Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

I have already explained that the first time Zafar saw Emily was when she was practicing her violin in the University Church at Oxford. He did not speak to her then and, by his account, she did not notice his presence. The second time he saw her, which was the first time they met, was that evening at the South Asia Society in New York in 1995. I recalled it vividly, and I brought it up with him. I told him I remembered Emily stealing glances at him, though he himself did not recall registering this, and I remembered Hamid Karzai and an Afghan businessman I couldn’t avoid.

He explained that it began there. A week after that evening, he said, I received a call at work from Emily. I hadn’t given her my number, but she remembered I worked in the same place as you. Emily reminded me of our meeting, of your introduction, as if I needed reminding. I did recognize her that evening; she was the same young woman I had seen playing the violin all those years earlier, but I would never mention that fact.

She asked if I might be able to help in a small way. I remember that she didn’t at all use my name. In fact, it was only several months later that she began to say it, after I told her that if she mispronounced it, the worst thing that could happen was that I’d let her know.

I have a friend, she said, who’s interested in banking, in derivatives trading. That’s what you do, isn’t it?

Yes.

He’s graduating from business school, and I wondered if you might be able to have a word with him, a sort of careers advice or chat about what you do. He can talk by phone, if you prefer, or he’ll meet you wherever you want, or in Wall Street, I’m sure.

Do you think he needs help?

There was a silence.

He doesn’t know if derivatives trading is right for him.

I do fixed-income derivatives. I don’t know anything about equities.

What’s that?

Equities or fixed-income derivatives?

Both, she answered.

Fixed-income derivatives are things like options on bonds, swaps, caps, floors, interest-rate derivatives. Equity derivatives are to do with stocks and shares. Banks run these things out of separate divisions, I said. I thought that perhaps it was not help that her friend wanted but a stepping-stone to an interview.

I’m not sure what he wants to do — and I don’t think he is. Perhaps you could talk to him about fixed-income derivatives?

How much mathematics has he studied?

I’m not sure.

You’re not sure or you don’t know?

I don’t know.

What was his degree in?

He’s doing an MBA.

His first degree?

History.

I don’t know any history graduates in fixed-income derivatives trading, not in this firm. Did he go to an American university?

For business school?

For undergrad.

Why does that matter?

If he did, he might have picked up enough mathematics in his minor.

Oh, I see. No, he went to Oxford.

There are plenty of jobs in banking that don’t require much mathematics — just none in fixed-income derivatives trading. I’m not sure I can help other than to repeat that he’d probably find the work very difficult. It’s not impossible, but if his classes at business school didn’t leave him with a working knowledge of the mathematics of derivatives, then he’ll first have to find the enthusiasm for a lot of hard work just to get up to speed, only after which he can figure out if he’d like the work. Perhaps you could explain this to him. Give him my number if he still wants to talk.

Again, there was that silence.

This all sounds rather fascinating, she said.

Finance? I asked.

Yes.

Again, the silence.

I’d like to learn more about it, she added.

This time I was silent. I thought of recommending a book on finance.

Perhaps we could meet for coffee? she asked.

The business school student never called me.

* * *

But the beginning proper was in the following year in London: One day, no more than two months into the affair, when we stepped out of a restaurant in Brixton, I asked her to marry me. It is astonishing to think now that I asked her so soon, knowing not very much about her, really, and yet at the time I was of course convinced in the uttermost depths of my heart that this was what I wanted. Only later was I able to interrogate that conviction and trace the source of the certainty. I have always believed — and believed it so clearly that I should say that I have always known —that certainty is a subjective state, and no less so the certainty about other subjective states, so that when one is asked whether one is sure about anything, one can only answer: Yes, but I might be wrong. One could even go so far as to say that one is absolutely sure but that there always remains the qualification that one might be wrong, for, if nothing else, between the subjective state of certainty and the world presented to us there is the mediation of this laughably fallible perception.

And yet in those days I carried a conviction on which I could have sworn my whole life, sworn the lives of others, and so it seemed the most natural thing in the world to ask her to marry me. In those days, which seem so much longer ago than these ten years, I believed I loved her.

Do you mean you now think you didn’t love her? I asked.

Zafar didn’t reply.

It’s an odd qualification, I explained to Zafar, to believe that you loved someone rather than just stating that you did. It suggests you’ve changed your mind — you now think you didn’t actually love her.

And what, responded Zafar, is really the distinction? Perhaps I should simply say that I loved her. After all, I wouldn’t say that I believe this fruit tastes bitter or that I believe this milk smells sour. Isn’t love the same, simply the gift of the senses, an affect received by them, and in fact only a state in ourselves, one that we perceive? Like the knowledge we have of where, at any given moment, our limbs are, through the sense of proprioception. Yet therein is the mischief, for how much do our senses fail us, mislead us?

I can’t get my head around this thing, he continued. We say love and somehow absolve ourselves of the question why? at the very moment of its greatest importance. If, when you say love, you refer to those physical signs in the presence of the beloved, if you mean the shortness of breath, the quickening of pulse, the dilation of pupils, and all the rest of it, then what use at all is it to say you love a person if any number of things — things that don’t make the beloved — can make you feel that ache for someone you really don’t know from Adam or Eve? If it springs from what you know about him or her, you know so little that in any other realm you would be a fool to form a judgment on such a flimsy premise, and yet you can fall in love with much less. All the same, I cannot deny that love and our conceit are everything.

It seems impossible to escape the conclusion that I’m entitled to say only that I believed I was in love. I expect you’ll remember what Virginia Woolf famously said about love and self-deception: Of course love is the only thing that matters to us; just think of all the delusions we maintain in order to preserve it.*

That day, before I asked her, Emily and I had had a pleasant lunch in an Italian restaurant. I’d ordered a bowl of carbonara and she a Florentine pizza. Emily left food on her plate; she always did. I have never been able to rid myself of the compulsion to eat everything, even long after the needs of the body are met, letting nothing go to waste.

Emily and I were in Brixton, not New York, and, if anything, the portion sizes were on the small side. Nevertheless, Emily was leaving a good deal of food on her plate, setting pieces aside, and as I continued to watch her I realized that she was leaving all the parts of the pizza that came into contact with her hands. Emily never ate food she had touched. Often when she and I ate together I would think of all the meals I ate with my hands as a boy. At first I wondered why she never went to wash her hands before eating; it was my habit — the habit of someone who grew up eating with his hands — and when I mention that I’m doing so, it often encourages others to follow suit. I say this because, over time, I noticed that she never, not once, went into any bathroom away from home, though she did use bathrooms in hotels. When I thought about it, I imagined she’d never cleaned a bathroom in her life.