In the Light of What We Know: A Novel Page 40

  I could forgive him the interrogation thus far and perhaps even further. We’re all quick to take whatever measure we can of whomever we meet. What is that strange sensation when we feel we have the person in the hand? We’re so eager to know the station given to a man by birth and curious to learn about the one he’s acquired through his own deeds, and when we have this pair we lean back and swell with the satisfaction of having got the sense of what he’s about. And for the preservation of that satisfaction, we will protect our expectations of him from subversive reality by means of blinkers that come down like some hysterical blindness. Is that the root of class? A simple system.

  I was born in Bangladesh, I answered.

  I have been asked that question—Are you Indian?—umpteen times, and my reply has always been the same: I was born in Bangladesh. In the U.S., in order to account for my accent, I might add that I grew up in the U.K. But then, in the U.S. I’m more likely to be asked if I’m British. The British accent trumps skin color, certainly in New York, and even after September 11, 2001.

  The point I want to make is that when I’m specifically asked if I was born in India, my reply—that I was born in Bangladesh—generally meets one of three reactions. The first is the look of recognition, evidence of knowing where Bangladesh is. The second is the look a person gives when he stands corrected but without enough information to grasp the correction. Bangladesh, I say by way of further explanation, is east of India—it used to be East Pakistan; it’s between India and Burma and south of Nepal and Bhutan. In some cases, this is enough to draw a nod of recognition, but in most the irresistible evidence of their faces is that their confusion is only magnified; if they could not quite place Bangladesh, then more likely than not they struggle with Bhutan and Burma. But some of the blessedly baffled have sufficient education to suspect that they ought to know better, and they might feign, entirely uselessly, a look of recognition.

  The third reaction is by far the most interesting. It was Tomaso’s response. For years, I believed I had no understanding of it. Now I think that most likely I have always had some inkling, but I didn’t want to confront it.

  The third is the look someone gives you when he believes your response ratifies what he said. The eyelids close, the head nods, and a smile hovers at the edges of the mouth. It bespeaks satisfaction, as if nothing in their expectations or understanding of the world has been disturbed—on the contrary, it just received confirmation. All this I saw in Tomaso’s face. He could have left it there. Nothing more was necessary.

  Which used to be India, right?

  Correct, I replied.

  The head continued nodding, just enough to be sure of being noticed while I was cutting tomatoes with a kitchen knife. My guess, borne of more verified guesses than I’d ever wish for, was that in Tomaso’s mind the boundary between India and Bangladesh, however it might be drawn politically, was not sufficiently hard in culture, in the imagination, in rightly guided imagination, to warrant note.

  I looked at the tomatoes I was cutting.

  What’s this I hear, Emily? Tomaso asked. Apparently, you’re going to work at the UN.

  Emily smiled at Tomaso. Her smile was engineered, machined into her countenance, an embossed symbol rather than an emotion. To Emily, that smile was somehow enough of an answer to all manner of questions, even when it was no answer at all. It earned her time. But when, more often than not, no further comment came from her, you did not press her. Somehow, to do so felt inappropriate.

  I used to marvel at the skill of it, until it dawned on me that what I saw was not the exercise of skill but the expression of a character habituated by the behaviors of a family that threw the cloak of secrecy over everything it did, an act of prudence, as if to smother every trace of some pestilence threatening to escape. She behaved as a body conditioned to respond to a certain stimulus of the senses.

  When do you leave? he asked Emily.

  He glanced back and forth from me to Emily. He was probably a good journalist, I thought. He did not ask me what he must have wanted to ask. Or was that my own insecurity? And what would I have told him, if he had? That she would go to the UN, cross the Atlantic, with my blessing, for I never wanted anyone else to think that I had held back a woman, I never wanted anyone to house me any deeper in the pigeonhole of a South Asian male?

  There are a few hurdles yet, she replied to him.

  Tomaso sat down and, turning to me, asked, Do they make olive oil in India?

  I’m sorry. Where?

  In India.

  I believe they do, I replied. I turned to Emily and reached for the bottle. Let’s use Tomato’s olive oil, I said.

  Tomaso’s, said Emily, correcting me.

  It must have seemed an easy mistake to make; I was cutting tomatoes, after all.

  Tell me. Is it true that Indians believe the earth sits on a giant turtle?

  Time came to a brief halt.

  Are you asking me?

  Yes.

  In some cultures, a rainbow is a symbol for the refraction of light.

  Now what does that mean?

  And Reno is west of L.A., Rome is north of New York, but do you speak African?

  I beg your pardon?

  Beg all you like. You’re not getting it.

  Excuse me?

  Yes?

  Tomaso shook his head. He looked exasperated.

  So?

  So, what?

  So, is it true? In India, do they believe the earth sits on a giant turtle?

  Do you know which country has the largest Muslim population in the world?

  I do know. Indonesia.

  Indonesia is the largest officially Muslim state, but the country with the largest Muslim population is India, which is a secular state.

  Right. But you haven’t answered my question.*

  Are you a Catholic?

  I am.

  So you believe in the transubstantiation of a wafer?

  Well, I’m not sure I subscribe to the whole theology.

  Likewise, I don’t know if all Hindus, or even some, believe that the earth rests on a giant turtle.

  Then why are you talking about Muslims?

  I can safely say that two hundred million Muslims in India—if they are Muslims in more than name—don’t believe that the earth rests on a giant turtle. Muslim ontology is not so far from Christian and Jewish ontologies. So to answer your question, there are many they in India who do not maintain that the earth rides on the back of a turtle.

  I see, he said. He seemed to consider this.

  I returned to the salad I was preparing.

  Do you go back often? he asked.

  Sorry, are you talking to me?

  Yes. Do you go back to India often?

  I’ve been there a couple of times, I said, pouring olive oil into a jar.

  It must be very hard.

  Why?

  They’re so poor.

  Yes, Tomato, the poor have it hard.

  I shook the jar of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. This time there was no doubt. It wasn’t a slip of the tongue. I wasn’t making a mistake with his name.

  Why are you so British? he asked. The man stood up. In his hand was the glass of red wine. Why can’t you be more Indian? he continued. You have such a fine tradition and culture and history but you’ve become an Englishman.

  Now you’re insulting the whole of England.

  The name’s Tomaso.

  You say potato.

  You’re nothing like my Indian friend at Oxford.

  How many times a day do you forgive someone his ignorance?

  Is that an apology?

  I’m sorry, Tomato.

  And at that, Tomaso emptied his glass over my shirt. He thrust it in my direction and the wine came flying out. A few drops made it to my face.

  That was unnecessary, I said.

  You asked for it, he replied.

  I wish I could tell you I had a witty comeback. The ones I formulated came too late and they weren�
��t so witty after all. I suppose I could have tried to justify myself, but where to begin? And why bother?

  I looked down at my shirt, looked at Tomaso, looked at Emily. Somewhere in the room must have been Tomaso’s girlfriend.

  Silly me. I’ve spilled wine on my shirt, I said and left the room. When I returned, the two of them had gone.

  * * *

  If Zafar’s story had meant to convey what it was he liked about Emily, I didn’t get it. Searching now for clues, I find myself asking if he had meant to suggest that there was a certain romance about being with her, the Tuscan hills, making love under the stars, the remove from his childhood, a certain glamour in a certain life. It sounds shallow to me, too shallow for my friend, I would have thought, but my instincts settle there. Perhaps he himself saw a shallowness in that, and that is why his little aside never meets the mark of answering my question. I did in fact press him on the point, though his answer seemed to me a touch disingenuous, which only returns me to my own conclusion.

  Good times, he said, are interesting times.

  By such a standard, the incident with Tomaso, I said, must have been a great time.

  His answers were unsatisfactory, but I left it there. And then there was the sex. Of course, I was uncomfortable listening to this—for reasons I’ll come to very soon—but what struck me above all else as he discussed the sex was that he was prepared to do so. Men don’t talk like that, not the men I know. And perhaps because of that, I had the thought that Zafar would not be staying very much longer. I had the thought that such openness evidenced a disconnection with the regular world, that he had abandoned the cultivation of a self to suit the society of his fellow men. I looked at him and saw that he would never have a job again, never return to the treadmill, never pay a mortgage and make a home and raise a family. He had slipped off the wheel.

  17

  My Brother’s Keeper or Betrayal

  It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.

  —William Blake

  Whenever he related his experience with Emily, Zafar’s demeanor changed and a darkness gathered about him, so that age and weariness showed in the features of his face. More or less everything he told me about his time with her was news to me. Sometime in 1997, we began to meet less and less frequently and, since the period coincided with a substantial increase in work for me—business in the mortgage market spiked, and the prospect of making partner quickly loomed in sight—our friendship waned. Time then seemed to move so quickly that I did not gauge the absence of friendships very well. Meena was also busy; having found her feet in finance, she’d set off at a sprint. I believed our relationship was content and strong and we could draw on that contentment to sustain us through the long working days of separation.

  And so it was that a year passed without our meeting, Zafar and I, and then another. Such regrets as I have are few; I am not an old man, but even if there had been time enough to accumulate regrets, I do not think my constitution works that way. My circumstances have also helped, I daresay, for I don’t think I ever faced the prospect others face of regretting bad decisions that took them down the road to financial burden or ruin, lives ruled by mortgage repayments and school fees, that seem to be the lot of so many people. True enough, I’ve not been immune to financial difficulties. But they were—they are—the difficulties of someone with good fortune.

  However, I do now have regrets about that time of my life. I’m not so presumptuous as to imagine that if I’d remained a presence in his life, he might not have declined as he evidently did in that time. What is the word for it? I say declined, but what was it? A descent? Collapse? Unraveling, unstitching, falling apart, breaking down?

  * * *

  I want to give an explanation, but there is no reason. I told myself afterward that perhaps I was consoling Emily, but her demeanor did not warrant such a view. There was no obvious distress in want of relief. Where there is nothing that can amount to an explanation, I am left only with the possibility of stating what happened. By that, I do not mean what Zafar would have meant, for to him, it must be apparent, what happens is as much in the mind as in the exercise of the body and its limbs. Our thoughts and feelings, the emotions and instincts that drive us on, these were to Zafar no less the stuff of the drama we enact than our actions that are easily described if not explained.

  Zafar spoke of the will, disparaging its purported freedom. And though I reject his rejection of the will, I understand the simplicity of his point: Only without invoking the idea of will can we properly speak of causes. If you want to know why a man made a choice, it won’t do to say that he simply chose. Zafar’s exposition therefore stands as an account of causes: the center line in a tug-of-war moves because men pull on the rope. But when we take the will out of the picture, should we not turn then to passions and instincts and drives in finding our causes? In his notebooks, Zafar records a passage from the philosopher David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, a well-worn passage, I know: We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. I cannot pretend that I have reasons or justifications.

  I remember the date because it was my father’s birthday, a Saturday in April 2000, and I was driving up to Oxford to visit him for lunch. The roads were uncluttered at ten in the morning, and the skies were clear and blue enough to drive with the cover down. My thoughts drifted in and out of matters of work. We had just completed a string of almost identical transactions on which the firm had made substantial profits, and I was thinking about how the structure might potentially be replicated with other clients and about ways it might have to be tailored. As I drew into Oxford, slowing to the pace of traffic, my phone rang.

  Hello, it’s Emily Hampton-Wyvern.

  Hello, Emily. How lovely to hear from you, I shouted over a passing truck. It’s been ages.

  Where are you? What’s all the racket?

  I’m sorry. I’m on the road, I replied. Something was wrong, I thought. Why, after all, would she call?

  Zafar’s in hospital.

  Good God. What’s the matter?

  He’s in a psychiatric hospital.

  I said nothing.

  He’s in a psychiatric hospital, she repeated.

  I was shocked by the news. It’s quite a thing to be hospitalized that way, isn’t it? It’s what doctors do to you, because you don’t know better, your mind can’t know better. But shock wasn’t the whole of what I felt. Zafar was undeniably someone I cared about. Someone I admired and in some ways envied. Yet there it was: I was shocked, and yet another part of me was not surprised. Which is not to say that I could see it coming. There was the mystery that surrounded Zafar, that was part of his attraction. I knew nothing really of his childhood, of his formation. What I did know—my brief encounter with his parents—only fed a thesis: He’d seemed self-made, came from nothing, but how far can that go? How feasible is it? Was he a working-class boy who had overreached? Lived beyond his psychic means?—to take some words from his notebooks.

  That’s awful. What’s wrong?

  Emily did not answer. I assumed she hadn’t heard me. I thought of pulling over, but the road had suddenly become clear.

  What happened?

  Still there was no answer. It struck me that perhaps she didn’t know.

  How is he?

  Before she could reply, I added: That’s a stupid question; he’s in hospital.

  Are you free this evening? she asked me.

  Shall I come over?

  Would you?

  I’ll be there at eight.

  18

  The Blood-Dimmed Tide

  Mathematics, as applied logic, which nevertheless stays within pure and lofty abstraction, holds a curious intermediate position between the humanistic and realistic sciences; and from the descriptions Adrian shared in conversation of the delight it gave him, it
became evident that at the same time he experienced this intermediateness as something elevated, dominating, universal, or as he put it, “the true.” It was a great joy to hear him call something “true”; it was an anchor, a stay—one no longer asked oneself quite in vain about the “main thing.”

  —Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, translated by John E. Woods

  Zafar returned to his account of events in Kabul, to Emily and the UN lounge. But if it appears that some time passed before he did so, it is largely the effect of my own reconstruction of our conversations. I did, after all—for reasons I’ve already given—bring forward the Afghan story. And, as I look over what I’ve put down so far, I see that much of the intervening material concerns me and my own life. Yet it’s equally true that my friend didn’t tell the Afghan story from beginning to end without deviation. That’s just not Zafar. He had taken me back to Islamabad in order, I understand, to set the context for his involvement in what happened in Kabul, when he met Crane. But now he took up the scene in the UN bar again, after making his presence known to Emily in the lounge.

  He left her with her circle of admiring men, he explained, men ever gravitating toward her, as ripe apples to the soft earth, he said. She now knew that I was here, in the compound, in Kabul. Passing through a low arch, I came into the bar, a cavernous room with plenty of sofas and armchairs, as in the lounge, but with furniture and people packed in and pressed together, and the lighting dimmer. Yet what attacked my senses were the smell and the noise. In several months of working in South Asia, I had not smelled that pungent admixture of alcohol and human bodily odor. It came from another world. The music was loud, the soles of my feet tingling with the vibrations, a volume to muffle the clamor of sexual gambits unbuckling over the scene. It was a scene of horror. This is the freedom for which war is waged, in the venerable name of which the West sends its working-class heroes to fight and die. If the Afghanis had been asked, would they have allowed this blight on their home? Is this what Emily was fighting for?