In the Light of What We Know: A Novel

by Zia Haider Rahman

  No. Can’t say I have.

  Even if you had, you still wouldn’t know.

  Know what?

  Know whether writing a memoir is cathartic. What about all those memoirs you don’t get to read because they don’t get finished? Started with all the hope in the world but abandoned halfway through because the author realized that writing it was dragging him down or because writing it killed him or just drove him insane. Spare a thought for those half-finished memoirs lying in drawers, like bloody daggers, memoirs that, far from delivering catharsis and closure, opened up old wounds.

  I’m talking about writing, not hara-kiri.

  The pen is mightier than the sword.

  What about those notebooks?

  Emily used to urge me to write. About what? I’d ask. About anything, she’d say. But one day when I suggested it might be interesting to write about us, about her and me, even to write about her family, she gave me a look of horror. There might even have been contempt in there.

  I’m not surprised. They’re a secretive lot, that family.

  Meaning you think they have secrets?

  Maybe secretive isn’t the right word. Paranoid.

  What if they have secrets to keep?

  Wouldn’t be a secret if I knew the answer to that.

  Can’t call them paranoid if you don’t.

  They just don’t talk straight.

  I suppose they might be paranoid in wanting to hide something of no interest to the rest of the world.

  Aren’t you overthinking this? I said, my frustration returning.

  When I was a boy, said Zafar, my parents told me that my birthday wasn’t what was shown on any official documents. I didn’t have a birth certificate—certificates weren’t a priority in rural Bangladesh. My parents told me it was on a different day, a different month and year from the official British records, different from what they’d filled in on application forms for welfare benefits and school enrollment and library membership. But the next day, they told me not to tell anyone my real birthday, never to mention it to a teacher. My father explained that if the authorities got wind of it, we’d all be sent back to Bangladesh. I was very young, and for some years I thought that we were frauds in Britain, that our very presence in the country was based on a lie. Do you think my father was being paranoid?

  Coming from Bangladesh, I replied, your father would have had little idea what the authorities would or wouldn’t care about. That’s not paranoia; that’s prudence. But what about staying here and writing something?

  Why are you banging on about this writing?

  You could stay and write a book. The flat at the top of the house is there to be used. Why not?

  I’m touched.

  Don’t be facetious.

  No, really. I’m touched.

  Why not write about your father? You could write about Bangladesh, you could teach people about a part of the world they know little about.

  Of course, replied Zafar. Yes, it’s very important that people learn about that, very important. Never mind the financial crisis, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, never mind global warming and the imminent peak oil crisis. Did I miss anything?

  That’s not all they’re thinking about.

  You’re right. What the world needs now is answers to all its questions about Bangladeshi history. And it especially needs to hear these answers from me, an alien in his native land and interloper among his hosts, because I know so much about Bangladesh, I’m a bloody authority, that’s what I am, a leading international luminary on the history of Bangladesh.

  Calm down, dear.

  Many people do know quite a lot about Bangladesh. They happen to be living in the region. I don’t think Indians and Pakistanis are quite as ignorant about Bangladesh as the people you have in mind, and they make up a fifth of the world.

  What about writing for a Western audience? I asked.

  Bridging two cultures?

  Why not?

  You know what Naipaul said about Indian literature?

  Tell me what Naipaul said about Indian literature.

  Indian literature written in English is astonishing because nowhere in history has a literature been produced that is written by one people about the same people but for another people to read, a literature sustained by a market abroad, the book readers of the West. Naipaul may lament this, but it is only a natural step from what came before to conscript now a generation of native intermediaries. Travel books were always written by the outsider, even if that outsider had a piss-poor command of language and customs. How well will a book about modern India sell to a Western audience, a nonfiction book about this shocking economic trend-bucking phenomenon, if it were written by an Indian? You have to wonder whether these writers Naipaul’s talking about, whether they end up playing to Western stereotypes. The fact that they get good reviews, that some of the writing is regarded as excellent, the fact that characters are said to be well drawn—so accurate, so true to life, how would they know?—none of that is actually evidence of the contrary and could actually be evidence of the same.

  You could write against that, with one foot in the East and the other in the West.

  Yes. There’s a good market for that, isn’t there? A thick book with a lovely cover, a silhouette of a minaret and dome, a view of the hills. Lace the edges with the pattern of a henna tattoo or a sari border. Very nice.

  Markets don’t lie, I said, ignoring his facetiousness.

  Do you know what an axolotl is? asked Zafar.

  At this point, I’m certain I merely rolled my eyes.

  An axolotl is a kind of salamander. Salamanders start off as one thing but at a certain stage in development they metamorphose into another, rather like toads from tadpoles, very much like them, in fact. The interesting thing about the axolotl is that somewhere along its evolution it decided it wasn’t having any truck with this change thing and it remained at that tadpole-like stage before metamorphosis. It doesn’t have to metamorphose even to reproduce.

  So how is it a kind of salamander if it can’t do that?

  Do what?

  Metamorphose. If it can’t metamorphose, then it’s just like everything else that can’t.

  Ah, well, here’s the interesting thing. If you inject an axolotl with a solution of iodine and a thyroid-stimulating hormone, and you shouldn’t try this at home, then the axolotl does in fact metamorphose; it goes through a radical transformation in hours or days and turns into something very much like a tiger salamander. The other thing I know about the axolotl, which is also amazing, is how extensively it can regenerate itself. It can regrow entire lost limbs. It can even regrow parts of its brain. Ain’t that a kick in the head?

  Now that’s an experiment not worth thinking about, I said.

  But once an axolotl is induced into metamorphosis, its life span shortens and it can never go back to what it was.

  Thank you for the primer on axolotls. When you said you’d considered writing about Emily’s family, what did she say?

  She said she was a very private person.

  How did you respond? To her?

  Exactly, I said. No one can tell their own story, is what I said. They’re the most untrue stories of all, the stories we write ourselves, by our own hand and in the first person, where our own dishonesty is hidden from us. Everyone has a region of privacy, things they keep from the world, but that region is only a protective layer behind which are the things they themselves cannot see, a layer shielding them from themselves.

  You said this to her?

  Something like it, but I don’t think she was listening. I think she was anxious about the prospect of me writing about her family.

  Sounds about right, I said to Zafar.

  She did, however, say I was expecting too much of writing. On the contrary, I said. I don’t expect very much of it at all. You should write your own story, she said. Which is not your story? I asked. No, she replied. Is no part of your story my story? I asked her. I’m a private pe
rson, she repeated. Do you have a copy of Brideshead Revisited? Zafar asked me.

  I think I do, somewhere, I replied.

  On the title page are the words: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder: A Novel. But if you look on the reverse, the page with the copyright statement, there’s an odd note, almost invisible, signed with Waugh’s initials. It says: I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they. Everyone knows that Waugh’s inspiration for his story was the Lygon family. But the question remains: Why did he write this? Why write that epigraphic disclaimer?

  Libel?

  As if merely saying that it’s not about them would save it from amounting to libel, like announcing that a fictional American president from Texas, whose father was president, too, is a lying son of a bitch. There has to be more to it. And besides, it’s a novel. The names are all different, not to mention the facts are bent out of shape. The oddest thing about it is the thou: thou art not he. Waugh is addressing someone specific, which only calls attention to the very question.

  What question?

  Whether it is in fact about the Lygons.

  Maybe in his head, it wasn’t fiction. Maybe it was all very real.

  Isn’t that true of all novels and their authors? Or the good ones at any rate. That they’re very real to the author?

  Maybe he wanted to make the distinction clear to readers?

  Then why bury it in the title verso page under the technicalities of copyright dates and publishing house?

  Why do you think he did it?

  I don’t know, replied Zafar.

  When did she say this?

  Say what?

  No part of her story was yours.

  A year or so into the relationship.

  It must have hurt.

  I wondered. I asked myself if we could ever be married, if our stories could ever combine.

  Bridging cultures, then.

  Zafar seemed to ponder this for a while, and I chastised myself for reminding him of something painful. I wasn’t there, but it seemed to me that had those been her words, they would have put a great distance between the two of them.

  Presently Zafar picked up his thread.

  Bridging two cultures, he said. That might be worth writing about.

  That’s precisely what I’m saying. So you have thought about it.

  What do you know about the Ponte Vecchio?

  Cross off axo … axo—

  Axolotls, he said.

  That’s easy for you to say.

  Practice a little but often.

  And now Florentine bridges.

  What do you know about it?

  It’s a big bridge with buildings on it. Jewelry and souvenir shops. Mainly a tourist trap when I went there, but then Italy’s one big tourist trap.

  Bridges are fragile things. A bridge belongs to nothing, to nowhere. The mind settles on the emptiness between its ends, a region of suspended animation.

  But you can walk that bridge. That’s what you can write about.

  The two cultures I had in mind were the sciences and the arts or the sciences and the humanities or the sciences and literature or whatever name it goes by.

  C. P. Snow?

  But I don’t know how to write about that.

  Why would you want to?

  Sometimes I think it matters, said Zafar. Sometimes I think I see a gulf and I think it matters very much. And sometimes I wonder if I’m seeing a gulf that isn’t really there. Maybe it just matters to me and it doesn’t really matter otherwise. You ask any of your nonscientific friends to list the Ten Commandments and they might struggle after seven or eight, but seven or eight isn’t bad. If, on the other hand, you ask them for the Second Law of Thermodynamics or Newton’s First Law of Motion, they look at you as if you’re a social buffoon.

  Science is so very specialized, I said. I don’t think my father knows the first thing about genetics. How can anyone other than a scientist know anything of substance about science?

  But still it doesn’t get me past the nagging thought that there’s something wrong in an entire establishment, all the opinion formers, all the policy wonks, and everyone who’s anyone in the public life of Western societies—there’s something not quite right about them being scientifically illiterate when it’s science that’s changed the lives of human beings in postindustrial societies more than anything else, and science that will do the same in the years to come.

  That’s a bit presumptuous, don’t you think?

  What? That science changed more than—

  No. That the entire establishment—whatever that is—is scientifically illiterate.

  All right. Not everybody.

  Write about it.

  I don’t know where to begin. It’s just too big. Anyhow, I’m not sure it’s even there, this gulf. And even if it is, maybe it doesn’t matter.

  * * *

  My true motivation for encouraging Zafar to write was to have him stay. Although the thought did not preoccupy me, I knew from the day he reappeared that before long he would leave. Even many weeks in, Zafar kept his possessions in his own two bags; he lived out of them, and they were never more than one item short of ready to go.

  What about the conversations on the DVR? There must be some interesting conversations on it if you recorded them. Were they interviews?

  Zafar didn’t respond.

  There aren’t any conversations on it?

  I think you’ll find that there are.

  But they’re not interesting?

  You should be the judge of that.

  It was only later that I realized why Zafar was being so shifty. He must have been smiling to himself inwardly, for he would have known, so careful had he been in his choice of words, that he had actually only suggested that I listen to the conversations on the DVR. When I finally did and took the DVR back to its first recording, I discovered that there was nothing on it apart from the conversations between the two of us. As I say, I only figured out all this later. When I confronted his oddly shifty responses, I moved on and tried a different tack.

  What about your notebooks? Why not make something of them?

  They don’t cover the half of it.

  Don’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good and all that. Glass half full.

  Do things by halves?

  Can’t they be organized into something?

  Do you know Robert Oppenheimer’s words from the Bhagavad Gita?

  You’re all over the place. More than I remember you being.

  Do you? he repeated.

  After he saw the first atom bomb explode? Yes, I said.

  Now I am become Death, said Oppenheimer, the destroyer of worlds. Apparently, he was a decent Sanskrit scholar, you know? Not half bad.

  Oppenheimer the physicist?

  Scientist and Sanskritist, now there’s a bridge. He said he translated it himself. So you have to wonder why he got it wrong. Apparently, a better translation is: I am Time, who has come forth to annihilate the worlds. So much more powerful, don’t you think? The Song of the Lord. And not a tautology. More meaningful.

  Tautologies mean nothing.

  More resonant.

  A tautology is nothing more than a tautology.

  I got the joke the first time. Maybe the original doesn’t have quite the resonance in the shadow of the mushroom cloud. My notebooks are just notes. When I read them, they call up memories. Without the memories intact, the notes are like queer ciphers. And memories are completely unreliable. Time destroys memory.

  But memories are all we have, aren’t they?

  How little, replied Zafar.

  And how precious. Have you seen Blade Runner? I asked him.

  Zafar nodded.

  Near the end, when Roy the android—

  Rutger Hauer.

  Yes. Roy the android is defeated by Deckard, and as he prepares to die he says something like: I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. I’ve seen attack ships off the
shoulder of Orion and something about the Tannhauser Gate, et cetera—I can’t remember the rest.* Did you know that Rutger Hauer extemporized those words?

  Zafar shook his head.

  The point is that in his dying moments the things he describes are things he remembers. They don’t mean anything to you and me, but they’re the things Roy remembers. For my money, the movie’s about what makes an android human. Where’s the dividing line? But then that comes down to the question: What makes a human being human? The answer in Blade Runner is memory. However flawed and faulty, however much you get your wires mixed up, the memories are what make you you. Don’t we have to hold on to them?

  Writing is what you do when you don’t want to forget.

  Exactly. There are ideas in those notebooks of yours, I said. I don’t know how much of it makes any sense, but there’s got to be something there, a thread, questions that preoccupy you. Isn’t that what they’re about?

  Read them, he told me. I don’t feel the compulsion to write a book, but maybe you’ll be moved to write something, something about yourself.

  No one can tell his own story. Didn’t you say that?

  But you disagree. Prove me wrong. Or invent someone to tell your story. Spectators see more of the game than players do.

  Why don’t you invent someone? I asked.

  Look, said Zafar. It was he who now showed exasperation. I don’t know how to get anywhere close to my own life, he said. My drama, like everyone’s, goes on upstairs, in the head. And I don’t think you can write the drama of the mind. All you have are the things people do. It’s always about what they do, and yet the mind is where the battles take place, the tragedies and comedies that rule the day. So we fall back on metaphors, accounts of stuff that happens in flesh between people, the movement of limbs, the actor curling the lips, the vibrations of vocal cords, the rush of air, a painter in a rage flinging paint at the canvas—it’s always the kinetics that steal the show while the governing drama, the theater of the mind, plays out behind the curtain. Shadows in the cave.

  Have you read The Moon and Sixpence by Somerset Maugham?

  No, Zafar replied.

  It’s modeled on the life of the painter Paul Gauguin. The whole novel stands in the shadow of the protagonist’s inscrutable decision to abandon his wife and children, abandon his life as a stockbroker, and disappear first to Paris and then to the South Seas to … to paint.