The Bones of Grace Read Online Free

looking around, I realised it would be a long time before I had a place of my own again.
    â€˜The palaeontologists are hanging out by themselves, as usual,’ Bettina complained, collapsing on Maude.
    â€˜The anthropologists are doing their best to look intimidating.’
    â€˜And failing.’
    I took another sip from the plastic cup and felt the warmth of wine and sugar spreading through my body. I wanted an excuse to talk about you. ‘So this guy, I haven’t seen him around campus before. Turns out he’s a Philosophy grad.’
    â€˜What’s his name?’ Bettina asked.
    â€˜Elijah Strong.’
    Bettina rolled her eyes. ‘Seriously?’
    â€˜Seriously.’ A thought suddenly occurred to me. ‘Unless he gave me a fake name. Do you think he gave me a fake name?’
    â€˜Definitely. In the meantime, there’s pie.’
    I replayed our conversation in my mind and decided no, you hadn’t lied, Elijah Strong really was your name. Later that night, I would look you up and find a photograph taken before you’d grown your beard and made you look very young, and for a moment I thought it wasn’t you, but of course it was. ‘Pie?’
    â€˜As American as. I turned the oven on in this crazy heat to lure you back to our shores.’
    We had been debating for months about whether I should return to Cambridge after my fieldwork. In the end, I had decided I wouldn’t. I could just as easily write my thesis in Dhaka, where I could be closer to the dig and closer to Rashid. I had decided this despite knowing the world was full of doctoral students who never finished their degrees. My ambivalence was compounded by my lack of determination to stay in your country – I’d never dreamed, likeothers I knew from back home, of living in America. When I was a teenager, I had once visited New York with my parents. My father had a cousin on Long Island, and we stayed in the guest-room of a two-storey house off the highway. I recalled an impressively fluffy wall-to-wall carpet and large rooms that smelled of onions. I had wondered why all the women covered their heads and why there were framed Arabic inscriptions on the wall above every doorway. When an alarm clock belted out a canned Azaan, I had not been able to stop myself from laughing. My mother had scolded me, but I knew she was secretly judging too, that in her mind an immigrant was someone who had abandoned their country.
    That was all I had known of America before landing in the small college town I had chosen for my undergraduate degree – it was before my parents’ fortunes changed, and it was the only place that had offered me a scholarship. Those four years were spent in misery, frigid winters and lonely weekends, marooned among other international students with no car. It wasn’t until I discovered palaeontology, and the whale, that it began to crystallise in my mind, the prospect of making a life for myself, here where people cared about the bones of animals that had lived far before memory or human ambition. Still, I couldn’t shake the image of that house on Long Island, the way all the people from home clung to each other. To my parents and to Rashid, I said nothing about the allure of living here; to my friends, like Bettina, I explained that there was no way I would settle anywhere but Dhaka. My parents were there, I was an only child, and they had lived through a war. To construct my loyalties in any other way would constitute a betrayal, and I was, above all things, aware of my commitments.
    I spotted Kyung-Ju and Brian, a boy from my cohort, and pushed through the crowd to them. My lab partner was drunk, her thin, bluish-black hair sticking to her forehead. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Ready for your big dig?’
    â€˜You had enough to drink?’
    Kyung-Ju clawed the air. ‘I’m the Asian tiger. I’m the Asian tiger.’ The slight animosity that had