Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

Of course she was going to champion me. How many deserving stars can there be in Kensington? she had asked. She couldn’t do otherwise. And of course her mother would resist. Is that what you mean? her mother had asked me. Is that what I’d meant when I said the judges were probably spreading the awards around these days? But how to respond, how to answer a direct question that is obviously unwanted? Uncompromising honesty or diplomacy? They are beautiful, these people, when they speak. Their conversation is a landscape of byways forking at every step, this choice between the direct and the delicate, between what is meant and what is polite, and they are beautiful because they can go the polite way but to the discerning ear make themselves understood.

The same choice — how to respond, to fight or play, defuse or discharge — such a choice had confronted me at the interview, before Court of Appeal judges, for the very award Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern was now discussing.

The interview had begun on a light note. I had arrived at the Inn of Court with only a minute to spare and was led straight to the interview rooms, without even time to leave my things at reception. The door was opened and I stepped into a large room with five judges sitting behind a long oak table, all white males. I clutched under my elbows a newspaper, my satchel, and a bottle of water.

The chairman, with a blazon of white hair and a kindly face, waved me in.

Do come in, he said, do come in. And do bring in your things, including that bottle of water — at least, I trust it’s water.

Whatever it is, I replied, it’s purely for medicinal purposes.

A ripple of laughter went through the panel of judges; the joke had an ingredient judges like, a reference to the outside world but incorporated as inside information, an in-joke, something breaking into the windowless courtrooms.

That was how it began, and the interview skipped along from there. I fielded question after question, including a couple about my academic background. The chairman mentioned that he knew two Court of Appeal judges who had studied mathematics as undergraduates, and I remember thinking it was splendid of this judge to say so. I believe this good man wanted me to understand that he wouldn’t let an unconventional background stop me and nor should I.

But one judge remained silent through all this until near the end. This man leaned forward, looking vaguely distressed or perhaps only confused.

I’d like to ask you a question or two, if I may.

I nodded.

I see here that you live in Brixton. My son says he goes to Brixton from time to time, and he tells me that on every street corner there are young men, black men, I might say, but that’s beside the point, many of them selling marijuana. He says it goes on all the time and that it’s part of the culture. It does sound dreadful to me. Now what do you say about that? How does one, in fact, respond to that?

There are other ways he might have framed his question. He might, for instance, have asked me about policing policy and whether a so-called light-touch approach could be justified. Should the police turn a blind eye and concentrate on greater crimes, or is marijuana a gateway drug and its sale therefore to be checked?

But he didn’t ask me that. Instead, speaking with a distaste that I was sure the other judges had noticed, he told me about his son’s experience, he told me how black men sold drugs on the street, a part of their culture — did he sneer? — and he asked me how one responds to that.

It’s difficult — isn’t it? — to know exactly how to respond to that, I said.

The air had frozen, as if all the human muscles in that room had tightened, save those of the judge who’d asked the question. The one beside him had turned his head toward him, but he had also tilted away, lifting his chin, as if to a put a distance between the two of them. I looked at each member of the panel, one by one.

As illuminating as an anecdote might be, I said, there’s no substitute for evidence. I’d need a lot more facts before I could even begin to tackle the question of how one might respond.

A moment passed in total silence, just long enough for the chairman to recognize an opportunity and jump in. Excellent, he said. Absolutely right.

* * *

In the drawing room of Penelope Hampton-Wyvern’s home, everything — the lines of every piece of furniture, the ironwork and porcelain of every lamp, the fabric of the curtains, the stately presence of the Bösendorfer, the carved frames of the pictures and photos, even the Bath Oliver biscuits — spoke of an observance of unwritten rules. The presence of these things may appear to bespeak the expression of conscious taste, of desires and choices, but look closely at the preferences. What autonomy of choice do you have if your preferences are so obviously conditioned by your social milieu? Where is your autonomy if what you choose is what you are bound to have chosen?

I have always felt that choice is a rarity in life, that it lies in wait in the crevices of time, to surprise us when we seem to have the least room to maneuver. The grand architecture of our time on earth bears no choice at all, no trace of will, free or otherwise. Without our will we are born and against it we die. We do not choose our mothers, any more than they choose the children they bear. We do not choose the circumstances of our parents, the home and inheritance, the unearned talents, or the circumstances of our formative infant years when our brains congeal into a steady state and the neural pathways set us on the course of our lives. Most of the time, we heed unwritten rules. They may be rules of culture and conditioning, patterns imprinted on the tender firmament of youth, or they may be the rules knotted into our brains, woven with DNA by our biological parents, but they are all still rules by which we live, by which we are governed. That notion of choice as we move through the world, the free will that we claim so proudly, is only the reflection of the body’s foregone direction, an image in the distorting mirror of ego, a trick of the light.

To answer Penelope honestly or to do so diplomatically, that was the question, the choice, before me. My mischievous casual remark— maybe their lordships felt pressured to spread these awards around a little —had now assumed proportions much greater than I’d intended. I was regretting it and was searching for an escape route, a form of words that would draw a line without embarrassing anyone.

These days, I said, there’s a lot of talk about political correctness, and there are people who say they feel pressured into saying and doing what’s politically correct. It would be presumptuous of me to imagine that the judges would be immune to the pressures that others are complaining about.

Anyhow, I continued, it’s just an obscure award in a tiny corner of the world — although I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t pleased to get it.

I maintained my stupid smile throughout. Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern smiled, too, but Emily did not.

We had been sitting for the better part of an hour when there came from the hall the shuffle of feet, the tinkle of keys, and the click of the front door shutting. Until that moment, I had assumed, as I think I mentioned, that there was no one else in the house. The sounds from the hall were undoubtedly audible to everyone, yet no one responded, no one acknowledged my puzzlement let alone offered an explanation.

If I were to trace my concerns at the time about Emily to any particular moment, I could point to a number of earlier episodes that had already seeded a disquiet, but tea that day had the distinction of throwing a new light on her.

I had at the very beginning taken Emily’s reserve as English feminine modesty. I had already seen something of the way certain English women understated their intelligence, especially where it might show them to be better than or the equal of the men around them, as if such exhibition were lacking in grace. But this, my first mistake, was replaced by another when I began to wonder if perhaps there was something I was saying or doing, or not saying or not doing, that caused Emily to be so unforthcoming about herself and accounted for her furtive absences. From time to time I have thought that somehow I might be responsible for hurtful behavior on the part of those to whom I have given a hold on my heart. It makes one wary.