The Bones of Grace by Tahmima Anam Read Free Book Online Page B

and marriages officially registered. To be told a straight story that you knew was true. Me, I couldn’t look at another living person and see something of myself, the angle of eyes, a gait, a particular texture of hair, or identify the things I hated about myself, the smallness of my breasts, the weakness of my ankles. The kink in my hair had no echo. In a culture where people commented freely on everyone’s looks, people rarely said anything about mine, because a simple phrase, ‘how beautiful you are’, couldn’t be followed by, ‘just like your mother’. Just like who? To whom did these long bones belong, the tone of my skin? Not to the ancestors collaged onto my history.
    I laughed with everyone else as the man described the look of shock on his parents’ faces, the judge at the registrar’s office standing up and ordering them to leave.
    â€˜We should go,’ you said, appearing behind me. You had changed into shorts and a red T-shirt with Chinese lettering on the front. ‘Zubaida has things to do.’
    â€˜I didn’t get to say a proper hello,’ your mother said, pulling her glasses from on top of her head.
    â€˜I’m leaving in a few days,’ I said.
    â€˜Well, that’s a shame.’ Your mother put her hands on my shoulders and regarded me, and I wanted to ask her if I could stay, to walk up the stairs and fold myself into the blankets on her bed. ‘Here,’ she said, as if reading my mind, ‘take this.’ And she pulled a necklace over her head andthen over mine. It was made of old buttons, each one a slightly different shade of blue. I kissed her on the cheek and said goodbye. Outside, a pair of brown cats had draped themselves on the porch. The air was packed tight in the heat, everything quiet and solemn.

    Meeting your family changed something between us. I saw the way you wrestled with your brothers, punching them on the arm by way of hello, and how everything was so perfectly dishevelled in your house. And I could imagine almost every day of your childhood, because it would have been documented in films or on television – in that way, you had probably lived a deeply unremarkable life, had experiences without specificity, and that had bothered you, the way my own past grated at me. All the things that irritated you were things that I had longed for, and all the things you longed for were things I took for granted. I fingered the necklace your mother had given me. It was so light around my neck I could hardly feel it, and I sought that, that lightness and impermeability, things passed from person to person with little significance.
    â€˜I was Clem’s favourite,’ you said, in answer to my question. ‘I’m going to miss her.’
    â€˜Was your father there?’
    â€˜I didn’t want to overwhelm you.’
    I was suddenly hungry. You suggested we return to Harvard Square and have lunch. We debated the merits of Felipe’s and Chipotle’s, both of which I had frequented over the years and would miss, and at that point I remembered I had left my suitcase at your house and I stopped in a rectangle of shade, asking if we could go back.
    You told me to wait there, and jogged backwards. A few minutes later you were wheeling the suitcase down thestreet. When you stopped I closed my eyes and I thought you might kiss me lightly and tenderly on the forehead, as if you had been kissing me for years, as if we had lived together in a house and raised children and frowned over the sagging roof and made French toast on Sundays.
    â€˜So tell me again,’ you said, putting your hands into your pockets and leaning back on your heels. ‘About your boyfriend.’
    â€˜There’s nothing to say, really,’ I said, taking the suitcase from you and starting to walk again. ‘He’s lovely.’
    â€˜How does he feel about new friends?’
    I imagined how I would describe our meeting to