Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

I’d take out my little notebook and research the things I had noted in it during the week. I’d look up the unfamiliar words I’d come across that had defied my palm-sized, well-worn Collins dictionary, and I’d browse the shelves and pick out another set of books to take home. Sometimes my inquiries would send the librarians retrieving books from the adults’ section, a large and separate room on the other side of the entrance foyer. My father would sit and read silently while all this happened around him. I have happy memories of these hours. But things changed on a day that was to be the last on which we walked together to the library.

At the desk in the foyer, I handed back the books I had finished reading over the preceding week. The librarian always mispronounced my name, saying Zay-far rather than Zaff-far. I did not correct her mispronunciation on the first occasion because I was so grateful that she had remembered my name at all. After that, of course, it became impossible to call attention to the error.

She said, Hello, Zay-far, and I acknowledged her, but then as I turned toward the children’s library there came a new thought, as if unannounced. I was nine years old then.

I thought that I ought to go into the adults’ library, not the children’s. Even though the prohibition against under-sixteens seemed to be strictly enforced in that library — maybe in all public libraries in those days — something told me that the staff would not stop me. Don’t get me wrong. I have come across anti-intellectuals in the most unlikely quarters, people who unpredictably bay at the whiff of aspiration, some because they can’t stand an uppity nigger, as it were, and some because love of learning visibly pains them. And in Britain in those days, of course, knowing your station was demanded not just by the superior classes but by every class. Yet I was sure this librarian would not stop me. I think my father had already sensed that something was afoot. Certainly, he did not meet my eyes. Later, whenever I thought about why I was sent back to Bangladesh, I would recall this moment, even if I could not find a direct connection.

I think I’ll go to the other library today, I said. There’s something I need to look up.

Everything happened slowly. My father did not lift his eyes from the floor.

Well, come and get me when you’re done, he said.

He turned and I watched him enter the children’s library with the two newspapers rolled up, wedged under the arm, his head down. I saw a man who might have thought his life insufficient, amounting to little more than a handful of routines marking his time on earth. If there was drama in the lonely heroism of a workingman, he did not know it. I have thought my father believed he had no entitlement to his anger at life’s inequities, since his life was the envy of many of those he had left behind in Bengal. I see now that he also carried enormous guilt for having survived the atrocities of the 1971 war. But that Saturday morning, as he walked into the children’s library, what I believe I felt was his heart breaking. Watching a door close that can never be opened again is, I am sure, enough to break a heart.

* * *

Zafar had fallen silent, and I believed I saw sadness in his face, but I thought that this was just as likely to be my own reaction, projecting my own sadness onto him, as psychotherapists would say. All of it is hard for me to imagine, so far are his circumstances beyond my own experience, but perhaps the longing for a certainty in the love of one’s parents never dims with time.

Something he said raised a question in my mind. Zafar had twice referred to being sent back to Bangladesh, sometime after his twelfth birthday, he had said, and I wondered whether he had mentioned that fact in order to open up this topic, perhaps even to draw questions from me.

At college and through the years of our friendship before he disappeared, I could never bring myself to ask him directly about his family or his childhood. We never, for that matter, talked about that day his parents came to Oxford. It was not that I had limited interest — my interest had always grown. In fact, I am inclined to think that a mark of a developing friendship is that one’s solicitousness extends further back and deeper, no longer content with asking merely how the friend is doing but developing interest and concern in all the things and people, the workplace, love, and family, that stand and have stood as influences upon the life of the person one cares about more and more. I never did ask him how his parents were, how they were doing, even though he asked me the same on many occasions.

There was an invisible barrier in the way, and Zafar had put it there. I don’t know when it came up, but it was there already at college, erected under cover of darkness. He never volunteered information, and perhaps that stark absence had built the invisible wall. Even when I hadn’t known not to ask about his childhood, I had learned not to do so. And yet here was my friend twice referring to being sent away.

If I have already altered the order of his account by bringing forward the thread leading to the events in Kabul, then it is in part because that is what Zafar’s story ultimately came to. That would be reason enough, but the fact is that I myself am tied to those same events — I almost added in ways I could not foresee .

Even if that were true — that I could not foresee my ties to what he would eventually come to — it would not be right . For what is the place of obligation and duty? How much should one foresee the consequences of one’s own actions? And how much do other causes that combine with one’s own actions, and thereby muddy one’s role, exonerate one? If Zafar began with childhood, was he signaling a greater class of causes, the beginning of every thread? I have an aversion toward drawing links between boyhood and the grown man; when I have seen it done it has all too often felt specious and self-serving, not to mention unproven and unprovable. What did my friend intend? What did he mean?

At first I was reluctant to intervene in his narrative. But as I listened to his stories of childhood unfold, to the theme of a gulf between himself and his family and the world about him, it seemed to me that this episode of being sent back as a child was vital. It was evidence of the gulf, before or afterward, between him and his parents and, indeed, it might have widened that gulf. I convinced myself that since Zafar appeared to have stalled I could jump-start his storytelling again by prompting him about this. I wanted to know more about his parents’ reasons for sending him to Bangladesh and about his experiences there, and so I asked: Why did they send you back?

When he looked at me, I felt, as I have often felt in his company, that he was searching me, as if he were tracing out the context from which my question had emerged. His head was tilted and his eyes flickered over the corners of my face before again fixing on my own.

Mine were not the sort of parents that believe children are owed reasons, he said.

But they must have given some explanation.

That it would be good for me, perhaps, to know something of my roots, he said.

What’s so funny? I asked. Zafar was chuckling.

That’s a translation of what they said, and the translation allows speculation that there might be something specific I should know.

Why is that funny?

Because the original Bengali doesn’t contain any such suggestion.

I’m not sure I follow.

I was a child. It was not a happy home. Asking questions was an act of aggression.

So you don’t know why they sent you.

It only came to me much, much later, as I learned more, that perhaps they had wanted me to spend time with someone in particular. In their way, I think that sending me to Bangladesh was their greatest act of kindness toward me. Shall I tell you about the journey?