Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

The walls were adorned with framed photographs, mainly of military personnel, some taken outdoors, others against a studio background. One picture in particular caught my eye, squat and wide angled, reminding me of matriculation photographs. When I drew up close enough, I saw that it was exactly so, a photograph from Exeter College, Oxford, class of 1964. Next to it was a photograph of soldiers, taken, according to the caption, at Sandhurst, the British army’s officer training center, where the future senior ranks of the armies of the colonies and postcolonies were sent, and are sometimes still sent to this day.

There was one dark face in the Oxford photograph, floating among rows of white faces, and, true enough, this face was also in the second photograph. I then heard a voice.

You’re an Oxford man, aren’t you?

I turned. Before me was the man in the photograph, much older, but the same man.

I studied there, I replied.

But you’re not an Oxford man?

His furrowed brow emphasized the question but gave no suggestion of genuine puzzlement. He had the fallen shoulders of old age that made me think of young men who stand tall, as if to exceed their own height. A sheer forehead rose above fulsome gray eyebrows before crashing into thick white hair, swept back, probably with the Brylcreem that is so popular in South Asia. An immaculate mustache framed the judgmental tilt to a robust jaw. He wore a gray Nehru suit and dark leather sandals.

If going there to study makes me an Oxford man, then that I am, I replied.

But in spite of all temptations, to belong to other nations, he remains an Englishman!

You know your Gilbert and Sullivan.

It’s not mine. In the army, the officers used to play bridge, you know? Mad about the game. They used to ask me: Mushtaq, old chap, why aren’t you a bridge man? I’m a chess man, I’d say. So are you an Oxford man?

Is a man who climbs mountains a mountaineer or a mountain man? I replied.

Quite. Hello, Zafar, old boy — may I call you Zafar?

Of course, I replied.

Pleased to make your acquaintance. Colonel Sikander Ali Mushtaq, retired.

How do you do? I said, taking his extended hand.

Your mountaineer friend — my nephew, by the way — has gone off on some business of his own, but he may join us for supper. Do you play?

Chess?

I learned the game as a boy from a friend, he said. He played very slowly and seemed ever calm and composed in the face of all the trials that came his way. He had a hard life. Father was a bastard. Chess teaches patience. Every game is different. A game can be deeply unsatisfying, dissatisfying, even as it delivers your triumph. Making victory alone your goal is to make failure of the worst kind a foregone conclusion.

How so? I asked.

It is an obtuse notion that a given game of chess stands alone and apart, that it is free of past and future, an egoistic notion that the game at hand is the one game that matters. Only arrogance can allow such a view. What matters is the beat and rhythm, the heave and ho of game after game, so that the cumulative history shows one the texture of what might be, of what is inherent in the thirty-two pieces and the sixty-four squares and, most of all, the board. Some people think chess is about the pieces. It is always about the board. One begins with the board half covered and half open, and as one progresses, one reveals its mysteries. But only game after game. Mark my words, Zafar. Only game after game. Do please take a seat. I shall have a whisky. May I pour you one?

Thank you.

He opened the door and called out for two whiskys, and with the door open I could hear the hum of servants.

Interesting photos, don’t you think? Oxford and Sandhurst, continued the colonel, emblems of Empire, and there we were, the former colonial subjects, sitting at the feet of dons who trained the colonial administrators. In 1835, Lord Macaulay, as I expect you know, wrote in his famous paper to the British Parliament about the superiority of the Western canon. In it, Macaulay writes a passage that I have never forgotten since I first set eyes upon it: We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern — a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.

The colonel paused, presumably to let the quotation take effect.

We have never overcome the sense of inferiority, he continued. Our elites study at their universities in their language. Marx called Macaulay the systematic falsifier of history. Do you know what I studied at Oxford? History. But whose bloody history? Theirs. We bought their values wholesale in exchange for our dignity, grafted their subject-ruler mentality onto our own so that these countries of ours are incapable of anything like democracy. Millions go starving while the rich and powerful in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh lord over them, disdaining them and denying them. We mimic the Westerners though we hate them.

Even as his language conveyed emotion, there was a deliberate care in his tone. His speech was the sound of a mind at work, but there was also a stillness behind it, like the calm that broods over an island before a storm.

I had taken to this fellow — with caution, of course — and in the polite way one gives a confirming opinion in amiable company, I offered a thought.

When a jihadi, I ventured — holding the word for a moment to allow its weight to fall — calls a Westerner a devil, it seems to me that he acknowledges the power of the West, for the devil is a mighty figure, a fallen angel but an angel all the same.

Indeed, said the colonel, holding my eyes with a curiosity that lasted forever.

But, my dear fellow, he said, breaking the sudden intervening stillness, your metaphor demonstrates the point in a way you might not have intended, for you know your Christian, er, Christian divinities better than your Islamic ones.

Fallen jinn, I said, remembering something I had read somewhere.*

Quite. Humans and the jinn have free will; angels do not — they are only instruments of God’s will. But the jinn also embody power, so your point stands, mutatis mutandis.

I’m obliged, I said with a smile. Macaulay’s Minute, I continued, was first and foremost an argument for English as the language of instruction in schools in British India. It’s about extending the writ of an official language.

Language indeed, said the colonel, glancing at me.

The reference was not lost on the colonel, said Zafar, that language was ever an instrument of oppression, and that he needn’t go back a hundred years or a continent away to understand this.*

My dear boy, said the colonel at length, you have a sensitivity to history that is admirable but does not come without a cost. I fought in 1971. I don’t propose to insult you by rehearsing the debate about numbers killed and so on. Nor would I dare to suggest that all that is by the by, for nothing falls by the by that we do not make it do so. It is not enough simply to say that we made mistakes. That can never be enough. But where does that leave us?

There was silence, broken only by the arrival of whisky.

Let me speak, continued the colonel, about Reagan’s mad dog Colonel Gaddafi. In his heyday, the old Libyan rogue was leader of anti-Western sentiment, the champion of the third world, but look at how he dressed, how his own army was fitted out. Why is it we all wear Western military uniforms? We hate the bastards and would bayonet them given half the chance, but we button up in their shirts and tie our laces in their boots. You studied—

Mathematics, I said. But as I did so, I had the impression that rather than answering a question, I had preempted him.