Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

She gave me a look that was not easy to read, as if I was being held responsible for something.

It’s certainly an anagram of nowhere , I said.

I’m going to sit by the pool, she said.

Tomaso was a friend of hers, from the same college at Oxford, an Italian with a crop of tousled brown hair and shoulders permanently pulled back after the fashion of proud men who are seldom the tallest in their company. He was educated at Lancing, Emily explained — Evelyn Waugh’s public school, I thought — but when I met him, I saw that his accent was nevertheless very Italian. She told me that he was a business journalist with Reuters, stationed in Turkey, though I later learned — don’t ask me how — that he had also established a fledgling gambling business online, in which Emily had been an investor. These gambling dot-coms, as you know, ran into difficulties with American regulators a few years ago.

Emily explained that he’d returned to Italy that week with his girlfriend, to his mother’s home, somewhere not far away. He and his girlfriend, a slim English girl with perfectly unblemished skin and dark eyes — whose name I can’t for the life of me remember — came to Villa Fontana for lunch.

From the beginning, Tomaso seemed to be sizing me up, and I speculated about whether he and Emily had once been an item, whether, at any rate, some embers of his love their fire retained — to quote that black Russian Pushkin. Did you know Pushkin was black, African black, had African blood?

I did not, I replied.

You can see it in photographs. He was very proud of it. Anyway, continued Zafar, she hadn’t mentioned anything about a past romance, and after Tomaso arrived there wasn’t a moment when I could ask. But then, I would never have done so anyway.

You were at Oxford? Tomaso asked me.

The four of us were in the kitchen preparing lunch. I was making up a salad, standing at the kitchen table. He was standing on the other side of the table, holding a glass of red wine, while Emily was fetching things from the fridge.

Yes, I was, I replied, thinking that perhaps he thought this was something we all had in common.

I was at Magdalen, he said.

Were you happy there? I asked.

Yes. I suppose I was. Did you meet Emily at Oxford?

This marked out a boundary in his relationship with Emily. Clearly, she had not said much about me to him. Moreover, he could not have known her so well at Oxford that he could assume, therefore, that if she had known me there, she would have mentioned me to him. Yet the moment this thought passed through my mind, I realized its error: Emily was, as you put it, so secretive. Who knows what she would have told anyone?

We met in New York, I replied.

New York?

New York.

You were in New York?

I was working there.

I was in business school there, at Columbia. What were you doing?

I was a banker.

What kind of banking?

I traded derivatives, I replied.

So you were a trader and not a banker?

It struck me as a little pedantic and even a touch too assertive to make a point of the distinction.

I’ve never seen a coin with the image of a tail on it, but that doesn’t stop people from saying Heads or tails? when they toss a coin.

He looked puzzled by my remark.

I’m not sure what it means myself, I said.

Emily was now standing behind Tomaso, outside his field of vision, at a counter laying out antipasti on a platter. She turned to glance at me. Her face bore no expression.

A trader, then?

True, I replied. I rather hoped he would leave the point there.

Why New York?

I was already in the U.S. before I got the job.

Doing what?

Law school.

Where?

Harvard.

He seemed puzzled by this.

But how do you go from law to trading derivatives? Isn’t it very technical?

Law?

No. Derivatives.

You think the law isn’t technical?

No, I mean derivatives. They’re very mathematical, aren’t they?

I studied mathematics before law school.

Oh, he said. He seemed to consider this.

A few moments later, he left the kitchen to return with a bottle in hand.

I brought this for you, he said, presenting it to Emily.

He had not said we brought this. His girlfriend looked down.

Emily took the bottle and, as she turned it in her hands, I noticed the label.

Hey, I said, that’s the olive oil they sell in that shop we went to. Marchmain’s, wasn’t it? Near Harrods, on Beauchamp Place.

I put some effort into pronouncing Beauchamp , trying to capture the French accent fluttering over the word.

Tomaso’s family produce it, she explained. It’s pronounced Beecham , she added.

She did not look at me.

Of course it is, I replied.

One way or another, I thought, the English will get you, even if it’s with their French. I had been put in my place: That’ll teach me not to question the ordering of letters.

Thank you, Tomaso, she said. We’ll use it in the dressing.

Tell me, Zafar. Are you Indian? he asked, as if making a prediction, the brow leaning forward, the eyebrows raised expectantly, the tone of voice willing ratification.

I could forgive him the interrogation thus far and perhaps even further. We’re all quick to take whatever measure we can of whomever we meet. What is that strange sensation when we feel we have the person in the hand? We’re so eager to know the station given to a man by birth and curious to learn about the one he’s acquired through his own deeds, and when we have this pair we lean back and swell with the satisfaction of having got the sense of what he’s about. And for the preservation of that satisfaction, we will protect our expectations of him from subversive reality by means of blinkers that come down like some hysterical blindness. Is that the root of class? A simple system.

I was born in Bangladesh, I answered.

I have been asked that question — Are you Indian? — umpteen times, and my reply has always been the same: I was born in Bangladesh. In the U.S., in order to account for my accent, I might add that I grew up in the U.K. But then, in the U.S. I’m more likely to be asked if I’m British. The British accent trumps skin color, certainly in New York, and even after September 11, 2001.

The point I want to make is that when I’m specifically asked if I was born in India , my reply — that I was born in Bangladesh — generally meets one of three reactions. The first is the look of recognition, evidence of knowing where Bangladesh is. The second is the look a person gives when he stands corrected but without enough information to grasp the correction. Bangladesh, I say by way of further explanation, is east of India — it used to be East Pakistan; it’s between India and Burma and south of Nepal and Bhutan. In some cases, this is enough to draw a nod of recognition, but in most the irresistible evidence of their faces is that their confusion is only magnified; if they could not quite place Bangladesh, then more likely than not they struggle with Bhutan and Burma. But some of the blessedly baffled have sufficient education to suspect that they ought to know better, and they might feign, entirely uselessly, a look of recognition.

The third reaction is by far the most interesting. It was Tomaso’s response. For years, I believed I had no understanding of it. Now I think that most likely I have always had some inkling, but I didn’t want to confront it.

The third is the look someone gives you when he believes your response ratifies what he said. The eyelids close, the head nods, and a smile hovers at the edges of the mouth. It bespeaks satisfaction, as if nothing in their expectations or understanding of the world has been disturbed — on the contrary, it just received confirmation. All this I saw in Tomaso’s face. He could have left it there. Nothing more was necessary.