In the Light of What We Know: A Novel

by Zia Haider Rahman

  Outside, we joined Emily and again he repeated his request to meet again. I had the impression it was me he wanted to see. We made promises, which I think we knew would not be kept.

  What did he ask you?

  So much for the privilege of confession, I replied.

  Come on, said Emily.

  He wondered if you were marrying me for my passport or my money, I said. Of course, it was the memory of what Rebecca Sonnenschein had once said, long ago, returning now to inform my reply.

  Really?

  More or less, I said with a smile.

  We had lunch in the hotel restaurant.

  I asked her if she’d booked a ticket on the same flight as me for that afternoon, knowing I hadn’t actually told her which flight I was booked on. But before she could answer, her phone rang. How I hated that phone. It rang, she answered hello and then set off away from the table to take the call. She’d come back, I thought, and not say a word about the call. What right, I used to tell myself, did I have to know who she was talking to? None. But why it troubled me, every time, had nothing to do with rights. One expects it of anyone, if a call interrupts a conversation or a meal, an explanation will be given, however cursory—that was so and so, had to take it, sorry, or even, simply, just work. Is it not how people are supposed to behave?

  She came back and resumed her meal.

  Are you coming with me this afternoon? I asked, again, even though her doing so should already have been implicit in everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours. The very act of asking, against that background, evidenced my doubts, signaled that I knew things weren’t quite right and that she wasn’t being entirely straight. And the fact that I wasn’t making any more of this than to ask a question the answer to which had no reason to change, the fact that I wasn’t confrontational, only added to the abasement. I was so careless of the dignity that every man must guard so that he can face himself each day. That I count chief among my regrets, the relegation of dignity.

  To Dubai? she asked.

  To Dubai, for London?

  I’ll get another flight.

  Have your plans changed in the last fifteen minutes? I asked.

  No.

  She was looking me in the eye as she said all this, that gaze I’ve told you about, that look that studies the effect of what she’s saying, that adapts and adjusts for what she sees, as if the purpose was to hold reality steady at the level of words that are spoken, as if that could ever be so.

  We passed the rest of lunch in silence. When I suggested coffee, she spoke again.

  I have to go to a meeting.

  In Kabul?

  No, here.

  Did you know about the meeting before coming to Islamabad?

  I came to see you.

  Do you plan to get on the flight tomorrow? Should I wait?

  I have to go to Kabul for another meeting.

  Tomorrow?

  Yes.

  In development and reconstruction, it already seemed to me, people were paid not by the hour but by the meeting. Meeting was work, and the work was coordination, and coordination requires a meeting of minds, and so meetings are required in meeting rooms, so that things can be discussed and consensus reached and minutes taken, so work can get done.

  Should I wait?

  No answer from her. It was infuriating.

  What did you imagine I would do?

  She said nothing.

  Do you know if Ariana’s running flights from Kabul to Dubai? I asked.

  I don’t think so.

  See if you can get yourself to Dubai tomorrow evening. We can catch a flight to London together, probably the day after. There’s a flight at four in the afternoon.

  There is a study that comes to my mind now, said Zafar. Patients—

  Really? Another study? I interjected.

  Do you really think you’re in a position to tease me?

  Go on, I said.

  The study addressed the failure of patients to show up for appointments, no-shows, something that has always been a problem at doctors’ surgeries. One surgery introduced a system of asking patients to repeat back to the receptionist the time of the appointment they just booked. Apparently, just getting patients to say the time of their appointment resulted in no-shows dropping by fifty percent or something astonishing.

  It’s one thing to ask a patient in a surgery to repeat something back—you’re providing a service, after all—but it’s another to do this with a friend, and another altogether to do it with your lover. What ruse can you apply and what price do you pay for applying a ruse to one so dear? I had no ruse.

  I explained to Emily that I needed to book flights, or my flight, at any rate, at least a couple of hours beforehand. If I didn’t do so, then I’d have to stay at a hotel in Dubai. Not cheap. Bear that in mind, I said.

  Oh, the indignity! There I am asking her to get to Dubai tomorrow but telling her when the last flight to London is on the day after that. Some part of me implicitly conceding, suggesting that she could come later—isn’t that what it was?—giving her an out to every request I made. That was the sum of it, this feeling of being broken into parts. I must have known something wasn’t quite right when she appeared in the room. Her luggage was too small. Did she not count on me saying yes when she asked me to marry her? A carry-on wouldn’t have been enough for her, not if she thought she might be going to London. And yet I shut out the wisdom of my own eyes. One part of me fighting with another.

  I should get going soon if I’m going to catch my flight. Can I drop you off somewhere? I asked.

  No, that’s fine. I’m going to stay here for a bit; I have a little work to do before my meeting. You should go.

  I settled the account, asked at the reception for a taxi to the airport, and went to fetch our bags.

  Emily and I kissed outside the hotel and I got into the car and watched her go back inside.

  To the airport, sir?

  Yes, please. But can you first go to the end of the road, around the roundabout, and come back this way?

  Certainly, sir.

  As we drove past the hotel, I saw Emily getting into a car that had the livery of a cab company.

  Thank you, driver. Let’s go to the airport.

  The car I was in was a Land Cruiser, not the Corolla or Nissan one might expect of a taxi. On arriving at the airport, I was not surprised to discover the colonel waiting there.

  Hello, Zafar, he said, stretching out his hands and gripping me by my arms.

  I’m sorry your visit to Kabul was so short. I trust you’ll be returning soon?

  It’s possible.

  I would like you to know that I’m here to help—we’re there to help. I don’t suppose you need help, but I want you to know that it is there. I trust you had a pleasant flight with our air force?

  It was fine. Thank you for the car, by the way.

  My pleasure. It will be here, as will a place for you to stay. Just let me know.

  Do I need to?

  He chuckled.

  How are you? I asked.

  I’m well, my boy. Very well. The sun is shining. What more can one hope for? You’re on the PIA flight for Dubai.

  Is that a question?

  If you need it, you have a room at the Hyatt. In Dubai.

  Thank you.

  Let’s get you checked in.

  A plane roared over us, and under the thundering noise, as before, the colonel leaned forward and spoke into my ear: When you come back, I want to hear what you make of this Crane boy. The Americans want him out of the way.

  I thought the colonel was baiting my curiosity. I said nothing.

  In Dubai, I checked into the Jumeirah Beach Hotel and began the waiting. In twenty-four hours, she would either be here or not and a decision would be made. What do we so often do when a decision is hard to make? We do nothing. We do not even wait for time to make the decision for us—waiting requires awareness and focus—and we would rather push the matter outside our
attention. The word decision has roots in the Latin decidere, which means to cut off or kill off. You can see it in the word homicide, for instance, to kill a man. A decision, you see, amounts to cutting off all the options but one. And it is not because the decision is inherently complex that we allow time to step in and take charge of making the decision but because addressing ourselves to the decision to be made fills us with anxieties or distress. When we make a good decision we may enjoy the satisfaction of having made a good decision, or at least the satisfaction of having made a decision at all. But when we let time make the decision for us, we are denied such satisfactions. Instead what we feel is relief, and if we stand to consider this feeling, we see that it is the relief that comes from knowing that we are now freed from having ever to endure the anxiety of confronting that decision. It is only relief. That is what time does to us all. It kills all the lives we might have had, destroys all the worlds we might have known. And that is why a man may commit suicide and never take his own life.

  There was nothing to do in Dubai but shop and there was nothing I needed that could be shopped for. The hotel had been an extravagance, which I’d sprung for only with a view to Emily joining me there, a night together in a vast building in the shape of a long sailboat, looking out over the Arabian Gulf. Opposite it, on a man-made island, was what was described as the only seven-star hotel in the world, Burj Al Arab, Tower of the Arabs, its image always in the pages of the in-flight magazine of every airline that went through the Gulf. It was a towering giant, joined to the mainland by an elevated causeway, its front adorned by a fleet of Rolls-Royces, each with only two doors. The roof had a helipad, of course, and I have seen in a magazine the aerial shot of a solitary man striking a golf ball there, if it was not a pose, sending the ball into the blue abandon of the Arabian Gulf.

  I went back to my room, pulled out my laptop, and went down to one of the restaurants to do some work. Legal work can be distracting—I liked arguments and reasoning, and from time to time a case could throw up an absorbing puzzle, perhaps not as often as you might imagine if television shows were anything to go by, but the occasional puzzle there was. My work in Bangladesh mainly focused on combating corruption, some of it litigation but much of it not really legal at all. It was what they called advocacy or even activism, trying to bring about the reform of institutions. I also took on commercial cases and had one such at the time, representing a consortium of bridge builders who, contrary to the contractual schedule, had not yet been paid by the government of Bangladesh. I tried to be careful about the cases I took on, avoiding any that might bring me into conflict with my anticorruption work, and on Hassan Kabir’s suggestion I informed prospective clients that I reserved the right to cease representing them without explanation. Despite this—probably on Hassan’s recommendation—some clients came to me. Some of those, by the way, did not actually want me to represent them but went around Dhaka getting consultations from lawyers who would thereby be conflicted from representing adversaries. You see the same sort of thing going on in D.C. sometimes, especially if there is a relatively small number of lawyers specializing in a narrow field.

  The case at hand was a simple enough breach of contract: The consortium’s claim looked watertight and I didn’t detect anything untoward. Besides, I took a liking to the senior executives, who flew over from the Netherlands and South Korea. When I learned about the particular stretches of river where the consortium had built their three bridges, when the maps were laid out to give me some background, I remembered that I had crossed that same river not far from where these new bridges now stood. And I remembered that as a boy all those years ago, a quarter of a century it was now, I had made my way across that river, and I thought of that other boy, the boy on the train. I expect the executives were too engrossed in their explanations to notice any shift in my countenance.

  But I couldn’t focus on the work. Was she really going to join me? The ability, from childhood, to exclude the cares around me, to ignore the fact of the threatening presence of my mother and father in the flat, the power to stay all things but that which was right in front of me, my books or a math problem or a legal brief, that ability I had so relied upon slipped away again.

  It was only in those periods of concentration, when the self is abnegated and the mind and the subject are fused and all thought is governed by the matter at hand, determined by it, as if it is not you that engages the subject, the work, but the work itself requisitioning the tools of your mind for its inherent purpose—it was during those periods that ironically I felt most in control, that gave the whole of time—before, after, and during—an aspect of will.

  I sometimes wonder if I’m missing out on something, if the days would end better, I would sleep better, I would dream better, if I turned in each night having behind me a day when I built something with my hands, tilled the soil, farmed the land, like my father, like the people in the village where I spent those boyhood years. Outside in Dubai, beneath the blur of sun, on construction sites studding this edge of sand and sea, there were thousands of men, most of them South Asian, many my age, working with their hands, pulling heavy loads, a dozen dying in the assembly of each new skyscraper, crushed by concrete or sliced by high-tension wire.

  And with every strain to wrest myself from the wandering thoughts, thoughts that took me into still-darker places, with every effort to bring myself back to the table, to the screen, and to focus on the work at hand, the work that required only so much as lifting the fingers, with every exercise of mental will, there came the sense of failure.

  In this state, the hours went by. I was there from late afternoon until the evening brought a surge of diners and the sight of so many cheerful people forced me out. In my room, I tried to sleep, failed, watched television, drank a whisky, watched CNN, drank another whisky, got dressed, went downstairs, and stepped outside. Dubai at night in the spring is cold. I went back inside and asked the concierge if he could lend me a coat so I could take a walk. He showed no surprise. I set off without direction, and I walked and walked in a place where there’s no walking to be done, where air-conditioned cars link air-conditioned buildings, illuminated by the fiercest streetlights in the world. And I think of the whole of the city, the people who inhabit its halls, who sleep now and breathe its recycled air and whose activities by day animate this strip of land on the rim of the desert, and I remember—because this thought is always a memory—that they will all one day be gone, that every one of them will be taken outside and pushed into the sand, that in a hundred years, or two hundred years, to be certain, every human being here, every lover and loser, every captain of industry and every hotel cleaner, every mother and father and every child will be no more and that these buildings will stand, not all of them, but enough will persevere without them. It is a thought that stills me, that brings a moment of calm. And I walk and walk, and amid the concrete, steel, and glass, under lights burning brighter than the noonday sun, it is the knot of anxiety, always tightening and turning, for which, above all else, I resent her. There is nothing so enfeebling, so degrading, as that state of fretfulness, of helpless agitation. And I’m wondering if those whiskys I had, those whiskys now percolating in me, now short-circuiting frayed neural connections, if those whiskys should be augmented by another and then another, even though I’ve never been prone to drink, not even the little that is enough to unsteady me; I’m wondering now if that might bring calm, if it might give me relief. Is this how people end up on drugs and alcohol, not out of despair but because of anxiety, the anxiety that dismantles the apparatus of thought? And amid all this, not for the first time, the time after time, the time and again, because I wished it, and because mathematics remains a refuge, I thought of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, a theorem so enchanting and disturbing, like love, a theorem that illuminates itself all the while it casts a shadow over mathematics, the queen of the sciences, the queen because she stands aloof, so resolutely disavowing the methods of sciences, so unstintingly disparagin
g of what we feel, what we touch, what we taste. I first came across it in a book in the library, a lovely little volume called What Is Mathematics?, which I came to understand was the perfect title for the book.

  In the midst of this, in the long, cold, and illuminated Dubai night, I hear the azan streaming out over the city. It might only be the drawl found in the Arabian Peninsula, its music drained of its color, a victim of Salafi asceticism, but there remains enough beauty to reverberate against my memory, and its timing is perfect. Allah-hu-Akbar, Allah-hu-Akbar, a long pause, and then piercing through the silence of expectation, a second couplet, the same words but this time drawn out forever. Allaaaah. And in the voice I hear sorrow and understand how close humility and sorrow are, and if my heart spoke then, it said: Lord, here I am.

  * * *

  Zafar fell silent and I wondered if he might cry. Many men are, of course, uncomfortable with crying, uncomfortable with their own and still more so with the crying of other men. But I felt no discomfort with the thought that he might be holding back tears because, for no reason I can properly identify, I myself felt teary. He was not looking at me but at some spot on the wall, far away, and would not have noticed my brushing away a tear or two before he emerged again from his silence.

  I am on my knees, he continued, on an empty night street, in a bright city between the desert and the sea, and I remember a story I read somewhere, barely more than a paragraph, a story of uncertain authorship, appropriately enough. No, not remember, but call to mind, because sometimes we draw on what we know—a song, a memory, a poem, an image, or a story—to augment what we feel, to make exquisite our moment of private suffering and perfect it. The story is saccharine, as hokey as a cross-stitched proverb in a square of embroidery hung on the wall of a suburban home. But it reduces me to tears every time, and in the privacy of hurting, the ego and vanity borne back, I call the story to mind. A man is walking with God along a beach and, looking back, he sees two sets of footprints, as is to be expected. But he notices that in places there is only one set of footprints, and he realizes that those places coincide with the most difficult times of his life. Turning to God, he says: Lord, you said you would always be with me, but in my moments of greatest need there is only one set of prints. God replies: My dear child, I have never forsaken you, for where you see only one set of footprints, that is where I carried you.