In the Light of What We Know: A Novel

by Zia Haider Rahman

  You have the same problem in translating poetry. You start off in one language and you have to project the work onto another. And the similarity is even closer. In map projections, there are a variety of things you want to preserve, such as area, distances, angles in triangles, and so on. But the trouble is you can’t preserve them all. The mathematics won’t allow it. Your flat map can’t reflect every one of these things even approximately. You have to choose among them which ones you want to keep. And that’s where the choice of projection comes in.

  There’s an easy way to show how you arrive at Mercator’s projection. Take a ball and slice off the very top and the bottom. Then imagine stretching it out so that the surface looks like a hollow tube. Now cut a slit along a length of the hollow tube. You can roll this out on a table. Notice how you’ve lost the very top and bottom of the ball and, in fact, if you look at the common Mercator’s map of the world, you’ll see that it doesn’t actually show you the North and South Poles or even small regions around them. That’s Mercator’s projection, but there are different ways of projecting the world.

  And the similarity with poetry? I asked.

  The cartographer’s job is to take the material on the surface of the globe—lakes, mountains, and cities—and represent these on a flat surface. The translator takes a poem, a piece of text, in one language and has the task of trying to represent aspects of the poem—rhyme, meter, rhythm, metaphor, and meaning—in another language. A cartographer doesn’t give you a miniature globe with all the same details on it as the globe of the world itself has. Nor does the translator simply give you the poem in the original language along with a Hungarian dictionary.

  Both of them face the same problem, namely, that they cannot capture everything exactly and they have to give up some things in order to convey anything at all.

  In going from the curved surface of the earth to the flat surface of a map, the cartographer would ideally want to preserve a number of aspects such as relative distances (so that the distance between Islamabad and Kabul should be in the same proportion to the distance between London and Dhaka on the map as it is in the real world); relative areas (so that the ratio of the area of Nigeria to that of the borough of Brooklyn is the same on the map as it is in the real world); angles (so that the angle subtended at Bagram air base outside Kabul by the lines to that air base from the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, home to an American air base, and from RAF Brize Norton in the Royal County of Oxfordshire is the same on the map as it is in the world); and so on. There are a number of such aspects, more than these few that I mention, but the fact is that the cartographer can’t preserve them all.

  It all depends on what you want the map to show and what use you have for it. People talk about things being lost in translation, but things can, of course, be gained in translation, too. A cartographer might add things, such as borders, which may or may not have some physical manifestation on the earth. But even if there is a fence to mark the border in the world, that fence is not the same as the political border represented on the map: A break in the fence doesn’t vitiate the political border. After all, the red line on the map doesn’t represent the fence and, in fact, the fence itself only represents the border.

  But the point of all this is that all these representations or translations begin from needs. Consequently, the loss of information and understanding that every act of representation involves is the effect of an act of destruction that serves a need. We might appear to have taken a step forward, but in fact we took one step back and two steps forward. Every time we want to understand anything, we have to simplify and reduce and, importantly, give up the prospect of understanding it all, in order to clear the way to understanding something at all. This, I think, is true of all human inquiry.

  * Zafar is referring to the International Security Assistance Force.

  * United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.

  * Zafar is referring to the decimal representation of numbers: The number 2,743, for example, means three 1s, four 10s, seven 100s, and two 1,000s, each position indicating a successively higher power of 10.

  * Used by the U.S. Army in the Second World War and the Vietnam War, the Mk2 defensive hand grenade was known as a “pineapple” because of the grooves cast into its shell, in order, it appears, to improve fragmentation while incidentally helping the grip.

  * Oskar Morgenstern was an economist who, along with John von Neumann, founded game theory. Von Neumann was a formidable mathematician who made contributions in many fields. There is a story, in connection with Gödel, which says much about both Gödel and von Neumann. On October 7, 1930, on the third and last day at a conference in Königsberg, Germany, in the final graveyard question-and-answer session, Kurt Gödel announced his staggering theorem in one sentence, an off-the-cuff remark: There are indeed propositions which are true but unprovable. It went unnoticed by all but one; John von Neumann, visiting from the United States, buttonholed Gödel after the session. That is how Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem entered the world.

  * Responding to the publication of the book One Hundred Authors Against Einstein, a work ostensibly directed at his physics, Albert Einstein said, “If I were wrong, then one would have been enough.”

  * The 1971 Indo-Pakistan War broke out when India intervened after nine months of the ongoing Bangladesh Liberation War, during which India was overwhelmed by refugees from the new nation. One somewhat underreported aspect of this underreported war was American complicity. I repeat here a passage recorded in Zafar’s notes, which is an excerpt from Christopher Hitchens’s book The Trial of Henry Kissinger:

  By 1971, the word “genocide” was all too easily understood. It surfaced in a cable of protest from the United States consulate in what was then East Pakistan—the Bengali “wing” of the Muslim state of Pakistan, known to its restive nationalist inhabitants by the name Bangladesh. The cable was written on 6 April 1971 and its senior signatory, the Consul General in Dacca, was named Archer Blood. But it might have become known as the Blood Telegram in any case … It was not so much reporting on genocide as denouncing the complicity of the United States government in genocide. [Hitchens describes it as “the most public and the most strongly worded demarche from State Department servants to the State Department that has ever been recorded.”] Its main section reads thus:

  Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities. Our government has failed to take forceful measures to protect its citizens while at the same time bending over backward to placate the West Pak[istan] dominated government and to lessen any deservedly negative international public relations impact against them. Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy, ironically at a time when the U.S.S.R. sent President Yahya Khan [martial law administrator, based in West Pakistan] a message defending democracy, condemning arrest of a leader of a democratically elected majority party, incidentally pro-West, and calling for end to repressive measures and bloodshed … But we have chosen not to intervene, even morally, on the grounds that the Awami conflict, in which unfortunately the overworked term genocide is applicable, is purely an internal matter of a sovereign state. Private Americans have expressed disgust. We, as professional civil servants, express our dissent with current policy and fervently hope that our true and lasting interests here can be defined and our policies redirected.

  * The Redskins were a 1980s skinhead band, whose members espoused left-wing antiracist values.

  * Zafar’s recollection of this incident differs from mine slightly, but in a key respect. I was present at the time, at the counter in the dining hall, standing two or three persons away from him. Zafar asked for a main course and Steven replied, Yes, sir. But contrary to his account, at that point Zafar didn’t just ask Steven to call him “Zafar.” He said: Steven, when you say “sir,” I look for my father. Please call me Zafar.

  I cannot imagine that Zafar ever addressed his father as
“sir.” I doubt he ever addressed him in English.

  * Here I imagine that the second time Zafar used the pronoun, when he gave it emphasis, he was using it with an initial capital letter.

  * “The Chaconne,” wrote Brahms, “is the most wonderful, unfathomable piece of music. On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.”

  * In fact, the director’s response was first to set the question in the broader problem of an actor trying to convey mental or emotional states generally. She mentioned the name of Duchenne, a French neurologist of the nineteenth century, who had identified certain facial expressions exhibited by everyone, that, he concluded, were involuntary, including a particular smile, now known as a Duchenne smile, which cannot be created by a person but is the involuntary effect of an emotional state. The particular muscles involved in expressing this smile cannot be consciously willed into action; they’re activated only when someone is genuinely very pleased. Before I could ask this actress-turned-director how she’d heard about this nineteenth-century French neurologist, she explained that Duchenne’s work was of enormous interest to the Russian director Constantin Stanislavski, the father of method acting. The problem Stanislavski identified was how an actor could convey emotions whose corresponding facial expressions could not be willed.

  When I asked Zafar, one day, why the photo of Emily in Penelope’s house had horrified him, he replied that she’d had a Duchenne smile. Even children born deaf and dumb, he said, burst into luminous smiles. I’d never seen her smile like that at me.

  * I did not keep the napkin but have reproduced the diagram after consulting pages on the Internet. Of course, the diagram also appears in Zafar’s notes, where beneath it are the words Knowing doesn’t fix things. When he wrote those words, I have wondered, was he referring to a specific thing, something he came to know, which was an answer to a question but which never resolved things for him?

  * Zafar provided no reference, but I have been able to establish that the remark is attributed to Purkyně by Hans-Lukas Teuber in the rather alarmingly titled volume Visual Field Defects After Penetrating Missile Wounds of the Brain (1960).

  * From a given set of axioms, using logical reasoning, mathematicians derive statements that are true. Hilbert believed that mathematics was consistent, i.e., that it is not possible to derive two different statements that contradict each other. That is what Hilbert’s intuition told him, but he did not have a proof.

  * I tracked down the letter he was referring to. It is from Pakistani Lieutenant Colonel Sultan Ahmed to Brigadier Hardit Singh Kler of the Indian army:

  Dear Brig,

  Hope this finds you in high spirits. Your letter asking us to surrender has been received. I want to tell you that the fighting you have seen so far is very little, in fact the fighting has not even started. So let us stop negotiating and start the fight.

  40 sorties, I may point out, are inadequate. Ask for many more.

  Your point about treating your messenger well was superfluous. It shows how you under-estimate my boys. I hope he liked his tea.

  Give my love to the Muktis [Bangladeshi resistance fighters allied with the Indians]. Let me see you with a Sten in your hand next time instead of the pen you seem to have such mastery over,

  Now get on and fight.

  Yours sincerely

  Commander Jamalpur Fortress.

  (Lt. Colonel Sultan Ahmed)

  Lt. Colonel Sultan Ahmed and his men were overrun shortly after this letter was received.

  * Actually, as I understood it, Zafar was developing a practice in banking regulation.

  * He was not even a lawyer back then.

  * Christianity and Islam share much theologically. They have the same prophets. Jesus occupies an esteemed position, as the Messiah who will return at the end of days—in Islamic theology. But the devil in Islam is a fallen jinn; the jinns were beings of “smokeless flame,” a race of supernatural beings with special powers, distinct from angels, created alongside man but invisible to men. Apparently, the English word genie has common roots with the Arabic jinni, as do the words gene and genius. In Zafar’s notebooks are these lines: What would etymology have looked like to the speakers of Old French, late Middle English, Latin, or Ancient Greek, had there been records to draw on? Would we today still think of European languages as having been born in Europe?

  * I came across the following material in Zafar’s notebooks, which, judging by the surrounding matter, was written long before Zafar’s conversation with the colonel. I assume it’s of Zafar’s own composition; there is no attribution. It’s no surprise that behind anything any of us says there may stand a whole catalog of things unsaid. But what I find unsettling about this extract is that it provides a window into how much Zafar restrained himself when he talked, a glimpse at that catalog of things unsaid:

  If in 1947 the partition of India created two new nations, the smaller could only have been conceived in the madness of those times, a bird of two wings and no body. And if West Pakistan and East Pakistan were two regions united by a common faith, then they were also two peoples divided by different languages. Even the name of the new nation, the most loyal expression of a people’s language, its label, was an act of exclusion and subordination. The prefabrication of one Choudhary Rahmat Ali: P, Punjab, A, Afghania, K, Kashmir, and the -stan, the annex of land, land of the PAK, with an anaptyxic epenthetic i, don’t you know, just to root the acronym in the land, all of which made a neat little pun, Land of the Pure, the Muslims, while it brought together its constituent peoples. Only it didn’t. Where were the Bengalis? Where was the B? One thousand miles of India between them. Surely not left out merely because the pun wouldn’t work but never conceived as a piece of the country, a part of the main. Next, in 1948, the West made Urdu the sole official language of the two parts. Imagine that, making Urdu—alien in speech and script—the only official language of the Eastern part, whose people were among the most attached of any to their mother tongue. They rebelled against it, and on February 21, 1952, things came to a head in clashes between the West Pakistani military and students at Dhaka University. Many died. This is even before things fell apart, before the war of liberation in 1971. To this day, Bangladesh marks the date, known as Language Martyrs Day, as a public holiday. In fact, in 2000, UNESCO made that date, February 21, International Mother Language Day. Who noticed? Who cared?

  Over the years I have had the same dealing with Pakistani cabdrivers. There I am, riding in a cab in London or New York, and because I am interested in the migrations of cabdrivers, these people, themselves so often migrants, whose job it is to take others from one place to another, I ask the driver where he’s from. Or perhaps I ask because I want the fight. The Pakistani driver answers, and after a quick look in the rearview mirror he asks me the same. From Bangladesh, I say, adding that I spent half my life in the West. We are from the same country! We are brother Muslims! exclaims the Pakistani driver in the last English he thinks he’ll be using with this customer before breaking into Urdu. I have to interrupt him to say that I don’t understand a word of that language, though I do, and I ask him if he speaks Bengali. No, they say, laughing. No, they say with a horrible laugh, as if the idea were ridiculous to all. Why is it that they laugh? Then they’ll tell me that I should learn to speak Urdu. Should you, I retort, speak Bengali? They laugh. You do know, I say, that Bengali is the fifth most commonly spoken language in the world? You do know that wars are fought over language, wars in which millions die? They shut up for the rest of the journey.

  At least, this is what I imagine saying.

  * In an article in Science magazine in 2000—one of those links emailed to me by my father—the novelist David Foster Wallace writes:

  Modern math is like a pyramid, and the br
oad fundament is often not fun. It is at the higher and apical levels of geometry, topology, analysis, number theory, and mathematical logic that the fun and profundity start, when the calculators and contextless formulae fall away and all that’s left are pencil & paper and what gets called “genius,” viz. the particular blend of reason and ecstatic creativity that characterizes what is best about the human mind. Those who’ve been privileged (or forced) to study it understand that the practice of higher mathematics is, in fact, an “art” and that it depends no less than other arts on inspiration, courage, toil, etc.… but with the added stricture that the “truths” the art of math tries to express are deductive, necessary, a priori truths, capable of both derivation and demonstration by logical proof.

  Where Wallace describes mathematics as an “art,” he adds a footnote quoting from a book by the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy (who famously discovered the self-taught Indian mathematical genius Ramanujan). The book, A Mathematician’s Apology, was given to me by Zafar as a present many years ago, on my graduation. It is a moving exploration of the joys and sorrows of mathematics. Quoted by Wallace, Hardy writes:

  The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or poet’s, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colors or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test; there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.

  Wallace’s footnote is especially affecting when one considers that Hardy took his own life, not long after finishing the book, and that Wallace did so as well, a fact the Financial Times found room to record despite the festooning ticker tape of corporate failures in September 2008.