There’s a scene in Tahmima Anam’s latest novel, The Bones of Grace , which reminds me of a Marina Abramović performance — all silent power and impasse. Zubaida, the protagonist, has been hauled home from a shipyard in Sithakunda, where she was working with a documentary crew and getting to know her American friend, Elijah. Her husband Rashid, whom she chose over Elijah, is the son of her parents’ dearest friends — good-looking, good-natured, but less clever than her.
Back at the in-laws’ house in Dhaka, Zubaida slumps into a pit of shame. She is treated like a sick child. Days drag, snacks are wheeled in and out on trolleys. She remarks, “Everyone settles with some degree of pleasure to enjoy your frailty.” Whereas in an Abramović performance there would have been props — rope, roses, a pistol with bullets — for the rest of the cast to inflict her with pain, in Zubaida’s case, she seems entirely intent on crushing herself.
“I wanted to shake her,” I tell Anam when I meet her in London. We are in a café near King’s Cross. Anam slides into the seat across from me. She speaks with a slight American accent — frequently throwing questions back at me. “Zubaida’s indecision drove me mad,” I say. Anam listens and laughs. “I was definitely tempted to make her have greater will. I think of her as someone 10 years younger than me, and how if this were me, I’d have such clarity on what I wanted. But she’s also been given this message that if she marries Rashid, who comes from a “good family”, all the questions about her past (Zubaida was adopted and knows nothing about the circumstances of her birth) will disappear… But I agree, it’s frustrating to be in the presence of a person who’s clearly unable to determine her own fate.”
Anam tells me the story of Zubaida’s adoption was always going to be a major part of the narrative. It’s an idea Anam lifted from her younger sister, who at 13 began telling people she was adopted. “It wasn’t true, but I thought, isn’t it interesting that you can be the beloved daughter of this family and still feel like an outsider? In Bangladesh, adoption is such an area of silence… everybody knows but nobody talks about it, and that’s considered an act of love, an act of generosity.”
Before marrying Rashid, Zubaida spends time with a crew in a place called Dera Bugti on the Punjab-Balochistan border, excavating the remains of an ancient whale, the Ambulocetus natans. The fossils of the Ambulocetus prove that whales were once land-dwelling creatures before they adapted to life in the ocean. “I don’t know how I came upon the whale but I wanted Zubaida to be a palaeontologist and I was looking to see which fossil remains were in South Asia. The fact that there were so many metaphorical things the whale allowed me to do was a gift from the ground,” Anam says.
Much of the book hinges on these twin processes of excavation and restoration — at the dig, in the shipyard, in the fancy dining rooms of Dhaka. Anam is wickedly good at judging her own milieu. My favourite is Zubaida’s mother-in-law, Dolly, who wears “sugar-spun concoction” saris, has a Pomeranian named Clooney, and calls her son “Baby Babu”. Initially she’s presented as a sweet old lady who is overly fond of jewellery, but as the action progresses, she turns increasingly callous. This, contrasted with the story of Anwar, who has worked as a labourer in Dubai, and whom Zubaida meets in Sithakunda. This section of the book, Anam says, came to her effortlessly, even though it was the first time she was writing in a male voice. “I certainly felt like it was time for some social commentary about class. That’s why the Anwar narrative is in the middle of the book. It’s why Zubaida is adopted, she doesn’t know who her parents are but she knows they must have been poor because that’s what happens in our societies. So I wanted to highlight the disparities without being heavy-handed about it.”
Anam presents Zubaida’s story to us in fragments, scavenged relics, only ever offering us glimpses, never the whole. But it is her layering of time upon these pieces that is magisterial. How do you pin one woman’s search for self against a creature that’s 50 million years old, or against the history of a tumultuous country? “I certainly feel like I inherited an enormous narrative and I’m thrilled it exists, I feel it’s a real anchor, but it’s not mine. It was passed over to me, so I have to decide what my relationship to it is, and negotiate that.”
Anam’s parents were involved in the Bangladesh Liberation War (the first two novels of her Bengal trilogy — A Golden Age and The Good Muslim — were inspired by her mother’s side of the family). Her father worked for the UN, so as a child she moved all over the world, but always, “as people who were eventually going to go home.” All her parents’ decisions were powered by this drive to return to Bangladesh — their jobs, their responsibility, their citizenship. They were born without a country and they made a country, Anam says. “For Zubaida, and for myself, that connection is much more of a dotted line than a straight bold line.”
Anam has accepted that she will probably never live in Bangladesh, even though it’s the place of the most creative richness for her. Her home is in London now, and after spending a decade on the trilogy, she can feel a shift towards a kind of writing that is more character-driven, intimate and internal. “I think the fact that The Bones of Grace is a love story, or that it’s a lot about me, came from the birth of my son. Some people do that with their first books, but I didn’t. It’s very easy to hide behind history and other people’s stories. I had to own that decision. Obviously, there are political issues and thematic interests, and I’m trying to say something about Bangladesh, but essentially, it’s a love story, and I’m cool with it.”
As for future projects, Anam says she has become increasingly attracted to short stories. “I was always afraid of them. I find the ones that are good so magical, but I always thought, that’s not for me.”
Her story, ‘Garments’, published in Freeman’s , has been selected for The Best American Short Stories anthology in 2016, and was recently shortlisted for the BBC Short Story National Award. “Writing,” she says, “is about removing words as much as it is about writing them down, and I think it’s in the removal I feel something happening… If you write a novel, your mistakes can be swaddled with more words, but in short stories there’s less room to hide. For me it’s all about finding a voice. It’s like tapping into a vein. So maybe I’ll try that.”
