Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

Listening to Zafar, I could not help thinking that perhaps Emily was right. Far from expecting too little of writing, Zafar expected too much, but only because he expected too much of human thought. His language sounded somehow constructed, even more so than it had done all those years ago. I see now, of course, that what he was talking about were things that had long preoccupied him, some old, some more recent, some that happened in 2002, six years earlier, and that they had preoccupied him with good reason. It is little wonder, for instance, that he was concerned with human motivation for action, which he went on to discuss, since the very thing he asked of himself had to do with his own motivation for the actions he came to take.

If the province of science is how? , continued Zafar, then the rigor of life, the predicament of living in the world, is contained in the question why? Wittgenstein said that when all the questions of science have been answered, all the problems of life will still remain. That may be, but it is equally true that when all the work of art is finished, when we have been blinded by every metaphor under the sun, not one question of how? or why? will have been touched. Tell the truth: First you have to find the truth, and there’s no guarantee that you can. But it’s even worse than that. What science is now making plain, in a way we once dimly suspected but could never say for sure or to what extent, is that we don’t know the half of our own minds. It seems the least reliable thing a person can say about any of his actions are the motivations that he himself ascribes to them. Naipaul’s advice cannot be dismissed, but the best to be said for it, which is the best that Theroux can do — because he’s human — is that it enjoins Theroux to root out any conscious dishonesties, and if he’s lucky a few unconscious ones will come out in the tangle. Peanuts.

Why not think of a book in the same way you think of a map or a translation? It’s not perfect, far from it, but it’s something.

A ringing endorsement. I had a friend who used to see a therapist, and she said something about the experience that’s stayed with me. Just being able to speak about some dreadful things, she said, and seeing that the therapist wasn’t falling apart from hearing them was helpful. What struck me was that I could imagine someone else saying that being able to speak about dreadful things and seeing that the therapist did break down in tears was helpful. It seems to me that this is the big difference between writing and talking. When you talk, you get to see the effect, and maybe it’s witnessing the effect that matters to you and not just framing your thoughts in words. We learn about the weight of things by seeing how they affect others. Why would you want to leave a broken person alone with a pen?

I’m running out of arguments, I said to him, and frankly I’m not sure it’s worth forcing this. I don’t agree with most of what you say. I don’t think your position is quite as reasoned as you seem to think it is—

For fuck’s sake, what’s with this writing nonsense?

Zafar’s face changed. We were in a restaurant, in Holland Park, where no one shouts unless it’s at a waiter.

Has it occurred to you that I might not want to write, that I might actually want to talk. I’m not telling you to read. All you have to do is listen.

You misunderstand. Of course we’ll talk—

Has it occurred to you that you might actually be the person to whom I have to say what I’m saying? Maybe you don’t want to find out why I’m telling you. You have a role, you know, center stage, I’d say. I could equally ask you if you don’t want to listen.

Of course I’m listening—

And what the fuck makes you think I want to sit down and write and stew myself in all this shit? Putting things on paper makes things real, hardens them, makes them unchangeable, even before things have made sense. Since when did books ever solve anything? They only raise more questions than they answer, otherwise they’re just fucking entertainment, and I’m not here to fucking entertain you.

Zafar stopped there. He fidgeted in his seat before picking up cubes of sugar and adding them to his coffee, one after another. The restaurant was empty. The lighting had been turned down.

I’m just saying … I’m just saying that your reasons seem like dressings for wounds.

Nice, he replied.

I don’t remember you being so bleak in college.

I wasn’t as untrusting. I had faith in the goodness of people, the perfection of love.

What happened?

Everything ends. And it’s how they end that leaves the lasting effect.

That’s another argument for writing: making something that outlasts you.

And there I was thinking that’s what children were about.

* * *

Zafar had been speaking about the past, but I knew nothing of where he was in the present. There remained also the question: Why had he come here, to the U.K., to my home? And what was he doing these days? No sooner had this last question presented itself to me than it seemed out of place.

It seemed to me that asking him what he was doing these days, let alone asking why he had come to my home, was to reduce our history of friendship, or reduce the intimacy that had evolved in the days since he reappeared, as he and I talked in a way we had never done before. It was inappropriate. There remained instead a sense of the present held in abeyance, left at the door, to enter later perhaps. For now, the past had spread through this house, crisscrossing the walls of the kitchen with Zafar’s stories and mine, redecorating a home in the colors of childhood and families and memory.

There is an observation in Zafar’s notebooks: In our twenties, when a friend tells us his relationship has ended, we ask, Who ended it? In our thirties, we simply say, I’m sorry.

In that shift is, I think, a change in our attitude to causation, from a belief that causation can be understood to a recognition that at certain times it is useless. Causation is about how things were necessarily true, because this led to that. In our conversations in those wintry days, there was always a quality of longing about them, particularly when they reached far back. Longing for what? When Zafar spoke about the past, I felt the presence of many pasts, the one that was spoken, but also other unlived lives, the lives uncaused, yet imagined. There is not one past but many, and every memory carries the spirit of all.

* * *

After a few days of reading from the bag of notebooks, I raised again, tentatively and for the last time, the idea of him writing a book.

You must be short of cash. A book could give you an income.

We were in the kitchen. Maria, the housekeeper, had left some pasta marinara for supper.

Zafar gave me a glancing look, as if to acknowledge my cheek in raising the matter again.

I have enough, he said. I had more, until last year when my parents nearly lost their house. Northern Rock collapsed at the same time as they came out of the fixed-rate period on their mortgage. They were hammered by the rates at the same time the bank was tightening up on risky loans. I have a little equity in a company that was doing well. Some of the dividend now goes to them to help make mortgage repayments. But I have enough. I don’t spend much.

What company? I asked.

I am embarrassed now for failing to express appropriate commiseration for his parents’ difficulties. The small remark about them should have struck me in a number of ways. Yet all my curiosity fixed on the surprising news that Zafar had invested in shares, for Zafar had never seemed to me to have an interest in owning anything, in assets, not even a house. And the remark about his parents was also the first mention of anything recent in his life. Of course, it didn’t tell me where in the world he’d been living, it didn’t tell me what he’d been doing, but I did not take the opportunity in front of me.