The Bones of Grace by Tahmima Anam Page A

trouble, at least for a few years.’
    â€˜Then what?’
    â€˜I’ll pop out another one.’
    â€˜That’s your grand plan?’
    â€˜I didn’t go to Harvard. It’s the best I could do.’
    No one would let me forget I’d gone to Harvard.
    Over whisky-laced coffees, we listened to Nadeem strum his guitar. ‘You’re different,’ Sally murmured to me, her chin on my shoulder. Not as different as I could be, I thought. But I said: ‘I’ll be back to my old self in no time.’

    I did not return to my old self. Every morning I woke up with a jolt and realised I was no longer in Dera Bugti. This reminded me of what it meant for me to be here, safe, in the arms of people who loved me, that the price for this safety was the life of another man. I was longing for more than the few cryptic messages we occasionally exchanged, but I was so diminished that I was convinced you would find me dull and unworthy of your notice, and anyway, I had still not found the words to describe what had happened, not even to you.
    When I wasn’t obsessively Googling ‘whale prehistoric arrest Zamzam Baloch disappeared’, I was lying about the apartment and not answering Rashid’s phone calls. He sent me messages asking if he could come to the apartment, but I never replied and he stayed away, though I imagined himbumping into me when I took long, pathetic walks around Tank Park or pushed a shopping cart under the blue lights at Unimart. I was very hungry and frequently on the verge of tears. My father knocked on my door every morning and asked if I would have breakfast with him. I almost always said no.
    My mother was distracted by a new job. I was thankful for this, because I knew that if she turned her attention to me I would be forced to put words to what was happening. In Bangla they refer to women like my mother as dhani morich, because the tiniest chillies are the hottest. My mother is tiny and terrifying. During the war, she drove her ambulance every day to Salt Lake, the refugee camp on the outskirts of Calcutta, where all the exiles were stacked into unused sewer pipes. She gave them vaccines and bandaged their wounds and held their hands as they lost their children to cholera. I believe her whole personality was built in that moment – only seventeen and having to look death straight in the eye – but she must have always been that way. My grandmother paints a picture of a girl who was more stubborn than a trapped fishbone, a girl who tried to cut down the guava tree in the backyard because it had given her a scratch the last time she had tried to climb it. But the war was fundamental, a kind of birth not just for the country but for all the too-young people who had willed the country into being.
    My parents are now, forty years later, starting to come to terms with what that war has done to them. All the good things – their marriage, woven with the broken threads of what they lost; the sweetness of knowing their lives have meant something, for they are not, like so many, plagued by the pain of insignificance. And the bad – both their brothers lost, my father’s on the battlefield, and mymother’s, later, to religion; the fear that they may not, after all, have gotten it right, because every time the country falters, they take it personally, as if there was a tainted seed planted then that corrupted all that followed.
    Recently they have been given a chance to take account in a trial for the men who aided and abetted the army. The word ‘genocide’ is in my home like the word ‘highway’, or ‘acorn’, may be in yours. My mother has given up her medical practice and she’s helping to gather research for the prosecution, travelling across the country to interview survivors and witnesses. She exists in a shroud of other people’s memories as she gently, patiently coaxes out their stories and writes them down. She