In the Light of What We Know: A Novel

by Zia Haider Rahman

  But won’t the corrupt bureau official just say that he informed the donor that there were problems with the application and that the donor and NGO went ahead despite being notified?

  That’s where technology comes in. Everything’s online and transparent so that anyone can log on and see what’s happening to a donor application for bureau clearance. If the bureau raises any queries, it would be required to specify those on the Internet file for that application. Again, if no queries are listed there, then the legal provision would deem there to be no queries at all. The key point is that the whole thing would be transparent to everyone and everyone would be involved in policing it. Actually, I think the donors rather than the government might be more uneasy about it.

  Why?

  Because everyone’s so fixed in a mind-set of secrecy. Even if there’s nothing underhanded going on, secrecy is the culture. I sometimes wonder if secrecy is an end in itself for all these people, donors, NGOs, the UN, the development community at large, if it confers some kind of reward on the human psyche. Perhaps secrets are power not because of their content but because only the select know. The bureau, by the way, could do a lot more positive things. Making the pool of information it gathers transparent and open to all, for instance, could help disseminate lessons learned from NGO projects, save the reinvention of wheels, and ultimately coordinate efforts for maximum impact.

  It would need funding.

  Possibly, but not necessarily a lot, and it would probably save many times its cost. Small but key changes in a system can have a huge impact. On the other hand, it might not work.

  Too many obstacles?

  No, it might not work even if we did get there. My reasoning could be wrong and my estimates of numbers might be wide of the mark. More than that, it’s the unknown unknowns that bother me even if I have no clue what they are—because I have no clue what they are.

  Joanna and Philip chuckled. Donald Rumsfeld was loathed in Kabul, and his comically philosophical maxims were the butt of many jokes, but still I had to admit that his distinctions between known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns were insightful and useful.

  Hindsight makes it hard to see what was predictable and what wasn’t. What worries me is that there might be questions out there that I haven’t thought to ask. Isn’t that the history of international development and Western beneficence: unknown unknowns invoked to legitimize excuses for what comes to pass when their preponderance should be a restraint on intervention in the future? I’ll tell you this, I added. One question I don’t know the answer to is what the hell I’m doing here in Kabul.

  Isn’t there a lot to be done? Afghanistan needs good people, said Philip.

  I looked at Emily.

  I’m flattered, but it’s not my war. It’s dreadful, I said.

  The war itself is over. The Taliban are ousted.

  The war has only started.

  And the country should be left to rot?

  The white man’s burden. How far will he go in the name of helping his inferiors? The country should be left alone.

  Philip might have taken offense, but he had the self-restraint not to show it.

  You’re in a better position to help than most.

  How’s that?

  Well, as a Bangladeshi and a Muslim you have a lot more credibility here, a lot more authority.

  I don’t know where to begin with that one.

  Begin where you like, he replied.

  That—his tone—was, I thought, the first show of male aggression, the first display of antlers. He’d held out for quite some time (and much longer than me). This is why men of his class of Britisher make such fine diplomats.

  Credibility with whom?

  With the Afghans.

  Because the new colonials care very deeply what the Afghanis think.

  Philip didn’t seem to register my irony.

  As for helping the people of Afghanistan, I’m not a missionary, I don’t have the faith in my own ability that you do in yours, faith to do good, faith in the rightness of your cause and the truth of your methods. Missionaries were at the vanguard of the British Empire, many of them genuinely believing they were doing God’s work and never questioning their role in sanctifying the exploitative project. You will know what Archbishop Desmond Tutu said: When the missionaries first came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.

  We should get out, I added, and steer clear. I have no place here.

  The room became silent. Joanna, sitting on the sofa, had parked her eyes on her knees. Emily was looking at Joanna, perhaps, I thought, to apologize. Philip, the thoroughgoing Englishman, pretended that nothing had happened, and for that I was grateful. I had become carried away. Even in my agitated state it was evident to me that anger was taking over my bearing, and it alarmed me. Something was gathering in me, as if armies had been summoned from all corners and the ground bore the first tremors of their approach. Now I might call them armies of injustice, humiliation, and defeat, but at the time I felt them as only the beginning of a kind of end.

  I should be getting back to AfDARI, I said, glancing at my watch.

  Good grief, said Philip. You’d better get going.

  Take something for your driver—we should have sent him something to eat, said Joanna.

  I don’t have a driver.

  You haven’t come by car?

  One of the AfDARI cars dropped me off.

  I thought he’d go back with Maurice, said Emily.

  Joanna and Philip looked at each other.

  You won’t make curfew, said Joanna.

  Really? asked Emily.

  You’ll have to stay here, continued Joanna. We’ll make a bed of sorts.

  I’m sorry, I said feebly. I rather thought I might get a lift back from one of the cars parked outside.

  The drivers will be gone now, said Philip.

  I am sorry.

  Not to worry, piped Joanna cheerily, plenty of room here.

  * * *

  I stayed the night in that very room. Philip left for his quarters in another building on the compound. Made up for me was a bed of sofa cushions on the floor, next to Emily’s bed. Joanna had the other single bed. We all went about things quietly.

  I prayed to fall asleep quickly. I couldn’t bear the thought of lying awake in this space, after an awkward conversation like that, and with Emily only an arm’s reach away. When Joanna pulled the sofa cushions onto the floor, had she been guided by some intuition to set them close to Emily’s bed? I was tired and sleep came quickly. It wasn’t a heavy sleep but a familiar shallow slumber, as if a reluctance held me from wading into the depths of unconscious life. Dreams came, vague forms, actions and actors, all with insufficient density to be remembered. And then the loneliness. That can easily be remembered in the dream state, a feeling of loneliness and a distance from everything I could ever hope to long for. You ask me if I loved her. And I tell you so many things but never answer the question because I cannot see how the category applies and still less because that word is—what is it Shelley said?—too often profaned. But this I can tell you: That night a purity of feeling came from time to time, the feeling that was there whenever a moment closed around us, a suspended moment in which I could sustain the belief that we were alone, that our attention was fully given to each other. I reached up to Emily in the darkness. This hand that is mine, that mediates so much of what goes on between me and the world, coiled under her blankets and, after first touching her back, came to rest on her waist, from where it moved along a short arc and when it reached her hips, it gently pulled at her.

  She, whom I had known always to fall asleep quickly and deeply, was still there, still there with me, as if we two were standing on the shores of sleep, a long, wide beach of white sand. She turned to face me, bringing herself closer by rolling over, and raised her hand to my cheek.

  There was no d
arkness. Flimsy sheets for drapes bled light from the floodlit compound and slivers of illumination formed geometric shapes on the walls and high ceiling of the room. The eyes needed no adjustment in order to see.

  * * *

  I have thought of Zafar as a generous human being, and though that opinion has not fundamentally changed, what I perceived then was another side to him. In his dealings with people in Kabul, on his own account, there was belligerence and willful obtuseness. I rather think, for instance, that this chap Philip had meant that Afghans would regard him as Bangladeshi and that this very fact would put Zafar at an advantage. Which had been suggested, after all, in Zafar’s own description of his exchanges with Suleiman. It seems to me that in Kabul he was spoiling for a fight. When Emily mentioned that Philip went to Winchester, Zafar’s willful misinterpretation—He’s not here?—is telling. It seems quite plausible to me that Emily had perceived Zafar’s interest in people’s backgrounds, which, again, is borne out by his own account. Did not the Pakistani general tell him to get over his infatuation with English public schools?

  * * *

  In the morning, when I arrived at AfDARI, I buttonholed Suaif at the gate.

  Do you think you could ask Suleiman if he has a moment to speak to me in my room?

  A few minutes later Suleiman appeared. I had packed my bag.

  Can you get me on a flight out of here?

  Suleiman glanced at my carry-on. He beckoned to me.

  Where do you need to go?

  Islamabad or U.A.E.

  You’re ready to go now?

  Yes. We can talk later.

  Give me ten minutes.

  Twenty minutes later, he returned.

  There’s a Pakistani army flight for Islamabad in half an hour. You have a seat on it. Let’s go.

  19

  Requiem for the Unlived Life

  CARDINAL PANDULPH: You hold too heinous a respect of grief.

  CONSTANCE: He talks to me that never had a son.

  —William Shakespeare, King John, Act III, scene 4

  God, what a woman! and it’s come to this,

  A man can’t speak of his own child that’s dead.

  —Robert Frost, “Home Burial”

  All of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.

  —George Eliot, Middlemarch

  On the first night in the hospital I slept as soundly as if Death had cradled me. Even in my sleep, I vaguely perceived an unfamiliar quality, as if I were weightless, as if I might even have acquired an immaterial form. I might have come there of my own volition, but now that I was there I felt I couldn’t leave, and for a while, in fact, I wouldn’t be permitted to do so. I had holed myself up, strangely comforted by the knowledge that human influence on my consciousness would be curtailed: I wouldn’t see anyone whom I didn’t want to see. I felt protected from others and, I think, because of that I felt protected from myself.

  That Zafar had been in hospital was not news to me, of course. In an earlier conversation, Zafar had said, I was once the patient of a psychiatric hospital. Now, when Zafar began to talk about his experience in hospital, I wondered if that earlier mention, however parenthetical, had been deliberate—the parentheses there precisely to hide the design. I had expressed no surprise, no shock or concern. Had I thereby confirmed something to him? Was his intention to see my reaction and from it draw conclusions about what I knew, had known? If I had anxieties about what Zafar knew (or didn’t know), they were soon to give way to the discovery that it was I who knew so little and he who had figured out even more than I knew.

  On the morning of the fourth day, the consultant came to visit, continued Zafar. Until then I’d been seen by a junior doctor, whose only function appeared to be to check that I was taking my medication, something the nurse could have done. The consultant, Dr. Villier, was a tall, slim Englishman, with soft blue eyes. If his smile was insincere, I certainly could not tell; the man was the embodiment of doctorly bedside manners. I’d first met Villier a month before, in his offices on Harley Street, when I learned that, as well as practicing as a consultant psychiatrist, he had a practice as a psychoanalyst, the combination of which made him interesting in my eyes. On his rounds in the hospital, Villier was accompanied by a junior doctor, a plump and balding South Asian man—Indian, I thought—with round features, a bulbous nose, and earlobes that sagged as if weights were clipped to them. Gold-rimmed spectales circumscribed the tiny black points of his eyes. Whenever those eyes weren’t focused on Dr. Villier, they darted suspiciously about my room, moving from one to another of my few possessions. I laughed at my own suspicion.

  You’ve met Dr. Mirchandani, of course.

  I nodded.

  How are we feeling today? Villier asked.

  I could not but grin.

  Villier was smiling. I’m sorry, he said, but what’s the joke?

  Your use of we … in a psychiatric hospital. We are well.

  I see, he said. He allowed a chuckle that settled back into a smile.

  It can’t have been, I thought, the first time this had been pointed out to him. I’ve been sleeping very well, I said irrelevantly.

  I’m glad to hear that. As I expect you know, we gave you something to help with the sleep.

  Mirchandani looked at a clipboard and, in what I took to be a Punjabi accent, read off the prescription for Dr. Villier’s benefit. Mirchandani sounded unconfident and Villier thereby became yet more elevated in my estimation. The South Asian doctor stood rigid, his knees locked. Villier’s body, however, was that tiny bit removed from stillness that is the mark of a kind of Englishness. As he sat on the edge of the bed and spoke, his hands and lower arms moved in small circling gestures. The senior physician appeared to occupy more of the room, and I sensed that the two men didn’t have an entirely easy relationship. Mirchandani will know, I thought, that I’d met Villier before I arrived here, and that Villier and I therefore had the narrowest but altogether important history that he, Mirchandani, did not have with this patient. Mirchandani’s only conversation alone with me, by the way, would take place in my second week, when, leaning forward, as if to take me into some confidence, he would ask me if I was sure I needed to be here, if I knew what kind of people came here, and if I was aware how much it cost. If this was his way of winning me over, it not only failed but allowed me to write him off altogether.

  How have the days been? asked Villier.

  I’ve been reading and writing.

  I noticed the books by your bedside. Dante’s Inferno. And this, he said as he picked up the other: Go for Gold: Five Steps to Super-Success.

  Gifts, I said.

  An interesting choice.

  Christmas past and Christmas future.

  Which one’s which? he asked, again smiling.

  You tell me.

  May I ask why you brought these particular books with you?

  I didn’t. They arrived yesterday. They’re gifts from Emily, I said. Express mail, you know, because there’s no time to lose.

  Villier’s eyebrows shot up.

  What do you make of that? I asked.

  That is interesting, he replied.

  You can do better than that.

  It’s very interesting, he answered, still looking surprised.

  Are you always quite so surprised to find a thing interesting?

  Villier said nothing. I’m not sure he heard me.

  You can assume there is no irony in it, I said. She has, in fact, no sense of irony—none for making ironic jokes, anyhow, I added.

  Had we been alone, I thought, he might have engaged me more easily. I didn’t have the gauge of the men’s relationship to one another, but I wondered if Villier needed to appear more in control in front of Mirchandani.

  I’m sorry, I said. I’m feeling a little grumpy.

  The truth was that I’d never felt better, not in months or even years. I had slept soundly with clear, simple dreams, deeply and long. And
I had awoken unaided and early enough to witness the growing light of a new day. I put my good spirits down to that happy sequence.

  Villier was Penelope’s psychiatrist, and she had arranged the initial consultation, even coming along with me.

  At the time, I had moved out of my apartment in Brixton into a bedsit in Hackney. I had left work, having taken unpaid leave, my cases handed over to others, but not before a disastrous quarterly review. I was spending waking hours watching television. I lived on one meal a day, either pizza, which I ordered in, or fast food, for which I ventured out into the world under cover of evening. At night, unable to sleep, I lay in bed reading, never taking in much and rereading paragraphs without effect, the words on the page coalescing into alien forms.

  I resisted the argument. It was a long time, the interval between that first consultation and the days in hospital, before I stopped fighting, if not fully yet accepting, the psychiatrist’s statement, what might have been a casual remark but for his fixing on my eyes, but for the silence he maintained after delivering it, but for the studied regard for my response. I could not accept that I was there because of Emily, however much his point was separated from moral responsibility. How does one person cause another to fall ill?

  His words seemed so casual that first time, in his office. On the windowsill behind him were photographs. I made out the deck and rigging of a sailboat in one. There was a very fat edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson next to it. The room gave no sign of its medical use. But then, what exactly is the sign of a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst? What is the sign of the space between mind and brain?

  The brain can be traumatized by stressful events, said Villier. It can be wounded by circumstances. Soldiers are the obvious example. But war is not the only venue for that kind of stress. There are other battlefields. Perhaps you think you must have been vulnerable in some way. And perhaps that’s true, but that doesn’t mean you caused your depression any more than an old man’s arthritis caused a tread on the stairs to break. Certainly the man’s injuries are made worse by arthritis. Had he been younger and fitter, perhaps he could have caught his own fall, but the step broke because it was weakened by termites. The broken tread on the stairs is the cause of his fall.