Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

I went back to my room, pulled out my laptop, and went down to one of the restaurants to do some work. Legal work can be distracting — I liked arguments and reasoning, and from time to time a case could throw up an absorbing puzzle, perhaps not as often as you might imagine if television shows were anything to go by, but the occasional puzzle there was. My work in Bangladesh mainly focused on combating corruption, some of it litigation but much of it not really legal at all. It was what they called advocacy or even activism, trying to bring about the reform of institutions. I also took on commercial cases and had one such at the time, representing a consortium of bridge builders who, contrary to the contractual schedule, had not yet been paid by the government of Bangladesh. I tried to be careful about the cases I took on, avoiding any that might bring me into conflict with my anticorruption work, and on Hassan Kabir’s suggestion I informed prospective clients that I reserved the right to cease representing them without explanation. Despite this — probably on Hassan’s recommendation — some clients came to me. Some of those, by the way, did not actually want me to represent them but went around Dhaka getting consultations from lawyers who would thereby be conflicted from representing adversaries. You see the same sort of thing going on in D.C. sometimes, especially if there is a relatively small number of lawyers specializing in a narrow field.

The case at hand was a simple enough breach of contract: The consortium’s claim looked watertight and I didn’t detect anything untoward. Besides, I took a liking to the senior executives, who flew over from the Netherlands and South Korea. When I learned about the particular stretches of river where the consortium had built their three bridges, when the maps were laid out to give me some background, I remembered that I had crossed that same river not far from where these new bridges now stood. And I remembered that as a boy all those years ago, a quarter of a century it was now, I had made my way across that river, and I thought of that other boy, the boy on the train. I expect the executives were too engrossed in their explanations to notice any shift in my countenance.

But I couldn’t focus on the work. Was she really going to join me? The ability, from childhood, to exclude the cares around me, to ignore the fact of the threatening presence of my mother and father in the flat, the power to stay all things but that which was right in front of me, my books or a math problem or a legal brief, that ability I had so relied upon slipped away again.

It was only in those periods of concentration, when the self is abnegated and the mind and the subject are fused and all thought is governed by the matter at hand, determined by it, as if it is not you that engages the subject, the work, but the work itself requisitioning the tools of your mind for its inherent purpose — it was during those periods that ironically I felt most in control, that gave the whole of time — before, after, and during — an aspect of will.

I sometimes wonder if I’m missing out on something, if the days would end better, I would sleep better, I would dream better, if I turned in each night having behind me a day when I built something with my hands, tilled the soil, farmed the land, like my father, like the people in the village where I spent those boyhood years. Outside in Dubai, beneath the blur of sun, on construction sites studding this edge of sand and sea, there were thousands of men, most of them South Asian, many my age, working with their hands, pulling heavy loads, a dozen dying in the assembly of each new skyscraper, crushed by concrete or sliced by high-tension wire.

And with every strain to wrest myself from the wandering thoughts, thoughts that took me into still-darker places, with every effort to bring myself back to the table, to the screen, and to focus on the work at hand, the work that required only so much as lifting the fingers, with every exercise of mental will, there came the sense of failure.

In this state, the hours went by. I was there from late afternoon until the evening brought a surge of diners and the sight of so many cheerful people forced me out. In my room, I tried to sleep, failed, watched television, drank a whisky, watched CNN, drank another whisky, got dressed, went downstairs, and stepped outside. Dubai at night in the spring is cold. I went back inside and asked the concierge if he could lend me a coat so I could take a walk. He showed no surprise. I set off without direction, and I walked and walked in a place where there’s no walking to be done, where air-conditioned cars link air-conditioned buildings, illuminated by the fiercest streetlights in the world. And I think of the whole of the city, the people who inhabit its halls, who sleep now and breathe its recycled air and whose activities by day animate this strip of land on the rim of the desert, and I remember — because this thought is always a memory — that they will all one day be gone, that every one of them will be taken outside and pushed into the sand, that in a hundred years, or two hundred years, to be certain, every human being here, every lover and loser, every captain of industry and every hotel cleaner, every mother and father and every child will be no more and that these buildings will stand, not all of them, but enough will persevere without them. It is a thought that stills me, that brings a moment of calm. And I walk and walk, and amid the concrete, steel, and glass, under lights burning brighter than the noonday sun, it is the knot of anxiety, always tightening and turning, for which, above all else, I resent her. There is nothing so enfeebling, so degrading, as that state of fretfulness, of helpless agitation. And I’m wondering if those whiskys I had, those whiskys now percolating in me, now short-circuiting frayed neural connections, if those whiskys should be augmented by another and then another, even though I’ve never been prone to drink, not even the little that is enough to unsteady me; I’m wondering now if that might bring calm, if it might give me relief. Is this how people end up on drugs and alcohol, not out of despair but because of anxiety, the anxiety that dismantles the apparatus of thought? And amid all this, not for the first time, the time after time, the time and again, because I wished it, and because mathematics remains a refuge, I thought of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, a theorem so enchanting and disturbing, like love, a theorem that illuminates itself all the while it casts a shadow over mathematics, the queen of the sciences, the queen because she stands aloof, so resolutely disavowing the methods of sciences, so unstintingly disparaging of what we feel, what we touch, what we taste. I first came across it in a book in the library, a lovely little volume called What Is Mathematics? , which I came to understand was the perfect title for the book.

In the midst of this, in the long, cold, and illuminated Dubai night, I hear the azan streaming out over the city. It might only be the drawl found in the Arabian Peninsula, its music drained of its color, a victim of Salafi asceticism, but there remains enough beauty to reverberate against my memory, and its timing is perfect. Allah-hu-Akbar, Allah-hu-Akbar , a long pause, and then piercing through the silence of expectation, a second couplet, the same words but this time drawn out forever. Allaaaah. And in the voice I hear sorrow and understand how close humility and sorrow are, and if my heart spoke then, it said: Lord, here I am.

* * *

Zafar fell silent and I wondered if he might cry. Many men are, of course, uncomfortable with crying, uncomfortable with their own and still more so with the crying of other men. But I felt no discomfort with the thought that he might be holding back tears because, for no reason I can properly identify, I myself felt teary. He was not looking at me but at some spot on the wall, far away, and would not have noticed my brushing away a tear or two before he emerged again from his silence.