Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

After the interview, I decided to give myself some time before rejoining Laurent and his mother, and so I took a walk through Oxford, around the Radcliffe Camera (twice), under the Bridge of Sighs, down to Magdalen Deer Park. Everything was as I had seen it in the books at the public library near my home in London, yet now a future at Oxford was more than an idle dream. But there was something new and unexpected.

As I walked through the streets, one thought returned to me over and over. One thought kept surprising me, springing at me from behind walls and at corners, like some trickster; one thought followed me around the city as I walked through its cobbled streets and along its sandstone walls: I would never again be destitute.

It was early December, and by midafternoon the light was retreating. I made my way back to the Eastgate Hotel, where Laurent’s mother had ensconced herself for the day. When I arrived, she and Laurent were taking tea by the fireside in the hotel drawing room.

How did it go? she asked me, as Laurent bit into a scone.

They’ve given me a place, I said.

What do you mean? asked Laurent, through a mouthful of scone. His mother looked at him sharply.

I think the college offered me a place, I said.

No, said Laurent, they don’t tell you until later by post. First you take the entrance exam, which you did last month, right?

Right, I replied.

Then they interview you and after that they let you know by letter.

One of the fellows — are they called fellows?

Yes.

One of the fellows said they looked forward to seeing me next autumn.

What exactly did he say? asked Laurent.

Well, she said — she was a woman — that they were pleased to inform me that I had a place to read mathematics at the college and they hoped I would accept, and they looked forward to seeing me next autumn.

There was then an odd silence as the information seemed to take root. I am not so naïve now, nor perhaps was I so naïve then, as to remain blind to their incredulity, though at that moment I, too, felt my own disbelief, as I heard myself.

You must feel overjoyed, said Laurent’s mother.

I’m happy, I said, but mainly I feel hungry.

I wasn’t sure I had enough loose change to buy anything to eat in this expensive hotel.

When I arrived back in London in the early evening, my father opened the door. It was a Tuesday, which was my father’s one day of rest from waiting tables. As a child I walked home on Tuesdays with the thought that my father would be there and that I would probably do something to make him angry. Years into adulthood, I have felt a recurrent anxiety on Tuesdays, which did not ease until these last few years, when I slipped from the cycles of the working world so that one day ran into the next, the weekends ceased to frame the week, and each day became nameless over time.

At the door, my father said nothing about the interview. I thought then that perhaps he had simply forgotten about it, or that he had not grasped how much turned on that interview. In the kitchen, my mother was chopping coriander leaves while the lid on the rice pan rattled, letting off bursts of steam. She asked me how the interview had gone, to which I replied that the college had offered me a place to study there. She smiled, and in a turn of phrase that I have never forgotten, and whose translation into English I think preserves the sense very well, she said: Good. This will vindicate me in the eyes of the extended family. I sensed that behind this remark lay some vast story and one I already suspected my mind was not equipped to hear without cost. My father simply said: That’s very good. Have you eaten?

It struck me then that my father might not have forgotten about the interview and that he might indeed have grasped its significance, and that perhaps this was why, at the front door, he could not bring himself to ask me about it.

* * *

I don’t know if it was merely the fact of listening to Zafar again after all those years, but I have to confess that his voice and his language sounded beautiful to me. Reading his notebooks and reviewing the recordings have been a pleasure, even lulling me here and there into a state of hypnotic calm, notwithstanding the knowledge of what came to pass and that everything was circling toward violence. In writing this account, I can’t deny that my own language, on the page, beats in places to the rhythm of his, rather like — I don’t mind admitting — the movement synchrony and posture mirroring of couples. Zafar spoke in balanced sentences, apparently crafted, on occasion perhaps sounding rehearsed, though this should not be regarded as a criticism, bearing in mind that he had probably spent most of his life considering the matters he was now setting out.

At times the composition of his speech evidenced a South Asian sensibility, as if he had learned English grammar from Victorian textbooks. There was no reason to expect his command of English to be anything other than fluent. But I always believed that I could detect an occasional unruly inflection of accent and, moreover, I perceived in some aspect of his composition — its occasional verging on the stilted, perhaps — that English was his second language, though I daresay he’d long outgrown use of his childhood language, Sylheti, a language related to Assamese and Bengali yet with its own script, he told me.

I remember asking him in college if Sylheti was another language altogether or merely a dialect of Bengali. Max Weinreich, the linguist of Yiddish, writing about the difference, replied Zafar, said that a language was a dialect with an army and a navy. Zafar is not quite right: I have discovered that Weinreich himself actually attributes the remark to a student of his. What I have been unable to trace, however, is the origin of something my friend said to me later, at the very end of the same conversation, when we parted. An exile, said Zafar, is a refugee with a library.

My search of the Internet and books of quotations yielded no source for this. I like to think that this was Zafar’s own observation, not so much because it offers a penetrating insight — like many quotations, it teases but does not satisfy, yet it is enough — but because the words seem so appropriate as applied to him. Zafar was an exile, a refugee, if not from war, then of war, but also an exile from blood. He was driven, I think, to find a home in the world of books, a world peopled with ideas, whose companionship is offered free and clear, and with the promise that questions would never long be without answers or better questions.

* * *

This was not the first occasion, I said to Zafar. You said that this was not the first occasion you saw your parents as individuals, individuals with their own hopes for themselves.

Indeed it was not, said Zafar.

I poured him more coffee. He took a sip, set down the mug, and continued his story.

The first occasion, he said, was some years earlier, before I was sent back to Bangladesh. On Saturdays, my father would go to work at one o’clock in the afternoon, not as he usually did at nine o’clock. The Governor, which is how my father always referred to the proprietor, recognized the extra demands placed on staff on Saturdays. The restaurant, in the heart of London’s West End, remained open until much later on Saturday, into the small hours of Sunday, in fact, in order to serve nightclubbers and pubgoers staggering in for a curry.

On Saturday mornings, continued Zafar, my father and I marked a routine of visiting the library. On the way, he would buy the Daily Mirror and the Sun , which he would read in the children’s library while I leafed through the books. Many librarians in those days refused to stock some papers because the Page 3 girls fell foul of library dress codes, so to speak.