‘You’re full of shit,’ he replied.
Bashonti released my hair. ‘Bhaiya, look at this mess.’ She pointed to my face, the rings of sunburn around my eyes.
Rashid was wearing a waistcoat over his shirt that emphasised his slim frame and the bulk of his upper arms. He had cut his hair short and changed his aftershave, but the rest of him was the same, his square forehead, his deep-set eyes and slightly flared nostrils. Looking at him, I remembered he’d had a bar installed over his bedroom door, that he pulled himself up on it every morning before going downstairs to eat breakfast with his mother. I was comforted by the sight of him, and I thought about resting my head against his shoulder, forehead to clavicle, and how reassuring that would be, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Zamzam, and Diana, and the end of my life as I’d known it.
‘Tell me everything,’ he said.
Outside, I heard the sound of a neighbour scolding someone, a child perhaps or a servant. The blood pumped against my scalp where Bashonti had been aggressive with the brush. I’ll never be a palaeontologist, I wanted to say, but I knew he wouldn’t be able to pretend convincingly that this mattered to him. ‘One of the people on my dig got into trouble and they had to shut it down,’ I said.
We ate dinner together, Rashid and my parents and my flattened hair, Bashonti piling rice onto his plate. Rashid spoke mostly to Ammoo, telling her about the new factory he and his father were opening out in Savar. After dinner my parents claimed they were craving ice cream and made a point of letting us know they would be gone for an hour.
When I was twelve we went to Thailand with Rashid’s family. My father’s business hadn’t yet taken off, so we stayed at a modest hotel across the street from the beach, even though Rashid’s parents could afford much better. Rashid spent the entire holiday watching a Test series between the West Indies and Australia while I lay in the hammock under a tree beside the kidney-shaped pool. One day, while I was staring up at the sky and thinking about Sylvia Plath’s suicide, Rashid nudged me with his foot and said, ‘Let’s go swimming.’ And, even though I had been waiting desperately for him to notice me, I knew there was nothing I could say that wouldn’t embarrass me later, so I ignored him, picking at the jute fibres on my hammock. ‘C’mon,’ he said again, tapping the top of my head, ‘it’s so fucking hot.’ It was thrilling to me that he would say the word ‘fucking’ out loud, and to me. ‘I don’t know how to swim,’ I said, still not able to look at him. ‘It’s okay,’ he said, ‘you can just float.’
I lay flat on my back, and he put his warm palm on my spine and ran me around and around the pool. We did this for what felt like hours. Later that year, when my parents bought an apartment on the other side of town and I struggled to make friends at the new school, Rashid took me under his wing, not embarrassed to be seen with me in the morning before the bell rang, waving to me from where he stood in front of the wicket, handsome beyond belief in his cricket whites, and when he ran the ball up and down his leg and made pink streaks on his uniform, I thought I would suffocate under the weight of my crush, but I didn’t, I just kept feeling his hand under me, his steady presence, teaching me to swim, to belong, to fit in. I don’t tell you this story to hurt you, Elijah, but to explain that the idea of leaving Rashid was like the idea of leaving behind my childhood, and, because I was a person whose life began with her own life, and not, like you, with a family tree that stretched back generations, I clung to every piece of my past, unable to forget, or let go, of a single thing, and maybe if Zamzam hadn’t been arrested and we had managed to get Diana out of the ground, I would have been able to move through this moment with greater confidence, the confidence to break old threads and strengthen new ones, but now, in the shadow of this spectacular failure, I became, again, an obedient orphan.
Rashid was all over me, kissing my face and my neck. ‘I can’t believe you’re home,’ he said. I leaned my head against him for a moment, but it was not as I had imagined.
I had, a few minutes earlier, received this from you: Ne me quitte pas.
‘Oh, jaanu, don’t be mad. I can’t be happy to see you? What’s the matter?’
‘It’s nothing.’ I looked down at my hands. I didn’t know how to put it, I didn’t even know what I wanted, so I said, again, nothing, and then it was too late: Rashid was rolling down the sleeves of his shirt and buttoning the cuffs, as if he had at some point decided to punch me and then changed his mind. Then he said, ‘Let’s go to Sally and Nadeem’s. You’ll feel much better after a drink.’
Nadeem passed me a gin and tonic and said, ‘What’s new with you, sister?’ and I replied, ‘I’m all fucked up,’ and Nadeem laughed, raking a skeletal hand through his hair. In high school he’d been Rashid’s best friend, but Rashid had left for university in London while Nadeem had stayed behind to join his father’s business. In the summer holidays we would come home to find him perpetually stoned, playing video games or chasing his Pointer around the back garden. There was a quick downward spiral, and a year spent in rehab, and then, much to everyone’s surprise, Sally agreed to marry him, and they moved into a flat and became ordinary.
‘You’re a strange girl,’ Nadeem said to me, tilting his whisky in my direction.
Sally passed around a plate of Bombay mix. ‘So you back for good this time?’ she asked.
Rashid cupped my knee. ‘I’m not letting this girl out of my sight.’
‘When’s the wedding?’
I wanted to lunge at her for bringing it up. ‘Everyone wants to know,’ I said. I noticed a streak of pale hair across her forehead and changed the subject. ‘Did you dye your hair?’
‘My cook did it. She’s a genius.’
The gin and tonic was making me woozy. I felt a surge of revulsion for Sally and realised I had spent my whole life with these people, and I thought again about Zamzam, and Diana, and you, Elijah. Were you thinking of me? What would you make of this apartment, the leather dining chairs, the white baby grand against the sliding doors, Gulshan Lake glittering in the background? My tongue was sweet and heavy in my mouth. I relaxed, allowing the memory of our days in Cambridge to float around in my mind. ‘It’s a bit radical,’ I said, going back to Sally’s hair.
‘Well,’ she announced, ‘I’m fucking pregnant.’
‘Shit!’ Rashid said, slapping Nadeem’s shoulder. ‘Come here, man. Let me hug you.’
I tried to think of something nice to say. ‘Congratulations,’ I managed.
‘You’ll be next,’ Nadeem said.
I would be next. I considered Dhaka, this neighbourhood with big houses behind high gates, this over-air-conditioned apartment, and I was overcome with affection. A part of me was still back on Trowbridge Street, or eating ice cream with the Atlantic summer at my back, talking about jazz and Shostakovich and breakfast sandwiches with you, or out in Dera Bugti with a chisel in my hand. But I was at ease for the first time in months, at ease standing on what I knew instead of the strata of meaning I was capable of imposing on every situation. With these people who had known me all my life and not at all, I didn’t have to talk about Zamzam, or the expedition, what I was going to do with my life, who I was going to become or who I had been.
Sally said she wasn’t going to give up drinking, though she sent Nadeem and Rashid to the balcony to smoke. ‘I’m terrified,’ she said to me when we were alone. ‘My vagina’s going to be the size of a drainpipe, and even my tits will go back to being tiny in the end. What’s the point?’
Sally, whose nickname came from her last name, Salehuddin, had always had a habit of making things sound worse than they actually were; in reality she was an optimist, insisting to her parents that Nadeem would someday grow up and become a good husband. I had attended their wedding, Sally buried under a thick layer of foundation, her parents hovering behind the wedding dais with fixed smiles on their lips.
‘It won’t be so bad. I hear