changing his mind, holding the cigarette behind his back, opened the door a crack, said, ‘Ma, Zubaida’s not feeling well, can you just send something up?’ and there was a brief exchange about my symptoms, whether a visit to the doctor was called for, a list of things I must do (the word ‘gargle’ was repeated), and then finally Rashid closed the door and came back inside. He opened a window, ushering in the sound of the rain hitting the thick leaves of the jackfruit tree that leaned against the eastern side of the house. For a moment I considered leaping out of that window and falling softly onto the grass below. Then, in answer to his question, I said, ‘He’s someone I met at Harvard.’ To which Rashid said, with a sadness that could only be whispered, ‘You already said that.’

It had come up before, when our engagement had been announced to the extended family. That I, having attended the elite college in New England, and then Harvard, would be more educated than Rashid. ‘More qualified’ is how people put it. But nothing had come of it — Dolly and Bulbul had mentioned it casually, and my parents had dismissed it, saying, how could this small thing matter when the children had known each other for years? Surely they would have discussed it and worked things out. But we hadn’t. What was there to say? How would such a conversation begin? Hey, I’m cleverer than you, what should we do about that? Should you read more books so you can know what I mean when I refer to Stephen Jay Gould’s Cerion snails? In retrospect, I wondered if we should have said something to each other. Perhaps Rashid should have read a few more books. Anna Karenina, at the very least. I remembered now how casually he had unpacked my boxes and put my books on the shelf in the study of our little suite, treating them as if they were all the same. My rare edition of Jane Eyre, for instance, with the lithographs, he had placed beside a paperback of his own, a Scandinavian thriller with the image of a white wolf on the cover. If I told him to read Anna Karenina now, he would get fifty pages in and say I was turning to Tolstoy for an excuse to cheat.

Rashid was saying something to me, but he was facing the open window and I couldn’t hear him. I was suddenly very tired. He tossed the cigarette from the window and turned to confront me again. He wanted, of course, to know the details. When and how. And why. There was a knock on the door, and a trolley was wheeled in with a jug of tangerine juice, a steel cloche, and a pot of tea. On a plate next to the teapot was a tiny pile of chopped-up ginger and a small dish of honey. The honey made me think of the mangrove, of that plastic bottle — what had you done with it? Rashid pulled up the cloche and asked me if I wanted something to eat. I shook my head. The smell of eggs made the bile rise in my throat. I knew I should keep talking, tell Rashid how sorry I was, tell him it was over, that I would never do something like that again. But I couldn’t bear to utter the words. I was emptied of will. Nothing happened. It was nothing.

‘Should I move out?’ I said finally.

This made him angry. ‘So like you,’ he said. ‘Running away when things get messy.’

I saw him battling with himself: on the one hand, giving himself licence to rage, on the other, measuring, calculating, bookending his anger. He came over and sat very close to me, and I saw his hands holding each other. I was suddenly filled with an old affection for him, the man who had been my childhood friend, and I leaned into him, and then the words, the things he wanted to hear all came pouring out, the sorrys, the desperate pleas for him to forgive me. All the time I felt you listening and your heart breaking, and now I was trying to tell a story, a maudlin, nonsensical story that was an explanation of what I had done and why.

We lay down together on the bed. Rashid pulled the sheet over our heads. A small amount of light came through and I could see the outline of the room, the heavy curtains framing the windows, the pair of Shakoor paintings, a present from my parents, on either side of the bathroom door. Oh, God, my parents. I would have to tell them. I turned around and buried my head in the pillow. I had ended up on Rashid’s side of the bed and I smelled his sleep smell. I could hear him breathing on the other side, and wondered if he was crying. But he wasn’t. I heard him get up and cross the room. At the door he turned around and said, ‘I’m joining my mother for breakfast.’ And as I heard the door closing behind him I realised he had been waiting for me to say I loved him, and that I hadn’t, not once.

About half an hour later he came back. He was holding the newspaper in his hand, and a bottle of cough syrup. I was on the bed where he’d left me. I had allowed my thoughts to drift back to that early moment on the beach when we climbed aboard Grace and you played the Steinway for the first time. I remembered the smell of the auditorium, already turning briny, and how you pierced the silence with your playing, as if it was the first sound in the history of the world. I might have slept, because when Rashid started talking it was difficult to open my eyes. He looked at me and sighed, long and deep, and sat down on one of the matching armchairs that faced the bed. ‘Did you tell your mother?’ I asked him.

‘No. But she knows something’s wrong. You’ll have to come out for lunch, at least, or she’ll call a doctor. She loves you. Everyone loves you.’

There it was again.

‘I love you too,’ I forced myself to say. And then, a truer statement: ‘I don’t want to lose you.’

The day dragged on. I took a shower and dressed in something Dolly would approve of. At lunch I was given broth and broken rice. In the afternoon everyone went to their respective parts of the house and it was very quiet, so I went outside and destroyed a few ixora flowers by pulling them from the bush and squeezing them between my fingers. A few of Rashid’s relatives came after dusk, and snacks were wheeled out on a trolley, and Dolly made excuses for my silence by claiming I had been ill for the last few days, and an uncle put his hand on my forehead and declared me feverish, after which I was excused and given dinner in my room, everyone taking a certain amount of pleasure at my frailty.

Later, in bed, Rashid turned away from me and I swam my palms across his back, overcome by a deep longing to be held. When I tapped him on the shoulder, knowing he was awake, he turned around and I said it all again, the sorrys and the forgive mes, genuine this time, because how could I want for anything, here in this house that had welcomed me, Rashid even now willing to lie beside me on the bed, and I said how undeserving I was, how I would try and make it up to him, that I did love him, I did. He kissed me on the forehead, his breath grave with smoke, and that is when I realised he hated me — you both did, except one of you would do it from afar, and the other from up close.

I couldn’t sleep and neither could he. I felt him twisting and turning on his side of the bed. At one point he got up and paced the room, finally settling into the armchair with another cigarette. He turned on the lamp by the dressing table, casting a lean shadow against the wall. When he finished smoking, he changed into shorts and running shoes, and I thought he would leave then, for the gym, but he switched off the light and sat back down. Every so often I would open my eyes and he and his shadow were still there, gazing back at me.

As the hours passed, I felt a small seed of rage taking root inside me. It occurred to me that I was owed something in return for what was happening. What was happening was that I would never be touched in the way that you had touched me, that all the things I had said to you as we made love would come back to you and you would be disgusted by the thought of me, and if I was going to have myself live in your memory as a woman who had no will, who, given all the freedoms and choices in the world, would choose this, if I was going to fall that far in your regard, then I would demand something in return.

The logic was faulty, of course — I have told you before, there had never been any explicit demands, no ultimatums or threats. And yet I felt as if they were all holding my life to ransom. What would I ask for in exchange? What could be as big as this? Even as the question was posed in my mind, the answer came catapulting back: I would seek out the woman who had eluded me my whole life. This was the only reasonable exchange, the only bargain I was willing to strike. And with this resolution firmly lodged in my mind, I fell into a thick sleep.

A few hours later I woke to find Rashid packing for an overnight trip to the factory. He was rolling his socks into cylinders and while he was placing them in a corner of his bag, I told him I had decided to find my birth mother. He paused, a pair of trousers folded over his arm. ‘How does that make anything better?’

‘I’ve decided,’ I said.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘you’re confused. I can see why you think looking for your — for this woman — is going to help, but it won’t.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because there are probably things you would rather not know.’

I recalled our trip to Savar, his proposal by the rectangular pool. ‘What are you trying to say, that I’ll find out I have adulterous genes or something?’

‘Zee, don’t bullshit me, I know you know what I mean.’

‘What, that I couldn’t help myself so I cheated on you?’

‘What the fuck do I know why you lied, cheated, whatever the fuck you did with whatever fucked-up stranger you met in America?’ He turned away from me and I saw he had an old scar just below his cheekbone on the left side. I had never noticed that scar before. What kind of a wife did that make me? I was a poor companion to him even before you came along. Then he said, after a long time, ‘Are you in love with him?’

It was the first time he had asked me, and I knew it wouldn’t be the last. I was tired and my head was heavy. I leaned against the soft upholstery of our bed. I considered telling him the truth, that not only was I in love with you, but that there was something out there called love, something I had never believed in because I thought it was beyond me until I met you, and now that I had, this did not make the love more desirable — perhaps even less, because of the wreckage it would leave in its wake — but unassailable, something enormous and fixed, a piece of architecture that would remain in my consciousness no matter how hard I tried to deny it.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Thank God for that.’

‘No,’ I repeated. He asked for assurances, and I gave them to him. I swore up and down the walls and past the corridors, and my sorrys spilled out into the garden outside, where the thick-leaved trees stood still. But I was resolved, and his resistance had only made me more determined. I was full of rage, against him, and Abboo and Ammoo, Dolly and Bulbul and all the other people who knew and had refused to talk to me all this time. The rage made it so that giving you up was the best thing I ever did, Elijah. Do not allow this to wound you, because in my anger — at my own cowardice, at the chain of events beginning with my birth that had conspired against me, against love, against all that I longed for in my body and breath and soul — I was finally released. I would do something, I would jump out of my own scissored self and traverse the difficult and treacherous chasm of history, and though I didn’t realise it at the time, because all I could feel was the missing-limb ache of your loss, the start of this journey prompted a small, electric joy.

To find my mother I would start with my mother.

I called Ammoo and found she was on her way to a sari shop in Gulshan Two. I asked if I could meet her there, and, always suspicious when there was a spontaneous change in plans, she asked me repeatedly why, and when I refused to say, she relented and gave me the name of the shop. ‘Fifteen minutes,’ she said. ‘Unless the traffic is bad.’ When I arrived she was already there, sifting through a pile of printed saris. I observed her for a minute before entering the shop, noticing how, lately, she had become more beautiful, something in the way her face had settled into middle age made her appear gentler, almost placid. She had chosen a sari now, a blue cotton, and the shop attendant was opening it up to show her how the pattern changed across the six yards of material.

I pushed open the glass doors, slipping into the cool of the shop and remembering a joke I sometimes shared with my father about Ammoo’s moods, referring to her as a thermometer. ‘What’s the reading today? Fever?’ ‘No,’ he would reply, ‘chills only.’

Ammoo spotted me, leaned back and frowned. ‘This was a strange place to meet. Is something wrong? Where’s Dolly?’

I had thought about it on the way over, rehearsing the scenario in my mind. ‘I wanted to buy you a gift,’ I said.

‘Why?’

‘Because I’ve saved some money, and I thought I should get you something. How about this one?’ I said, pointing to the blue cotton.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked again. She held my elbow so she could face me fully.

I went on the offensive. ‘What, I can’t buy my mother a present?’ I glanced at the price tag. I wanted to buy her something expensive, something flashy that would glint every time she opened her cupboard, but I knew she would never go for that. ‘This one’s too cheap. Won’t you buy a silk or something?’

‘Jaan, really — this one will be fine. Something wrong with Rashid?’

The short drive to the sari shop had given me a chance to rehearse what I was going to say, but I wanted to begin the conversation on my own terms, and Ammoo had a habit of unsettling me. Already the energy of the morning was starting to dissipate. ‘While we’re at it, let’s get something for Nanu too.’

We chose a grey pastel for Nanu. I paid. ‘Now,’ I said, ‘there’s a café next door, and I’d like to go there, and I’d like to talk to you about something serious.’

I led us out of the store and down the narrow street beside it. A metal staircase bolted to the side of the building led to a café on the second floor. Inside, the room had a curved wall on one side, and a set of tall windows on the other that looked down at the traffic on Gulshan Avenue. We sat down on a pair of soft armchairs with our backs to the view. The menu listed a variety of cupcakes and fruit juices.

We ordered coffees. ‘I’ll have the chocolate soufflé,’ I said to the waiter, ‘I hear it’s very good.’

Ammoo leaned back in her chair, slipped off her sandals, and tucked her feet under her. I had rarely seen my mother sit any other way — sometimes even at her office, she led meetings in bare feet, crossing her legs over a conference chair or leaning a bent knee against a boardroom table.

‘How are the trials going?’

‘There are twenty-seven Birangona women at the centre in Sirajganj. One of them told me the people in her village still won’t let her draw water from the tube-well. It was supposed to be a name that helped them, but it’s become a label for life.’

‘Will there be more convictions?’

‘Sometimes I think it’s a pointless exercise. But then I meet these women and at least I can look them in the eye and tell them we’re doing something. That we haven’t forgotten.’

‘We haven’t,’ I said. I was beginning to understand why she had pressured me to change my major in college. My mother went to sleep every night knowing that she had played her tiny part in making the world turn. I had always told myself that Ambulocetus was no different, but I knew now that it was. Mo had taught me that, the way he had attached himself to you and me and made us feel that we belonged together, and to him.

‘So, what was it you wanted to talk to me about?’

The coffees arrived, and I busied myself with a packet of sugar. Of course now that I was here, in this moment with my mother, I didn’t want to do it. ‘There’s a boy who works at Prosperity. Can’t be more than eight or nine. His parents are both dead, or missing, I can’t be sure. I’ve been teaching him to read.’

We’d had three lessons before everything fell apart. Mo quickly memorised the alphabet, and his hand was steady as I had him trace over the letters. I had even gone into town and bought him books, with simple words accompanied by images: ‘ma’, ‘kak’, ‘bok’. Late into the night, the light remained on in the kitchen as he placed the book on the floor and squatted over it, not touching the pages, just leaning forward and mouthing the words. ‘Those men at Prosperity, they need people like you,’ I said. ‘People who care what happens to them. I’m trying to understand you. And I wish you’d try to understand me too.’

‘Is that what’s bothering you? I’m sorry, you’re right. I never really got my head around your studies. I won’t complain about the whales any more. But what’s going on? Are you finished with Rubana’s project? You come and go without explaining anything.’

I had rarely seen my parents argue. Sometimes I would notice a brittle silence between them, or my mother, hypertensive, would put a large pyramid of salt on the edge of her dinner plate. I don’t think either of them was used to apologising, at least not overtly, though perhaps something passed between them when I wasn’t looking, a pattern of recriminations and sorrys that occurred behind closed doors.

‘You know your father and I are proud of you. We thought you’d be a professor one day.’

‘I don’t know if I should have married Rashid,’ I said. It was as good a place to start as any.

Ammoo reached out and touched the edge of the table. ‘You can’t say that. Don’t say that.’

‘He’s suffocating me.’ There, it was out.

‘You don’t know that for sure. You haven’t given him a chance. It’s hardly been two years.’

‘Why are you defending him?’

‘He’s always been like a son to me.’

It was just as I’d suspected. That Rashid was the child my mother had never had. ‘He’s your son more than I am your daughter?’

It took a moment for her to realise what I meant. Her face fell as if I had hit her, her gaze dropping to her lap, her mouth twisting and drawing inwards. ‘I can’t believe you said that.’

‘It’s true. You love him more than you love me, I’ve always known it.’ I had started in this brutal vein, and found I couldn’t stop.

The soufflé arrived. I broke the surface of the chocolate and plunged my spoon inside. It was burnt and dry. Ammoo started to cry.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said, pulling a tissue out of her handbag.

I dipped my spoon into the dessert again. ‘This is disgusting.’

Ammoo carried the soufflé away. I watched her arguing with the man behind the counter. A few minutes later she came back, removed her sandals again, and sat cross-legged on the chair. ‘They’re bringing another one,’ she said, her voice clogged with tears.

‘I need to know more. About my adoption. We never talked about it and you never told me anything. It’s my fault too. I never dared to ask.’

We looked at each other. For an instant, I thought she might reach across the table and hold my hand. We would stay like that for a long time, talking about everything. Then we would walk out of the café with our arms intertwined, the burned soufflé forgotten, perhaps even having neglected to pay, no words, only the heavy truth hanging like a hammock between us.

Ammoo started laughing, a hollow, sharp laugh. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘You’re saying it’s not true.’

‘I’m saying I don’t know what you mean. We told you and then there was nothing else to talk about. I can’t believe it. My own daughter.’

That’s just the thing. Not your own daughter. ‘I’m just asking to have a conversation.’

‘You sound so American,’ Ammoo said. That meant I was cold and heartless, that I didn’t care about hurting my mother. That I wanted to talk about things. ‘I want to stoke the American in you,’ you had once said. Well, maybe that’s exactly what you’d done.

‘I want to know, Ma.’

‘Why don’t you ask Dolly?’

What was this obsession with Dolly? ‘Because I’m asking you. Don’t pass me off to my mother-in-law.’

Ammoo was shaking her head. ‘Dolly arranged everything. She brought you to us and had us sign the papers. She told us your mother had abandoned you and wouldn’t come looking, that’s it.’

The replacement soufflé arrived and when I took a spoonful I discovered it was identical to the first, grainy and overcooked.

‘Why you insist on bringing me to these pretentious Gulshan-type places, when you know they can’t even make a decent cup of tea?’ Ammoo said. ‘Let’s go.’ She pulled a note out of her handbag, flung it at the table, and marched out of the exit, not looking back to see if I was following. I took another spoonful of the soufflé, then another, scraping the sides until it was reduced to a rubble of chocolate crumbs at the bottom of the dish and my mouth was filled with the taste of burned chocolate.

The driver opened the car door and I got in beside Ammoo. As we were about to pull away, we saw the waiter rushing towards us. He tapped on the window. ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘I’m very sorry, but bill was eight hundred and sixty taka. You only gave five hundred.’ He held his hands behind his back while Ammoo counted out the money and passed it to him through the car window.

We were silent until we reached the Gulshan roundabout. ‘So you’re telling me that Dolly and Bulbul brought you a baby and you didn’t bother to find out where I’d come from?’

‘It was a mercy,’ Ammoo said, wiping her face with the end of her sari. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

Outside, it began to rain. Abul Hussain turned on the wipers.

‘You don’t know what it’s like to want something so badly, to try, and keep failing. Your father and I — we couldn’t bear it. Thank God for Dolly and Bulbul.’

‘I’m in love with someone else.’

Ammoo threw herself back against the seat of the car and put her hand over her eyes. ‘I’m not listening to this.’ And then: ‘It’s that American boy, isn’t it?’

‘Elijah. His name’s Elijah.’ Where had she heard of you? I thought for one paranoid moment that Rashid had told Dolly and that it was all over the family now, but then I realised I had spoken about you soon after I’d returned from Cambridge, using any excuse to say your name aloud. Ammoo had probably suspected something and decided to ignore it.

For a moment I thought Ammoo was going to slap me, but she was defeated, staring up at the roof of the car. ‘Rashid knows.’

‘Oh, God.’ I could almost hear my mother thinking, my poor boy.

‘I’m sorry. It was my fault. I take responsibility for everything.’ After the roundabout, the traffic came to a halt. A boy with an armful of white roses knocked on the car window, pleading with me to buy a few flowers.

‘You take responsibility, but at the same time you want to blame us for not talking to you about this — this adoption thing?’

‘I’m not blaming you, I’m just saying, a little transparency would have gone a long way.’

‘What’s wrong with Rashid?’

‘I can’t stand being in that house. I can’t breathe. They’re just like any other rich family. The kind of people you taught me to laugh at.’

‘I don’t recognise my own daughter. Why are you talking like this?’ She pulled out her phone. The little boy knocked again, and Ammoo waved him away. ‘I’m calling Dolly.’

‘I don’t want to talk to her.’

She put her phone away. ‘Do what you like, but please, don’t tell her about this other boy, it will break her heart. And she’ll never forgive me.’

The traffic eased and we pulled away from the little boy and his flowers, passing the market and turning left at the park. The collective disappointment of everyone I knew pressed down on my chest and made it difficult to breathe. And yet at this news of my adoption — could it be true? Was it really all Dolly and Bulbul? — I felt a small lifting. Now that my mother and Rashid knew, even though things were messy and they were all about to gang up against me, at least it was out in the open, and things that should have come out many years ago were finally being said. I would ask Dolly for the whole story. I hadn’t given up my right to know.

When it came to it, I didn’t have the courage to confront Dolly. I woke up every morning and promised myself I would ask her at breakfast, but then Bulbul would be at the table, or Rashid’s brother would walk in just as I was about to bring it up. I saw her ordering the servants to tidy up the garden or organising menus for dinner and decided she looked tired, or busy, and I would put it off. The questions gnawed at me, but my mother’s look of disappointment reverberated in my mind, making everything seem impossible.

Sally came over one day with her baby, her second (as she had predicted herself, she’d had two in quick succession). They had named the girl Nadia. She passed him to me as soon as she walked in the door, blowing on her freshly painted nails. ‘I just got a manicure,’ she said. ‘I think of that as winning. Today is a winning day.’ She had tried to cheer up her skin with a heavy coat of make-up, but underneath her eyes were dark and sunken.

‘I’m so fucking tired,’ she said. I offered her a coffee. ‘I can’t drink caffeine,’ she sighed. ‘It goes into my milk.’

The baby stirred in my arms, batted a hand against my chest, and fell back asleep. I lifted his head to my face and kissed the mellow indent at the top of his head. He smelled fragrant, yet unperfumed, a kind of sweet loaminess that came from deep within his skin. I inhaled and inhaled.

‘There’s a rumour you and Rashid are on the outs,’ Sally said, leaning back and putting her head against the rounded armrest of the sofa.

‘People are always trying to break us up,’ I said. ‘Remember a few years ago, when there was a rumour he was sleeping with you?’

Sally blew on her fingertips again. ‘Assholes.’

‘And then there was another story about him and some Indian girl who worked in garments.’ I was getting a little agitated, remembering all the rumours about Rashid and other women.

‘So there’s nothing to it?’ Sally said.

The baby stirred again, his mouth opening and closing, so I stood up and shifted my weight from one foot to the other. I considered telling her everything, wondering whether she would laugh it off and declare me finally — finally — human, capable of making mistakes like everyone else, or whether she would hold it against me for ever, even if she pretended to take my side. ‘No, there’s nothing,’ I said. ‘Just the usual. Marriage isn’t easy.’

‘You’re telling me. I married a man who still calls his mother every night before he falls asleep and tells her what he ate and how many shits he did.’

I laughed. ‘Seriously?’

‘No fucking joke.’ She sat up, pulled a cigarette out of her bag and clamped it between her teeth.

‘You’re smoking?’

‘No I’m not fucking smoking. I’m just holding onto my brain by chewing on a Benson’s.’

The baby screamed. I swayed more aggressively but I was ineffective, so I passed him back to Sally. She swivelled around to check that no one was looking, pulled at her kameez, and guided a dark, enormous nipple into the baby’s mouth.

‘Yes, I know. My tits are fucking incredible, but Nadeem won’t even touch them. He says they’re for the baby and that creeps him out. I’m so horny I could screw the driver.’

‘It was never true, was it? About you and Rashid.’ My eyes were lemony with tears.

Sally drew the baby closer and looked up at me, the unlit cigarette still dangling from her lips. ‘I’m going to tell you something honestly. Don’t be mad.’

‘Okay.’

‘I would have. Seriously, I would have. We’re all a little bit in love with Rashid. You know that.’

I did know that. Everyone, my mother and my friends and random people I had never met, telling me how wonderful he was, what a perfect man. The baby suckled fiercely, his cheeks pulsing as he swallowed.

‘Did you do it?’

‘No. But not because of you. Because he wouldn’t. He would never touch anyone but you.’

I let out a breath, letting the tears fall freely against my cheeks. We didn’t speak after that. Sally held her baby upright until he burped wetly and softly on her shoulder, and then she left, leaving behind the fragrance of curdled milk and tobacco.

That night, I examined Dolly as she ate, careful to open her mouth just wide enough to prevent her lipstick from smudging. Bulbul was narrating a story about a telecommunications secretary who had asked him for a bribe that morning. ‘Nowadays they don’t dance around the subject,’ he said. ‘They just put out their hands and tell you how much.’ Rashid complimented the lamb chops, and Dolly said it was all down to the meat, which she had procured at great expense from the German butcher. Who by the way, Rashid interjected, now sells bacon. Bacon? The eyes of the assembled group widened, even mine, more out of surprise than horror. ‘What’s the country coming to?’ Dolly lamented.

‘I actually like bacon,’ I said. Rashid swung his knee towards me under the table.

‘Tawba, tawba,’ Dolly said, slapping her own cheeks.

Bulbul pushed his chair back and said, ‘Every time I go to Bangkok, we eat the noodle soup. Then someone told us it’s made of pork.’

‘We had to stop eating it,’ Dolly said.

‘But we haven’t,’ Bulbul said. ‘We had it the last time. And you know the sausages at the breakfast buffet aren’t chicken.’

‘Of course they’re chicken. Five-star hotel is full of Arabs.’

‘Everyone pretends they don’t know what’s in it.’ Then he pointed at me and said, ‘Just don’t go telling everyone your secret.’

After dinner, instead of following Rashid up to our bedroom, I lingered at the table and asked Dolly if I could borrow a necklace. Rashid and I were invited to a wedding the following night and I wanted something to go with my sari. Her annoyance at my pig-eating dissipated and she led me up to her bedroom, where, inside a panelled bank of closets, she turned the combination lock on a safe. ‘Do you want just gold, or some kind of colour? Ruby, emerald?’ Her voice was high and melodic and I realised she was practically giggling with joy. So this was what she had envisioned when she thought of my future in this house, that we would coo over her collection of trinkets, coordinate our outfits, share handbags and earrings. I must have done something to give her the impression that this future was possible, and I remembered now that when she had proposed shopping trips to London or Singapore, I had smiled and agreed, because some part of me wanted a mother like that, a mother who wasn’t tempering every conversation with some new angle on how terrible the world was. Dolly lifted a three-stringed ruby necklace out of its velvet box. A diamond clasp bound the necklace together. I took it from her and held it with both of my hands. Then I said, ‘Ammoo told me that you arranged my adoption.’

Dolly kneeled in front of the safe and pulled out another box. She popped the button and opened it, and inside was a wide gold collar. I was reminded of a National Geographic spread on an African tribe whose women wore thick brass cords to stretch their necks. ‘This story is racist,’ my mother had commented, taking the magazine from me. ‘Don’t read it.’ I shook the memory from my mind and focused on Dolly, attempting to read her expression. I returned the ruby necklace to its box and dabbed at the gold collar. ‘This is nice. It looks old.’

‘It belonged to my mother-in-law.’

‘Ammoo said you set everything up. She called it a mercy.’

Dolly turned back to the safe, so I couldn’t see her face when she said, ‘By then she was desperate. Bulbul and I couldn’t stand to watch her suffering any more.’

I pictured my mother, and found it was easy to imagine her younger, to cast grief upon her features. ‘Can you tell me where it was — where I was from?’

‘Do you want to wear the gold?’

‘I’m afraid it might be a bit formal,’ I said, retracting my hand. Looking closer, I saw how gaudy the piece was, how crudely the jewels had been placed in their setting.

‘You always go simple,’ Dolly said. ‘Weddings are for dressing up.’

‘It’s just — I don’t know the couple very well and we’re just going to drop in for an hour.’ I hated these things, but Rashid said he had promised the groom’s father, someone he did business with.

‘I don’t remember anything,’ Dolly said, closing the box and returning it to the safe.

‘Was it an orphanage?’

‘No, it was a girl. A girl in need.’

‘I’ll wear the ruby,’ I said.

She passed the box to me and then I watched as she put everything back in its place, and I wondered if any of the servants knew about the safe, if they had pressed their hands against the door and tried to guess the combination. ‘You don’t remember anything else?’

‘No,’ she murmured.

I didn’t believe her. ‘There’s no documentation? Birth certificate, adoption papers?’

‘There was. But it was all lost when we renovated the house.’

She sighed, as if she had told me this story a thousand times. ‘Your parents were upset. We did everything we could to make it easier. Bulbul even greased some palms at the registry and put Joy and Maya down as the mother and father.’ She moved to her dressing table, which was crammed with perfume bottles and small cylinders of lipstick, and began to unravel her hair. I was dismissed. As I turned to go, more in the dark than ever, she said, ‘I can’t tell you what to do. But you should stop eating that filth.’

Rashid and I attended the wedding the next evening. I wore the rubies around my neck and tried to hold onto the feeling I had experienced at Sally’s confession. I made light conversation with the other wives and ate biryani with a fork and wondered what, after all, was holding the universe together. Afterwards I fell asleep in the car on the way home and stumbled into bed. In the morning Rashid woke early and I started telling him what his mother had said. The air was heavy with his aftershave. ‘No one will talk to me,’ I complained. He opened his side of the closet and stood there for a moment, sliding a tie from one of the articulated hangers.

‘Did you hear what I said? I’m not getting anywhere.’

‘Maybe they don’t know anything,’ he said. He wrapped the tie around his neck.

‘How can they not know? A baby, a whole live person, appeared out of nowhere. I wasn’t immaculately conceived.’

‘Why don’t you drop it, Zee?’ he said, pulling the silk through its loop.

I peeled the comforter off the bed, ready for a fight, but I was at a disadvantage because he looked and smelled so much better than me, so I folded myself back into the blankets and banged my fist against the pillow. Rashid left with a curt goodbye, reminding me to call Nanu because she was having a check-up that afternoon and I should ask about her sugar level. How did he hold such a catalogue of mundane information in his head? No one loved Nanu more than me, but I was hardly going to keep track of her diabetes. I whispered a curse under my breath as the door slammed shut.

I called my parents — no reply on either phone. I sent them each an identical text message. I waited for what seemed like the entire day, but was probably a few hours. Finally, I went to their apartment and Bashonti opened the door. Ammoo was in the centre of a small tornado of people in the living room and I could smell something frying in the kitchen. I stood on the fringes of the group, catching Abboo’s eye a fraction of a moment before being noticed by a woman — one of my mother’s friends — who smothered me against her chubby shoulder. ‘It’s good you came,’ she said. ‘We all need to be together at a time like this.’ I nodded, pretending to know what she was talking about. Bashonti emerged from the kitchen and passed around a plate of samosas. I couldn’t tell if the moment was a solemn or a happy one, but I was hoping for solemn, because then no one would notice if I looked preoccupied or upset. It was always something I’d hated about people, the way they looked into your face and felt they had to make a comment about your appearance, like ‘You’ve lost weight’ or ‘Are you depressed?’ when I wished they would say ‘Tell me why the sperm whale carries oil on the front of its head’, which would have been a question I was equipped to answer. Not that the location of the spermaceti was an evolutionary puzzle anyone had thus far been able to solve, least of all me. But as a topic of conversation it was far superior to what I was usually offered.

‘How’s your gorgeous husband?’ my mother’s friend asked. So nobody had died, then.

‘He’s fine, thank you.’

I tried to detach myself, but she grabbed hold of my arm. ‘Newlyweds. So romantic. Better enjoy it before the babies come.’

I felt a hand on my shoulder, and it was Ammoo. ‘I’m going with Salma and the other lawyers — do you have a car, or do you want to go with your father?’

‘I’ll go with Abboo,’ I said. ‘What are we doing at the courthouse?’

She squeezed my hand. She had forgiven me, or perhaps forgotten altogether. ‘They’re opening it to the public today.’

I stuffed a few samosas into my mouth as the plate hovered near me, and then followed my father downstairs and into his car.

‘The road looks clear,’ Abboo said, looking ahead to assess the traffic.

‘I have no idea what’s going on.’

He peeled his eyes away from the road. ‘Don’t you read the newspaper? They’re announcing the Ghulam Azam verdict today.’

Of course. Only a person whose head was buried deep in the sand wouldn’t know that. I was reminded again of the difference between my parents’ household and Rashid’s — the conversation around the dinner table last night had been about the rising cost of labour and how so-and-so had to shut down their factory because the workers had gone on strike. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve been busy.’

‘A big day for your mother. Try to be supportive.’

‘I am supportive.’

‘She feels you don’t care about the trial.’

A car stopped abruptly in front of us, and Abboo jammed his hand on the horn. I knew my parents questioned whether I cared about the country as much as they did, and I had never really felt the need, or had the courage, to confess that I did not. I was proud that they had been in the war, proud to call my parents freedom fighters, but in reality I resented the space that it took up, the way all their conversations would eventually rotate back to reminiscing about the war, as if there was nothing but a bead curtain between this moment and that, so that all it needed was a brush against history to reveal the shiny betterness of the past. It was difficult to compete with, even more difficult to imagine that my life would ever amount to anything significant. They often said that the country lived in the shadow of that moment, that because the deaths had never been fully accounted for there was no way to move on, but what they never admitted was that it wasn’t just the dead, or their families, who felt the dark cloud of those nine months following them wherever they went, but the rest of us, the children of the people who survived, all of us burdened with what we couldn’t do, our imaginations limited by the protean, whereas theirs were set free by having done the impossible.

We pushed through the crowd of reporters and cameramen who had gathered at the entrance to the courthouse. I had only seen the building from the outside — a classical façade made grand by its brilliant white colour — and now, up close, it was impressive, wide marble corridors with double doors leading to the individual courtrooms. As we followed the group up the stairs through the corridor on the upper floor, we found Ammoo. She caught my eye and waved, and I noticed that her features were somehow rearranged, made bigger by the event, and I wondered if this was the face she had worn throughout the war, the look of majesty that comes over a person when she is assured of her role at a crucial moment in history. She entered the courtroom and the doors shut behind her, and we stood and waited outside. Abboo reached over and took my hand. I couldn’t remember a single question I wanted to ask him; all the curiosity I had gathered up the evening before vanished in the dusky light of this afternoon and the cluttered murmur of the crowd. I saw a few familiar faces, friends of my parents, colleagues, people who I might have gone to school with. A chant rose up and gathered volume. ‘Death!’ I heard. And then: ‘Hang him!’

The door opened and we fell silent, but it was just someone leaving. He waved his hand to indicate his irrelevance, then shut the door behind him and ducked away. I saw a woman holding the hand of a small child, and remembered a story my parents liked to tell me about how they had taken me to Suhrawardy field to attend the mock trial of Ghulam Azam. Back then, twenty years ago, only a fake trial for this man could be held, with actors playing the prosecution and a stuffed effigy in place of the real villain. He had been found guilty, sentenced, and executed at that trial, but it had all just been play, not like now, when Azam and the other men like him were in fear of their lives, their pasts finally catching up with them. That’s why my mother defended this government, no matter what its other sins might be, because it was the first time, and the only time, that anyone had made Azam account for what he had done. The man was heavy with the dead, and now he was standing in front of a judge and being asked to explain the deaths of children, and he would have nothing to say. He was old now, over ninety. His reckoning had come late, but it had come, and I was here to witness it. I swelled with the weight of the moment, understanding what it was, possibly for the first time, to be my mother’s daughter.

The door opened again and the news spread in a ripple, passed on from one person to the next until someone announced, ‘Life imprisonment!’ Cheers clashed with shouts of disappointment. Everyone started talking at once and trying to push into the courtroom. Abboo’s hand was still gripping mine, and we were moved along until we were close to the doorway. I peered inside and saw a group of people surge towards the front of the room, raising their hands up to the bench to get the attention of the judge. People held their cell phones above their heads and took photographs. Finally the crowd became so thick that I couldn’t hold on to Abboo’s hand and we were separated.

After a few minutes there was a commotion as Ghulam Azam was led out of the courtroom. A ring of policemen surrounded him, but they could only move very slowly, and as they passed me I took a good look at him. He was in a wheelchair, his feet apart but his knees pushed together. His hands were cuffed in front of his body, a cap stiff and large on his tiny face. One of the policeman had placed an almost kindly hand on his shoulder as they processed slowly out of the courtroom. Ghulam Azam would be taken to prison that day, and a year later he would die, mourned by people all over the world who didn’t know, or didn’t care, about what he had done. My mother would repeatedly curse her computer screen as she read the stories of the crowds that showed up at his funeral, her triumph diminished every time he was referred to as ‘Professor’, every time he was written about as a religious leader rather than what he really was — a murderer. But that was later. On this day, the satisfaction was substantial, if not complete, a guilty verdict, a sentence, and he sitting birdlike in a wheelchair with only a policeman for company. As for me, catching those glimpses of the man, my own father solid and devoted somewhere in the room, I hung in the balance. My own discovery contracted and swelled like the chambers of a heart, and one moment I decided I didn’t need to press my matter forward, because, as Rashid had reminded me, I was loved and that should be enough. But in another, the desire to resolve my story, to call time on the silence that had surrounded me, was inescapable, and finally it was this urge that won, and as soon as the scales had tipped, I couldn’t wait another moment. Ghulam had trumped me, but now that he was finally defeated it was my turn. I jostled my way towards the exit, pushing against the tide of people, the only one going the other way, until I was spat out of the building, struggling for breath as I reached the gardens outside the courthouse.

I hailed a rickshaw, too impatient now to wait for Abboo, and pointed in the direction of Nanu’s house in Dhanmondi. As we crossed Mirpur Road I took out my phone and sent a text message to my parents. I have to know the truth, it said. Otherwise I am leaving home and never coming back. I couldn’t help sounding hysterical, suddenly all the years I had not known clambering on top of me. I peeled back the rickshaw’s sunshade, trapped in my own chest, unable to fill my lungs with enough air.

The front door was ajar and there were voices coming from inside. I entered and saw a man seated on the sofa with his back to me, a massive back, broad and padded, a white turban on his head. He turned to face me and then quickly turned away.

‘It’s only Zubaida,’ my grandmother said.

The man stood up and came towards me. Under the turban, the pair of thick-rimmed glasses, the beard that brushed his chest below, he had a beautiful face, dark, soft eyes and a kind mouth. ‘As-salaam alaikum,’ he announced. On his forehead was a black bruise like Ali’s, only wider and darker, shiny from years of prayer. ‘How wonderful it is to cast my eyes on you.’

‘Your uncle is visiting from America. He just arrived this morning.’ Nanu was smiling in that wistful way she did whenever she mentioned my uncle. I myself had no memory of this man. He had come to Dhaka only once, as far as I could remember. He had given me a Kit Kat and frightened me with a story about the heat of hellfire. My parents often talked about him. Before the war, Ammoo told me, Sohail was a charismatic young man who kept a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book in his front pocket. Their father had died many years before, and in their modest bungalow in Dhanmondi it was just him and Ammoo and Nanu, and something about being surrounded by women had made him delicate, almost fragile. Certainly not a fighter. So it came as a surprise to everyone when he crossed the border and joined the Mukti Bahini. Sohail, Ammoo says, did not distinguish himself as an assembler of crude explosives, or as a crack shot or a fearless running-into-the-line-of-fire type. He is rumoured to have baulked at crucial moments, like the igniting of a device or the running over of an army checkpoint. But what he lacked in skill, and courage, he made up for in conviction. When it came to believing what he was doing was right, Sohail was unbeatable.

But Ammoo doesn’t recall what he did in the war as much as what he became after the war was over. It was not fashionable then, as it is now, for young people to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, or to encourage their wives to cover their heads, or to pepper their sentences with appeals to God. But Sohail Mama adopted the cloak of religion just after the war and did not shed it for the decades that followed, not through the death of his son, or the shifting of the world order, or the isolation from his friends and his past that were demanded by this new, lean life. In his own way he was a man who pushed against the tide, breaking hearts along the way, mowing over his friendships and his family because he was convinced he was doing the right thing, no matter how high the price — the highest price being that he and Ammoo rarely spoke, and whenever Ammoo mentioned his name or told me anything about him, she would always end with a sigh and say that it was as if her brother, like Abboo’s, had died in the war.

I sat down beside Sohail now and he offered me a plate of dates, which he said someone had brought to him from Mecca. The dates were stuffed with whole almonds. I put one in my mouth and when I bit down I tasted a cloying sweetness. We said very little, regarding one another openly. I consumed one date after another. Sohail occasionally peered over his glasses and exhaled deeply, pulling and smoothing his beard with one hand, then another.

I wondered about his sons, whether, if I happened upon them, I would find them at all familiar, or if they would be just like all the other bearded men at airports and shopping malls, their wives trailing a few feet behind them. ‘Nanu,’ I said, turning to my grandmother. ‘Rashid said you were getting your diabetes checked.’

‘Sweet boy,’ she said, smiling. ‘He sent me his car so I could go to the doctor.’

Bastard. ‘What did the doctor say?’

She waved her hand. ‘Nothing to worry about. I’m not going to stop eating my Toblerone.’

‘I came to ask you something.’

Somehow Sohail’s being there made me believe that it would all finally come out. In fact, I was unsure whether anyone would be capable of lying in his presence, and I wondered whether this was the secret to his success, the reason he was able to convert many dozens of Americans every week, not only at his mosque, but also as he went about his life, shopping at the supermarket, refilling at the gas station, picking up his wife from her Islamic exercise class on the other side of town.

I turned to Nanu. ‘Did you know I was adopted?’

Her reply was immediate. ‘Yes.’

‘From where?’

‘I always thought your parents should have told you, but they had their reasons. They asked me not to talk about it.’

‘Did you know?’ I asked Sohail.

‘Your mother wrote to me. But she told me it was in confidence, and I haven’t spoken of it since.’

The doorbell rang. ‘Don’t answer that,’ I said. ‘Tell me more.’

‘I don’t know any more, jaan,’ my grandmother said. ‘Come, sit beside me.’ She patted the cushion, upholstered in pink.

I wasn’t sure how or where to direct myself. The doorbell rang a second time, and I found myself leaning against the door. ‘Are any of your children adopted?’ I asked Sohail.

‘Mine are not. But our Prophet, peace be upon him, was himself an orphan.’

I nodded, remembering what I had whispered to you that night at Sanders. The bell rang for the third time. Then, my father’s voice. ‘Sweetheart, open the door.’

‘Is Ammoo there?’ I asked.

A pause. ‘Yes.’

‘Let them in,’ Nanu said gently.

I opened the door and found my parents in the corridor, standing slightly apart but holding hands. ‘Sohail Mama is here,’ I said.

I stepped aside and they followed me in. Nanu rose from her seat, leaning on her walker. ‘I’m going to get more tea,’ she said. ‘Sohail, come with me.’

‘I can’t, the servant girl is in there,’ he said. He observed purdah and the only women he would glance at had to be related to him by blood.

‘For God’s sake,’ Ammoo said, ‘you haven’t changed.’

Sohail turned to Ammoo and hugged her, unoffended.

She shrugged him off. ‘I’m here for my daughter.’

‘Something of a daughter,’ I said.

Nanu closed the kitchen door behind her. Sohail, enormous, made himself invisible by looking up at the ceiling and mouthing something — a prayer, I assumed. Ammoo began to make galloping, strangled sounds into her hands. The noise echoed around the room and then was swallowed by Abboo and me. We looked at each other and I nodded to him so he would know it was okay for him to start explaining. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. ‘You know, don’t you, sweetheart, that I was captured during the war.’

So he was going to start with that. I couldn’t be angry about that, could I, because he was a war hero with war wounds. Maybe that is how I should have been thinking of myself all along, as a war wound, a throbbing reminder of something bad and something good that happened all at once.

‘After I was released, and the war ended, and your mother and I married — well, we tried for a few years, but as it turns out—’

I was afraid he would detail his torture so I finished his sentence. ‘You couldn’t have children.’

‘Something like that,’ he said. Sohail finished his prayer and withdrew his gaze from the ceiling. We heard Nanu moving around the kitchen, the clatter of plates and cups.

‘Looking back,’ Abboo continued, ‘We made some errors, in the way we—’

‘It was my fault,’ Ammoo interrupted. ‘It was me. There was nothing wrong with your father. I was the problem.’ She stood up and circled the room. From the kitchen came the rising and rising sound of the boiling kettle.

‘Come here, jaan,’ Abboo said, and Ammoo obeyed, returning to sit beside him. I could see them very young now, their faces lean and tired, grappling with things beyond their control, images from the war, and the sparse, mysterious future before them.

‘For a long time I didn’t think about children,’ Ammoo said. ‘But then suddenly I did, and when I did I felt a sort of desperation. We tried everything, spent all our money.’ She smoothed the pleats of her sari. ‘Anyway, the point is, the silence — your father did it to protect me. We never talked about it. The few people who knew, they just assumed it was him, and because of the war, no one asked.’

‘But what about me?’ I said, wanting to remain angry. ‘You never wanted to tell me any of this?’

‘We wanted so badly for you to be ours,’ my father said. ‘We were selfish. We’re so very sorry.’

Nanu returned with the tea. She sat down and busied herself with pouring and adding powdered milk, sugar. Sohail passed around the cups, placing one in front of me, patting my head as he moved heavily back to his chair.

‘There’s more, I know there’s more. Dolly said she lost all the records of my adoption. How could that be?’

Ammoo’s eyes fell to the floor. ‘You tell her,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t bear to think about it.’

I could see Abboo struggling to form the words. I wanted to tell them I loved them, that my life wasn’t so bad, that I knew they had done their best. I wanted to feel sorry for Ammoo for the burden she’d been carrying around all these years, but the urge to be harsh was stronger. You, Elijah, of all people, will know that I was capable of being cruel. I looked around and they were all staring at me and the air seemed to wrap itself around my mouth. I ignored my father’s outstretched arms, the soft sobs of my mother. ‘You know what this makes me? Not knowing who I am? It makes me half a person.’

‘It was a terrible time,’ I heard Sohail say. His voice was steady. ‘We all did things in the war, and we’ve all found ways to make peace with those things.’

‘Did you kill anyone?’

‘That’s not what he means,’ Abboo said. ‘After the war, everyone was looking for meaning, for something that would help us to make sense of what happened. For some people, it was their work — lot of money people made. And sometimes’ — he looked at Sohail now — ‘it was religion.’

‘For us it was a baby,’ Ammoo said. ‘We wanted a baby to erase all our pain.’ I looked at her and saw that she was pulling it out of herself with tremendous pain and effort, like a demonic spirit that had lodged itself between her ribs and had to be exorcised. As she spoke, her voice grew in volume and confidence. ‘So when we couldn’t — when I couldn’t — you won’t understand, it’s something so deep, the inability to bear a child.’

I took a sip of tea, burning my tongue.

‘We didn’t want to have any contact with — her — your mother. It was too difficult. So we let Dolly and Bulbul handle everything, and then we asked them to destroy the evidence. Once you were legally ours, we just wanted to forget you had ever belonged to anyone else.’

I didn’t know what to say. Their reasons for wanting to erase the adoptedness of their child — me — was not unreasonable. It was born out of a need to love and be loved, I could see that now and I believed it. But it also meant they must have, on some level, been ashamed — not in the way some might have thought, and I had always feared — that my roots were somehow contaminated by poverty, or bad luck, or misfortune — but ashamed of themselves, and maybe ashamed was not even the right way to describe it — more that it was a terrible thing, the fact that I’d had to come from somewhere other than my mother’s womb, that I wasn’t made of them in the way they had so ardently desired, that their solution for the damping of their sorrow had collapsed around them and left them no option but to settle for someone else’s child. So although I was grateful for this truth, it made me think of all the nights they might have spent waiting, and wanting, and being denied, and perhaps even after I had come to them, they may have glanced down at my sleeping face and wished I were someone else, the someone who was never to be, and I could see now why they didn’t want me to know, because as soon as the image flashed before my eyes, I missed the time, just a few minutes ago, when the knowledge didn’t exist, not in the specific, tangible way it did now.

I looked at my uncle to see if he had something to say at this moment, something solemn and meant for moments such as these, but he was leaning back with his hands folded on the dome of his belly. ‘I have to find her,’ I said. ‘I’m going to keep looking until I find her.’

Abboo sighed deeply and tightened his arm around Ammoo, who was wiping tears from her eyes with the end of her sari, tracing the bottom of her eyelid where her eyeliner had smudged. ‘How will you do that, darling? We have no idea what happened to her.’

Sohail Mama hauled himself up and ambled towards me. ‘I am going now,’ he said. ‘I’ll stay at the mosque tonight.’ I saw a shadow crossing Nanu’s face, knowing he wouldn’t listen if she asked him to stay. All the mothers in the room were longing to cling to their children, I thought, lanced by the memory of my miscarriage. Sohail hugged me and I clung to him. ‘Allah sees everything and forgives everything, remember that.’ His soft shoulders smelled of rosewater. ‘Losing a child is like the end of the world.’ I let him whisper a prayer into my ear, knowing that I was betraying Ammoo as I lingered in his arms.

After he had slipped on his sandals and closed the door behind him, I said, ‘I’m going to spend the night here. Nanu, can I stay?’

‘We’ll stay also,’ Ammoo said.

I was too tired to protest. Nanu busied herself in the kitchen, emerging with a simple chicken curry and rice. She spooned the rice onto my plate. Once or twice she tried to raise various topics of conversation, but no one took her up on it. I ate with my head down, hungrier than I wanted to be, glancing occasionally at my parents. My mother was pushing her food around with a fork. Finally I went to bed without a word to anyone and fell asleep immediately.

When I felt Ammoo’s hand on my face, it must have been close to dawn, because the room was bathed in pale orange light. I don’t know how long she’d been there, but she was lying down beside me and her eyes were open. When I started to turn away from her, she stopped me, her palm firm on my cheek. ‘When you were a baby I would lie down beside you and pull your mouth open like this,’ she said, pressing her thumb down on my chin. ‘And I would put my face close to yours and I would try to smell your breath.’

‘How did it smell?’

‘Milky and sweet. Like custard.’

My mother could beat anyone at hard-luck stories. If you started a conversation with her about something bad that had happened to someone you knew, she would pretend to listen and tell you something so harrowing and dark you would immediately fall silent. I always thought of this as Ammoo’s superpower, the ability to make people feel simultaneously better and far, far worse about their place in the world. I realised now, listening to her frayed breathing, her story of catching the scent of the child that had come to her so late, and with such trouble, that she lived within these dark tales. They fed her and she fed them. She was in dialogue with the lives of others, breathing the very air they expelled, those invisible people who were nothing but a blur to the rest of the world, but alive, vivid, to her. I put my palm over her palm on my cheek, and we lay that way for a long time, circled by the years we had spent belonging to each other.

In the morning, after Nanu had fed us all breakfast and we went our separate ways, my mother back to Sirajganj to start another round of interviews, my father to the factory, I considered the failure of my search, casting my mind to the time my parents made the decision to adopt me. The country, at peace, must have been unsatisfying to my parents. They missed the people they had become when their names began with ‘Comrade’. Returned to ordinariness, they no longer hummed the protest songs as they fell asleep, now in unstrange places. Too quickly they forgot the tragedies of that hour, and what remained was a lingering sense of loss, because now they were citizens, and the business of citizenship was inferior by far to the business of revolution. What they wanted, more than anything, was an anchoring hope, and that anchoring hope was me.

And that is why I would never know who my mother was. They had destroyed the evidence and started a family in the new country.

I wandered around the city. I walked up road 27 and went into various shops, one displaying only black-and-white saris, another selling handicrafts, its walls decorated with rickshaw art. I bought a postcard. Elijah, I wrote, I will never know who my mother is. On an impulse, I took a rickshaw to the Dhanmondi Post Office and stood in line behind a string of men in identical pale-blue half-sleeve shirts and I wrote down your address and paid the severe woman behind the counter. Immediately I regretted it, wishing I could reach behind the metal grille and retrieve the postcard, but the lunchtime crowd swelled and I lost my will. Eventually, hunger drove me home, past the parliament building which sat like a giant grey crab on Manik Mia Avenue, past the planetarium and the tiny bookshop tucked behind the old airport, and finally into Banani, where I stopped at a cheap bakery to buy a chocolate Swiss roll that I knew would irritate Dolly. All the while I was thinking, my search is over. I was still the restless being I had always been, but now that I knew there was nothing left to discover, was the mystery greater, or did it shrink?

I could not decide this on my own. There was no one for me to ask, no one to tell me how to feel about this, the failure and resolution of my search, not my parents, not my husband, not the friends I had gathered over the years at home. I realised that I had spent much of my life parcelling myself out, giving a little to this person, a little to that, and there was no one to connect the dots, no one to understand the sum total of all the parts, the orphan, the scientist, the daughter of revolutionaries. Except you, of course. But, in spite, or perhaps because, of that, I had given you up.

I dialled Rubana’s number. I knew she would scold me for leaving the beach abruptly, but I suppose I wanted someone to tell me to follow through, to be better. She didn’t reply, so I sent her a text message, and about an hour later she called me back.

‘I’m filing a case with the High Court,’ she said, as if we had been cut off in mid-sentence. ‘I’ll be using your interviews.’

‘I thought they were just for the film.’

‘The case studies will make a difference. Put a human face to all the misery. You’ve done a good thing.’

A good thing. I thought about the way I had treated Mo. ‘Bilal told me you left,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry. I had some personal issues to deal with.’

‘I hope your mother doesn’t regret sending you to me.’ I heard a pause, then a clicking sound, as if she was pressing her lips together and separating them. ‘I’ve heard things, about an American boy.’

Of course Rubana would have heard. My face burned as I busied myself with a crease on my kameez.

‘You know I don’t really care about these things — your life is yours. But you can’t give people excuses for not taking you seriously.’

I felt guilty at the strength with which I wished this woman was my mother. I told myself it was time to stop doing this, a habit I had developed over the years — stop looking for her at every turn, imagining she was this person, or that. Strangers on the street. Women I had known my whole life.

As if she had read my mind, Rubana said, ‘You could go back and do a few more interviews.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, relieved. She was giving me a way out again, and I was taking it with both hands.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said to everyone. ‘Rubana needs me to finish some work.’

Rashid refused the tub of pistachio ice cream being passed around the table. ‘When will you be back?’ he asked.

‘My baby-babu misses his bride,’ Dolly said.

‘A few weeks.’ Under the table, I reached for his hand.

‘Can’t someone else do it?’ Dolly said. ‘It’s so sad when newlyweds have to be apart.’

‘Why don’t we all go down for a weekend?’ Bulbul said. ‘We haven’t been to the house in months.’

‘It’s going to rain the whole time. You’ll catch a cold. Rubana is really being unreasonable,’ Dolly said.

‘I’ve missed the Chittagong golf course,’ Bulbul said. ‘If we go down I can play a few rounds.’

Dolly plunged her spoon into the ice-cream tub. ‘That’s it. You’ll drag me all the way down there and disappear for the whole day.’

‘Weather is nice this time of year.’

‘No, it’s not. And Sigma and Pultu will be disappointed if we don’t invite them for lunch.’

‘Of course,’ Bulbul said, leaning back in his chair. ‘But Pultu can play a round with me and we can have lunch at the club.’

Dolly and Bulbul went back and forth a few times about whether they should fly or drive down to Chittagong, where they should have lunch, and Rashid excused himself, and we all dispersed before the tea trolley arrived. ‘You really have to go?’ he asked as soon as we had closed the bedroom door behind us. He pulled his phone out of his pocket, unrolled his shirtsleeves and threw himself down on the armchair.

Rashid had decided not to think about the depth of my entanglement with you, but simply about the fact that I had strayed, because it would then remain a problem to be solved. That had always been his way. And I knew that his main strategy was keeping me close, watching over me and treating me with great care, as if I had developed a hairline crack all across my body that would slowly heal, but only if my two halves remained pressed together for a long time.

‘You can come to Chittagong and visit, like your mother said.’

‘I wish you would call her Ammoo,’ he said, bringing up a conversation we’d had months ago, about what we would call each other’s parents once we were married. Rashid had slipped easily into calling my parents ‘Ammoo and Abboo’ after a lifetime of ‘Maya auntie and Joy uncle’, but I had been unable to make the transition.

I was in no mood to argue. ‘Like Ammoo said.’

He stood up, removed his watch, placed it carefully back in its case, and started to undress. ‘I need to get out of here,’ I said. ‘I feel like someone cut my anchor.’

He looked at me and I saw myself through his eyes, clouded and unreadable. ‘I don’t understand. You have everything in life. Everything.’

I wanted to tell him about the day before, about what my parents had told me, that I was giving up the search — I knew this would appease him — but instead I unbuttoned his shirt and let it fall to the ground, slipping my arms around him and stroking the ribbed cotton of his singlet. I raised my face to kiss him and he lowered his mouth towards me, but he stopped as our lips briefly touched, pushing my elbows away. ‘I can’t,’ he said. I nodded, stepping away, feeling rejected despite everything. He picked up his shirt from the floor and darted into the bathroom, and I cried while he brushed his teeth. When he came back he lay down on the bed and fell asleep quickly, letting me curl around his tense, bowed back.