Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

My father loves playing board games. Most of all, he loves Chutes and Ladders, an utterly pointless game. I’ve never considered the matter before, but it occurs to me now that he would first have come across the game in Pakistan. In his boyhood there, if he had called it by an English name, then he would have known it as Snakes and Ladders. But there’s the possibility he might have known it by an Urdu name, since the game, as I’ve discovered on looking it up, is actually ancient Indian in origin. My father and I first played it together in Princeton and so it is that we have always called it by its American name. I wonder these days about such small things, and wonder whether they mean anything or nothing at all. The best I can come up with is that their meaning might lie only in being noticed, in being allowed to be remembered.

Chutes and Ladders was for the home; on road trips, we used to play Twenty Questions, a word game known everywhere, I think. We played it in Princeton, as far back as I can remember, in the car on Saturday mornings on the way out to the baseball field. I would have twenty questions to figure out what he was; I could ask him if he was an animal or if he was a plant or if he was a sportsman or a scientist. Later, to the list of categories were added theorem and formula, my father taking care to distinguish the two. Twenty yes-or-no questions to work out who or what he was and then it would be his turn to ask the questions. I remember that it would take me a long time, before the game even started, just to decide who I was going to be, so many possibilities yet none coming to me, but my father always waited patiently.

I think of those Saturday drives often now, when I’m in the car, because of something he taught me on one of them. My father was a physical formula that day, which I ultimately failed to identify in twenty questions. It is a fundamental formula of classical physics that every schoolboy is taught: The kinetic energy of an object in motion is equal to half its mass multiplied by the square of its velocity. The mass of a thing, explained my father, was the same as its weight on earth. My father asked me what the energy of a car traveling at 30 miles per hour was, and I replied that I didn’t know how much a car weighed. He said: Good point. I remember his affirmation, of course. Assume it’s m , just m , he said. Half of m times 30 squared, which is half m times 900, which is 450 multiplied by m. Now tell me what the energy of a car traveling at 40 miles per hour is.

I worked it out, slowly, and I replied that it was 800 multiplied by m.

That’s nearly twice the energy of the car traveling at 30 miles per hour, he said.

800 is almost twice 450, I said.

Correct. And it’s energy that kills you, that’s what does the damage, not the speed alone.

What do you mean?

A bit of dust that hits you at forty miles an hour will just bounce off. Now I read something yesterday that said the chances of a child dying after being hit by a car traveling at forty miles an hour are about eighty-five percent, but if the car’s traveling at thirty miles an hour the chances are forty-five percent. How can there be such a big difference? After all, the speed increase is only one-third. You got it. It’s because the energy is almost doubled.

I never thought of it as a lesson but as something my father found fascinating and wanted to share with me, and I now think of it every time I drive, if only in the moment it takes to move from third gear into fourth.

* * *

One day, when I could not have been more than fifteen — I had already gone up to Eton, so it must have been on short leave one weekend — I poked my head around the open door of his study. He was in his chair, turned toward the window, his back to his desk, with his feet up on the sill. He was looking out at the evening light. Even then I admired him for his work. Thinking is what he does, and he could do that facing a darkening sky.

Hey, buddy, he said with his back to me.

My father does not have a Pakistani accent, nor an American one. His voice, he says, is each accent inflected by the other, and because there aren’t many Americans who settle in Pakistan and learn to speak Urdu as well as the natives, we can’t know, he says, but maybe their accents land up somewhere next to his, even if geographically he himself is going the other way. His voice has a rich enveloping warmth, without the means ever to rise in anger. I suppose you might describe it as having the softness of cashmere silk, Kashmir silk, but I think now of Zafar and hold back: I think he would laugh at such description, and fair enough, I suppose.

I sat down on the ottoman — the same ottoman after which Zafar would ask on that very first day of his return into my life, and which he, of course, would later repair — my father’s ottoman, which the dear man gave me years later when I set up home on my own. It was where I had sat as a little boy and where, at the age of fifteen and probably too big for it, I sat as he turned in his chair to face me with a bright smile.

We remember the things that in their time had a presence. There is no sensory faculty for the perception of voids, only clues by which to infer their existence, making them harder still to remember than to perceive.

On my visits home, my father never asked me on my first day back how school was going. Maybe on the second day, as that day was, or the third, if there was one, but never on the first day back. I see that now but never noticed it then.

I asked him what he was doing. He explained he was working on the spin of subatomic particles.

Which is, by the way, the sort of remark that’s a real conversation stopper at dinner parties, causing my mother to roll her eyes for the benefit of guests, even if it was followed by a gesture of affection for my father.

What’s that? I asked.

The spin?

I nodded.

It’s a property of the particle. Just as people have properties, like compassion, mercy, love, and anger, particles have all sorts of properties. Electrical charge, mass, even color. And spin is another property. Except it isn’t anything like the spin of a ball.

Then why call it spin?

Good question. I think the names physicists give correspond to things we can imagine in order to talk about something we can’t imagine.

How do you know it’s there, this spin?

That’s the strangest part of it. It isn’t there. In fact, spin comes into being only when we look for it. Until we do, it’s not there.

I was puzzled. I must have looked puzzled.

Nature is mischievous. She plays tricks, explained my father. Remember our game of Twenty Questions?

Yes.

When we take measurements of a particle, it’s as if we’re asking the particle a question about what it is. Imagine the particle playing the game. Every time we ask a question — take a measurement or reading — the particle gives us an answer, yes or no, so that over twenty questions or twenty thousand we get a picture of what this thing is. Make sense?

I wasn’t convinced.

Me neither, he added, but that’s how I’ve been thinking about it.

Have you really been thinking about Twenty Questions?

As a matter of fact, I have.

My father chuckled. Let me tell you something about how I used to play the game, he said, not how I play it now, but how I played it back in Princeton. You used to take a long time deciding what you were before I could start asking questions.

I remember.

But I never did. I didn’t take a moment. I cheated.

How?

I made it a rule to always answer your first three questions with a yes, a no, and a yes.