In the Light of What We Know: A Novel

by Zia Haider Rahman

  The building was legally protected by English Heritage, so any renovation work was subject to rigorous controls. Bill and Dave were highly skilled: Later, I’d see that the fact that their vans always looked spotless told you everything about their clients, the buildings they worked on, and the streets on which the vans would be parked.

  Because the terrace of adjoining houses followed the curved contour of the street, the rooms in the house weren’t entirely square, which presented certain difficulties in the construction of furniture fitted into corners. This fact became useful to me.

  Bill and Dave had come in near the end of the renovation project to deal with various woodwork, such as bespoke furniture, skirting, dadoes, and picture rails, and to reconstruct four flights of stairs. The existing staircases, while sturdy, were irretrievably damaged by carpet adhesives and decades of tread. Moreover, since the carpet had been removed, successive repairs over time had left the stairs with a mishmash of materials, including a number of makeshift chipboard risers and treads. All the furniture—bookcases, cabinets, and wardrobes throughout the house—would be constructed on site, except for the kitchen cabinets, which the two men later confided to me were actually off the shelf. Nine times out of ten the owners can’t draw, said Bill, and can’t even describe what it is they want. They’re bankers and lawyers, he said. Bill and Dave would then show them a catalog, just for ideas, and right as rain the owners would pick something out and say they wanted that, just that, and no they didn’t want to buy it off the shelf but wanted it made to measure, tailored to their lovely house, so that it had that personal touch, the real thing, not something you could find in any house in the area. Exactly like that, they’d say, still pointing to the picture in the catalog.

  They can’t tell the difference, said Bill.

  Can’t tell their arses from their elbows, said Dave.

  At first, all I did was clear up after these two men, fetch tools and materials, and maintain a steady supply of tea and custard cream biscuits, as Bill and Dave went about their diligent business of bringing wood and other materials to life, while plumbers, electricians, and painters came and went around us. When the day ended I’d pack the power tools into the two vans, and in the mornings I’d unload them again and set them out where they’d need them in the house.

  I warmed to Bill and Dave quickly. I remember that both of them always said “thanks” or “cheers, mate,” even to each other. Such words did not seem to figure in the vocabulary of Sylheti, a language in which, rather than saying thank you, one balanced the whole sentence on terms of deference to age or class. This had the effect, I had noticed, that those who were senior in age or higher in class weren’t required by the language to indicate deference and were therefore saved from stooping for the tools to express gratitude.

  My mother had always winced when I said please and thank you. Thank you, I’d say when she gave me a second helping of rice and curry. Or thank you when she handed me a lightbulb as I stood on a chair to change the ceiling light. Thank you was an English phrase that ruptured my spoken Sylheti. My mother would grimace and insist that I stop saying it. Because we never had that kind of relationship, I could never ask her why. I have thought that she couldn’t bear to hear me say thank you because it signified how far away I’d moved from the culture and values she had inherited, even then. But over the years that have passed since boyhood, I have come to regard such explanations, where mere cultural difference is invoked at every turn, as facile and unilluminating. I now consider her distaste as having had a quality of depth I had not attributed to it before. I think the woman who had raised me, who had provided a family for me, however flawed that family was, was offended that I had turned the web of duties, which bound a family together, into the mere exchange of favors, thank you and please standing for reciprocation. In her mind, I believe, a network of duty and service, tightened under centuries of evolution, had been reduced by my thank you to the trading culture of the West. It was duty and obligation, not measured gains, that reinforced the bonds within the extended family to make something stronger than there would have been otherwise, strong enough and large enough to endure hardships. My understanding came much later, though. But in the summer before college, when I heard Bill and Dave say please and thank you, occasioned at every turn and gesture, I was charmed.

  Above all, I liked Bill and Dave because of the banter between them. The two of them talked incessantly about the work in a language that was new to me. A carpenter’s world is steeped in a vocabulary of its own, and Bill and Dave were masters of that vocabulary. It was never just a hammer but a cross pein pin hammer, never just a plane but a rebate plane, never a mere clamp but a three-way edging clamp or a G or an F clamp. Each tool had a specific function, and Bill and Dave would never make do with one tool where another was better suited to the job. I fetched the tools as need arose, and very quickly I came to know each tool’s name and function.

  This isn’t just a cross-head, or even a Phillips cross-head to be specific, explained Bill as he showed me a drill bit for screws. This, he said, is a Pozidriv bit. Look closely and you’ll see that the Pozidriv bit has four additional points of contact with the screw.

  I nodded.

  It doesn’t have the rounded corners that the Phillips cross-head bit has, he continued. Its chief advantage over the cross-head is that, provided the screw and the bit are in good condition, the bit won’t cam out, which means you can apply greater torque. By the way, you may think knowing the names of tools and hardware is about identifying them, but if that’s all you think then you’d be wrong. You see, calling things by their proper names is the beginning of wisdom. That’s a Chinese proverb and they invented writing. The wisdom, in case you’re wondering, is that when you get names right, you narrow the gap between you and the thing. The most important tool is your hand and you’d be in serious trouble if there were a gap between you and your hand. So names are important. Unless you’re talking about roses, that is. But only roses.

  I learned much simply by keeping one ear on the two men discussing the work as they went along, while I went about my own tasks. In fact, I think overhearing is quite possibly the only honest way to make the acquaintance of anyone. We may never know who someone is, but at least we have some sense of how he behaves with us, through our engagements with him. Eavesdropping is undoubtedly useful, where some or other information is sought, but the accidental eavesdrop, such as might be afforded on coming down the stairs in the morning in the home of a friend one is visiting—this kind of domestic eavesdrop can be illuminating in another way. Standing there in midstep, one knee cocked, one hand on the banister, while overhearing one’s friend talking to his wife, one gains an impression of something rare: how the friend relates to another in the world, in one’s absence. That self is never apparent in any direct conversation, for one cannot have a conversation without influencing the stance of one’s interlocutor. In conversation, I only see the man as he presents himself to me, as he responds within the present and history that there is between him and me. We are not each one person but number at least as many as those whom we know. What one hears upon eavesdropping might shock or titillate, since it is always illicit, always a stolen property, always guaranteed the character of the forbidden. Yet against the light of day, what one has heard may emerge as little more than the revelation of one’s own self, the reality that discloses itself only when regard for oneself and for how one is perceived is removed from the act of listening or watching. How else to account for that disturbing sensation of witnessing the independent existence of another human being whom one knows only in direct engagement? And how else to make sense of the disquiet than to confront the self-centeredness it exposes? If there is indeed honesty in that moment of eavesdropping, doesn’t it spring from one’s absence, which frees one to listen without the din of one’s own ego?

  On day three, as I came up the stairs with a tray bearing three mugs of tea and a plate of custard creams, I heard Bill talking
to Dave.

  Paki-man is fitting in well. Gets stuck in, he said.

  Nice boy, said Dave.

  Speak of the devil, here’s our Paki-man, said Bill, seeing me standing in the doorway.

  Now let’s have that tea.

  They downed their tools.

  Dave made eye contact with me.

  Bill, I don’t think our new friend likes being called Paki-man.

  No? Why’s that, then? asked Bill, as he dunked a custard cream in his tea.

  I wasn’t sure if he was asking Dave or me.

  I suppose, said Dave, some people might construe it as derogatory, offensive, even.

  This was in 1987, before Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses was published, before people took to the streets to burn a book many had never read. My own father would say he refused to read a book that corrupted people with its filthy blasphemy.

  So does that mean, responded Bill, that I should not use a word because someone might take offense?

  Bill, said Dave, unless you were born yesterday, you must know “Paki” is rather a charged word. You don’t need a PhD in sociology to know that, do you?

  Do you know about the Redskins? asked Bill.

  I don’t suppose you mean the American football team?

  Correct. I don’t mean the American football team, which, by the way, could be called an American American football team. I mean the Redskins band, I mean the Redskins movement, I mean left-wing skinheads.* A skinhead today is linked with far-right extremism—at least in the public imagination. See a skinhead on the street, and if you’re black—or brown like our friend here—you’d be shit scared, you’d feel threatened, maybe even insulted without a word being traded.

  I see where you’re going with this, said Dave.

  Exactly. The Redskins couldn’t be further from neo-Nazis politically, but by adopting the same appearance and dress as right-wing thugs, they undermine what skinhead means.

  And, said Dave, completing Bill’s line of argument, if more people become aware of this, then a skinhead walking down the street is less likely to cause others to feel threatened.

  Exactly.

  So a word can mean exactly what you want it to mean, said Dave.

  Exactly, Alice.

  But, I interjected, you’ve just shown the opposite, haven’t you?

  How’s that? asked Bill.

  Well, the real skinheads, the original ones, wanted it to mean one thing, but if the band is effective in redefining the meaning of skinhead, then the original skinheads can’t have it their way. They can’t have skinhead mean what they want it to mean.

  The two men exchanged looks, as if each sought confirmation from the other.

  So maybe words, I continued, can’t mean exactly what you want them to mean. Not for long, anyway.

  I suppose that’s right, said Dave.

  Are you offended? asked Bill.

  I’m troubled—I was troubled. I wasn’t sure where you were coming from, but I think that just watching where you were going with it has made me less troubled. Not troubled at all, in fact.

  Not offended? asked Dave.

  I didn’t like what I was hearing, not at first, but now I don’t mind at all, I said.

  In fact, I couldn’t help smiling. Perhaps I was too young, with too limited an experience of the world to fully grasp how unusual the scene before me was, but it had an inherent comedy about it, the very different registers between their work and their banter. The conversation between the two men carried on and I pitched in once or twice. It ranged from the question of banning the use of certain words and the degree to which one ought to consider other people’s feelings, to questions of free speech and the cost of limiting one’s vocabulary.

  When the custard creams were finished, I gathered the mugs onto a tray.

  Then, abruptly, Bill turned to me: Hang on a moment! How exactly should I pronounce your name?

  Zafar, I said.

  Zafar, where are you from?

  Willesden, I said.

  Of course you are, said Bill, smiling at me. As English as Admiral Lord bloody Nelson himself, the Duke of Bronté of the Kingdom of Sicily. But where were you born?

  Bangladesh.

  The two men looked at each other.

  Bill, he’s not a Paki, then, after all.

  Indeed he is not, replied Bill. Zafar, our apologies are in order. A Paki comes from Pakistan. You, my boy, are from Bangladesh, and as anyone who watched George Harrison’s 1971 Concert for Bangladesh will tell you, Bangladesh—or should I say East Pakistan, as it was then?—Bangladesh didn’t fight a bloody war with Pakistan just to have the likes of us calling its good people Pakis. You, in short, are not a Paki-man.

  I was shaking my head with disbelief. It was presumptuous of me, but I wondered how two carpenters from Essex could know the story of a small country on the other side of the planet, a place dismissed by Henry Kissinger as an “international basket case.” They could not have known of the four happy years that I carried in me. I felt connected to these two men from the edge of London and to the world they inhabited because they knew about Bangladesh, knew even about its liberation war. Bill hadn’t described it as a “civil war”; it was never an internal war. Whether it was deliberate or not, I could have hugged him for that tiny accuracy.

  As I started toward the doorway, tray of empty mugs in hand, Bill called out.

  I’ve got it!

  He glanced at Dave and then looked at me again.

  Anglo-Banglo, he said. That’s what you are.

  * * *

  For five days, I listened to these two men working away, and in good spirits I did all the grunt work. I watched and learned.

  Then luck came my way when Dave called in sick with flu. Summer flu, a right fuck, said Bill.

  Mitered joints are all about trigonometry, especially in rooms whose corners aren’t square. Of course Bill and Dave had some clever gadgets and measuring devices to take all the mathematics out of the work and speed things up, tools to get the proportions right, even a device for measuring lengths and angles. The measurement of internal lengths in an alcove with a standard metal tape is notoriously inaccurate because of the curl of the tape at the end; it’s just not good enough for the high-end furniture Bill and Dave were making. But Dave was sick and the gauging devices were stored in his van outside London, on the other side of the city, at the other end of Essex from Bill’s home.

  Bill asked if I could help out by doing some of the cutting, while he tried to get the measurements right. But he was taking a long time, going back and forth, shaving off more and more of whatever piece he was trying to fit perfectly, and I stepped in.

  Bill, I can do that for you, I said.

  Do what?

  Measure everything out. Do all the calculations, even get cracking on the measurements and calculations for the staircase. I can cut the risers and treads; I can work the sliding compound miter saw.

  Yeah, mate, I’m sure you can, but we’re already one man down and we need to finish up here by the end of next week.

  I can do it faster, much faster, than you can.

  Bill smiled. I felt I had taken a gamble, though perhaps I had taken no gamble at all and it was my own insecurity to think that I had. I like to think that at that moment, Bill saw a boy on the edge of becoming a man, a boy who was cocky all right but who had also just spent five days doing the most menial work without complaint and without pay, and had therefore earned the right to speak up.

  We worked fast. I measured out everything, calculated angles and lengths, and measured out again: The carpenter’s rule is measure twice, cut once. At the end of that day, Bill gave me twenty pounds, as he did on all the following days that summer, when the three of us worked on a number of projects mostly in and around Kensington. Twenty pounds seemed like an enormous amount of money to me; my bus fare to Kensington and back left sizable change from a pound.

  When I sat there in the drawing room of Penelope Hampton-Wyvern’
s home, looking at the bespoke bookcase against one wall, I might have appeared composed and still, but my body felt reverberations from the memory of that summer working with the philosopher-carpenters. Of course, none of this would have been known to Penelope when she saw me looking at the bookcase and mistook it for an interest in the books.

  * * *

  I used to think, as I have said, that I introduced Emily to Zafar. In March 1995, I visited New York, where Zafar had already been some time established as a derivatives trader, while I, in my London base, was beginning to come into a sense of competence in my work. I invited Zafar to accompany me to the opening of an art exhibition at the South Asia Society of North America, which in those days was located in a rather eminent building on Vanderbilt, close to Park Avenue. My grandfather had been a patron of the society in the seventies, coming to its rescue when its hobbling finances threatened closure. It is, I assume, because of this that members of my extended family have always received invitations to receptions and openings. While this particular event was promoted as an exhibition of Afghan rugs, most of the rugs on display were made, as I recall having read in the catalog, by craftsmen from Uzbekistan and not Afghanistan. Such conflations reflected a lack of discrimination that changed altogether after September 11, 2001. Zafar has since explained to me that soon after the American intervention in Afghanistan, rug prices shot up as hordes of aid and development workers began cleaning up the rugs, so to speak, to send back to their homes in London, New York, and D.C., and to decorate their new houses in Kabul; property prices also rocketed. In fact, the new do-gooders contributed to massive inflation, distorting the local economy, said Zafar, so that engineers and doctors gave up their vital professions for quick money as drivers shuttling the officials of the UN and aid agencies from one meeting to the next. But I suppose, Zafar had added, there is a silver lining: The West now knows rather more about these rugs.

  The opening of the exhibition was to be combined with a reception for the sponsor, an Afghanistan-born businessman of my grandfather’s acquaintance. The man lived, or rather had set up domiciles, in Geneva and New York, and had apparently taken to calling himself an exile, despite having left Afghanistan long before the Soviet invasion, and even while, as more recent word had it, he’d cultivated a number of horticultural concerns in Afghanistan with the tacit permission of its Soviet-backed government.