In the Light of What We Know: A Novel

by Zia Haider Rahman

  Even as his language conveyed emotion, there was a deliberate care in his tone. His speech was the sound of a mind at work, but there was also a stillness behind it, like the calm that broods over an island before a storm.

  I had taken to this fellow—with caution, of course—and in the polite way one gives a confirming opinion in amiable company, I offered a thought.

  When a jihadi, I ventured—holding the word for a moment to allow its weight to fall—calls a Westerner a devil, it seems to me that he acknowledges the power of the West, for the devil is a mighty figure, a fallen angel but an angel all the same.

  Indeed, said the colonel, holding my eyes with a curiosity that lasted forever.

  But, my dear fellow, he said, breaking the sudden intervening stillness, your metaphor demonstrates the point in a way you might not have intended, for you know your Christian, er, Christian divinities better than your Islamic ones.

  Fallen jinn, I said, remembering something I had read somewhere.*

  Quite. Humans and the jinn have free will; angels do not—they are only instruments of God’s will. But the jinn also embody power, so your point stands, mutatis mutandis.

  I’m obliged, I said with a smile. Macaulay’s Minute, I continued, was first and foremost an argument for English as the language of instruction in schools in British India. It’s about extending the writ of an official language.

  Language indeed, said the colonel, glancing at me.

  The reference was not lost on the colonel, said Zafar, that language was ever an instrument of oppression, and that he needn’t go back a hundred years or a continent away to understand this.*

  My dear boy, said the colonel at length, you have a sensitivity to history that is admirable but does not come without a cost. I fought in 1971. I don’t propose to insult you by rehearsing the debate about numbers killed and so on. Nor would I dare to suggest that all that is by the by, for nothing falls by the by that we do not make it do so. It is not enough simply to say that we made mistakes. That can never be enough. But where does that leave us?

  There was silence, broken only by the arrival of whisky.

  Let me speak, continued the colonel, about Reagan’s mad dog Colonel Gaddafi. In his heyday, the old Libyan rogue was leader of anti-Western sentiment, the champion of the third world, but look at how he dressed, how his own army was fitted out. Why is it we all wear Western military uniforms? We hate the bastards and would bayonet them given half the chance, but we button up in their shirts and tie our laces in their boots. You studied—

  Mathematics, I said. But as I did so, I had the impression that rather than answering a question, I had preempted him.

  A splendid subject, an education in thinking, without the encumbrance of knowledge. Tell me, Zafar, my boy, what takes you to Kabul?

  I thought you’d never ask, I said.

  Now that, young man, is the first untruth you’ve told me.

  * * *

  Looking back, I am better able to see the change in Zafar’s exposition, particularly as he started on those turbulent times with Emily. But despite my growing impression that there was something he was not talking about, something he was skirting around, I could not but be struck by how much about himself he was also sharing. At first, I saw it as an enormous change in the man I knew, but that notion did not survive reflection. What presumption is involved in attributing change to him when all that can be said is that I had come to know something about him that I had not known before? One ventures, therefore, that what one takes to be a change in another person is in fact only an improvement of one’s own understanding of that person, or that what we thought we knew is shown to be a false presumption of our own making. It might even be the object’s perception of a change in the subject, the observed’s perception of a change in the observer, that permits the observed to behave in a way that had hitherto been suppressed—did Zafar feel I could now listen when he had before felt I couldn’t? Might the only real change to have taken place be a change in myself? If such a possibility is disconcerting, one must ask: Why?

  * * *

  I need to go to bed, Zafar said.

  He looked exhausted.

  But there are so many questions. Who was this colonel? What did you say to him? Did you stay there that night?

  Yes, that evening I stayed as a guest of the colonel. He was hosting a dinner party, to which he invited me. As if he thought he was addressing my concerns, the colonel said that his guests were house-trained and would refrain from asking me why I was there or where I was going, though they might ask where I was coming from. Very un-American, the colonel had remarked.

  And the UN? I asked Zafar.

  We’ll come to all that tomorrow. I must sleep.

  At that, Zafar stood, picked up his glass, and downed the rest of his whisky.

  I listened to his slow steps receding up the stairs. It was early December, and in the few months he’d been staying with me, I’d grown accustomed to the presence of another person in the house. When Meena had been here, she’d been away so much, at work late, at work on the weekends, that the house had felt unoccupied. One’s own presence was confirmation of emptiness. I liked having my friend around.

  He occupied the space as if it were his own, and that pleased me so deeply I was afraid of it ending. He would come and go, sometimes disappearing for days, but he was a grown man and didn’t need to be asked where he’d been. I did not want him to feel I was poking my nose in his business; he would tell me if he wanted me to know. But once, after an absence of a few days, I did ask him, and his glance showed his surprise at my asking.

  I was in Wales, he said.

  We were sitting in my study. I had heard him entering the house, then his steps going up the stairs—taking his bag to his room, I thought—his steps coming down, and then the tinkle of glass in the kitchen. Zafar had ordered a crate of champagne the week he arrived. He came into the study, bottle of champagne and two flutes in hand, where I had been sitting in the armchair, leafing through the FT, finding nothing more to read. I took my feet off the ottoman.

  After opening the bottle, pouring two drinks, and handing me one, he parked himself at the desk and pulled a coaster onto the green tooled leather surface.

  Cheers! I said.

  To life! he replied.

  I never heard him say that in other company. I suppose he might have done so when I wasn’t around, but I like to think not. One takes such tokens of affection as one can find.

  What’s in Wales? I asked.

  Happy days. Good times.

  You went there with Emily?

  Yes, he said, looking away.

  At the beginning?

  Yes.

  And did you get what you went for? I mean this time.

  I wanted to see what effect returning would have, what I might feel.

  I’m sorry, Zafar.

  No. It’s quite all right. I stayed in the same cozy little inn, in the same room above the inn’s wood-paneled drawing room, and I lay on the same endless bed, surrounded by the fireplace, the tasseled rug, and a Queen Anne dresser, where she sat and fixed herself in the morning. I felt nothing. It was as if someone else had been there. Not me.

  Zafar was quiet again. And again, the question came back to me: Did he love her? Was it difficult for him to face—to face what? He was sad; it was in his eyes and mouth, which now looked unfamiliar, as if he’d pulled on a mask or pulled one off. The muscles around the face were slack, which is when perhaps emotion in its retreat lets go the reins.

  There’s a line, he said, in Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt: It is well to have a few memories of extravagance in store for hard times.

  Was Wales an extravagance?

  He was wrong, you know?

  Who?

  Greene.

  How’s that? I asked.

  It’s the memory of extravagance that makes other times hard.

  Are these hard times?

  Do you remember those bops in college
?

  The ones you never went to?

  The ones where half the men stood around watching everyone else dance.

  Which means you were watching the men watching, I said.

  What can I say? I like to watch.

  Creep.

  They always played the same tunes.

  “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell and lots of Morrissey, I said.

  And that tune, “Sit Down,” wasn’t it? Rather ironic for a dance song.

  By James.

  Yes, of course, he said. What’s so funny?

  I was chuckling.

  How do you know about stuff like that?

  Zafar didn’t respond, and I suppose that was fair enough.

  There was a line in that song, he said presently, that comes back to me: If I hadn’t seen such riches I could live with being poor.

  Yes, if only you didn’t know that the Joneses next door just got a top-of-the-line lawn mower.

  Something like that.

  11

  Twenty Questions or Failing to Credit Risk

  House prices have risen by nearly 25 percent over the past two years. Although speculative activity has increased in some areas, at a national level these price increases largely reflect strong economic fundamentals, including robust growth in jobs and incomes [and] low mortgage rates …

  —Ben Bernanke, chairman, President’s Council of Economic Advisers, Testimony Before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, October 20, 2005

  I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.

  —Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?

  Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function. Since science has begun to distrust general explanations and solutions that are not sectorial and specialized, the grand challenge for literature is to be capable of weaving together the various branches of knowledge, the various “codes,” into a manifold and multifaceted vision of the world.

  —Italo Calvino, “Multiplicity,” translated by Patrick Creagh

  My father loves playing board games. Most of all, he loves Chutes and Ladders, an utterly pointless game. I’ve never considered the matter before, but it occurs to me now that he would first have come across the game in Pakistan. In his boyhood there, if he had called it by an English name, then he would have known it as Snakes and Ladders. But there’s the possibility he might have known it by an Urdu name, since the game, as I’ve discovered on looking it up, is actually ancient Indian in origin. My father and I first played it together in Princeton and so it is that we have always called it by its American name. I wonder these days about such small things, and wonder whether they mean anything or nothing at all. The best I can come up with is that their meaning might lie only in being noticed, in being allowed to be remembered.

  Chutes and Ladders was for the home; on road trips, we used to play Twenty Questions, a word game known everywhere, I think. We played it in Princeton, as far back as I can remember, in the car on Saturday mornings on the way out to the baseball field. I would have twenty questions to figure out what he was; I could ask him if he was an animal or if he was a plant or if he was a sportsman or a scientist. Later, to the list of categories were added theorem and formula, my father taking care to distinguish the two. Twenty yes-or-no questions to work out who or what he was and then it would be his turn to ask the questions. I remember that it would take me a long time, before the game even started, just to decide who I was going to be, so many possibilities yet none coming to me, but my father always waited patiently.

  I think of those Saturday drives often now, when I’m in the car, because of something he taught me on one of them. My father was a physical formula that day, which I ultimately failed to identify in twenty questions. It is a fundamental formula of classical physics that every schoolboy is taught: The kinetic energy of an object in motion is equal to half its mass multiplied by the square of its velocity. The mass of a thing, explained my father, was the same as its weight on earth. My father asked me what the energy of a car traveling at 30 miles per hour was, and I replied that I didn’t know how much a car weighed. He said: Good point. I remember his affirmation, of course. Assume it’s m, just m, he said. Half of m times 30 squared, which is half m times 900, which is 450 multiplied by m. Now tell me what the energy of a car traveling at 40 miles per hour is.

  I worked it out, slowly, and I replied that it was 800 multiplied by m.

  That’s nearly twice the energy of the car traveling at 30 miles per hour, he said.

  800 is almost twice 450, I said.

  Correct. And it’s energy that kills you, that’s what does the damage, not the speed alone.

  What do you mean?

  A bit of dust that hits you at forty miles an hour will just bounce off. Now I read something yesterday that said the chances of a child dying after being hit by a car traveling at forty miles an hour are about eighty-five percent, but if the car’s traveling at thirty miles an hour the chances are forty-five percent. How can there be such a big difference? After all, the speed increase is only one-third. You got it. It’s because the energy is almost doubled.

  I never thought of it as a lesson but as something my father found fascinating and wanted to share with me, and I now think of it every time I drive, if only in the moment it takes to move from third gear into fourth.

  * * *

  One day, when I could not have been more than fifteen—I had already gone up to Eton, so it must have been on short leave one weekend—I poked my head around the open door of his study. He was in his chair, turned toward the window, his back to his desk, with his feet up on the sill. He was looking out at the evening light. Even then I admired him for his work. Thinking is what he does, and he could do that facing a darkening sky.

  Hey, buddy, he said with his back to me.

  My father does not have a Pakistani accent, nor an American one. His voice, he says, is each accent inflected by the other, and because there aren’t many Americans who settle in Pakistan and learn to speak Urdu as well as the natives, we can’t know, he says, but maybe their accents land up somewhere next to his, even if geographically he himself is going the other way. His voice has a rich enveloping warmth, without the means ever to rise in anger. I suppose you might describe it as having the softness of cashmere silk, Kashmir silk, but I think now of Zafar and hold back: I think he would laugh at such description, and fair enough, I suppose.

  I sat down on the ottoman—the same ottoman after which Zafar would ask on that very first day of his return into my life, and which he, of course, would later repair—my father’s ottoman, which the dear man gave me years later when I set up home on my own. It was where I had sat as a little boy and where, at the age of fifteen and probably too big for it, I sat as he turned in his chair to face me with a bright smile.

  We remember the things that in their time had a presence. There is no sensory faculty for the perception of voids, only clues by which to infer their existence, making them harder still to remember than to perceive.

  On my visits home, my father never asked me on my first day back how school was going. Maybe on the second day, as that day was, or the third, if there was one, but never on the first day back. I see that now but never noticed it then.

  I asked him what he was doing. He explained he was working on the spin of subatomic particles.

  Which is, by the way, the sort of remark that’s a real conversation stopper at dinner parties, causing my mother to roll her eyes for the benefit of gues
ts, even if it was followed by a gesture of affection for my father.

  What’s that? I asked.

  The spin?

  I nodded.

  It’s a property of the particle. Just as people have properties, like compassion, mercy, love, and anger, particles have all sorts of properties. Electrical charge, mass, even color. And spin is another property. Except it isn’t anything like the spin of a ball.

  Then why call it spin?

  Good question. I think the names physicists give correspond to things we can imagine in order to talk about something we can’t imagine.

  How do you know it’s there, this spin?

  That’s the strangest part of it. It isn’t there. In fact, spin comes into being only when we look for it. Until we do, it’s not there.

  I was puzzled. I must have looked puzzled.

  Nature is mischievous. She plays tricks, explained my father. Remember our game of Twenty Questions?

  Yes.

  When we take measurements of a particle, it’s as if we’re asking the particle a question about what it is. Imagine the particle playing the game. Every time we ask a question—take a measurement or reading—the particle gives us an answer, yes or no, so that over twenty questions or twenty thousand we get a picture of what this thing is. Make sense?

  I wasn’t convinced.

  Me neither, he added, but that’s how I’ve been thinking about it.

  Have you really been thinking about Twenty Questions?

  As a matter of fact, I have.

  My father chuckled. Let me tell you something about how I used to play the game, he said, not how I play it now, but how I played it back in Princeton. You used to take a long time deciding what you were before I could start asking questions.

  I remember.

  But I never did. I didn’t take a moment. I cheated.

  How?

  I made it a rule to always answer your first three questions with a yes, a no, and a yes.

  You mean you hadn’t decided on what you were when you started your round?