The Bones of Grace Read Free

your knuckle with my tea-cold hand. You seemed pleased by my touch, yet you didn’t return the gesture. I told you that I had never been close to anyone who had died. Then I said: ‘I know this will sound strange. But when I remembered my parents telling me I was adopted, it felt like a death. Like there’s a person I’ve been my whole life and she’s a fake, a ghost.’
    â€˜It must be hard, not knowing.’
    â€˜I’m afraid of what it means. And I feel alone in the world.’
    â€˜Loneliness is just part of being a person. We long for togetherness, for connection, and yet we’re trapped in our own bodies. We want know the other fully, but we can’t, we can only stretch out our hands and reach.’
    It was so close to what I had felt an hour or two ago, when you had touched me and then untouched me, that I said, ‘I think that’s the best thing anyone has ever said to me,’ and you smiled, your lips disappearing into your beard.You said were pleased to have been given the opportunity to say the right thing. Then you asked me to tell you more about Dhaka. ‘I don’t know anyone from Bangladesh. In fact, I can’t say I know any whale-hunting Shostakovich fans from any country.’ I was charmed by this description of myself. I said you should come and see the place for yourself. You said you would like that. I told you how my parents had met during the Bangladesh War, that it had been the event that had framed their lives, and mine. We talked about that for a bit, and I gave you the potted history of my country I had narrated many times in the last seven years.
    The café closed and we stepped out into the night, which was bright with heat and cones of streetlight. We drifted slowly towards my apartment. There seemed an infinite number of things left to say. We hesitated at the top of my street, reluctant to part, and, if I had paused to think for a moment, I may have had a premonition of what was to come: breaking your heart, finding my mother, Grace , the end and the beginning, the pulling crew, the discovery of love and its abandonment, and my telling you this story of our love, and of Anwar, and my mother. But I didn’t pause, and the clairvoyant moment passed me by, and so we said an ordinary goodbye, promising to meet in the morning. When we parted, I felt my mind freeing itself of the story of my birth and turning to more graspable things, the dig I was about to go on, the fossil that was waiting in the earth, the lip balm and magazines I needed to buy before I departed.
    You will wonder, as I often have, about the precise moment we fell in love. Was it on Grace , after you played the piano, or was it before that, the moment I saw you through the print-smudged glass at Chittagong Airport, or in your parents’ living room, or as we parted that firstevening, Shostakovich soaring in my music-mind, turning around as you walked away so that I could see you retreat with slow steps in your sandalled feet and hippy trousers?
    But I should tell you now that it was not that night, because that night, I did not believe in love. I knew, of course, that it existed. I knew that it was the central principle around which most people built their lives, and I wasn’t foolish enough to assume that it was something I could avoid entirely. But I did not believe that I lived in an age when a great love was possible. Everything about my life was too easy. I could love whomever I wanted, and marry or not marry them, or change my religion, or get divorced multiple times and have children with three different fathers if I wanted. I came from what you might call a traditional society, but I was not in thrall to that society. What I was in thrall to was the past. This had to do with my parents and the war they had been in, and, as a model for love, for what was possible between two people, they had set an example that fixed in my mind the notion that the epic