Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

It’s true, I said.

There was silence.

I am so glad. Congratulations. This is marvelous.

Penelope went on in that vein for quite a while before asking for contact information. She took down the number for the hotel and I returned the phone to Emily.

Not yet, said Emily.

Evidently, she was answering a question, and I have wondered what that question might have been. Have you told your father yet? Or she might have asked Emily if I’d given her a ring — she wouldn’t have known then that Emily had done the asking, that Emily had proposed to me, and not the other way around. But I think that this shrewd woman, mother to a daughter who had judged her deficient, who addressed her as “Mother” in a blunt, toneless voice and had not forgiven her for the failure of her marriage — was that all it was? — I think this shrewd woman had most likely asked her daughter if she could go ahead and announce the engagement. Not yet , Emily had said. The same reply she’d given me when really not so very long before I had asked her if we could tell people she was pregnant.

But after the call Emily became animated. She appeared to be quite taken by the idea of marriage, a wedding. Her manner assumed a jollity, and she might even have skipped and clapped her hands, had her character been that way disposed. But yes! I have seen her skip, maybe even clap her hands, I’ve seen the enchanting, gleeful skipping of a girl as I entered the house and down she came, down the stairs, happy to see me, reaching out and resting her hands on my chest. There were plenty of moments like that — I wasn’t entirely mad.

I suggested that we call the airline and get her a seat on my flight. She took the airline’s phone number from me but didn’t call then — she had to go to the bathroom, she said.

In bed later that evening, she talked about the wedding.

If we have the wedding in Italy, at my grandmother’s villa, then I think we should do something nice for our long-suffering friends and fly them over.

I suppose we could, I said, musing to myself how “our friends” so differs from “our respective friends.” “Long-suffering,” I thought, was there only to justify the extravagance.

I could not offer any more than that lame answer, I suppose we could. I think it’s fair to say that there are women for whom the wedding is itself an object of and for perfection, the embodiment of an idealization that begins in childhood, in girlhood, and gains mass through adolescence and into womanhood. Emily was such a woman. On the other hand, I myself had only ever harbored dread of the wedding day, whomever I might marry in the end. I’d always known that I wouldn’t have an arranged marriage; I’d always known that it was unlikely I’d marry a woman my parents considered suitable, a Muslim woman from the Sylhet province in Bangladesh; I’d always known that educated women with that kind of background and with a Western sensibility were few. There are many more now, but they are too young for me, of course — too late for me. I just didn’t meet any people like that. The worst part of it for my parents must have been the fact that their social status never brought them near families with educated children. They were peasants in the sense that connotes nothing pejorative. They came from peasants and they knew that they themselves, that their class, was the obstacle to fulfilling their own ambitions for me, to make good their shame.

In any event, I now had little to do with them. My visits to their home in London were separated by months and sometimes years. In fact, I saw more of them in the one month when they needed help with their mortgage than in all the rest of time since I left their home for university. We seldom spoke on the phone. Once, three years passed without contact. When Emily had asked me if she could meet my parents — three months after I’d been introduced to Robin and four after Penelope — I explained things but afterward offered, of course , to take her to my parents’ home.

But if they won’t let you in, I said, or if they say they don’t want to speak to you, there’s nothing I can do about that.

They wouldn’t?

I don’t want to discourage you — you should know how it is — but if you’re asking me, then I have to tell you what I believe. I think they won’t let you in. But I might be wrong.

Emily didn’t press the issue, and I didn’t tell her that I’d already spoken to them about her and they’d said they didn’t want anything to do with her and didn’t want me mentioning her name in their presence again.

Because of this, I knew that I’d marry outside and that therefore my parents would never come to my wedding, so that when Emily started talking about flying people over to an Italian villa, when Emily talked about the little church high on a hillside overlooking a valley, a venue for the ceremony, and outside which, once, on a lush slope of grass — holy profanity! — we’d made love, when Emily broached matters of the wedding day, dancing like a girl, all I could think about were the implications of my parents’ not being there.

And, in fact, I did not want them there. To have wanted them there would only have made sense if I’d wanted them to enjoy it, if I’d wanted them to give their blessing, but I knew that that was a wish too far. I’d have to wish first that some part of them could rejoice. And there was also a fear of embarrassment. It wasn’t the fear of a banal embarrassment, of parents retelling compromising stories of childhood, as if my father or mother could make a wedding speech in English, but a fear of embarrassment at the evident rupture between them and me. Why should that cause embarrassment? I don’t know. What I know is that when I consider that rupture, when I consider the various ways I am separated from my parents, the ways they seem alien to me and I to them, I fear that others might consider the same and that they, too, will conclude that I am an unfeasible human being, so that the embarrassment I fear is not just the universal child’s embarrassment — Daddy, stop that, you’re embarrassing me — but a deeper anxiety about who I am.

So when Emily spoke of chartering a plane, of a wedding in a Tuscan church sitting pretty at the top of a hill, I thought of how my half would not live up to her fantasy, to the ambitions of an ambitious woman. I imagined a wedding in which one half came incomplete, with an absence that pointed only to deficiency, a hole that everyone would be wary to avoid stepping into, whatever clever and moving words I might spin in the groom’s speech.

* * *

In the morning, after a breakfast in bed, Emily made a curious suggestion.

Let’s go and see a priest.

To get married now?

No, silly! To talk about getting married. It’s what you do, go and see a priest.

Aren’t we going to England?

We can see one here anyway. Don’t you think it would be fun?

Talking to a priest?

Emily was enchanted by the practical matters of the process. She was like a girl playing with new dolls. I knew it was the prospect of losing me finally that had brought things to a head, but I wondered how much of the new mood was sustainable when the claims of work, of a professional life, came back in. That room was an enclave, separated from all the world, all the business of reconstruction and development, a piece of the world that had its own weather system, its own motion of time, an island populated only by two people.

On my way to the hotel two days earlier, I’d seen a great golden cross flashing in the bright sun, rising above a line of trees, as high as a minaret. A short walk down a wide avenue, whose fast-moving traffic made it an exhilarating peril to cross, and we came to St. Thomas’s Roman Catholic Church in the Diocese of Islamabad-Rawalpindi, Pastor Anwar Daniel, M.A.