Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

Where are you?

In Islamabad, I wrote.

I fired off my short reply and then tried to book a ticket to Dubai. There were no direct flights from Islamabad to Dhaka, or to Delhi, for that matter — I think planes going out of Pakistan were not allowed over Indian airspace. I took down the contact numbers for telephone bookings for Emirates and PIA and checked my email again.

There was another message from Emily.

Where in Islamabad?

It was difficult to answer her. Even then, in those dying days, despite the disgust and horror and the tides of anger, I wanted to tell her where I was, where I could be found, so that she could get on the next flight, I imagined, rush to my hotel in Islamabad, pay the concierge a bribe for the room number — for a surprise, she’d tell him (and was that really why I wanted a hotel other than the security-infested Marriott?). Or maybe she’d ask for the telephone number for the room — to call from a phone in the lounge, she’d say, but instead read off the last four digits and head for the elevator and knock timidly on my door and, when I open it, smile widely, a smile of reflex, and declare her love and so on and so forth. It was the most undignified, reprehensible part of me. And yet the part of me that didn’t want to tell her where I was staying was equally complicit in betraying me, for reducing me in my own eyes, for it didn’t want to tell her not because it wanted nothing more to do with her but because it couldn’t bear the wait, the not knowing if she would come or not. What a tangle of negatives, double and triple. We were finished, weren’t we? Months ago, made good and final when I left for Dhaka, Bangladesh, for who would ever go there other than to put distance between one thing and another, the old and the new, an end and a beginning? But then the planes brought down the towers and everything was fucked-up, clocks unsprung and compass needles sent flying, and who knew where or when they were. I have read that in the weeks afterward, there was a spike in the number of couples getting engaged. I have read that after 9/11, there was a big jump in the number of people deciding to drive rather than take a plane, to get from D.C. to Boston, from New York to Chicago, and apparently more people died in the resulting increase in car accidents in the six months after 9/11, in the increase alone, than in the attacks themselves. The whole thing is irrational, of course, the response to the attacks, the individual human responses and the collective political responses. Emily and I were all but finished, a final finish subverted by 9/11 breaking open the ambiguous days at the end of an affair. What is that line in Larkin’s poem? Specious stuff that says no rational being can fear a thing it will not feel. And here I was wondering how I would respond to her question, what I would write, staring at the screen but feeling the suspension of my fingers above the keyboard.

You ask if I loved her, and I tell you that I did and I didn’t. I’ve been here over three months, and how often have you spoken of Meena and yet how is it that I know that you wish to be near her? I know because our actions don’t tell the whole story, they never do. It is not that thought is hidden behind the actions but that all the omissions and silences, the evidence of things not seen, must be accounted for if you’re to see anything. Emily stood for something, she rescued me and condemned me in the same gesture. You may say that that is not love, and I would laugh at you for presuming to know what another’s love isn’t and what his love is. Emily was England, home, belonging, the untethering of me from a past I did not want, the promise through children of a future that was rooted, bound to something treated altogether better by the world than my mother, the girl who loved me.

I wrote back telling her where I was, giving her the name of the hotel, and no sooner had I clicked Send than I felt the onset of waiting. I had to buy a plane ticket, a ticket to Dubai, from where I could catch a flight back to Dhaka. I called the airline and booked a seat on a flight the following afternoon, enough time for Emily to get out here — if that is what she had in mind. But the waiting was terrible. It was as if time had changed, no more arrow in flight but a smiling Buddha sitting before me, a figure of marvel, with the patience to withstand an eternity of staring.

It was late in the afternoon. I had not eaten all day. At a restaurant I ordered a plate of kebabs that came with bread as long as my arm. I ordered a salad to go with it, but before it arrived I was full with meat and bread. In my hotel room, I turned on the television, but after two minutes of CNN, I switched it off and went back downstairs to the guests’ business center to check my email. She hadn’t written. Back in my room, I took a sleeping tablet and turned in for the night.

The following morning, I went downstairs and logged on. There was a reply from Hassan Kabir: I regret to have troubled you so. Note that I plan to be in Kabul next Wednesday and trust you will be able to join me there. If you stand in need of additional travel documents, visas, or letters to facilitate entry, let my staff know.

After a light breakfast in the hotel restaurant, I returned to my room, where I tried to work on some legal papers. I was in a buoyant mood. Even if I did not admit it to myself then, I can tell you now that some part of me was holding out the hope that Emily would show.

At four thirty, there was a knock on the door.

Hello?

It’s me.

Door’s open, I said.

It was Emily.

We made love.

* * *

Shall we call your mother and tell her?

Emily did not answer immediately. Was that calculation I saw, the same calculation I had seen before, time and again? She had asked me to marry her and I had said yes, so that perhaps all I had seen in that look was the doubt to which everyone is entitled at the moment they impose their will on the course of their lives. That must be it — that is what I wanted it to be.

Yes, let’s, she said.

She spoke first. Zafar and I are getting engaged.

Getting engaged? I thought. Was there some ceremony involved? It occurred to me for the first time that I really didn’t know the ins and outs of the process, not just the process that Emily must have grown up with, girls of her station, her place in English society, but the process of engagement and marriage, and what happens in between. The engagement as an abstract noun, the wedding invitations as embossed cards, that was about all I knew. There was a wedding ceremony, of course, a white wedding dress and a reception afterward.

We’re in Islamabad now. We’ll be coming to London.

Will we? I had no reason to argue with her. If I had become giddy with delight, however briefly, it wasn’t because of the prospect of marriage but because Emily seemed to me for the first time to be acting with resolution about me, with a clear commitment to me. This even though I knew that the only thing left, the only thing to convey the requisite level of emotional commitment, was to ask me to marry her. Perhaps, too, I was just glad for the forward movement, the change in itself, the escape from the toing and froing, the ambiguities and vacillations, and the uncertainties of feeling loved one day and disregarded the next. There is always enough ground for self-deception, its possibilities endless. It is because I knew this then, because I felt the presence of these ideas, that I must wonder now if I had been going along with a game, calling her bluff, forcing her to play this card.

Emily handed me the phone.

Is it true? asked Penelope, her voice severe and direct.

Should I laugh at myself now for not being in the least surprised by Penelope’s question? For in fact realizing that I’d expected the question and expected it to be meant genuinely, as it was?