Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

Aisha’s purpose in life was to circulate information in society as if she were hemoglobin in the body. She talked about everything she had heard and seen, she gossiped about her closest friends and worst enemies, about acquaintances, and about people she had never met but who seemed vivid in her imagination. Her excited retelling evidenced to my mind an utter disregard for the distinction between first- and secondhand information, so it was never clear whether she had actually been present when, for instance, the former president of Pakistan, General Musharraf, had allegedly gotten so drunk at an officers’ ball, she said, that he pissed in the basin of the ladies’ bathroom while coming on to the wife of the Norwegian ambassador. I never got much out of the stories, and I think the titillation for my parents gradually wore thin. Notably, however, she said very little about Penelope.

* * *

When he talked to me about Emily and her family, and, for that matter, about much of everything else, there were moments when, I thought, he talked as if he might have been talking to a third party, someone who had never known anything at all. At the time, I had not yet read his notes; only later did I see that his narration drew heavily on his own writing, as if in part he were reciting. And there was the DVR and its talismanic presence in our conversations. Whenever I switched it on, Zafar never so much as nodded in acknowledgment, as if, I think now, he understood why I had taken to it. Between his spoken words and my act of putting it on the record, I would manifest my own confession. And when he seemed to be addressing a third party, perhaps that was a means of making me listen anew, afresh.

We think we have the measure of so many people, we have the sense of what they’re about, what drives them in the world. How many do we think of in this way? We might count them. But when we begin to think of how many people we believe in turn have the measure of us , things fall apart. Who has the measure of us? Parents? When I was growing up, perhaps mine did. In my teens and even into college, my parents had a running commentary of life, but now I recognize that in fact what they were following was my growing up. They were, as Zafar might say, attending closely to the growth and temporal needs of the infant until maturity, when that creature sets off on his own, no differently from other primates. Somewhere along the way, imperceptibly, like passing through the midpoint of a tunnel, I emerged into adulthood and independence to find that my parents had retreated from my life, returning to their own again. They knew me, so to speak, within parameters.

And then my concerns briefly became our concerns, Meena’s and mine, though that honeymoon of union, that unity of hopes, loves, and fears, was short-lived (though long enough for the pairing to have issued offspring, had there been a unity of purpose there). And now my concerns so resolutely belong to me and me alone that when I look upon those dreamy days with Meena, I wonder if they were not merely a haze of endocrine-driven delusion, a suspension of every sane faculty to clear the way for mating. There was passion. Lord knows there was passion. We believed that the passion was testimony to the depth of our mutual love, when in fact it exposed the intensity of the loneliness that had driven us toward each other, that had primed us for the intimacy of the act and the fantasy that fueled it all.

But that delusional urge is only one of the varieties of self-deception that encourage us to believe we know another human being and, for that matter, ourselves. This faith in having the measure of others really becomes unstuck when you begin to consider how many you’d acknowledge as having the measure of you. That number dwindles before your eyes.

My friend appears as several Zafars to me now. There is the Zafar in our college years, the Zafar who reappeared at my door, the Zafar revealed to me by his story, and a Zafar in the pages of his notebooks. Perhaps he had always been too various to be known, but it seems to me more likely — to paraphrase something from those notebooks — that the truth is finer and that the only answers each of us hears are to the questions we are capable of asking.

Yet it’s one thing to be ignorant of everything in the years when he’d disappeared, and quite another to have seen nothing of what had been in front of me. I thought I’d introduced him to Emily, but I was wrong about even that, something you’d think you couldn’t get wrong at all.

* * *

Soon after I proposed to Meena, all the parents met. My family drove up to Wolverhampton from Oxford. My grandfather was with us: On the phone from Pakistan he had insisted that my parents delay visiting Meena’s parents by a week, so that he could fly over to London and come with us. I am his eldest grandchild, and I was going to be the first grandson to get married. I had met the parents before, and they seemed like lovely people. The father had a grocery store in a suburb of Wolverhampton, where they lived and where Meena was born. Her family was originally from the Punjab, as was my family. But unlike mine, her ancestors left the Punjab for Kenya in the swirling mass of migration for work in other parts of the British Empire. Her mother stayed at home, above the store, and raised Meena and her two older sisters, both now married and gone. Assembled in a living room crowded with sofas, we all spoke English, mainly for my benefit, though Meena admits that her Urdu only creaks along. But from time to time the gathering broke into Urdu, and it seemed at the time that there was an intimacy in the room because of the shared language and references. It was all very nice, I thought.

On the drive back, my parents said they’d had a pleasant time and that they thought Meena’s parents were good people, but that really what mattered above all was whether Meena and I were suited. You must be the judge of that, said my mother. My father said very little, thereby allowing, it seemed to me, my mother to represent a corporate view. But at home, late in the evening, my grandfather took me aside in the library.

She’s a lovely girl, bette, said my grandfather, and your mother is entirely right that the main concern is whether you like her, not whether we like her or them, which of course we do — they’re good people. I’m not saying you’d be marrying beneath you if you married Meena. Such ideas are simply unacceptable in these modern times in which we live. We are above those things now.

He lowered himself into an armchair and set his whisky down. I took another seat.

But let’s talk heart to heart, grandfather to grandson, na bette?

My grandfather addressed me as “bette,” an Urdu term of endearment that I understood was reserved for sons. My own parents always addressed me by name, though occasionally my mother would call me “sweetheart” in English, which was naturally the language in which we communicated.

Of course, I said. You must know I have great respect for your opinions.

I hope I’ve earned it, bette. There’s a lot of your father in you, you know? Yes, quite a lot. He has, mashallah, a great marriage, as you’ve seen, but I think this, in no small part, is due to a meeting of minds, a common cultural framework, you understand. They may seem very modern, and in fact your parents are very modern people, bette. But I think — and this is where you must decide for yourself — they’ve had it rather easy.

In what way?

My grandfather paused then, his eyes looking away.

They’ve been able to take for granted the shared values and social position they have, without perhaps reflecting on the role such things have played in their marriage — and, for that matter, in their lives.

Which is?