In the Light of What We Know: A Novel

by Zia Haider Rahman

  We think we have the measure of so many people, we have the sense of what they’re about, what drives them in the world. How many do we think of in this way? We might count them. But when we begin to think of how many people we believe in turn have the measure of us, things fall apart. Who has the measure of us? Parents? When I was growing up, perhaps mine did. In my teens and even into college, my parents had a running commentary of life, but now I recognize that in fact what they were following was my growing up. They were, as Zafar might say, attending closely to the growth and temporal needs of the infant until maturity, when that creature sets off on his own, no differently from other primates. Somewhere along the way, imperceptibly, like passing through the midpoint of a tunnel, I emerged into adulthood and independence to find that my parents had retreated from my life, returning to their own again. They knew me, so to speak, within parameters.

  And then my concerns briefly became our concerns, Meena’s and mine, though that honeymoon of union, that unity of hopes, loves, and fears, was short-lived (though long enough for the pairing to have issued offspring, had there been a unity of purpose there). And now my concerns so resolutely belong to me and me alone that when I look upon those dreamy days with Meena, I wonder if they were not merely a haze of endocrine-driven delusion, a suspension of every sane faculty to clear the way for mating. There was passion. Lord knows there was passion. We believed that the passion was testimony to the depth of our mutual love, when in fact it exposed the intensity of the loneliness that had driven us toward each other, that had primed us for the intimacy of the act and the fantasy that fueled it all.

  But that delusional urge is only one of the varieties of self-deception that encourage us to believe we know another human being and, for that matter, ourselves. This faith in having the measure of others really becomes unstuck when you begin to consider how many you’d acknowledge as having the measure of you. That number dwindles before your eyes.

  My friend appears as several Zafars to me now. There is the Zafar in our college years, the Zafar who reappeared at my door, the Zafar revealed to me by his story, and a Zafar in the pages of his notebooks. Perhaps he had always been too various to be known, but it seems to me more likely—to paraphrase something from those notebooks—that the truth is finer and that the only answers each of us hears are to the questions we are capable of asking.

  Yet it’s one thing to be ignorant of everything in the years when he’d disappeared, and quite another to have seen nothing of what had been in front of me. I thought I’d introduced him to Emily, but I was wrong about even that, something you’d think you couldn’t get wrong at all.

  * * *

  Soon after I proposed to Meena, all the parents met. My family drove up to Wolverhampton from Oxford. My grandfather was with us: On the phone from Pakistan he had insisted that my parents delay visiting Meena’s parents by a week, so that he could fly over to London and come with us. I am his eldest grandchild, and I was going to be the first grandson to get married. I had met the parents before, and they seemed like lovely people. The father had a grocery store in a suburb of Wolverhampton, where they lived and where Meena was born. Her family was originally from the Punjab, as was my family. But unlike mine, her ancestors left the Punjab for Kenya in the swirling mass of migration for work in other parts of the British Empire. Her mother stayed at home, above the store, and raised Meena and her two older sisters, both now married and gone. Assembled in a living room crowded with sofas, we all spoke English, mainly for my benefit, though Meena admits that her Urdu only creaks along. But from time to time the gathering broke into Urdu, and it seemed at the time that there was an intimacy in the room because of the shared language and references. It was all very nice, I thought.

  On the drive back, my parents said they’d had a pleasant time and that they thought Meena’s parents were good people, but that really what mattered above all was whether Meena and I were suited. You must be the judge of that, said my mother. My father said very little, thereby allowing, it seemed to me, my mother to represent a corporate view. But at home, late in the evening, my grandfather took me aside in the library.

  She’s a lovely girl, bette, said my grandfather, and your mother is entirely right that the main concern is whether you like her, not whether we like her or them, which of course we do—they’re good people. I’m not saying you’d be marrying beneath you if you married Meena. Such ideas are simply unacceptable in these modern times in which we live. We are above those things now.

  He lowered himself into an armchair and set his whisky down. I took another seat.

  But let’s talk heart to heart, grandfather to grandson, na bette?

  My grandfather addressed me as “bette,” an Urdu term of endearment that I understood was reserved for sons. My own parents always addressed me by name, though occasionally my mother would call me “sweetheart” in English, which was naturally the language in which we communicated.

  Of course, I said. You must know I have great respect for your opinions.

  I hope I’ve earned it, bette. There’s a lot of your father in you, you know? Yes, quite a lot. He has, mashallah, a great marriage, as you’ve seen, but I think this, in no small part, is due to a meeting of minds, a common cultural framework, you understand. They may seem very modern, and in fact your parents are very modern people, bette. But I think—and this is where you must decide for yourself—they’ve had it rather easy.

  In what way?

  My grandfather paused then, his eyes looking away.

  They’ve been able to take for granted the shared values and social position they have, without perhaps reflecting on the role such things have played in their marriage—and, for that matter, in their lives.

  Which is?

  Again, there was a gap when his eyes did not meet mine, and I wondered suddenly if rather than reaching for the words, he was holding them off.

  Common social position is a glue that binds people; it fixes you into a broader scheme of family and friends and like-minded persons.

  My grandfather spoke diplomatically, but his message was clear enough. I was going to marry beneath me, and he thought that this could cause problems. I loved my grandfather, but as I looked at the old soldier sitting in the armchair, the titan of Pakistani industry, I saw a man whose homes were crawling with respectful servants, a man who couldn’t bear “all this queuing one has to do in London and New York.” He wasn’t, in the end, very modern at all. I was able to console myself with the thought that modernity was perhaps not to be expected of men of his age, who had lived with ideas that had never needed defining, never drawn scrutiny.

  Yet his suggestion that the success of my parents’ marriage was founded on something like shared class status did trouble me. I knew that other families would rather a child marry outside, marry a Westerner—which always meant white—than marry a Pakistani of lower class or birth. But weren’t they other families, not mine?

  I had come to think of my father in a tender way as a bumbling academic, his head in his thoughts, and of my mother as the dynamic, pioneering, and assertive woman. They were two people with friends in varied circles looping around them, whose commitment to education and modern values was tangible in the things they expressed, with words, with subscriptions to Amnesty, The New York Review of Books, and the New Statesman. Surely they were free of my grandfather’s class sensibility, just as I believed I was? The world, having moved on, had forced men like my grandfather to describe things once unspoken; being confronted with the vulgar mention of class, such men were straining the words available to them. Might not the moving world have carried my parents further, taken awareness to its breaking point, and unbound them altogether from old expectations?

  But I remembered my parents’ relative silence in the car on the way back from Wolverhampton and the few words uttered. There was my mother’s remark: They are good people, my mother said, but what matters is whether Meena and you are suited. As my grandfather nursed his whisky, I
thought of that “but” lodged in the middle of the sentence uttered by my mother, the pivot of meaning from which doubt now radiated in circles.

  I married Meena for love. When I married her, she had a simplicity of taste and purpose, which I saw in that worn-out, stained backpack hanging off one shoulder, and I loved that pared directness about her. Now she has luggage. A Gucci bag she checks in and a leather carry-on with a chunky golden buckle whose Prada logo never stops glinting.

  A decade and a half later, so much has changed. It is not contemptuous familiarity that I feel. Not the familiarity that, we’re told, wears down relationships, the humdrum routine and dulling of senses at witnessing the same rituals, the same behaviors, day in, day out. Familiarity was not our ruin but rather change was. Zafar disagreed on this, saying that the change was already carried within me, a potential energy that was always there. Eventually, he said, I was bound to find Meena wanting. Every man, he said, carries his own pyre, which sounded like another one of his literary references. But I believe that Meena and I changed. Once I asked myself if I’d misunderstood something at the beginning, if I’d failed to read something, some sign, if I had shut my eyes when my heart was opening. But I have ceased to ask myself these questions. For a while we had walked together, and then somewhere along the path we each took our own way.

  The prevailing state of affairs between us two could not have continued. We were to have that ritual of the most modern of marriages, the trial separation. On her return from a quick work trip abroad, instead of coming home she moved into one of the firm’s serviced apartments in Knightsbridge. More change was bound to come. Yet I have to accept that Zafar’s presence, my listening to his story, and letting into my life someone at once foreign and familiar, influenced the pace and even the direction of motion in my own affairs. To be precise, it—he—has influenced how I see things. Is that not direction? How one regards the past, how one sees the present—do these not show our way ahead? Or are we to side with the fund managers behind those absurd advertisements for investment funds, where they glorify their track record in bold while hiding in small print the reality that past performance is no guide to the future and that nothing’s quite so insecure as a security? Can making half the print small save the whole thing from its inherent contradiction?

  * * *

  I was born in 1969 in the town of Princeton, New Jersey, where we lived a few streets from Library Place in a quiet, leafy part of town dotted with roomy two- and three-story colonial and Victorian houses, some painted in pastel colors, all with spacious yards.

  There were other graduate students who were married, some with children, but unlike those families, who lived in apartments, my parents and I lived in a house that my father was able to buy outright because of my grandfather’s generosity. I went to kindergarten and elementary school in Princeton, amid its serenely beautiful streets, in the kind of international neighborhood you find in certain university towns in the U.S. Most of my classmates were the children of academics—I’m hard-pushed, in fact, to recall any who weren’t. I still maintain contact with some of the friends I made there and have gathered that many of our peers went on to respectable jobs, some to become academics themselves, others to become lawyers, bankers, and politicians. Two are members of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, which is a rather disproportionate representation for one American elementary school.

  Through the parents, every corner of the world was represented in the school. The semesters were, to my memory, long successions of events marking religious festivals, new years, and obscure holidays from around the globe. In the 1970s, Princeton already had a number of academics and students from South Asia, mainly from India but also some from Pakistan. I knew a Pakistani boy and an Indian boy, but I never met them socially outside school. The South Asian children in Princeton played cricket, while every Saturday morning my father drove me out to Mercer County Park for Little League, and, in fact, I still have the first baseball mitt he bought me. At Eton, some years later, I tried to get a baseball group going, rallying the American contingent. Though how loyal to America were they who’d been sent to Eton for schooling? It never took off; I think the masters regarded it with suspicion while the boys probably saw it as an inferior version of cricket.

  At home we spoke only English. My parents did not discuss Pakistani politics and they did not discuss Pakistan. The food we ate, however, was Pakistani—my mother was and still is a superb cook. I say that the food at home was Pakistani, but I should add that in Princeton my mother took to baking. To this day she bakes that most American of foods, apple pie, and she does it better than anyone else in the world.

  And there was Crane, the Crane of my childhood, the boy who was my best friend at elementary school and who is to take a place in this story. Crane was in and out of our house all the time, his own being joyless, I think now, not so convivial, and ours filled with people coming and going, bustling with young academics in the spring of life, filled also with smells of alien cooking, blistering spices, and a father who was present. During the week, Crane’s father lived in Manhattan, increasing his fortune in finance, raising the credit ratings agency he’d established that later put a noose around my neck. In the nineties, Forrester, the agency, would develop an expertise in rating collateralized debt obligations and mortgage-backed securities; on my own account, for business, I would have occasion to meet the man, Forrester senior, but I’m getting ahead. He and my parents had met at one of my grandfather’s parties in New York. It turned out we all had homes in Princeton and so they became friends. His son and I went to the same summer camp in Vermont, and in Princeton I sometimes visited Crane at his home to play. When we left Princeton to move to Oxford, I continued to see Crane but less frequently: My parents still visited New York when my grandfather came from Pakistan on business.

  I remember now a summer day at that Vermont camp, whose days strung together made up the long vacation in my American years, when Crane and I, out in the woods on a trek with the counselor, along with three other boys, aged eight, broke away from the rest, Crane diving into the undergrowth and I following, a follower even then, for an adventure, he said, though I could see it in his face that breaking away was the adventure itself.

  Oh, look, I said, there’s a hidebehind.

  Where?

  Right behind you.

  Crane turned and of course he couldn’t see it. My father had told me about the lesser spotted hidebehind, a bird with one wing, which therefore flew in clockwise circles around your back and was really, really hard to see, he said, so you had to be quick like a mongoose, which I knew had to be really, really quick, even if I didn’t know what a mongoose was. My father laughed his face off as I spun on my heels trying to take the bird by surprise. The hidebehind carried on in my world for a while, because I wanted it to, even after my father gave the game away.

  It’s gone, I said. No wait, there it is again.

  Hey, looky here, Crane said, stopping. He was peering over a patch of dirt.

  I’m no fool, I thought, but coming closer I saw the object of his attention, a chipmunk on its side, twitching, and I knew, as did Crane, that the creature was wounded or sick, that the animal was dying.

  We should put it out of its misery, he said.

  Even though I didn’t know what that meant, there was a part of me that sensed the awfulness of it. It sounded like something a grown-up would say, and I looked at Crane with admiration.

  Then Crane lifted his foot and placed it above the chipmunk’s head, letting the sole hover in the air above it. My stomach felt bad. Slowly he brought his heel down, grinding it into the dirt is how I remember the sight, and I can hear now the skull cracking, like peanut brittle. When he removed his foot, the creature lay in a distorted shape, its head sunk into the earth, and, nestled in the dirt and fur, was the ball of an eye.

  * * *

  At the time, any onlooker might have concluded that I was being raised as an American. American is in
fact what I was and what I continue to say I am if pressed on the matter. I have an American passport. This point, if I state it matter-of-factly, seems to close out the persistent questions of Europeans.

  I know, however, that when I say I’m American, I don’t mean much more than that I hold an American passport. I’m entitled to a Pakistani passport because of my parents, and though I obtained a British passport in order to ease travel within Europe, I otherwise travel on the U.S. one. But such patriotism as there is in me really goes no further: I am not moved when I hear “The Star-Spangled Banner”; I do not feel the urge to leap to America’s defense when I hear Europeans castigate the whole country (despite the obvious foolishness of regarding as homogeneous a continent that runs from California to New York and Montana to Texas—it was put well by a friend, a New Yorker born and bred, who lives there still, when he said that America was fine to visit but he wouldn’t want to live there). Perhaps the closest I come to feeling myself American is when a U.S. immigration officer snaps the navy blue passport shut and hands it back with a smile and with the greeting “Welcome home.” At that moment, I have felt to varying degrees the sensation of a breeze kissing the back of my neck, which might very well be called patriotism. It might ultimately be rather trivial. But I know that such things, small as they might seem to me, are far from trivial to others.

  In New York, all those years ago, in another conversation as we idled about in Greenwich Village, I mentioned to Zafar my experience on being handed back my passport at JFK the day before. His reaction startled me. Before I could ask what was going on, he had turned on the sidewalk, hailed a cab, and was climbing in. My friend directed the cabdriver to take us to lower Manhattan, where we caught the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. He said he wanted to show me something there, and since I had only ever seen the statue from Manhattan, I went along with his sudden impulsive turn.

  As we pulled away from the port, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center loomed up, and then, when the ferry heaved farther into the bay, with the Manhattan skyline receding in that picture postcard image of New York, I began to feel the combination of romance and longing that such a sight is, I think, bound to arouse in native and visitor alike. The sun was high and the city’s glass skyline gave off specks of dazzling light. The water was calm and it seemed as if lower Manhattan were floating on the surface of the sea. At the stern of the ship, hoisted on a pole leaning toward the foamy wake, was the flag of the United States of America.