Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

Nor have I. You don’t hold that against me, do you?

Do you remember Gandhi cleaned the latrines in his ashram? Zafar asked.

In the movie?

I don’t know why it bothers me so much, but I keep thinking about those fingers of hers. I’ve even imagined that Emily’s attitude toward what she’d touched was the attitude of women who in another age would have worn thin silk gloves. And I think of all the decent food, food that had done no wrong, that she left behind. Childhood poverty looms over one’s whole life. Its effect is felt even as the effect is separated from the cause, despite all the intervening events, even wealth and success. Growing up poor primes every emotion for a certain key.

I remember, I said to Zafar, when we went out for supper in Manhattan back in the day. You used to get the leftovers to go, and when you passed a homeless guy, you’d hand it to him. You know what used to get me about that?

What?

That you noticed the homeless guy. Time and again, we’d be walking and talking, and yet you’d notice the homeless guy.

The portions are so big in America.

It was good of you.

Just as eating everything on the plate is good?

Yes. It is good.

It isn’t. I wanted to rid myself of the need to eat everything on the plate, because the compulsion served no useful purpose; in fact, quite the opposite. Where there is plenty, eating more than you need at that moment is gluttony. The food is going to waste either in the landfills or in your own body. You’re damned either way, so why not just give it up and be done with the guilt and torment? I never chose to see the homeless man; I just did, and I did because however much I tried — however much I might have made the prospect impossible by acquiring degrees and getting paid stupid amounts of money in jobs that promised security — I could never shake off the certain belief that I was only one small misstep away from the same destitution. It’s stupid, but only if you think that it’s a rational thought or a conclusion to some kind of reasoning, which it isn’t. It’s just the way it is, among those things you carry forward into your life from childhood. Fighting it isn’t any good.

Why would you want to rid yourself of that?

What? The sheer terror of poverty? Why would anyone want to leave that?

Zafar’s sarcasm took me by surprise.

Only someone who doesn’t have it could ask that, he added.

No, I meant the sensibility to the homeless.

Listen. I’m talking about why I noticed the homeless guy. You can’t understand it because you don’t know what it’s like.

Why are you having a go at me? All I’m saying is that when you see a homeless guy and give him food, that’s a commendable act of charity.

You said it yourself. I always noticed them. I noticed them because I couldn’t help it. Only from the inside can you know what it’s like from the inside. Understanding isn’t just knowing or learning what it is but knowing what it’s like.

Do you think you might be confused a little?

I think I might be confused a lot.

You say love is about actions, and all I’m saying is that your actions were quite loving.

What? Giving some sod on the street the leftovers that would have gone in the bin?

Yes.

Think about Emily’s brother, James, said Zafar. The Hampton-Wyverns had their Christmas shindig during the day but, on Christmas Eve, James — or so Emily told me — helped out at a soup kitchen at a homeless shelter in West London. He must have served more meals in one evening than I’ve handed over doggy bags of scraps in all my time in Manhattan. That’s the kind of relationship I want with poverty — something that doesn’t bite me every time I see affluence or misery.

Zafar’s account of the beginning of his relationship with Emily revealed aspects of him that I had never properly appreciated. I listened to him and steadily I formed an impression that was so starkly at odds with the understanding I had had of him that I began to call into question my own judgment. I cannot help but wonder now, as I consider this point, whether Zafar might have intended this, or at least have been conscious that his narrative might have that effect. I had sensed a background of adversity, but the man I’d met at Oxford seemed to be so comfortable in his skin, so much above me, so terribly clever to begin and end with, so sure in his dealings with others, that no one could reasonably have contemplated the vicious tempest that churned below the surface. In Zafar’s notebooks, there is a line from Somerset Maugham, whom I admire, as I say, a line I have already used as an epigraph to an earlier chapter, but that bears repetition. Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.

You asked her to marry you. You never told me.

It was autumn 1997, said Zafar. Autumn in England, even in the metropolis, even in Brixton, he said, can surprise you with its melancholy beauty, every time. Outside the restaurant we stopped in the square to collect ourselves and take our bearings for the walk to my flat. The evening’s failing light picked out the edges of leaves on the tops of the trees. The blustery wind scattered debris along the street, and I was in love with the world. I took Emily’s hand.

We neared a road, stopping for the cars streaming past. I looked right and made out an oncoming gap. When I looked left, I saw Emily’s face, a picture which in that instant elicited unfathomable tenderness, and in an act of folly, in a moment that seemed to have no root in conscious planning, as the bulk of my weight listed from the back foot onto the front, as I held her eyes so that I would have no doubt that she heard the conviction in my voice, I asked Emily Hampton-Wyvern a question I would never ask her again.

She let out a little laugh, a perfectly formed ladylike laugh. Just enough. And I said nothing more.

Afterward, I told myself that this laugh was the reason why I could never ask her again. But the truth is that this so-called reason was a cover I gave myself, a refuge from inclement facts — but while not wholly ineffective, it could not forever hold off the reality. Reality seeps through the cracks. She would never marry me. It wasn’t going to happen. Even after the engagement, I still believed this. In fact, even if we’d got married, I knew I would still believe that she wouldn’t marry me and I don’t think I would have been wrong. I don’t think I would ever have occupied the space set aside in the romantic vision of the girl whose formation was in another country, a land that shared not even one border with mine, no border of race or nationality of course, but still less any border of class. I’ve said it before: Race, or as everyone now likes to say, ethnicity , was never so much a source of anxiety as class. In point of fact, racial difference was part of the attraction for both of us, I am sure, an aspect of the fierce sexual love binding us, central to it.

This was 1997. Five years later, when she in turn asked me , all my own laughter had left me.

She asked you ? I asked.

She did, though really she asked under duress.

How do you force someone to ask you to marry her?

The duress didn’t come from me, said Zafar. We were going to break up. That much was pretty certain. Asking me was her last-ditch attempt to rescue things, even when, I think, she had no wish to rescue the future but only the present, as it was.

I’m sorry, Zafar, but I’m not sure I understand what happened. Of course I want to ask you what went wrong, but I can’t help thinking that something about it must also have been right. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have stayed in it. I know a lot of it was long-distance and you don’t need to explain to me how things can just keep ticking over if you’re apart for big stretches. But there must have been something you liked about her?