Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

That’s very kind, Meena, said my friend.

Excellent, she announced. You should take notes, she said, turning to me. Get a recorder even, one of those Dictaphone things — I bet Zafar has some stories to tell, don’t you, Zafar?

She smiled at him again.

But now, she continued, I have to love you and leave you. I need to make some calls to New York. See you boys in the morning.

Meena took the bottle of whisky with her.

The kitchen seemed empty. Zafar played with the glass in front of him. I got up to get another bottle of whisky from the back of the cupboard.

Are you under investigation? asked Zafar.

What makes you think that?

The email Meena mentioned.

That was a firm-wide email sent out today reminding staff not to use swearwords in emails.

We both know that’s not what emails like that are about.

Tell me, Zafar. Tell me what they’re about.

They’re reminders to thousands of employees that their emails might fall within disclosure in the course of legal proceedings. They’re a reminder not to put things down in writing and on the record. But you know that: Meena wouldn’t have left her comment about the email where she did if she didn’t think you knew what it actually meant. Does she think proceedings of some kind are on the way? Investigations?

You’d have to ask her.

The conversation stopped. I know he was staring at me, and I imagine he understood I did not want to go into it all, not yet. It was too soon, too quick.

She’s right, you know, I said, pouring myself a whisky. Where the hell have you been, Zafar? For pity’s sake, you just disappeared. I heard all sorts of things. Goodness knows if one-tenth of them are true.

As I sat down at the table, Zafar pulled out what looked like a cell phone.

It’s a DVR, a digital voice recorder, he said. You can listen to the conversations on it. Take it. In fact, keep it.

Zafar looked at his glass and moved it forward by an inch. The whisky rippled back and forth.

It was, of course, an odd thing to do — bring out this DVR and give it to me — but even if I was intrigued to know what was on it, I was struck more by the fact of Zafar volunteering something that must surely have been private. Conversations, he said. Which meant other people besides himself. It was so out of keeping with my idea of the man. But I don’t think the weight of that moment really bore down until later, when I came to understand that he had wanted to unburden himself of something, and that this physical gesture, this divestment, was a sign, a way of defining the beginning.

Do you have anything else to drink?

I smiled then for what must have been the first time since seeing him again. There was a bottle of champagne in the fridge, which had been sitting there for a year, waiting for something. I popped it open, set two flutes on the table, and poured.

Zafar was caressing a button on the voice recorder with his forefinger, apparently lost in thought, before pressing it. A tiny red light came on. One tiny light.

The kitchen was vast, far too big for a couple. Meena and I could each move in this house virtually unnoticed by the other, a freedom earned by affluence. We were free to ignore each other most of the time, which made all the more difficult the minutes when we couldn’t. The kitchen had become a room to leave when it had served whatever function had warranted your visit. It was sterile, inert. There were no signs of breakfast or meals cooked regularly, or even merely eaten, in it, no greasy-capped bottles of olive oil on the counter by the stove. In the cupboard sat Le Creuset pans whose insides were as free of blemish as newly fallen snow is without children. It was in every way unlike the cluttered, warm, and fragrant kitchen of my parents’ home, not the fire around which a family eats. There were no children and therefore no stray pieces of paper with crayon spirals, circles, and scrawls, no trophies of a child’s efforts pinned to the fridge door by magnets. Indeed, there were no magnets, no magnetism. Now the dirty crockery from Zafar’s supper sat in the sink, the handle of an abandoned pan rising above the top like the handle of a bayonet, the only sign of life in this room. Here was clean steel, marble, and granite, and perfect lighting for perfect dinner parties for perfect couples. And I was sitting with an old friend — I laugh to think this — the strangest man I ever knew, as my career crumbled into pieces, my wife laughed, and life slipped ever more from my purchase. That’s how it felt then, life slipping away. If I had been asked to characterize the feeling, I would have said that professional progress had given me direction and purpose, and now, with its slow-motion collapse, I would have spoken of the loss of a sense of control. But that would have been off the mark: You don’t have to wait until you lose something to ask if it was ever worth having. Little wonder that I didn’t author those words but found them in my friend’s notebooks.

Does your job mean more to you than you thought it did? asked Zafar.

Is that what you think?

It’s a question.

It’s always meant a lot to me.

You never needed the money, did you?

Money’s useful.

I remember you bought this house before you even started work.

Zafar looked around the kitchen. The big house had been bought with my grandfather’s money.

Was it prestige? asked Zafar. Respect of one’s peers? The chance to make your own money? Or maybe it was the mathematics? That’s fun, isn’t it?

I felt uncomfortable, but even now I’m not sure quite why. Behind his probing there was sometimes the sharp edge of a threat; perhaps that was the trial lawyer in him.

We’ve always been open with each other, haven’t we? said Zafar.

I glanced at him. Was there irony there?

It was all those things, I replied, but that’s not wrong, is it? It’s what everyone wants, I said.

Challenge, prestige, something difficult, a bit of mathematics, and some pocket money to boot — those are the things you got out of finance, but they’re not why you’re still in it.

Go on.

The mistake you make is the same mistake everyone makes about finance, continued Zafar.

Which is?

They don’t see that finance changes people. Everyone thinks that the guy madly making big bucks, that master of the universe, actually wants the big bucks, when in fact the money itself means nothing to him. Very soon he doesn’t even want what the big bucks can buy, but wants what they represent, what they stand for.

Zafar stopped there, in the middle of expressing an idea, it seemed to me, and I saw, for the first time since his reappearance, that old sudden stillness in his eyes when he was taken away on his thoughts.

Everyone, he continued, wants his life to stand for something other than what it would, which is about eighty years — in the West, at any rate — eighty years of working, eating, sleeping, shitting, breeding, and dying. Lives of buttoning and unbuttoning — who said that?

Don’t know. Tell me, why is finance so different from anything else?

It isn’t all that different, but it’s easier to see what’s really going on because money attracts power over others, the greatest power being to provoke envy, and the envy of others affirms one’s own choices. Other walks of life can do that too.

All this is a little too New Age for me. Even a bit facile.

But as I said this, the brusqueness of my language only confirmed to both of us my discomfort with the conversation.

My friend topped up the champagne flutes.

Think of those numbers and base ten, said my friend.

Yes, exactly. I’d like to get back to the story you were telling. See. The red light is on, I said, nodding toward the DVR on the table.