Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

Again, there was a gap when his eyes did not meet mine, and I wondered suddenly if rather than reaching for the words, he was holding them off.

Common social position is a glue that binds people; it fixes you into a broader scheme of family and friends and like-minded persons.

My grandfather spoke diplomatically, but his message was clear enough. I was going to marry beneath me, and he thought that this could cause problems. I loved my grandfather, but as I looked at the old soldier sitting in the armchair, the titan of Pakistani industry, I saw a man whose homes were crawling with respectful servants, a man who couldn’t bear “all this queuing one has to do in London and New York.” He wasn’t, in the end, very modern at all. I was able to console myself with the thought that modernity was perhaps not to be expected of men of his age, who had lived with ideas that had never needed defining, never drawn scrutiny.

Yet his suggestion that the success of my parents’ marriage was founded on something like shared class status did trouble me. I knew that other families would rather a child marry outside, marry a Westerner — which always meant white — than marry a Pakistani of lower class or birth. But weren’t they other families, not mine?

I had come to think of my father in a tender way as a bumbling academic, his head in his thoughts, and of my mother as the dynamic, pioneering, and assertive woman. They were two people with friends in varied circles looping around them, whose commitment to education and modern values was tangible in the things they expressed, with words, with subscriptions to Amnesty, The New York Review of Books , and the New Statesman. Surely they were free of my grandfather’s class sensibility, just as I believed I was? The world, having moved on, had forced men like my grandfather to describe things once unspoken; being confronted with the vulgar mention of class, such men were straining the words available to them. Might not the moving world have carried my parents further, taken awareness to its breaking point, and unbound them altogether from old expectations?

But I remembered my parents’ relative silence in the car on the way back from Wolverhampton and the few words uttered. There was my mother’s remark: They are good people , my mother said, but what matters is whether Meena and you are suited. As my grandfather nursed his whisky, I thought of that “but” lodged in the middle of the sentence uttered by my mother, the pivot of meaning from which doubt now radiated in circles.

I married Meena for love. When I married her, she had a simplicity of taste and purpose, which I saw in that worn-out, stained backpack hanging off one shoulder, and I loved that pared directness about her. Now she has luggage. A Gucci bag she checks in and a leather carry-on with a chunky golden buckle whose Prada logo never stops glinting.

A decade and a half later, so much has changed. It is not contemptuous familiarity that I feel. Not the familiarity that, we’re told, wears down relationships, the humdrum routine and dulling of senses at witnessing the same rituals, the same behaviors, day in, day out. Familiarity was not our ruin but rather change was. Zafar disagreed on this, saying that the change was already carried within me, a potential energy that was always there. Eventually, he said, I was bound to find Meena wanting. Every man, he said, carries his own pyre, which sounded like another one of his literary references. But I believe that Meena and I changed. Once I asked myself if I’d misunderstood something at the beginning, if I’d failed to read something, some sign, if I had shut my eyes when my heart was opening. But I have ceased to ask myself these questions. For a while we had walked together, and then somewhere along the path we each took our own way.

The prevailing state of affairs between us two could not have continued. We were to have that ritual of the most modern of marriages, the trial separation. On her return from a quick work trip abroad, instead of coming home she moved into one of the firm’s serviced apartments in Knightsbridge. More change was bound to come. Yet I have to accept that Zafar’s presence, my listening to his story, and letting into my life someone at once foreign and familiar, influenced the pace and even the direction of motion in my own affairs. To be precise, it — he — has influenced how I see things. Is that not direction? How one regards the past, how one sees the present — do these not show our way ahead? Or are we to side with the fund managers behind those absurd advertisements for investment funds, where they glorify their track record in bold while hiding in small print the reality that past performance is no guide to the future and that nothing’s quite so insecure as a security? Can making half the print small save the whole thing from its inherent contradiction?

* * *

I was born in 1969 in the town of Princeton, New Jersey, where we lived a few streets from Library Place in a quiet, leafy part of town dotted with roomy two- and three-story colonial and Victorian houses, some painted in pastel colors, all with spacious yards.

There were other graduate students who were married, some with children, but unlike those families, who lived in apartments, my parents and I lived in a house that my father was able to buy outright because of my grandfather’s generosity. I went to kindergarten and elementary school in Princeton, amid its serenely beautiful streets, in the kind of international neighborhood you find in certain university towns in the U.S. Most of my classmates were the children of academics — I’m hard-pushed, in fact, to recall any who weren’t. I still maintain contact with some of the friends I made there and have gathered that many of our peers went on to respectable jobs, some to become academics themselves, others to become lawyers, bankers, and politicians. Two are members of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, which is a rather disproportionate representation for one American elementary school.

Through the parents, every corner of the world was represented in the school. The semesters were, to my memory, long successions of events marking religious festivals, new years, and obscure holidays from around the globe. In the 1970s, Princeton already had a number of academics and students from South Asia, mainly from India but also some from Pakistan. I knew a Pakistani boy and an Indian boy, but I never met them socially outside school. The South Asian children in Princeton played cricket, while every Saturday morning my father drove me out to Mercer County Park for Little League, and, in fact, I still have the first baseball mitt he bought me. At Eton, some years later, I tried to get a baseball group going, rallying the American contingent. Though how loyal to America were they who’d been sent to Eton for schooling? It never took off; I think the masters regarded it with suspicion while the boys probably saw it as an inferior version of cricket.

At home we spoke only English. My parents did not discuss Pakistani politics and they did not discuss Pakistan. The food we ate, however, was Pakistani — my mother was and still is a superb cook. I say that the food at home was Pakistani, but I should add that in Princeton my mother took to baking. To this day she bakes that most American of foods, apple pie, and she does it better than anyone else in the world.

And there was Crane, the Crane of my childhood, the boy who was my best friend at elementary school and who is to take a place in this story. Crane was in and out of our house all the time, his own being joyless, I think now, not so convivial, and ours filled with people coming and going, bustling with young academics in the spring of life, filled also with smells of alien cooking, blistering spices, and a father who was present. During the week, Crane’s father lived in Manhattan, increasing his fortune in finance, raising the credit ratings agency he’d established that later put a noose around my neck. In the nineties, Forrester, the agency, would develop an expertise in rating collateralized debt obligations and mortgage-backed securities; on my own account, for business, I would have occasion to meet the man, Forrester senior, but I’m getting ahead. He and my parents had met at one of my grandfather’s parties in New York. It turned out we all had homes in Princeton and so they became friends. His son and I went to the same summer camp in Vermont, and in Princeton I sometimes visited Crane at his home to play. When we left Princeton to move to Oxford, I continued to see Crane but less frequently: My parents still visited New York when my grandfather came from Pakistan on business.