Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

I saw, then, a form on the veranda of the main house, sitting on the step. I could make out a dash of long black hair, iridescent in the darkness, and the drape of a white sari over the bent form. The woman’s head was nestled in her crossed arms, which braced her hunched-up knees. She has not seen me, I thought. I stood there taking in the gifts of my senses, crickets plucking the air, the forest rising behind the huts, the treetops knitting into the blue fabric of the night, one moon shimmering in the sky and another floating on the surface of the pond. I picked up a loose stone and tossed it into the pond to watch the water strike up in a vibrating luminosity, a remarkable geometric precision.

The woman was now standing a few steps off the veranda, the whites of her eyes catching the light, her hair shining. I tried to imagine how I must have looked to her, but I was so tired all I could see was my body crumpling.

We both walked and, when we met, we stood for a moment, each regarding the other. She was in her midtwenties in those days, slender and beautiful, and I do not think I will ever forget the tenderness in her eyes. She lifted her hand to cup my cheek and then curled it around the back of my head and pulled me into her breast, holding me tightly. My body gave way, and the exhaustion from the day folded over me. This is how I began the next four years of my life in a village in the northeast corner of Bangladesh. They were the happiest years of my life, but they began with tears.

In the month that passed before Zafar first spoke about Emily, he and I settled easily into a pattern. I gave him his own set of keys to come and go as he pleased, and at my insistence he took up the mansard of our house, which was maintained as a virtually self-contained flat for visitors and consisted of a large bedroom, a bathroom, and a box room under a south-facing window, which served as a study-cum-lounge. There was even a kitchenette, though Zafar would take his meals with me and, at the beginning, with Meena, when she happened to be home in time.

Meena’s firm, like several investment banks, was bearing the brunt of the downturn in equity and bond markets. Mine had taken some losses because of its substantial commitment to mortgage-backed securities and other lines of business linked to the subprime markets, but the losses had been limited because we’d identified a warning bell and took heed when it sounded. Yet however modest the losses, I was at the center of them.

I was not without supporters. Several partners, including some senior ones, had taken me aside, though only individually, to say they recognized that the whole firm had been squarely behind my project to build up the MBS business and that it was disingenuous now for anyone to suggest that I should take the fall for the collapse of that sector.

I spent less time at work, most of it helping the derivatives desk unwind our positions. And now, with the collapse of the mortgage derivatives business, what I am left with is more time of my own, more time — the irony is not lost on me— at home , that home, my home, the home where, but for Zafar’s arrival, I would have wanted least to spend my time. To spend time? I knew what to do with money, how to sow and reap on the markets, but time? How do you spend time? And how might you learn to do so?

There was a time, not long ago, in fact, when work had complete hold over life, when I was my work, when I took such pleasure in it that work was the recuperation for work itself. But that is gone now. Everything is changed.

In that first month after Zafar’s return, some of this new time I spent with Zafar, sometimes at home. But often we went for long walks, which we took in a variety of places, by the river, or on Hampstead Heath, or through the Georgian squares of Bloomsbury, after meeting at the British Museum or the British Library.

Though we did from time to time talk about my work and the financial markets generally, I was never keen to do so, and, besides, I wanted to know more about his life. My interest, it began to dawn on me, derived from that area of the soul into which circumstances can take us, where we feel compelled to reevaluate things, things taken as given, the most basic things — the role of love, the meaning of work, the progress of a day and a whole life, the old dispensation , as Zafar described it. The phrase no longer at ease in the old dispensation is something that Zafar had used often years ago and that today I know, having searched for it on the Internet, comes from a poem called “Journey of the Magi,” by T. S. Eliot, who was born in St. Louis, Missouri, but made his home in England. Eliot’s reference to the magus’s unease with the old dispensation is understood to reflect his own unease, after his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, with the atheism and perfunctory Christianity around him. I don’t know how much of this Zafar had known in our college days, when he seemed to strike up those words at every opportunity. They seemed pompous on the lips of an undergraduate, although I was, of course, deaf to the reference. But I wonder now if it is possible that in comments here and there, comments such as that, one could perceive the tiny makings of all that was to unfold over the years. It is a natural-enough human tendency to search for early signposts of the present. One is scarcely able, for example, to hear oneself think today above the holler of economists and politicians claiming to have long seen the signs of financial and economic disaster, if not to have foretold its coming.

* * *

In an ill-lit Italian restaurant in Knightsbridge, Zafar spoke about Emily. He began not with the first occasion of meeting Emily but instead with the afternoon on which he met her family for the first time — her mother and brother. I see now, of course, that his relationship with Emily was never a relationship with one person, nor was it an engagement with only one family. But in this relationship with a particular family, I think, Zafar encountered a version of England, and even of the West (though he never presented his account in such grand terms) — a version that had haunted him. In that relationship he had been forced to confront his demons, as the expression goes. He would have suggested that this analysis was incomplete, and, it is fair to say, his own account did not frame the predicaments of his life in such stark simplicity.

Nothing I can say about my feelings in those early days after his reappearance can properly account for the depth of my wish to talk to him and to hear him. I had yet to understand it myself, or begin to do so. There were some obvious things, and I’ll come to those, but they didn’t explain the sense of urgency and commitment. But the foregoing paragraph brings into view something I had not seen clearly before, something that is one more piece of explanation.