In the Light of What We Know: A Novel

by Zia Haider Rahman

  In the early evening, as the light was retreating and monsoon clouds colluded behind the hills, we came to a bridge where the train ground to a complete stop. An hour passed—or perhaps it was ten minutes—and being somewhat irritated by the persistent halting, I decided to leave the carriage to stretch my legs and see things for myself.

  We had stopped by a town strewn along the banks of the river from where the train tracks rose up toward the bridge, beneath a visible moon, free of the distant clouds, nearly full, in fact, and phosphorescent. As I climbed off the train, I took into view the town’s main thoroughfare, two hundred yards or so of a wide dirt road. The rains had polished it, raising the edges of bricks that had been set into the dirt road, not in any tessellated order but laid here and there to supply traction to rickshaws and carts. In the failing light, kerosene lamps were being lit in the tin-roofed shacks on both sides of the street, while men squatted beside baskets of fish and vegetables.

  Some way off, at the front of the train, the driver and his junior were locked in animated discussion with a throng of men. Something was happening. As I drew closer I found to my astonishment that I understood what was being discussed. I should have expected to hear Sylheti at some point, but I was not ready for it. Evidently, we were in Sylhet, nearing the end of the journey, having passed the trading center of Srimangal and now deep into the province. The boy from my carriage who had presented me with the mango was standing at the edge of the throng, his back to me. I stepped close to him and asked, in Sylheti, what was going on. He turned and smiled at me, perhaps pleased that I spoke Sylheti, and explained that the townsfolk thought the bridge was unsafe. They say, explained the boy, that an hour before we arrived an iron beam fell from the bridge, so it is now weakened.

  A few villagers were standing close to the bank side and I approached them to see what it was that they saw. The river below me was wide, several times wider than the train was long, and was running fast. In the monsoon season, the rivers are swollen, many to bursting point, and some flow so fast they are impossible to navigate by boat. Above the river, stretching all the way across it, supported on several pillars was an iron truss bridge. It was, I remember thinking, as high as the blocks of flats in London where we lived—where I used to live.

  I remember the height of those flats. I remember hearing that Joya had died. Joya visited my mother often, her two little children with her, though I never sensed any strong connection between her and my mother. After my mother first met Joya, she said that Joya’s children were mixed race. I knew what that meant as a matter of fact, yet what saddened me was the note of disdain I heard in my mother’s voice. But I was always glad for any visitor who would draw the attention of my mother and, on Tuesdays, my father. Sometimes, when Joya left our home late, she would promise to switch the lights on and off in her living room, whose window we could see from our flat, to let us know she’d crossed the housing estate safely. It was Joya’s idea. My mother didn’t seem to care to look, or perhaps she knew that I would look. Joya jumped from a window in her flat one day and landed on the chain-link fence that marked the concrete play area. My mother told me this and seemed troubled by it on the evening she told me. On the following Saturday, as my father and I crossed the housing estate on our way to the library, I counted the eleven floors to her living-room window.

  The small crowd of townsfolk, the driver, and the assistant were walking onto the bridge. I joined the boy, my new friend, and we moved with the group onto the tracks and toward the river. As we walked along the tracks, the train driver periodically peered over the handrails and shone a flashlight down the side of the bridge, while his assistant brought a hammer down hard onto the rails. The bridge reverberated sounds that seemed to come from the iron upper framework, not from the deep underbelly of girders and I-beams. We reached a third of the way across when one of the townsmen called out the point where the girder had fallen away. A discussion followed, most of which I did not catch. On the other side of the river, there was a coil of flickering lights, where the bridge landed on the riverbank. I asked a man standing at the edge of the crowd whether the train would stop there. There was another town at that end, he explained, and, because it had a telephone, the train driver stopped there to collect messages.

  I told the boy, in my awkward Sylheti, that I would carry on walking across the bridge to the other side of the river and catch the train there.

  It would be nice to walk with you, he said. But I have to go back to my parents. Where is your family?

  In Bilaath, I said. Bilaath, or Vilayet as it has otherwise been transcribed into English, derives from Persian and Ottoman Turkish, in which the word meant governorate or district. In Bengali, the word is used to refer to Britain. In fact, one English colloquial name for Britain, Blighty, somewhat archaic these days and mainly reserved for comedy, is derived from the word Bilaath, which was current in India in the time of the British Raj.

  Do you have any brothers?

  I suppose now this seems like a curious question, but at the time, it did not. Friendship is one of life’s mysteries.

  No, I replied.

  The boy smiled and set off for the train.

  Could you keep an eye on my bag? I asked.

  Of course. Don’t worry.

  I walked farther onto the bridge, the first town receding behind me, into an unlit region between two hives of human activity. Beneath me, the swollen river thrashed about in the dark, throwing up white arcs of reflected moonlight. Deep from within it there seemed to rise a growl.

  I wasn’t far from my ultimate destination. The plan was that I would be met at the station by another uncle, my father’s brother.

  At the other side of the river, I came upon a second hub of human life, a few shacks and stallholders. Kerosene lanterns left a shuddering glow on surfaces. I smelled the sting of mustard oil and heard its crackle.

  The stallholder was frying a mixture of onions and chickpeas with some spices, and the smell was, as Brits would say, terrific. I had eaten nothing more all day than the mango the boy had given me. I gestured to the old man behind the stall that I would like some of what he was cooking. He took my money and wrapped up a portion in a small cone of newspaper. Across the bridge, the train blew its whistle and I could hear the intermittent chug of the pistons heaving the wheels. All the smells, sights, and sounds, from the pan in front of me, from the train across the water, from the river’s moan, from the string of glowing lanterns, from the solitary moon—all claims on the senses came to me as one, as if merged into the entire night.

  The snack was delicious and I asked for four more: another for me and three for the boy and his parents.

  If I close my eyes, I can hear the sounds again: the groan, the creak and snap of girders buckling, the high-pitched whistle of wires flying, the crash of a carriage hitting the tower, of another hitting the pier at the base, and then the sound of water, not a splash but as if the growling torrent had leaped up and crunched the falling carriage in its teeth. Halfway along the bridge was a splay of girders, their edges picked out by the moonlight. The river had taken the train, separating the carriages into prongs in the water.

  The townspeople on both sides rushed to assist, launching their skinny boats into the river. I climbed down to the riverside, almost losing my foothold in the mud and loose earth. It seemed to take forever, and by the time I reached the riverbank, bodies and all sorts of articles were already visible in the gray waves under the light of the moon.

  I wanted to help and clambered onto a boat with two others. But everyone must have known that the passengers had had little chance against the enormous impact.

  Of course I waited for my new friend and his parents, but I never saw them again. Perhaps they survived, perhaps they were rescued by another boat and taken ashore, but they had been sitting in the front carriage, as I had been, and that carriage would have taken blows from the front and behind, between river and train.

  Zafar poured us both some more ch
ampagne.

  We drank silently.

  You never told me about all this, I said to my friend.

  Should I have? he replied. There’s a lot we haven’t talked about, isn’t there?

  I know that I looked down when he said this. I know that I reached for the stem of the glass, lifted it, and drank. Was that shame?

  Did you get home that night? I asked him. It was home you were going to, wasn’t it?

  My friend, you know me well enough to know that I couldn’t possibly use the word home without couching it in so many caveats as to make it useless. I was going back to my father’s village, the family homestead, the place where I had lived as an infant, the place where I believe I was born.

  After the train crash, I spent a few hours trying to help, but I was an outsider, a small boy from Bilaath, who didn’t know how to steer a boat, who couldn’t pull a body out of water. When I began to feel I was getting in the way, I stepped back from it all. The townspeople were incredible; they’d quickly taken control of the situation and seemed to know exactly what to do, as if their collective consciousness preserved the means to meet such adversity.

  I started walking along the railway track toward Kulaura station, where I was supposed to meet my uncle, my father’s brother. I did of course look for the rumored telephone, but when I found it, a man was busy trying to get through to Sylhet city to inform the authorities of the disaster, and my own needs seemed to me petty. My bag was gone, of course. I had nothing other than a wad of cash in my pocket, a penknife, passport, notebook, and a pencil.

  I pushed what I had seen out of my mind because it was so big and I did not know how to think about it. The pure night was rolling in, and though it would not be cold, I knew that I would be afraid of the dark.

  The clouds had now dispersed, revealing the blue night that kept the stars apart. There were so many stars. City dwellers see this rarely, on vacations when their senses are addled by many new things at once. They cannot dream of the clear darkness, how the stars emerge only when everything else in the world is held at bay.

  I remember it all so well, but I also know that I cannot recall the memory with the character of perception I had then, the way we see things as children. I saw the moon in its near-fullness and understood that though we call it moonlight, it is, after all, only sunlight and that we’re always living in the glare of one star, reflected or not. Don’t they say that even the oil in the ground is just the compressed energy of the sun?

  Two people can see the same thing differently—that is obvious—but the notion that the same person can see the same thing utterly differently, something about it unsettles me, leaving a vacancy between me and those days, like an empty chair between two people.

  An hour or so later, I came to a level crossing, a patch of crumbling tarmac. In the distance, on a ribbon of mauve hemming a hill against the edge of the sky, I saw a light moving at the pace of a star. It grew brighter before dividing in two. The car was a white Land Rover, which, I would learn, was in the service of the UN, much like the Land Cruisers and Pajeros so ubiquitous among aid organizations in the third world today. As it drew near, I waved it down and, after explaining my predicament to the driver and offering to pay him something, I jumped in. He’d take me to the village, which involved a considerable detour, he explained, and his employers would not be happy if they knew. I understood what he was saying.

  It was a terrible ride, the roads entirely unsuitable for cars, made worse by the rains.

  The driver dropped me off about a mile from the village. He’d not heard of it but he did know the post office station that I was able to name, and that is where he set me down, before turning back. As I watched him drive off, I was startled by the oddity of a large white car in an area of the world that I knew was without electricity, without running water, without decent roads, generations away from modernity.

  There was only one route ahead, past the brick and tin-roofed hut of the post office, down the road of broken earth, which narrowed into barely more than a footpath. This eventually led into a forest of bamboo thickets, in which the path became more solid, being shielded from the rains by the tall, overhanging stalks, lunging upward, striking each other, to cut the sky above them into star-encrusted blue-black shards.

  There were pineapples growing in the wild among bamboo and shrubs, in what I first thought were areas of darkness but what I would discover in time were patches of soil, often in elevated mounds, thereby draining well, that received shafts of light at the time of day when the sun was high. They were red, these pineapples, with traces of the yellow and the green you know of pineapples but much more of an ocher red, blossoms of rust. And they were not the monstrous things you find in supermarkets here, but small, scarcely bigger than an orange, all the better for sneaking into the small spaces where the light made it to the earth. In later months, when I saw a pineapple shining in a cone of sunlight, I would pick my way through the undergrowth, come up beside it, and look up to see what the pineapple could see, to find the sun that found this fruit.

  When I think of those pineapples now, I always think of a hand grenade. It is an image seen somewhere, almost certainly later, an image written over memories already laid down.*

  I remember so much. There is a woman squatting at a fire, her sari pulled around her, and she is blowing through a piece of bamboo into the base of the fire. There was less oxygen in her breath, it occurs to me now, than in the air around her, since it was exhaled breath. But it was flowing fast through the length of the bamboo and so the flames grew greater.

  As an adolescent back in Britain, I believed that what I saw in boyhood was a representation of a beginning, a homeland without politics, that such memories built up a picture of a time and place, that these things I had seen, these things I had tasted and smelled, the stuff set down in the store of memory, that they were an ark from which a whole world could be re-created. But my belief in this idea waned as I grew. It was an ambitious idea to begin with, but even before the ambition perhaps it was simply wrong in its root, a false premise: to think it possible to re-create a world. Whatever the why, I lost faith in it as I came to construe the meaning of memories ever more narrowly. Some pineapples grow in the wild in one corner of a remote part of the world—remote from me.

  I remember a joke about a mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer riding a train in Scotland. Looking out the window, the engineer sees something that catches his eye.

  Look, he says, it’s a black sheep! It seems the sheep in Scotland are black.

  The physicist shakes his head. Nonsense, he says. All we know is that there are some black sheep in Scotland.

  The mathematician looks at his two friends, sighs, and with all earnestness observes: All we can say is that there is at least one sheep in Scotland, one side of which is black.

  At every stage, the world that breaks in through our senses struggles to find a footing in our brains. We might liken memories to the messages recorded on a tape, but we mistake the message for the medium, or the other way around, for memory is the tape itself. When I listen to my memories now, I believe that all they tell me are stories about themselves. All I know is that in a corner of Sylhet province in Bangladesh, moved first by the sight of pineapples, there was a little boy, one side of whom turned to face the sun.

  As the tangle of forest gave out to an open space, there came into view a long, wide field with the orderly appearance of cultivation. At its far end it swept into a hillock, on which there squatted a low tree, with long branches reaching out like the wires of an umbrella.

  Aubergines were, as I came to learn, grown in that field, and over the next four seasons, when they were chest-high, I would help to harvest them. To the side of the field, in a depression in the soil, which was otherwise unmarked, was the grave of my grandfather.

  When King Fahd of Saudi Arabia died in 2005, he was buried the following day in an unmarked grave, in accordance with the austere practices of the dominant Wahhabi variety o
f Islam. Saudi Arabia did not declare a period of national mourning, the national flag was not lowered, and government offices did not close. The idea is that we return to God with nothing, each standing equal to others; Death, the great leveler, treats king and pauper alike. At the other end of the spectrum, let me add by the way, if you visit the Ottoman cemeteries in Istanbul, such as the vast grounds at Eyüp and Karacaahmet, not only will you see elaborately carved stelae marking the site of the Muslim dead, but you will also find many headstones topped with carvings of hats and headgear corresponding to the deceased’s station in life: the pasha’s fez, the janissary’s börk, and the bashlyks of courtiers. Ottoman class was preserved in death, a heresy, presumably, in the eyes of Saudi Muslims.

  The hillock at the end of the field belonged, as I would learn, to the family, but it was where, with my grandfather’s blessing, the local Hindus would bring their cows to die, in a part of the world where, historically, varieties of religious practices, not just Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, but varieties within each, carried on side by side. In fact, many intermingled to form syncretic faiths, which is even apparent today in the practices of Muslim Sylhetis in London. My own parents, I remember, once attended a convention of some visiting Hindu guru or swami, held at Wembley Arena, and my mother used to visit Hindu fakirs in London to have her future foretold. All this is by the by and, indeed, I came to learn these facts only later, and only later still would I grasp the significance of such things in the war of 1971.

  On emerging from the forest of bamboo, then, I saw to my left the field and hillock, as I say. To my right was the hamlet. My body sensed imminent relief, and I could feel the sinews of my legs begin to yield to their tiredness. I approached the cluster of mud huts and shacks that comprised the family homestead, my grandfather’s and his sons’. Perhaps it was a kind of home. Something from infancy came down to me, not a memory but an echo heard many years later.