In the Light of What We Know: A Novel

by Zia Haider Rahman

  I wrote back telling her where I was, giving her the name of the hotel, and no sooner had I clicked Send than I felt the onset of waiting. I had to buy a plane ticket, a ticket to Dubai, from where I could catch a flight back to Dhaka. I called the airline and booked a seat on a flight the following afternoon, enough time for Emily to get out here—if that is what she had in mind. But the waiting was terrible. It was as if time had changed, no more arrow in flight but a smiling Buddha sitting before me, a figure of marvel, with the patience to withstand an eternity of staring.

  It was late in the afternoon. I had not eaten all day. At a restaurant I ordered a plate of kebabs that came with bread as long as my arm. I ordered a salad to go with it, but before it arrived I was full with meat and bread. In my hotel room, I turned on the television, but after two minutes of CNN, I switched it off and went back downstairs to the guests’ business center to check my email. She hadn’t written. Back in my room, I took a sleeping tablet and turned in for the night.

  The following morning, I went downstairs and logged on. There was a reply from Hassan Kabir: I regret to have troubled you so. Note that I plan to be in Kabul next Wednesday and trust you will be able to join me there. If you stand in need of additional travel documents, visas, or letters to facilitate entry, let my staff know.

  After a light breakfast in the hotel restaurant, I returned to my room, where I tried to work on some legal papers. I was in a buoyant mood. Even if I did not admit it to myself then, I can tell you now that some part of me was holding out the hope that Emily would show.

  At four thirty, there was a knock on the door.

  Hello?

  It’s me.

  Door’s open, I said.

  It was Emily.

  We made love.

  * * *

  Shall we call your mother and tell her?

  Emily did not answer immediately. Was that calculation I saw, the same calculation I had seen before, time and again? She had asked me to marry her and I had said yes, so that perhaps all I had seen in that look was the doubt to which everyone is entitled at the moment they impose their will on the course of their lives. That must be it—that is what I wanted it to be.

  Yes, let’s, she said.

  She spoke first. Zafar and I are getting engaged.

  Getting engaged? I thought. Was there some ceremony involved? It occurred to me for the first time that I really didn’t know the ins and outs of the process, not just the process that Emily must have grown up with, girls of her station, her place in English society, but the process of engagement and marriage, and what happens in between. The engagement as an abstract noun, the wedding invitations as embossed cards, that was about all I knew. There was a wedding ceremony, of course, a white wedding dress and a reception afterward.

  We’re in Islamabad now. We’ll be coming to London.

  Will we? I had no reason to argue with her. If I had become giddy with delight, however briefly, it wasn’t because of the prospect of marriage but because Emily seemed to me for the first time to be acting with resolution about me, with a clear commitment to me. This even though I knew that the only thing left, the only thing to convey the requisite level of emotional commitment, was to ask me to marry her. Perhaps, too, I was just glad for the forward movement, the change in itself, the escape from the toing and froing, the ambiguities and vacillations, and the uncertainties of feeling loved one day and disregarded the next. There is always enough ground for self-deception, its possibilities endless. It is because I knew this then, because I felt the presence of these ideas, that I must wonder now if I had been going along with a game, calling her bluff, forcing her to play this card.

  Emily handed me the phone.

  Is it true? asked Penelope, her voice severe and direct.

  Should I laugh at myself now for not being in the least surprised by Penelope’s question? For in fact realizing that I’d expected the question and expected it to be meant genuinely, as it was?

  It’s true, I said.

  There was silence.

  I am so glad. Congratulations. This is marvelous.

  Penelope went on in that vein for quite a while before asking for contact information. She took down the number for the hotel and I returned the phone to Emily.

  Not yet, said Emily.

  Evidently, she was answering a question, and I have wondered what that question might have been. Have you told your father yet? Or she might have asked Emily if I’d given her a ring—she wouldn’t have known then that Emily had done the asking, that Emily had proposed to me, and not the other way around. But I think that this shrewd woman, mother to a daughter who had judged her deficient, who addressed her as “Mother” in a blunt, toneless voice and had not forgiven her for the failure of her marriage—was that all it was?—I think this shrewd woman had most likely asked her daughter if she could go ahead and announce the engagement. Not yet, Emily had said. The same reply she’d given me when really not so very long before I had asked her if we could tell people she was pregnant.

  But after the call Emily became animated. She appeared to be quite taken by the idea of marriage, a wedding. Her manner assumed a jollity, and she might even have skipped and clapped her hands, had her character been that way disposed. But yes! I have seen her skip, maybe even clap her hands, I’ve seen the enchanting, gleeful skipping of a girl as I entered the house and down she came, down the stairs, happy to see me, reaching out and resting her hands on my chest. There were plenty of moments like that—I wasn’t entirely mad.

  I suggested that we call the airline and get her a seat on my flight. She took the airline’s phone number from me but didn’t call then—she had to go to the bathroom, she said.

  In bed later that evening, she talked about the wedding.

  If we have the wedding in Italy, at my grandmother’s villa, then I think we should do something nice for our long-suffering friends and fly them over.

  I suppose we could, I said, musing to myself how “our friends” so differs from “our respective friends.” “Long-suffering,” I thought, was there only to justify the extravagance.

  I could not offer any more than that lame answer, I suppose we could. I think it’s fair to say that there are women for whom the wedding is itself an object of and for perfection, the embodiment of an idealization that begins in childhood, in girlhood, and gains mass through adolescence and into womanhood. Emily was such a woman. On the other hand, I myself had only ever harbored dread of the wedding day, whomever I might marry in the end. I’d always known that I wouldn’t have an arranged marriage; I’d always known that it was unlikely I’d marry a woman my parents considered suitable, a Muslim woman from the Sylhet province in Bangladesh; I’d always known that educated women with that kind of background and with a Western sensibility were few. There are many more now, but they are too young for me, of course—too late for me. I just didn’t meet any people like that. The worst part of it for my parents must have been the fact that their social status never brought them near families with educated children. They were peasants in the sense that connotes nothing pejorative. They came from peasants and they knew that they themselves, that their class, was the obstacle to fulfilling their own ambitions for me, to make good their shame.

  In any event, I now had little to do with them. My visits to their home in London were separated by months and sometimes years. In fact, I saw more of them in the one month when they needed help with their mortgage than in all the rest of time since I left their home for university. We seldom spoke on the phone. Once, three years passed without contact. When Emily had asked me if she could meet my parents—three months after I’d been introduced to Robin and four after Penelope—I explained things but afterward offered, of course, to take her to my parents’ home.

  But if they won’t let you in, I said, or if they say they don’t want to speak to you, there’s nothing I can do about that.

  They wouldn’t?

  I don’t want to discourage you—you should know ho
w it is—but if you’re asking me, then I have to tell you what I believe. I think they won’t let you in. But I might be wrong.

  Emily didn’t press the issue, and I didn’t tell her that I’d already spoken to them about her and they’d said they didn’t want anything to do with her and didn’t want me mentioning her name in their presence again.

  Because of this, I knew that I’d marry outside and that therefore my parents would never come to my wedding, so that when Emily started talking about flying people over to an Italian villa, when Emily talked about the little church high on a hillside overlooking a valley, a venue for the ceremony, and outside which, once, on a lush slope of grass—holy profanity!—we’d made love, when Emily broached matters of the wedding day, dancing like a girl, all I could think about were the implications of my parents’ not being there.

  And, in fact, I did not want them there. To have wanted them there would only have made sense if I’d wanted them to enjoy it, if I’d wanted them to give their blessing, but I knew that that was a wish too far. I’d have to wish first that some part of them could rejoice. And there was also a fear of embarrassment. It wasn’t the fear of a banal embarrassment, of parents retelling compromising stories of childhood, as if my father or mother could make a wedding speech in English, but a fear of embarrassment at the evident rupture between them and me. Why should that cause embarrassment? I don’t know. What I know is that when I consider that rupture, when I consider the various ways I am separated from my parents, the ways they seem alien to me and I to them, I fear that others might consider the same and that they, too, will conclude that I am an unfeasible human being, so that the embarrassment I fear is not just the universal child’s embarrassment—Daddy, stop that, you’re embarrassing me—but a deeper anxiety about who I am.

  So when Emily spoke of chartering a plane, of a wedding in a Tuscan church sitting pretty at the top of a hill, I thought of how my half would not live up to her fantasy, to the ambitions of an ambitious woman. I imagined a wedding in which one half came incomplete, with an absence that pointed only to deficiency, a hole that everyone would be wary to avoid stepping into, whatever clever and moving words I might spin in the groom’s speech.

  * * *

  In the morning, after a breakfast in bed, Emily made a curious suggestion.

  Let’s go and see a priest.

  To get married now?

  No, silly! To talk about getting married. It’s what you do, go and see a priest.

  Aren’t we going to England?

  We can see one here anyway. Don’t you think it would be fun?

  Talking to a priest?

  Emily was enchanted by the practical matters of the process. She was like a girl playing with new dolls. I knew it was the prospect of losing me finally that had brought things to a head, but I wondered how much of the new mood was sustainable when the claims of work, of a professional life, came back in. That room was an enclave, separated from all the world, all the business of reconstruction and development, a piece of the world that had its own weather system, its own motion of time, an island populated only by two people.

  On my way to the hotel two days earlier, I’d seen a great golden cross flashing in the bright sun, rising above a line of trees, as high as a minaret. A short walk down a wide avenue, whose fast-moving traffic made it an exhilarating peril to cross, and we came to St. Thomas’s Roman Catholic Church in the Diocese of Islamabad-Rawalpindi, Pastor Anwar Daniel, M.A.

  I knocked and we waited.

  Any guess which St. Thomas this is named for? I asked Emily.

  The Apostle Thomas?

  Now that would be an irony.

  Why?

  St. Thomas went east, while the other apostles remained in the Mediterranean. Thomas landed up in India and founded a church there.

  Really?

  Indians practiced Christianity for fifteen centuries before Western missionaries came along and forced them to convert to the Church of Rome. There were Nazranis, for instance, part of the Jewish diaspora long settled in the south of India, who converted to the church of St. Thomas well before Vasco da Gama or Ferdinand Magellan set foot there. The Portuguese rooted them out because they were deemed heretics from the true faith. The unforgivable crime of Indian Christians was to disturb the European’s understanding of himself, and the only proper response was to kill such people. Vanity of vanities. All is vanity. I know what you’re thinking.

  What am I thinking?

  You’re wondering, why the irony, though? Here is a Roman Catholic church bearing the name of the saint who founded the church that was destroyed by Rome.

  How do you know about all this? Emily asked me.

  You don’t?

  No.

  Since I wasn’t there at the time and I don’t know anyone who was, I can only assume it must be from books.

  A bolt opened behind the church door. Greeting us was a squat, rather well-fed South Asian man wearing a shalwar kameez and, strikingly, a clerical collar. He addressed Emily.

  Good morning. What can I do for you?

  We’re getting married and we wanted to talk to a vicar, she said.

  The priest looked surprised.

  I am happy to talk to you, he said.

  He stepped out, pulled the door shut, and led us to a small building next to the church. Inside, in his private chambers, we sat down and he offered us tea, which we declined.

  We are a Catholic church, which means that I’m not a vicar but a priest. Are you Catholics? he asked, looking at me.

  He had an odd verbal tic, flashing his tongue out between phrases, pursing his lips, calling to mind a dog lapping at water.

  Anglicans, said Emily, stepping in. But we’d be very happy to talk to you, if you don’t mind helping us.

  I was wondering what in heaven’s name there was to talk about. What were we doing here? Emily never showed a religious disposition. But of course! It was all ceremony and ritual. There was a process, a procession, of things to do.

  If you don’t mind helping us, she had said. A nice piece of manipulation at work. But how, really, could a priest help? It was, from my perspective, a decidedly odd thing to do, to reach for a priest, but everything Emily suggested seemed to come naturally to her, as if it were taken from an order of ceremonies.

  And it tickled me to be in a church in Pakistan, a nation founded for the Muslims of India. I knew there were churches in Islamabad, I knew that there was one in particular that expat Christians attended, and I thought that perhaps this one might be it. It was in the right neighborhood. But counting against that possibility was, I thought, the fact that the priest was Pakistani.

  If there was anything that needed discussing, any pastoral steer to give, this priest offered little. He was far too curious about us, as individuals and as a couple.

  Where are you from?

  We’re British, said Emily.

  And you? he asked turning to me.

  I was born in Bangladesh.

  Ah, Bangladeshi. I see.

  What is bringing you to Pakistan?

  I’m working in Afghanistan, said Emily.

  Oh, really? You have the work cut out.

  He chuckled.

  You wish to be married here?

  No, she replied, we’ll be married in Italy.

  In Italy? He looked confused.

  Yes, my grandmother has a house there.

  Your grandmother, she is Italian?

  No.

  He looked even more confused. He then turned to me.

  What is your job?

  I’m a lawyer.

  Excellent.

  Apart from addressing the priest’s curiosities, the conversation didn’t seem to be going anywhere. I could hardly blame him, two people outside his congregation appearing at his doorstep, asking for what exactly?

  When he seemed to have satisfied himself that he had his bearings, he asked Emily if he could see me alone.

  I’ll wait outside, she replied. Perhaps I can lo
ok around the church?

  The door is unlocked, he said.

  When she left, the man turned to me and gave me a broad smile.

  I have to ask you this and you can tell me the truth in confidence. Why do you want to marry her?

  I didn’t know quite where to begin and he must have seen that.

  Do you love her?

  Yes, I said.

  But, he said, this love thing is a tricky business, don’t you agree?

  Again, I didn’t know how to respond, and he did seem to want some kind of response, if only to let him progress along some route he had in mind.

  You must be honest. Are you marrying her for the passport?

  No.

  Are you quite sure about this? The devil always helps us deceive ourselves.

  I’m quite sure, I said.

  Where will you live?

  I don’t know, I said, as I remembered a trite homily I’d read somewhere: A bird and a fish can fall in love, but where will they make a home? Unlikely, I thought. They only meet when the bird has the fish in its claws. Fall in love?

  I was holding back information, and I saw that if I left it too late, he would feel insulted that I hadn’t shared it sooner.

  Perhaps I can help—I have a British passport.

  Oh, I see! he said. He fell silent for a moment, lapping his tongue away, as if gathering his thoughts.

  I think this lady is from a moneyed family. Am I right?

  They’re well-off.

  May I ask—are you from a moneyed family?

  No, I’m not.

  I see.

  Again, the pause and lapping.

  Then you must think hard before taking this step.

  He glanced at his watch. I would very much like to see you again, he added. I’m sorry, but I’m late already for a pressing matter.