Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

There was comfort in mathematics, which teased my mind, drew it in and emptied it of everything. I caught glimpses of a kind of truth. I remember first encountering long division, which was set out in a book as a mere process — something to be done, if not understood. But I could not stop asking myself why it worked. We take much for granted, much that is granted by others, and we’re told to do as we’re told, and we agree. And we must agree. I haven’t the time or, for that matter, the inclination to work out that the earth is basically spherical, but when I see the curve of the horizon from a plane, I believe I have seen something that is consistent with what I have been told is the truth, that the planet is curved like a ball. But how can we know that we’re accepting something that we ought not to accept, without knowledge of the why? In mathematics, the why is everything. How, or rather, why, did this mechanical process of long division work, calculating how many times one number goes into another, working out the remainder, and then the carrying over. Why did someone think it would always work? What was going on?

On my way to school one dreary morning, a realization blossomed in my mind: the idea of a number base. The idea was never contained in such words, and only later did I learn about other bases such as binary and hexadecimal. I see the connection, but what still eludes me is how the mind can make the journey, how it covers the ground between two ideas; what I do not understand is how contemplation of long division led this organ in the skull to an understanding of number bases. I grasped that when we add, subtract, multiply, and divide numbers, we are relying on a base of ten to represent them, but this base is entirely arbitrary, of our own choosing. The numbers themselves do not care.

This was the kind of thinking I had settled into even as a boy and, at the time, I saw in such tendencies of my mind the root of all strife between me and my parents. For a long time I felt, which is to say I consciously thought, that our difficulties were of my doing, my fault, that I had brought upon my parents some grief to warrant their treatment of me — to warrant the violence. I know now, of course, that self-blame is rather common among children in such circumstances as mine.

There comes a day for most people, I think, when they see their parents through the same lens as they see others, as human beings who stand alone and apart with aspirations for their own lives, and with all the flaws that are laid bare by defeated hopes. Such an epiphany can come in a moment, in a fraction of a second, in which everything is compressed and laid out at once. When it comes, it could, I suppose, be unsettling, as if heaven lifted its veil. I remember learning what Islam teaches: that on the day of judgment no family ties are recognized and that each of us stands apart before the maker, only for himself.

One such moment that I can remember, though not the first, was on the day I learned I had a place at university.

In the week before that day, Mrs. Fraenkel tapped me on the shoulder in a busy corridor at school. Mrs. Fraenkel was a history teacher, whose physical appearance always warranted a pause. She seemed forever weighed down by the same gray-and-brown wool pullover, her mauve hair an abandoned nest and so dry it could burst into flames at any moment. Her wrecked teeth, like a mouthful of broken cigarettes, denied her the self-confidence to smile for longer than an instant.

She never actually taught me, but since candidates for Oxford entrance were a rarity in my school, word of my application must have reached her in the staff room. As pupils filed past on their way to other classrooms, Mrs. Fraenkel, whose fingers and face bore chalk marks, asked me how I intended to get to Oxford for interview. I could hitch a ride with a family friend of hers, she suggested, and explained that her friend’s son, a pupil at a school whose name meant nothing to me then, was also trying for Oxford entrance. I later learned that Mrs. Fraenkel had moonlighted as a private tutor, and I speculated that this might be how she knew this family.

He’s bright enough but not in your league, she said.

Perhaps this was the kindest remark anyone could make, anticipating as I now believe it did the anxiety I would feel on meeting these magnificent people, the sort of thing that should be said even if you don’t believe it to be true. In those days, I knew nothing of what I’ve come to know of the upper classes, who seemed to my mind then either fat people in dusty wigs, half recumbent or mounted upon some unfortunate horse, in paintings with gilded frames, or thin people who stalked the globe, gathered loot, and discovered the sources of rivers already long known to unimportant people. With such ideas in my mind, it was easy to dismiss them. But the middle classes — that is to say the intelligentsia, the writers, academics, doctors, and lawyers, and all those whose labor is framed by the transmission of words, written or spoken, but only after years of study — to me these people were forbidding in the particular power they held. They seemed to have a natural, ordained intimacy with what I loved, the world where I was safe, the world of imagination, books, and ideas. When I looked closely at people in the public library, none of them conformed to my idea of the intellectual elite, who never came to the library but had, I believed, shelves and shelves of books at home.

At seven o’clock on the morning of my interview, I took an hour-long bus journey from Willesden Green to High Street Kensington. At the appointed place, I was picked up by Mrs. Fraenkel’s friend. Inside the car, in the driving seat, was a middle-aged woman who spoke to me in a rich French accent. I smelled perfume. Her short hair followed the line of her white neck, a string of pearls straddled the collar of her blouse, and the slender fingers of one hand held the steering wheel while those of the other rested on her thigh, the tips of the fingers just below the line of her skirt. I cannot remember her name. In the front passenger seat sat her boy, Laurent, I was told. As I settled in, Laurent crooked his head toward me, flashed me a confident and utterly disarming smile, and resumed his conversation with his mother. The car seemed to move without any sound, like mercury over steel, but what I remember most vividly is that I was able to cross my legs.

I did not have much to say to these people, and they seemed busy discussing arrangements for coaching Laurent. I was informed that he was “a fencer,” not merely that he liked fencing. As we broke free of the suburbs of London, I lost myself in the book I had brought with me, volume one of Mechanisms in Modern Engineering Design by Ivan Artobolevsky, translated from Russian into English in 1975. Some years before I had come across the single volume in a poky secondhand bookshop in Marylebone for the price of two bottles of milk. It was an utter delight, a compendium of designs of lever mechanisms with page after page of beautiful diagrams. The elderly bookseller, who in my imagination was the same Ezra Cohen whose name was etched into the storefront, explained to me that the book had been distributed by the Soviet Union throughout the third world, at knockdown prices as part of their propaganda efforts. When I expressed surprise at how well informed he was, Mr. Cohen shrugged his shoulders. I’m an old socialist and I like books, he said.

An old socialist who called the Russian effort propaganda, including this, a collection of mechanical-engineering diagrams for building bridges and machines to raise water and irrigate land. I did not stay and talk to Mr. Cohen, for already I was dreading returning home with, instead of milk, a book written originally in Russian and in symbols and diagrams. I have since imagined a conversation in which I stand silently and listen to Mr. Cohen, with all his books around him, talking to me, not about the building of bridges, not about breaking the chains that bind the poor, but instead explaining to me what I have since come to understand, that the idea is the thing and that words can do only so much.