Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

One or two are jotting down notes. One man takes a sip from a tumbler with ice — whisky, I think to myself, whisky in Kabul — and accidentally dribbles a little onto his shirt. He glances at Emily — first and only at Emily — to see if she’s noticed. He is embarrassed. But has he any shame about drinking whisky in Kabul? Do these people believe it was only Talibs who held to the faith of their fathers? Were the Afghanis merely oppressed townsfolk and they the cavalry? These fucking people. By what right?

They are the offspring of civilizations that have promoted individual rights, the rights of the self, yet establishing the limits of the private sphere not at the line where skin meets air but outside the body, not at the point where the fist and another’s nose are separated by a breath of air, not even before the thumping vibrations of the air meet the ears of the natives, thrusting one man’s private sphere, his black man’s music, into the native’s, whose private sphere is his tribe, which, unlike his European liberal counterpart, is more than himself. That’s what my liberal friends have done. And I see them sitting there now. Their repugnance at the unequal treatment of women, their repugnance at the treatment of homosexuals, these could not be accepted as just that: repugnance. They cannot abide Let them be but fight their wars of reconstruction to the banner of Let him be or Let her be. They have built this monument to the European enlightenment, the West’s enlightenment, and they call it human rights, and on that rock they have founded their new humanity, and in its name they act with clear conscience. Bush and the neocons — God bless them — might have wanted their natural resources and strategic positioning, but the liberals were always after their souls.

I knew Zafar could be very animated. I had seen it when he talked mathematics. But I’d never known him to have any strong opinions on politics, or at least I’d never heard him express such. Yet now he seemed possessed. I still cannot quite say why, but I wanted to interrupt him, perhaps to break his stride, pull him back, keep him from going off the rails. Or perhaps to save myself from becoming too uncomfortable.

Are you uncomfortable? he asked me, breaking off from his flow.

Why should I be?

I meant, in your seat. You’re fidgeting.

No. I’m fine. I’m fine. Please, go on.

Zafar leaned back, looking unconvinced.

And now these heroes, he continued, they want to refashion the world in their image. They can do this only as long as the world that they are on the very cusp of changing is seen as a reliquary of humanity. This is the Orient they need to imagine. They paint pictures of intense color and beauty without depth. They charm us, but they charm themselves first. The fluttering kites, a caravan under a vermilion sky, and the night train over a chasm, children with eyes of moon, silk roads, and the derring-do of Burtons and Lawrences. Their coin is the ecstasy of beauty, and with it they buy their right in the world.

Everything seen by the West is seen through the West. The Western reader, who is already the most adventurous person in the world, is afraid, for he has been taught to fear the Orient. This state — a mix of charm, mystique, and danger: the ingredients of riotously good sex — is the guarantor and license of military, economic, and cultural enterprises that reduce the Orient. It is the basis for creating fear.

When I was a child, our first home in England was a squat in Marylebone, in a part of London that is now rather chic. We lived in a condemned building, which no one could be bothered to demolish. We lived in two rooms — a kitchen and the other room — in the basement with an outside lavatory. I can remember the place vividly, everything about it, the rubble in the yard, through which we picked our way to the lavatory, the single room almost wholly taken up with two beds. But while I can remember the kitchen, the two-ring electric hob and the secondhand fridge that alternately rattled and gurgled, while I remember that side of the room where our food was prepared, a few square feet, I can recall nothing of the other half. Yet my memory has not failed me. I have no visual memory of the side below the small window at the far end— far for a boy — because whenever I entered the kitchen I kept my eyes away from it; I never looked that way. There is nothing for my eyes to remember. From time to time, I might catch a scuffling sound, or from a scurry or scratch I would see a gray thread, a spark of static, at the perimeter of my vision. If I was in the bedroom, I might hear my mother now and again going at the rats with a broom. I was terrified of them, and the only response was not to look. This is how fear works. It transforms our perceptual field. It changes how we allow ourselves to experience the world — in order to circumvent the fear.

* * *

Zafar’s mysterious East was, if I understood him correctly, a conjured enchantment of the West. But I found it hard to follow him. Even so, I wonder now if in fact Zafar had undertaken his own enchantment, if he’d endowed Emily with this same charm, mystique, and danger, had given her qualities that had no more real presence than as the bare bones upon which to hang a fantasy. From what I knew of her, growing up in overlapping social circles, she was if not ordinary then unexceptional, other than perhaps in having an academic aptitude. What took me by surprise was the note of jealousy entering Zafar’s narrative; I would never have put him down as the jealous sort. Listening to him discuss Emily, listening to the account of Kabul, of him standing in that room with a view of Emily, I wondered whether he had in fact loved her.

I see Emily, continued Zafar, but she does not notice me, and she won’t unless I do something. To my right is a pile of magazines— The Economist, The Atlantic Monthly , and others. I pick up the nearest and walk right up behind the chair opposite her, outside the circle of chairs and sofa, this ring with Emily its leader. I open the magazine and look her way and catch her eye as she looks up, and I look away. Why do I look away? Emily will not leap up and come to me. I know that. Emily will not exclaim “Zafar!” at her sheer surprise to see me there. I was in Kabul, she knew, staying at AfDARI, she possibly knew, but what was I doing here at the UN bar? There will be a break, a pause, a hesitation, maybe not so small in fact, and the men will look up, too, because they will follow her eyes. You know that we can’t help that? It’s a physical response that is virtually impossible to suppress. But because I look away before they look up, I retain anonymity and they cannot identify me as the man whom Emily then ignores. I look away to save myself that little shame.

I walk to the archway, toward the funnel of noise from the bar. Her eyes won’t follow me, because that would signal to her ring of admirers the cause of her momentary distraction. But she’ll come, in her own time. She’ll come and find me.

* * *

I had started my journey a week earlier. In 2002, the UN rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan was a chap called Dr. Hassan Kabir, who was based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The “Doctor” honorific and his name were inseparable. In South Asian circles, his career and history commanded awe: sometime fellow of All Souls, once a partner in a giant international law firm, and in his day instrumental in the founding of the modern state of Bangladesh as an author of its constitution. Of the eight or so who put their pens to the document, all but Kabir were to perish over the years in various coups and assassinations. Wit and cunning, they say. I could never utter his name without thinking of that other doctor, Henry Kissinger, which is the best irony since Kissinger spared little effort to thwart the emergence of the new nation. Perhaps I think of Kissinger because political divides are thinner than others, social ones, for instance. National interests don’t vary, only nations do.