Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

You mean you hadn’t decided on what you were when you started your round?

I had no idea.

Are you serious?

I used to dress it up, of course, he continued. I’d umm and ahh just to give the right impression, but I didn’t have a clue. But by the fourth question I had to think up what I might be, subject to the conditions set by my answers — yes, no, and yes — to your first three questions. It made it easier to get the game going and made it a little more interesting for me.

That sounds like fun.

Now imagine playing the game but answering every question randomly and then at the end, and only then, trying to figure out what you are.

But that could be impossible. What if your answers don’t match anything in the world?

Maybe, he continued, but that’s actually rather like what these subatomic particles do. We observe them, they give their answers, and we figure out their spin, even when all along they never had any such thing.

I didn’t really grasp what all this meant — the physics eluded me — but I don’t think my father expected me to understand. In fact, I think he wanted to convey how baffling these ideas were even to him, even as he lived to wrestle with them.

After supper that evening, my mother headed out to her class; she was ever diligent about her retraining as a psychotherapist and never missed a lesson, even when I was home during vacations. My father and I loaded the dishwasher and again sat down at the dining table with some ice cream.

Chutes and Ladders?

Sure, I said.

We often played after supper, though I understand — and understood even sometime in my boyhood — that men seek out excuses to ease conversation.

Let’s play Twenty Questions also.

Twenty Questions first? I asked.

Let’s play them at the same time.

I smiled at my father. It was my turn to play it as he once did: He might be asking the questions, twenty questions, but with this new version of the game, I would be the one working out who I was.

We played the two games slowly, switching from one to the other and with so many digressions as we played, conversations about this and that. We talked a little about my studies. I was doing well enough, I’d say, and mention my grades — I always did well enough, never more, and he might remark on the surprises that come from pushing oneself, remarks delivered with an abstraction that at once directed them nowhere or to himself but were shared for my benefit. I know that this quality about my father, the keenness of eye, for instance, for the links between things — the digressiveness was something that Zafar had as well. I know there was a similarity between them that must have drawn me to Zafar. There were wild differences, of course. My father was deeply interested in the politics of the world; in his beliefs he was a liberal through and through. But Zafar back then had little to say on such matters. Yet for all the differences, their similarities — the digressions, the wandering searches, the discernment of links — they were all comfortingly familiar to me the first time I talked to Zafar in the Junior Common Room of our college at Oxford.

In science, my father said, nothing is worth a dime that doesn’t accord with our observations of the world. There’s really only one field in all of human endeavor where no observation can undermine the authority of a statement.

Mathematics?

Yes. Are you an animal?

No. Why didn’t you become a mathematician?

1, 2, 3, 4. I wasn’t good enough, he replied.

It was the first time I’d heard that tone in my father’s voice; an expression of a deficit and longing and — at the risk of putting it a touch too high — of a wound.

In Zafar’s notes, I came across a scrawled entry that I think reflects the sentiment. I don’t know whom Zafar was writing about or if it is a quotation from somewhere, but the note says, His personal tragedy was the tragedy of all men, that they cannot shake off the lives that might have been, the unlived lives that follow them.

Do you know what St. Francis of Assisi said about proselytizing? asked my father.

What?

Evangelize by all means and, if necessary, use words.

That’s great.

Are you an abstract noun?

Yes, I replied and rolled the die.

I’ve never been inclined to give you instruction on how to live. I’m not sure I’d know where to begin. Besides, the most useful lessons your mother and I could teach you are the ones we’ve taught unwittingly through our actions. Don’t they say that the best lessons have no teacher, only a student?

But you want to say something now?

He rolled the die. Are you a scientific concept? I’m not sure it’s as much a lesson as something to consider.

Tricky. Probably not in the sense you’re thinking, I replied.

You know that theoretical physicists rather enjoy trying to find metaphors from everyday life to elucidate physics — why call it spin? — but it seems to me we could go the other way and use physics as a metaphor for life. I have been thinking about our game of Twenty Questions in the context of quantum mechanics, but it occurred to me a while ago that it is also a metaphor for living. The task is always to try to figure out who you are. Are you an emotion?

Yes, I answered.

I had a friend at Princeton, a Russian graduate student. He had a cute message on his answering machine, delivered in his thick Russian accent: Who are you and what do you want? Some people spend a lifetime trying to answer these questions. You, however, have thirty seconds.

My father and I chuckled.

What happened to him?

Gone. My point is that you could think of the people you meet in your life as questions, there to help you figure out who you are, what you’re made of, and what you want. In life, as in our new version of the game, you start off not knowing the answer. It’s only when the particles rub against each other that we figure out their properties. It’s the strangest thing, this idea in quantum physics, and yet somehow unsurprising when you consider it as a metaphor. It’s when the thing interacts that its properties are revealed, even resolved.

I moved my game piece along, landing at the bottom of a ladder.

That’s it really, he added. That’s all I wanted to say.

* * *

All that was then, over two decades ago, and if I were required to provide a reason why that occasion comes to mind, it may be that I am thinking now also of a rather more recent day in September 2008, just before Zafar’s reappearance, when I visited my father with an ill-formed hope that he might have words of advice — however much the grown man in me might have resisted putting it in those terms. I drove up to Oxford on that same road I’ve driven so often before, but on this day with a heart weighted down by worries. I cannot say that I had the purpose of going through them with him, for I had not properly articulated anything in my own mind in the nature of a question. Granted, there was the question of whether and what to disclose to the financial regulator — I had yet to receive the formal invitation to appear before a congressional committee — but what I carried in my breast was, rather, a vague disenchantment and directionless sense of being. There was also the state of my marriage, the drift of which was, by then, too long and wide to be accommodated as the passing consequence of our respective and collective commitment to work. The road to Oxford was sure enough, but the course of my mind was lost in byways. Rather than by any resolve, I think now, I was drawn home because it was the first place of security.

It is, in the end, Zafar’s lack of home, to paraphrase his notes, the unmooring of his body, which leads to and results from the unmooring of his soul, in one of those incalculable feedback loops that rule us beyond our limited wit. I have been fortunate in many respects; life has been unsparing in its blessings. But I have come, early or late (I don’t know), to understand that what has made me in my own eyes at times, and I suspect in others’, a rather unadventurous and even boring human being has also saved me from greater woes; that my greatest asset was the stable love of parents I admired.