Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

To Dubai? she asked.

To Dubai, for London?

I’ll get another flight.

Have your plans changed in the last fifteen minutes? I asked.

No.

She was looking me in the eye as she said all this, that gaze I’ve told you about, that look that studies the effect of what she’s saying, that adapts and adjusts for what she sees, as if the purpose was to hold reality steady at the level of words that are spoken, as if that could ever be so.

We passed the rest of lunch in silence. When I suggested coffee, she spoke again.

I have to go to a meeting.

In Kabul?

No, here.

Did you know about the meeting before coming to Islamabad?

I came to see you.

Do you plan to get on the flight tomorrow? Should I wait?

I have to go to Kabul for another meeting.

Tomorrow?

Yes.

In development and reconstruction, it already seemed to me, people were paid not by the hour but by the meeting. Meeting was work, and the work was coordination, and coordination requires a meeting of minds, and so meetings are required in meeting rooms, so that things can be discussed and consensus reached and minutes taken, so work can get done.

Should I wait?

No answer from her. It was infuriating.

What did you imagine I would do ?

She said nothing.

Do you know if Ariana’s running flights from Kabul to Dubai? I asked.

I don’t think so.

See if you can get yourself to Dubai tomorrow evening. We can catch a flight to London together, probably the day after. There’s a flight at four in the afternoon.

There is a study that comes to my mind now, said Zafar. Patients—

Really? Another study? I interjected.

Do you really think you’re in a position to tease me?

Go on, I said.

The study addressed the failure of patients to show up for appointments, no-shows, something that has always been a problem at doctors’ surgeries. One surgery introduced a system of asking patients to repeat back to the receptionist the time of the appointment they just booked. Apparently, just getting patients to say the time of their appointment resulted in no-shows dropping by fifty percent or something astonishing.

It’s one thing to ask a patient in a surgery to repeat something back — you’re providing a service, after all — but it’s another to do this with a friend, and another altogether to do it with your lover. What ruse can you apply and what price do you pay for applying a ruse to one so dear? I had no ruse.

I explained to Emily that I needed to book flights, or my flight, at any rate, at least a couple of hours beforehand. If I didn’t do so, then I’d have to stay at a hotel in Dubai. Not cheap. Bear that in mind, I said.

Oh, the indignity! There I am asking her to get to Dubai tomorrow but telling her when the last flight to London is on the day after that. Some part of me implicitly conceding, suggesting that she could come later — isn’t that what it was? — giving her an out to every request I made. That was the sum of it, this feeling of being broken into parts. I must have known something wasn’t quite right when she appeared in the room. Her luggage was too small. Did she not count on me saying yes when she asked me to marry her? A carry-on wouldn’t have been enough for her, not if she thought she might be going to London. And yet I shut out the wisdom of my own eyes. One part of me fighting with another.

I should get going soon if I’m going to catch my flight. Can I drop you off somewhere? I asked.

No, that’s fine. I’m going to stay here for a bit; I have a little work to do before my meeting. You should go.

I settled the account, asked at the reception for a taxi to the airport, and went to fetch our bags.

Emily and I kissed outside the hotel and I got into the car and watched her go back inside.

To the airport, sir?

Yes, please. But can you first go to the end of the road, around the roundabout, and come back this way?

Certainly, sir.

As we drove past the hotel, I saw Emily getting into a car that had the livery of a cab company.

Thank you, driver. Let’s go to the airport.

The car I was in was a Land Cruiser, not the Corolla or Nissan one might expect of a taxi. On arriving at the airport, I was not surprised to discover the colonel waiting there.

Hello, Zafar, he said, stretching out his hands and gripping me by my arms.

I’m sorry your visit to Kabul was so short. I trust you’ll be returning soon?

It’s possible.

I would like you to know that I’m here to help — we’re there to help. I don’t suppose you need help, but I want you to know that it is there. I trust you had a pleasant flight with our air force?

It was fine. Thank you for the car, by the way.

My pleasure. It will be here, as will a place for you to stay. Just let me know.

Do I need to?

He chuckled.

How are you? I asked.

I’m well, my boy. Very well. The sun is shining. What more can one hope for? You’re on the PIA flight for Dubai.

Is that a question?

If you need it, you have a room at the Hyatt. In Dubai.

Thank you.

Let’s get you checked in.

A plane roared over us, and under the thundering noise, as before, the colonel leaned forward and spoke into my ear: When you come back, I want to hear what you make of this Crane boy. The Americans want him out of the way.

I thought the colonel was baiting my curiosity. I said nothing.

In Dubai, I checked into the Jumeirah Beach Hotel and began the waiting. In twenty-four hours, she would either be here or not and a decision would be made. What do we so often do when a decision is hard to make? We do nothing. We do not even wait for time to make the decision for us — waiting requires awareness and focus — and we would rather push the matter outside our attention. The word decision has roots in the Latin decidere , which means to cut off or kill off. You can see it in the word homicide , for instance, to kill a man. A decision, you see, amounts to cutting off all the options but one. And it is not because the decision is inherently complex that we allow time to step in and take charge of making the decision but because addressing ourselves to the decision to be made fills us with anxieties or distress. When we make a good decision we may enjoy the satisfaction of having made a good decision, or at least the satisfaction of having made a decision at all. But when we let time make the decision for us, we are denied such satisfactions. Instead what we feel is relief, and if we stand to consider this feeling, we see that it is the relief that comes from knowing that we are now freed from having ever to endure the anxiety of confronting that decision. It is only relief. That is what time does to us all. It kills all the lives we might have had, destroys all the worlds we might have known. And that is why a man may commit suicide and never take his own life.

There was nothing to do in Dubai but shop and there was nothing I needed that could be shopped for. The hotel had been an extravagance, which I’d sprung for only with a view to Emily joining me there, a night together in a vast building in the shape of a long sailboat, looking out over the Arabian Gulf. Opposite it, on a man-made island, was what was described as the only seven-star hotel in the world, Burj Al Arab, Tower of the Arabs, its image always in the pages of the in-flight magazine of every airline that went through the Gulf. It was a towering giant, joined to the mainland by an elevated causeway, its front adorned by a fleet of Rolls-Royces, each with only two doors. The roof had a helipad, of course, and I have seen in a magazine the aerial shot of a solitary man striking a golf ball there, if it was not a pose, sending the ball into the blue abandon of the Arabian Gulf.