Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

In the evening, ten minutes after picking me up, our little convoy, a dozen women and me, pulled up at the gates of the UN compound, an area soaking in artificial floodlighting. Soldiers in blue berets milled about a flank of Humvees by the gates, lighting cigarettes as they laughed, machismo in their sweeping gestures but nervousness, too, in furtive looks to the side. We climbed out of the cars and filed into a prefabricated security booth, not dissimilar to the ticketing booths you might find at the entrance to a public attraction, a castle or the botanical gardens at Kew. Our passports were checked and we were frisked before being allowed to proceed through a narrow hallway into the compound. I have no doubt that my association with this group of Western women sanitized me, and I thought of how a man might feel when, on arriving at the door of a nightclub in New York with several women on his arms, he and his coterie are ushered in ahead of the long line.

From the right of the hallway there came a hubbub; that way, I assumed, lay the UN lounge and bar. But to the left, leading outside, was a door propped open with a brick. I slipped off toward it, separating myself from the women ahead of me, and came out onto the compound area under the night sky. There were soldiers wandering about beyond, spilling onto the road. An Afghani man was standing by the door smoking. We exchanged greetings and I asked him for a cigarette. I handed him my Bic lighter, telling him that it was extra, I had another. He explained he was waiting for a crate of wine for Mr. Maurice. It struck me as a trifle odd that he was waiting inside the main gates, but I didn’t probe.

I was, by the way, dressed entirely inappropriately for Kabul. You see that I now wear cargo pants and the like, clothes better suited to travel in out-of-the-way places. But I had arrived in Kabul in a black suit and black shoes and a sky-blue cotton shirt; I had dispensed with the tie, which I kept folded in my pocket — silk ties make strong rope. Wearing a suit had become a habit in South Asia. It cut through a lot of questions. I had taken on the dress of a slightly older generation and projected a rather businesslike persona.

At Oxford, I never had money for decent clothes. But I was a student, so what did it matter? There’s a funny thing about all those public school boys, the Paulines and Wykehamists: They were so scruffy.

Zafar made me smile. It was certainly true of me.

They seemed not to care in the slightest how they looked, he continued. Do you remember Stinky Flowers?

David Flowers, I said.

But everyone called him Stinky.

Because of his last name, I replied.

But there was in fact something stinky about him. He didn’t wash; I’m sure of it. Is that what an education at a grand English public school gives you? Not self-confidence, but rather a lack of self-doubt, the certainty that the world will welcome you as you are, which is the cream of society, no matter what you look like.

Not everyone who goes to Eton is like that, I said to Zafar.

Did you know that there isn’t a drug on earth that works on more than seventy percent of the population? A pharmaceutical drug.

And?

Not one drug. Pharma companies consider a drug a success if it’s effective in a much smaller proportion of patients. You’re not going to write off the drug, said Zafar, just because thirty percent of the population don’t fit the pattern.

It’s not the same.

Of course it’s not the same. That’s why it’s an analogy. The point is that it’s similar in a relevant respect. I’m not talking about the minority of public school boys. I’m not even talking about the majority necessarily. I’m only saying that there’s this pattern in public school boys that you don’t find in others to quite the same degree.

That they smell?

No. Their sense of entitlement, their attitude.

Zafar, I thought, was right about the attitude to clothes. I fell into the category of carefree dressers at college. It never seemed to matter very much. So long as you had appropriate gear for events — a suit, black tie, white tie, etc. — what did it matter what you wore around college otherwise?

I asked Zafar why he’d worn a suit in Afghanistan.

He explained that wearing a suit in South Asia had a normalizing effect.

A suit means business, he said. It shuts out certain kinds of irritating interactions that can undermine one’s work. Bangladeshis, and for that matter South Asians generally, are an inquisitive lot, always probing to establish one’s family ties. I had seen the instant slightly deflated, even crestfallen, look people gave when it transpired that I was not linked to any great family — quite the opposite, I was a social nonentity. It seemed to disappoint them: Suddenly their opportunities for gaining favors diminished before their eyes. How different it was, it is, in America. There I might answer curiosity with the information that my father was a waiter, my mother a seamstress, and the response would be utterly different. I know some would call this naïveté, but the persistence of the myth of the clean slate is itself the guarantor of an optimistic faith in human freedom, the capacity to break bonds and forge something new. Even this new president is himself a sign of the underlying spirit of a country that has the capacity to believe in change, unlike the Europe that so fears it.

But optimism, by its nature, is boundless, brooks no limits, knows no discouragement, keeps going, does not know when to stop. To go from America’s founding belief that it can form an ever more perfect union to a belief that it can reconstruct another country in the image of its hopes for itself — to cover that distance — does not take long: A politician does it before he tells you that he approves this message. Yet this is not news. From pride to narcissism, the road was long ago marked out by corpses.

* * *

There I was, within the UN compound in the Shar-e-Naw district, the mansions district, under a black sky, and I wondered what devil had brought me to this place. What was my real motivation. I knew, of course, how I’d come there. I knew, too, who had asked me to go and what each of them had wanted of me. But in those moments, as I stood there puffing on a cigarette, on the brink each time of choking, I wondered again what my own motivation had been. And there was the thought of Emily; there was a good chance she would be there, inside.

This was the hub. Many UN staffers, as well as others, lived in the various houses scattered about the compound, all behind a wall guarded by soldiers. Everything in the space was accounted for, everything in the service of human beings. Everything lifeless but the priority to protect life. There was no sign of vegetation, neither a tree nor a bush, just stone and brick and whitewashed walls and dust. It was obvious that the building was never conceived as it stood but had metastasized over time, that it had grown here and there, pushed out on one side and later on another, so that the floodlights carved shadows from the corners of the houses, the sudden alcoves and jutting boxes. Above the buildings, condensing steam bubbled from a vent.

Some of the Afghani drivers of the cars parked beyond the gates had gathered together while their masters were socializing indoors. They smoked and talked, despite a soldier’s hand-waving remonstrations to move away. I stepped around a corner of the building to recover a moment, a preparatory calm without demands on the senses, only to be met with new sounds, beating music and the jostling strains of raised voices. Laughter clambered out through an open window that released, too, the smoke from cigarettes and the vapors of sense-rattling alcohol. Kabul in the spring of 2002, when the West had barely arrived, yet again, and there was this bar, a den of warm merriment while drivers huddled in the cold outside and men in blue berets scowled at the locals.