The Bones of Grace (20 page)

‘Yes, sir,' I find myself saying. ‘Loyalty like that, it doesn't come easy.'

‘And I suppose you want something for your trouble?' He's getting up, he's coming towards me, he's going to give me something, a little money and a slap on the shoulder, friendly like. You have to ask for it, I think. All you have to do is ask. Foreman's close now, he takes my chin in his hand, lifts me up so we're eye to eye, and for a minute I see him staring at my lips and I think he's going to kiss me. He opens his mouth. And then he spits, toothpick flying out of his mouth, right there on my face.

‘You stinking bitch, fuck off. You blackmailing me?' He makes a fist, sends it to my cheek. I fall, cursing Megna, her hair and her stupid wisdom. I try to make myself small. He kicks me. I feel his shoe in my stomach. I double up, he kicks me again. My face explodes. A tooth comes loose. I taste blood.

‘Who pulled you out of the shithole you call a country?'

‘You.'

‘Louder!'

‘You!'

‘Who gave you a job when you came crawling?'

‘You.'

‘Say it.'

‘You!'

And then I make the begging sounds, tell him about my brother, about his leg, how they make him sit in those clay pits for eighteen, twenty hours a day, feeding silk into the loom, the cold grabbing his thighs. ‘Please, foreman,' I say, ‘forgive me.'

‘Piece of shit. Get out.'

Pahari and Malek come back from the cinema with smiles so big I can see their back teeth. I show off my broken face.

‘What happened to you?' Malek asks.

‘Foreman. What you get for thinking big thoughts.'

‘You?'

‘Ya, me. Surprise.'

Pahari's looking at my face, my swollen eye.

‘Uglier than ever,' I say, trying to laugh.

He's shaking his head. ‘That's not right. They can't do that.'

‘They can do whatever the fuck they like. It's their country.'

‘We'll go to the police. He can't just beat you.'

He makes me cheerful with his baby talk. ‘It's nothing,' I say. ‘Sit. Tell me about the cinema.' I pat the bunk. ‘Come, Malek.' But he's pacing the tiny corridor between our beds.

‘Bastard, bastard,' he mutters.

I turn to Pahari. ‘So what did you see?'

‘English film,' he says, raising his eyebrows. ‘Lots of shooting.'

‘Your girl enjoyed?'

He lies back on the bunk, raises his hands to his face. ‘Shit, man.'

I could almost remember that feeling, the first time I tasted a woman's mouth. ‘Be careful,' was all I could say. ‘They put you under a spell and then you're finished.'

‘So what you'll do about your brother?' Malek is squeezing himself onto my bunk.

‘Brother will have to wait.'

‘Let me give you the money.'

‘What do you have?'

‘I have, I have.'

‘No, brother. I won't eat your rice.' I can't help it, my tongue keeps going to the missing tooth, the gap made of jelly. Malek tries to press me but I can't take his money.

‘Oh, I almost forgot, brother. We brought you a gift.' Pahari takes a packet of candy out of his pocket. I chew with my good side.

‘Sleep now,' I say to them both. ‘It will last longer if you dream about it.'

Next day, foreman comes to the camp. ‘I have a job,' he says.

Bride is almost finished, she just needs her windows cleaned. Sheikh Abdullah Bin-Richistan is coming to cut a ribbon and everything has to be perfect. ‘We're running out of time and job needs to be done in a hurry.' ‘I'll go,' Pahari says, even though it's higher, much higher, than he's ever been, but he wants to take his girl out, proper restaurant this time, with people smiling and asking if he wants ice in his Coke and bringing plates to the table.

‘I want double overtime,' he says. Foreman smiles and says, ‘All right,' and then, because I see something in the boss's eye, I raise my hand too, and before you know it,
Malek is watching us drive off in a truck. Foreman takes us into Bride's lobby, empty and shining, and I give myself a little smile, because I know I put this thing together with my own hands, me and Malek and the other boys, working through the devil's breath of summer. Pahari is looking around, dreaming of when he's going to own the whole place. They've taken off the elevator on the outside, but there's another one at the back of the building, where all the cooks and cleaners and guards will come and go, and we're going up, up, all the way. ‘Wear this,' foreman says, handing us a pair of hard hats. Then he slides open a big door, and we are on the roof of the building, flat and open to the sky. I wonder if Pahari's thinking it wasn't such a good idea after all, but he's not one to admit it. When I put my hand on his back he shrugs it away, moving with speed to where foreman is pointing, to a little balcony hanging over the edge of the building.

Clips and ropes fix us to the sides of the balcony. ‘I'm going to lower you all the way down,' foreman says. ‘You do one floor at a time, slowly. Then you push the button, and you go up.' He shows me how to work it. I see there isn't anything holding us to the side of the building; we're only attached at the top. It's going to sway. I look over at Pahari again, wondering if I should cut out of the whole thing, but he's grinning like it's Eid. ‘Don't worry,' foreman says. And he winks.

On the way down Pahari hangs on the edge and makes a strange, low sound which I think is panic but then he turns around and says, ‘FLYING!' The bastard is laughing, holding his arms out and shaking his shoulders around like he's hero in a filmi dance sequence. The windows are like mirrors, we can see our reflections. He puts his arm around me and we are floating down, angels from heaven,
Superman and God and people who don't eat shit for a living.

Every window we clean, we go up one more flight. We're shining up that Bride and she's looking good. There's a wind up here, the balcony moves a little, then a bit more as we move higher. Now we're holding on with one hand and cleaning with another. We wash, I push the button, we go up. Wind gets stronger.

‘I'm going to marry her,' Pahari tells me.

A man marrying for love. Too good for me, but nothing's too good for Pahari. He wants everything.

‘Do it,' I say. ‘Is she going to convert?'

‘I'm Christian, you idiot.'

All this time, and I didn't even know. That was my problem. I thought everyone was the same, but it didn't have to be that way. Even I didn't have to be the same. I could be different. The wind dies down and we have a moment of quiet so I can think about all the ways I could be different. And then, before my dreaming starts making me big, wind picks up again. This time, it comes with sand. Minute later the air is thick with it, so thick I can only just make out Pahari on the other side, holding on with both arms. ‘It will pass,' I shout, swallowing a mouthful of the desert. ‘Don't worry. Hold on.'

We wait, turning our backs to the wind, becoming small, small as we can. I crawl to Pahari and I grab his jumpsuit, put my arm through his arm. We groan as the sand comes into our ears, into our clothes, the devil's spit. The balcony lifts, higher on one side and then another. I pull the lever, but we can only go up, not down. Only one way, so I climb us up, slow as I can. Close to the top and suddenly it shudders to a stop, and I push and push but nothing happens. I crawl to the other side, see if I can make the ropes move.
I can't. I ask myself if this is the time to start praying, but no God was going to hear me now, not after all the curses I had sent in His direction. ‘It will pass, it will pass,' I keep saying, but Pahari can't hear me now, he's on the other side, and the wind is too high, and before I know it, we're going back and forth like a swing, and it's everything I've got to keep my arm around the bars of the platform, and I do just like what I teach those boys when they first get here, just focus on a small piece of the building, not the tall of it falling away below me, just this little piece in front of me, and I will the moment to stand very still, and then I see Pahari, his arm has come loose, and the ropes that tie him to the machine are floating free, and the sound of him falling is swallowed by the hiss of the desert, that shape-shifting snake.

I'm home now and I've got everything. Because Pahari's dead and they paid me off. I'm the greedy bastard now. I'm the one who isn't the same. The old me would've stayed, maybe made sure Pahari got his proper burial, maybe I wouldn't even have taken their dirty money, maybe I would've made a stink about it, but soon as they handed me that envelope I was gone. Malek told me the sheikh was getting rid of foreman. We shouldn't have been up there, not without better safety equipment. It's not something they can cover up, like the boys who jump because they miss their mamas and can't take another day. We were up there for an hour; lots of people saw, real people who matter. ‘We can make our demands,' Malek said, ‘ask for better pay, overtime and a good place to sleep.'

But I didn't care about any of that. Because when I was going to die, when I was hanging up there with the storm in my face, all I could think about was my kid. My kid,
walking around with no memory of a father, a kid who would look at himself in the mirror and not know where his face came from. Who knows what Megna had told him, though if she said bad, it would all be true, because I was a bastard for letting it come into the world without a name. Now I want it all, I want my fridge and my socks and my name and Megna, my little piece of heaven, and I'm coming to get it.

II I Am a Doorway Man

I am a doorway man. I sit in the doorway and people come. In the morning, they tell me the gossip. So-and-so's wife left him. Lost all his money gambling and she buggered off. Cup of tea and we talk politics. I'm a big man now, the parties are after me – who will I join? Awami League, BNP? They want me, they want my money, my sway with the village. I sit in the doorway while they kiss my ass. I tell the mollahs to go to hell, none of that fake Goddery. I've seen God, I tell them. He's made of sand and he spat right in my eye.

My story gets bigger with every lip it crosses. First I'm up fifty storeys, then a hundred. Two hours up on that balcony. No six. Ten. Hanging by a rope. Upside down. His forehead was lucky, otherwise he would've been dead like the other guy.

Even Morshed is sucking up. Morshed, who took two acres from my uncle to export me to Dubai, lining his pockets with the money of every SOB who wants to go to foreign. Fat from the stink of the desperate. Now he says, let's be partners, I'll give you ten per cent. If I haggle with him, I can get fifty out of him, no problem. But I'm not going to dirty my hands any more. I didn't even answer the letters from the gang, Bride and Groom both finished,
now they're building a golf club on a fake island, sand they're getting from the sea. That life is over. Pahari's dead and I have his blood money, and now I'm gonna sit here in my doorway and let the people come to me.

After all the visiting in the morning, I take a walk around the village. I see the chillies like red lipstick around the borders of people's houses. I see the rice, dark green, then yellow. I walk around the mosque but I don't go inside; if it's there to bring me peace, I don't deserve it.

I walk to the market to take a look. It's winter now and all the interesting things are out of the ground. Things I could only have with my eyes before, now going into my belly. Wife is thrifty, she doesn't like it. I gave her some of the money – only a little – and instead of having a party like I told her, invite everyone and slaughter a goat, she bought a heifer and a bull. There's milk in my tea every morning. Rest of the milk she sells on, and the bull she's fattening – Eid comes she's going to sell it and buy two more. I rile her up, say I'm going to slaughter it myself, what she's gonna do? I'll feed the whole village, the beggars will come to me for scraps, I'll be the king, no more dreams of hanging by my fingers to that balcony, Pahari about to marry his Christian girl, falling like a pebble from the sky.

After lunch, I sleep. No one bothers me, telling me feed the cow, fetch the dinner, dig out the vegetables. I sleep for two, three hours. When I wake up they're at the doorway again, telling me how brave I was, how lucky.

Only my mother isn't happy. ‘A son,' she keeps on saying, ‘it's nothing without a child. No, I won't stop nagging. Divorce that darkie, you don't need her any more. Find another one. Fair, young. She'll give you a son by next spring and I can die in peace.'

I won't. At night after she gives me the dinner, Shathi listens from outside until my plate is clean. Then she comes, pours a bowl of water over my hands, passes me a bar of soap. She dries my hands with the end of her sari. Then she eats alone. In the bed I can hear her breathe, her sigh as she rolls from one side to another, trying not to disturb me while the blood stirs in her. She wants to be touched. Even though she's skinny and from the looks of it there's nothing but bones to her, I know she has blood, I know her blood wants to be moved, circled around, so she knows she's a woman. My hand reaches out to touch her, but I whip it back. There's nothing for me in that body, no comfort. My hand moves again, floating across the valley between us. I reach out and put my hand on her hip. She lies very still but I can hear a tiny breath escape from her lips. My hand gets heavy on her, like it's going to stay there, and then I can feel myself about to shift, nudge myself a bit closer to her, and Pahari and Megna come back to me, and the moment is poisoned. I push her, rough. ‘Move to your side,' I say, soothed when I am cruel, then I turn around, I ignore the deep breath she is trying to suppress, the tiny moonsliver of a cry.

Friday and I'm walking around the village and this time I think I'm not going to avoid the mosque. Too early for the prayers, grounds are empty. I go around the side and enter the small door at the back. This mosque was built a long time ago. It was tiled in blue and white, once, before people picked off the tiles and stuck them above their own doors. There was a tiny room at the back where Megna had lived with her mother. The mosque-cleaner and her daughter. They came to this village when Megna was a just a baby. I go inside now, pulling away the thin curtain
over the door. I'm waiting to see the cot, the calendar of Ganesh her mother hung under the window. She had wandered into the village and said her husband had died, there was no one to take care of her, and the imam at the time took her in, said the room was empty and she could have it.