Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

Then luck came my way when Dave called in sick with flu. Summer flu, a right fuck, said Bill.

Mitered joints are all about trigonometry, especially in rooms whose corners aren’t square. Of course Bill and Dave had some clever gadgets and measuring devices to take all the mathematics out of the work and speed things up, tools to get the proportions right, even a device for measuring lengths and angles. The measurement of internal lengths in an alcove with a standard metal tape is notoriously inaccurate because of the curl of the tape at the end; it’s just not good enough for the high-end furniture Bill and Dave were making. But Dave was sick and the gauging devices were stored in his van outside London, on the other side of the city, at the other end of Essex from Bill’s home.

Bill asked if I could help out by doing some of the cutting, while he tried to get the measurements right. But he was taking a long time, going back and forth, shaving off more and more of whatever piece he was trying to fit perfectly, and I stepped in.

Bill, I can do that for you, I said.

Do what?

Measure everything out. Do all the calculations, even get cracking on the measurements and calculations for the staircase. I can cut the risers and treads; I can work the sliding compound miter saw.

Yeah, mate, I’m sure you can, but we’re already one man down and we need to finish up here by the end of next week.

I can do it faster, much faster, than you can.

Bill smiled. I felt I had taken a gamble, though perhaps I had taken no gamble at all and it was my own insecurity to think that I had. I like to think that at that moment, Bill saw a boy on the edge of becoming a man, a boy who was cocky all right but who had also just spent five days doing the most menial work without complaint and without pay, and had therefore earned the right to speak up.

We worked fast. I measured out everything, calculated angles and lengths, and measured out again: The carpenter’s rule is measure twice, cut once. At the end of that day, Bill gave me twenty pounds, as he did on all the following days that summer, when the three of us worked on a number of projects mostly in and around Kensington. Twenty pounds seemed like an enormous amount of money to me; my bus fare to Kensington and back left sizable change from a pound.

When I sat there in the drawing room of Penelope Hampton-Wyvern’s home, looking at the bespoke bookcase against one wall, I might have appeared composed and still, but my body felt reverberations from the memory of that summer working with the philosopher-carpenters. Of course, none of this would have been known to Penelope when she saw me looking at the bookcase and mistook it for an interest in the books.

* * *

I used to think, as I have said, that I introduced Emily to Zafar. In March 1995, I visited New York, where Zafar had already been some time established as a derivatives trader, while I, in my London base, was beginning to come into a sense of competence in my work. I invited Zafar to accompany me to the opening of an art exhibition at the South Asia Society of North America, which in those days was located in a rather eminent building on Vanderbilt, close to Park Avenue. My grandfather had been a patron of the society in the seventies, coming to its rescue when its hobbling finances threatened closure. It is, I assume, because of this that members of my extended family have always received invitations to receptions and openings. While this particular event was promoted as an exhibition of Afghan rugs, most of the rugs on display were made, as I recall having read in the catalog, by craftsmen from Uzbekistan and not Afghanistan. Such conflations reflected a lack of discrimination that changed altogether after September 11, 2001. Zafar has since explained to me that soon after the American intervention in Afghanistan, rug prices shot up as hordes of aid and development workers began cleaning up the rugs, so to speak, to send back to their homes in London, New York, and D.C., and to decorate their new houses in Kabul; property prices also rocketed. In fact, the new do-gooders contributed to massive inflation, distorting the local economy, said Zafar, so that engineers and doctors gave up their vital professions for quick money as drivers shuttling the officials of the UN and aid agencies from one meeting to the next. But I suppose, Zafar had added, there is a silver lining: The West now knows rather more about these rugs.

The opening of the exhibition was to be combined with a reception for the sponsor, an Afghanistan-born businessman of my grandfather’s acquaintance. The man lived, or rather had set up domiciles, in Geneva and New York, and had apparently taken to calling himself an exile, despite having left Afghanistan long before the Soviet invasion, and even while, as more recent word had it, he’d cultivated a number of horticultural concerns in Afghanistan with the tacit permission of its Soviet-backed government.

I was of two minds about attending, not only because I would be jet-lagged by midevening, after flying into New York forty-eight hours before, but also because I wasn’t particularly keen to meet the Afghan businessman, not for some lofty ethical reason but because inevitably I would be pumped for information about the extended family. Through my parents, I was sufficiently up to speed with its news to give a passable account, but I rather feared the Afghan might follow me about for the evening, hungry for news about my grandfather’s businesses, even if I told him, as I had in the past, that I knew nothing.

For all my misgivings, I went to the reception, carried there by a sense of obligation to my grandfather, who had sent word, which I received that morning, that if any member of the family happened to be in New York at the time, he would appreciate a show of face at the reception. I owe the man a good deal but I also love him.

When Zafar and I arrived at the exhibition hall, it was dusk and the reception was already under way. I needed to go to the restroom and left Zafar to fend for himself. Some of the eccentricities that attach to the reputation of mathematicians did indeed attach to him, but those eccentricities never seemed to cripple him socially. They were actually apparent mainly in private one-on-one conversations when, for instance, in the course of discussing something he might suddenly stop in midsentence, disappear into himself for a few moments, before returning to pick up whatever it was he was saying. Sometimes, he simply walked off. He might, for instance, be so absorbed in something he was reading that, as I recall once, when coming to the college library to fetch him for lunch, I had to shake him quite violently before he stirred. In fact, I’d had to do so just that evening, before the reception, when I collected him from his trading desk, prizing him from an array of computer screens.

Still, I knew he was quite unafraid to approach people and make his own introductions. I have seen him stride up to people and say: Hello, my name is Zafar. What’s yours? He would tilt his head and smile, and that was enough to strike up a conversation. But I returned to find Zafar standing alone with a glass of champagne in hand, looking at a map of South Asia.

A few paces from him stood a woman facing the adjoining exhibit. She looked vaguely familiar. Her face was powdery white and her eyelashes suggested mascara; she wore a black dress cut just above the knee, and her wavy hair was bunched up high at the back of her head. The breast of her jacket promised a curve, though later I would grasp the falsity of that soft curve when it gave up a padded bra. At the South Asia Society, standing by a hanging rug that evening, this figure maintained itself in a stillness that seemed to continue forever. She looked beautiful to me, and I was struck by a feeling of physical weakness, as I have always been on those occasions when feminine beauty aroused me.