I deleted your playlist from my phone and humoured Rashid while he talked about moving into a flat. I began to suspect that was an imminent end to my problems, an end to living and reliving a scrap of a week, obsessing about Diana trapped in the ground, imagining the look on Zamzam’s face as he was loaded into the back of that van. The lie upon which my whole life rested. All of it.
In the evenings Rashid and I sat on the balcony and swatted mosquitoes, sometimes sharing a cigarette, staring out at the lake and the scatter of buildings on the other side. Sally’s pregnancy was starting to show, and the four of us went to parties where Rashid mixed cocktails and held me while we danced. I liked that he was a poor dancer and I could look into his eyes as he made jerky movements with his arms. He sneaked into my room a few times, leaving without a trace before morning, not even his scent lingering on the sheets.
Early one Friday morning, when the traffic was thin, we drove out of the city to Savar and stood under the sail-shaped war memorial. He had brought breakfast, a thermos of tea and a pair of stuffed parathas wrapped in foil. It was cold; we huddled together under our shawls. By this point I had stopped thinking about you entirely, or at least that’s what I had told myself, trying to turn it into a happy, light memory, like a preamble to something, but not the substance of life itself. It had been a month since you had written: Do I Move You? And I had not replied.
Rashid and I walked past the memorial, to the rectangular pool at its base. The path was paved in small red bricks. Pink lotus flowers floated on the surface of the water, which was deep green and opaque.
‘So, you going to marry me, or what?’ We were at the far end of the pool now, and I looked over at the memorial, the white folds of concrete rising up to a triangular point, and I remembered once when my parents had driven us out here and I had soiled my pants, and Ammoo had made me stand up in the back seat all the way home. I didn’t often worry that my parents would send me back to wherever I had come from, but that day, somewhere in my mind I feared they might, and I had gripped the seat in front of me in terror, wondering if the driver would be directed to drop me off on the side of the road and pull away because, although Abboo and Ammoo had promised to love and look after me as if I were their own child, I had crossed an imaginary line.
Rashid reached out from under his shawl and took something out of his pocket, and when I glanced down at his hands I saw that it was a small velvet box with an engagement ring inside.
The week before, I had written to Bart to ask if there was any news about Zamzam or the dig, but he hadn’t replied, and now I felt the years fall away – the long episode in America, the evenings of music, the sweet cold of New England winters.
Rashid was directing me to sit at the edge of the pool. ‘We don’t have to live here, you know. We can live in London. And we’ll travel anyway.’
The implication that I was not at home in my own country irritated me. ‘What makes you think I don’t want to live here?’
‘You want to live here? Great. Makes my life easier.’
‘You think I don’t fit in?’
‘It’s fine, Zee, don’t worry about it. I just meant, you know, it’s nice to get out once in a while.’
‘Because you’re rich, so we can take holidays in Bangkok and Dubai?’
‘What’s wrong with Dubai?’
There were a million things wrong with Dubai, and I could start listing them, but if I did I knew we would have to break up, so instead I said, ‘I want to live here.’ The concrete was cold; I tightened the shawl around my shoulders. Rashid passed me the flask and I took a long sip of tea.
‘Okay. That’s settled, then. We live here. Together.’
I took another sip. ‘Did you put whisky in the tea?’ I reached out and held his hand under the shawl. ‘I feel tipsy.’
‘Let me take care of you, Zee.’
I looked up and saw that the sky was greying and thickening. It would rain on the way home, and we might get stuck in traffic. ‘Let’s do it as soon as possible. How about January?’
His arms shot up. ‘Yes!’
So this is how it happened, Elijah. As Rashid and I made our way back to the car, what passed through me was relief, because now we could all stop pretending there had ever been any other future in my stars, and for the first time in a long time, all the ways in which I felt the absence of my mother, the mother that knew the seedling-me – the me that was here before I was here, a flutter in the guts, that voice of knowledge and doubt – was silent and obedient.
At my door, Rashid asked if he could spend the night. ‘Your parents are asleep. And anyway, who’s going to give them a grandson?’ he winked. ‘Gotta practise.’
‘I’m tired,’ I said, evading him. ‘It’s been a long day.’
‘You’re killing me!’ he said, holding my gaze, holding my elbow in his palm, holding every year we had known each other in the outlines of his face. I imagined him turning on his heel and marching back to the stairwell, jiggling the car keys in his pocket, his irritation dissipating within moments of leaving me, so I relented, undressing in silence at the foot of the bed and letting him fall asleep with his back turned to me, and all the time I was thinking of you, and what it might be like to be with you in this bed, whether you would be as serene in sleep as the man beside me now.
The next day, I went to visit my grandmother. The traffic in Dhaka is unimaginably bad, and it took two, sometimes three hours in the car to get to her apartment in Dhanmondi, which left about one hour for playing rummy, gossiping, and eating the vast number of snacks Nanu could conjure up at a moment’s notice. She was waiting for me in a starched blue sari, smelling comfortably of pressed roses and talcum powder. Pithas – sweet steamed rice cakes – were already waiting, covered with a piece of foil to keep them warm. A teapot and a pair of apples joined them on a tray.
‘I told her to make them after you arrived, but she wouldn’t listen,’ she complained, referring to the cook she had recently hired. ‘So stubborn. Let me look at you.’ She examined my shalwar kameez, nodding in approval.
‘So,’ she said, shuffling the cards, ‘you want to bet money, or just keep it friendly?’
‘I’m getting married,’ I said.
She flung the cards aside. ‘Finally! Somebody brings me good news. Is it that boy?’
I bit into a pitha. ‘Yes. Dolly auntie’s son.’
‘Good. Your mother will be so happy. She told me you came back and ignored him.’
‘I did, and then I changed my mind.’ It sounded strange when I put it this way, as if I was returning to a bowl of leftover soup. ‘He’s very sweet.’
‘Your mother used to tell me she would never get married.’
‘And what did you say?’
‘I told her marriage is wonderful, and children are even better.’ She pulled off her heavy glasses. Nanu had been a young bride, and then a young widow, and anytime she mentioned her husband, an expression of such grief and longing came over her that it was as if she had just lost him the other day. And yet, she could have made an excellent case for being a woman on her own. There was a lightness to her, humour and joy, that she hadn’t passed down to my mother. She had a regular bridge date with her friends, and hosted a monthly kitty party, in which her cousins and neighbours pitched in their savings, so that one person could win the whole lot once a month, names pulled out of an old pillowcase and celebrated with sweets. And she spent as many hours reciting from her Qur’an as she did in front of the television, watching old Hindi films and singing along to the musical numbers.
‘Is he nice to you?’ she asked, wiping her eyes.
‘Very nice.’
‘That’s