Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

She said she’s going to train as a lawyer.

Why go to law school if not to become a lawyer?

I don’t know. But who says she’s going to train as a lawyer? It’s a means, not an end. Go to law school or go into the law, but train as a lawyer ?

I hear she was very ambitious at school. She worked her tits off.

Was she in our year?

Year below, I replied.

What did she read?

English, I think.

Then the numbers don’t add up. She said she’s just finishing two years at Harvard.

Zafar always spotted things like this. I paused to do the arithmetic. English was a three-year degree, and she was a year behind us. My friend was right. And, in fact, I later learned that after Oxford she spent a year studying art history in Florence and another year working for Sotheby’s in London, though these facts are of no consequence.

I see what you mean. Two years are missing, I said.

Exactly. Do you think she’s calculating? he asked.

You’re the one doing the calculating.

No, I mean calculating .

Maybe she’s indecisive. Some people just have to keep their options open. They don’t know what they want — they can’t help it.

Maybe both, he said.

* * *

That, then, was how I thought he met her: with my introduction. The truth of it was rather different and it leaves me uncomfortable. In another of our conversations, which took place in the week after he gave his account of meeting Penelope Hampton-Wyvern for the first time, Zafar told a story about Emily Hampton-Wyvern, something that happened some years before that evening at the South Asia Society, but in his usual way he approached the business apparently from a tangent, setting down another piece of the picture, a lemma. He said that he had always been drawn to people with interesting names, and he explained, quite matter-of-factly, that before he met Emily, he had fallen in love with her name, the whole of her name. But this was not, he went on, the first time he had fallen under such a spell.

Zafar reminded me that at Oxford he’d had a blazing affair with a Jewish Rhodes Scholar from New York. In those days, before cell phones and email, college porters took down telephone messages for students and pinned them onto a large corkboard in the post room by the lodge, small pieces of yellow paper, folded once, with the names of the recipients on the outsides. Porters came in every few minutes during the day to pin messages to the board, while students milled about checking for messages and mail. At night there were fewer calls, these from overseas, but the porters still came and posted the messages as they arrived. The college had a large number of international students.

In the freshers’ week of his first year, explained Zafar, he was mesmerized by the post room. I once saw a notice, he said, admonishing students for scaling the scaffolding that had been erected in the front quad for renovation work taking place there. Anyone caught climbing on the scaffolding will be hung thereon , it read. I remember thinking that objects were hung , while people were hanged. The next day, someone had drawn a line through the warning, leaving the original text still legible, and had inserted underneath, Anyone caught hung like scaffolding will be climbed upon. Then the day after that, the notice, with its witty edit, had been moved to the locked glass-fronted case beside the main gate, ordinarily reserved for announcements for all the world to see of scholarships, academic honors, and more orthodox signals of the college’s pool of talent.

The post room was the conduit for the whole of the outside world. Students came in with expectant faces or braced for disappointment. This is where messages were left, messages sent from far and wide, at all hours of the day. All this was long before Oxford received the newfangled Internet.

I would sneak in late at night, said Zafar, in order to read the messages pinned to the board. Not meant for me, but they were my view of other worlds. I would take down those messages and discover in them snapshots of other lives, how life might be elsewhere for others, through a simple message of love, perhaps, from a parent or an aunt. I would learn something of the people I saw walking across the garden quad in jeans and tattered T-shirts, clothes that said everything of the carefree optimism attached to lives unimpeded by need, for what could trouble someone, I thought then, who had family, parents who left messages saying only that they missed their son or daughter? These notes bore single lines from which my mind could draw backward a whole story. The message board was not inert to me, not cork and pin and pieces of yellow paper, but a thronging clamor of sound, some of it mere information, numbers and dates, but much of it the private communication of love.

When I returned a note to the board, I would take care to fold the yellow piece of paper along the existing crease and put the pin through the same hole in the paper. I was careful, listening for the sound of footsteps in the porter’s lodge, on the other side of the internal door, or for the shuffle of feet on the gravel outside. But it was not enough to be careful.

One night, I took down a message for a student called Peter Brooke. The message read simply: Am arranging Easter holiday in Bermuda. Will you join us? Let us know. It came from someone who had evidently given his name as Lord Brooke and, even as I heard someone approaching from within the porter’s lodge, I could not wrest myself from revulsion and envy: Why on earth did this person feel it necessary to establish his nobility with a porter?

It is remarkable that station is so important to such people. By then I knew, of course, of the complicity of the working classes. I had understood that rank was important to everyone, even the lowest on the social ladder. I remember Steven, the old man — he must have been in his late fifties by then, if not older — Steven the scout, who cleaned the rooms for students who evidently could not be asked to do it themselves, Steven who could never have been Stephen with a ph —how wrong does St. Steven look? — Steven who served lunch and dinner in Hall, too, and called every undergraduate boy sir . When I once asked him to call me Zafar, Yes, sir , came the reply.*

I was holding the note for Peter Brooke in my hand when I heard the door handle turn. I fumbled and dropped the pin. The door opened.

The porter looked at me, looked at my hands, and saw that I was holding a yellow note. The note could have been for me, I thought in my defense. But there were never any messages for me and he must have known that, in that small college of fewer than two hundred undergraduates. He pinned another note to the board and left the room, without making eye contact again.

The following day I received my first message on the notice board. It was a summons to the dean’s rooms.

The dean explained that privacy was invaluable in keeping a community together. It was apparent, he said, that I had been reading a message meant for someone else: The porters had not taken any messages for me yesterday. I was rather touched, in fact, that he said “yesterday”; whichever porter had reported me would have told him, I’m sure, that I never received messages in order to establish why he, that porter, was so certain that the message he’d seen me holding could not have been meant for me.

I told the dean what I was doing and why. He did not seem surprised, still less angry, and I felt, as I have often felt in certain English circles, that the parties to the exchange were acting out roles, merely going through motions, while the real content was somewhere else, perhaps hovering in the air between.