Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

And so it was that a year passed without our meeting, Zafar and I, and then another. Such regrets as I have are few; I am not an old man, but even if there had been time enough to accumulate regrets, I do not think my constitution works that way. My circumstances have also helped, I daresay, for I don’t think I ever faced the prospect others face of regretting bad decisions that took them down the road to financial burden or ruin, lives ruled by mortgage repayments and school fees, that seem to be the lot of so many people. True enough, I’ve not been immune to financial difficulties. But they were — they are —the difficulties of someone with good fortune.

However, I do now have regrets about that time of my life. I’m not so presumptuous as to imagine that if I’d remained a presence in his life, he might not have declined as he evidently did in that time. What is the word for it? I say declined , but what was it? A descent? Collapse? Unraveling, unstitching, falling apart, breaking down?

* * *

I want to give an explanation, but there is no reason. I told myself afterward that perhaps I was consoling Emily, but her demeanor did not warrant such a view. There was no obvious distress in want of relief. Where there is nothing that can amount to an explanation, I am left only with the possibility of stating what happened. By that, I do not mean what Zafar would have meant, for to him, it must be apparent, what happens is as much in the mind as in the exercise of the body and its limbs. Our thoughts and feelings, the emotions and instincts that drive us on, these were to Zafar no less the stuff of the drama we enact than our actions that are easily described if not explained.

Zafar spoke of the will, disparaging its purported freedom. And though I reject his rejection of the will, I understand the simplicity of his point: Only without invoking the idea of will can we properly speak of causes. If you want to know why a man made a choice, it won’t do to say that he simply chose. Zafar’s exposition therefore stands as an account of causes: the center line in a tug-of-war moves because men pull on the rope. But when we take the will out of the picture, should we not turn then to passions and instincts and drives in finding our causes? In his notebooks, Zafar records a passage from the philosopher David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature , a well-worn passage, I know: We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. I cannot pretend that I have reasons or justifications.

I remember the date because it was my father’s birthday, a Saturday in April 2000, and I was driving up to Oxford to visit him for lunch. The roads were uncluttered at ten in the morning, and the skies were clear and blue enough to drive with the cover down. My thoughts drifted in and out of matters of work. We had just completed a string of almost identical transactions on which the firm had made substantial profits, and I was thinking about how the structure might potentially be replicated with other clients and about ways it might have to be tailored. As I drew into Oxford, slowing to the pace of traffic, my phone rang.

Hello, it’s Emily Hampton-Wyvern.

Hello, Emily. How lovely to hear from you, I shouted over a passing truck. It’s been ages.

Where are you? What’s all the racket?

I’m sorry. I’m on the road, I replied. Something was wrong, I thought. Why, after all, would she call?

Zafar’s in hospital.

Good God. What’s the matter?

He’s in a psychiatric hospital.

I said nothing.

He’s in a psychiatric hospital, she repeated.

I was shocked by the news. It’s quite a thing to be hospitalized that way, isn’t it? It’s what doctors do to you, because you don’t know better, your mind can’t know better. But shock wasn’t the whole of what I felt. Zafar was undeniably someone I cared about. Someone I admired and in some ways envied. Yet there it was: I was shocked, and yet another part of me was not surprised. Which is not to say that I could see it coming. There was the mystery that surrounded Zafar, that was part of his attraction. I knew nothing really of his childhood, of his formation. What I did know — my brief encounter with his parents — only fed a thesis: He’d seemed self-made, came from nothing, but how far can that go? How feasible is it? Was he a working-class boy who had overreached? Lived beyond his psychic means? — to take some words from his notebooks.

That’s awful. What’s wrong?

Emily did not answer. I assumed she hadn’t heard me. I thought of pulling over, but the road had suddenly become clear.

What happened?

Still there was no answer. It struck me that perhaps she didn’t know.

How is he?

Before she could reply, I added: That’s a stupid question; he’s in hospital.

Are you free this evening? she asked me.

Shall I come over?

Would you?

I’ll be there at eight.

Zafar returned to his account of events in Kabul, to Emily and the UN lounge. But if it appears that some time passed before he did so, it is largely the effect of my own reconstruction of our conversations. I did, after all — for reasons I’ve already given — bring forward the Afghan story. And, as I look over what I’ve put down so far, I see that much of the intervening material concerns me and my own life. Yet it’s equally true that my friend didn’t tell the Afghan story from beginning to end without deviation. That’s just not Zafar. He had taken me back to Islamabad in order, I understand, to set the context for his involvement in what happened in Kabul, when he met Crane. But now he took up the scene in the UN bar again, after making his presence known to Emily in the lounge.

He left her with her circle of admiring men, he explained, men ever gravitating toward her, as ripe apples to the soft earth, he said. She now knew that I was here, in the compound, in Kabul. Passing through a low arch, I came into the bar, a cavernous room with plenty of sofas and armchairs, as in the lounge, but with furniture and people packed in and pressed together, and the lighting dimmer. Yet what attacked my senses were the smell and the noise. In several months of working in South Asia, I had not smelled that pungent admixture of alcohol and human bodily odor. It came from another world. The music was loud, the soles of my feet tingling with the vibrations, a volume to muffle the clamor of sexual gambits unbuckling over the scene. It was a scene of horror. This is the freedom for which war is waged, in the venerable name of which the West sends its working-class heroes to fight and die. If the Afghanis had been asked, would they have allowed this blight on their home? Is this what Emily was fighting for?

Men are social animals, we are told, the evidence all around us. I went to Glyndebourne once with Emily and her mother, all of us dressed to the nines. The music was good enough, some or other opera, but it seemed to me that Glyndebourne was as much as anything else a social occasion: picnic hampers bulging with booty from Fortnum & Mason and Harrods, jams, Gentleman’s Relish, and strawberries. Champagne bubbled over the sound of corks popping. A scene from what? An impressionist painting perhaps? Yet what do I know about their art? It was a beautiful summer’s day. Penelope said hello to friends and acquaintances — the brush of cheek against cheek — and so did Emily. I saw two other South Asian faces and wondered if, after years of passing off, I now looked even half as much at ease as they did.