Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

Of course, I’m disturbed by what Suleiman—

It’s simply not true! I exclaimed, interrupting Zafar. I’ve known Crane since … since fuck. He can be a shit— could be a shit — but this. I don’t believe it. There’s no evidence for it, I said.

Zafar didn’t respond.

Is there any evidence? I asked him.

Why don’t I just tell you what happened?

I nodded and Zafar continued.

I listened to Suleiman without interrupting him, listening for what it is he wants to volunteer to me.

There are bad people in the world, I said to him presently.

There is bad and there is evil, he replied, and there is only one thing to be done with evil.

I didn’t respond immediately.

Do you have a Dictaphone? I asked him.

There’s one in the office.

Can you record Crane talking about this?

Suleiman grinned but just as quickly lost his smile.

Will I get into trouble?

I can’t promise you you won’t, but I believe you won’t.

What did you have in mind?

Have you looked inside the envelopes?

They’re sealed.

His face showed again, briefly but unmistakably, those shadows of fear I had seen when I first met him.

What are you afraid of? I asked.

I am not afraid.

I regretted my question. Young men do not bear their fears well. Moreover, I saw that Suleiman might still be smarting from Crane’s patronizing gesture, Crane patting him on the back, on the head, as if he were a child.

What do you think is inside them? I asked him.

Money. You?

I’m not sure. How thick are they?

Maybe a centimeter thick. Not even that, he replied, gesturing with forefinger and thumb.

How many pages would you say?

I don’t know.

Guess.

Ten or twenty, I don’t know.

When do they come, the envelopes?

Mondays and Thursdays.

Only those days?

Always Mondays and Thursdays.

When?

Noon. Like just now.

Always?

Always around that time.

Never later or earlier?

Give or take fifteen minutes.

Are the envelopes brown?

Sometimes brown, sometimes white.

Always the same size?

No. Different sizes.

Always different?

Not always. Mostly large.

We need to find you two minutes. Can you get your hands on a digital camera?

His eyes widened; I think he only sensed what I was getting at and it occurred to me that his fear might have prevented him from seeing it for himself.

What are you thinking? he asked.

Get a camera and I’ll explain.

* * *

I saw Suleiman again later that day. He asked me if I’d given any thought to the post of executive director. I hadn’t. He asked if I could, and we left it at that. Clearly, Suleiman and — if he was to be believed — the Afghani trustees thought Monsieur Touvier wasn’t up to the job, or something worse.

I first came across Maurice’s name a month earlier, when I was in Bangladesh. Emily had sent me an email — not long before her plea by telephone to come and save twenty-five million lives, give or take — with an attachment she asked me to comment on: Your strategic thinking would be hugely appreciated . It was an Excel spreadsheet setting out a budget for a new outfit within the UN, she explained, to coordinate donor aid, which she’d drawn up with someone’s help. That last fact, that she’d been helped, had to be said, I thought. She didn’t know her way around spreadsheets, she knew I knew that, and she wouldn’t want me to think she was passing it off as her own work. It was really rather clever , she said. I wondered if she actually believed that.

There were tables of budget items and costs, including Land Cruisers, property rental, electric generators, backup generators, computers, printers, office furniture, budgets for staff — local and international (the salaries were wildly different) — all the way down to stationery. What the thundering fuck was clever about it? This was a budget, a simple list of things they thought they needed or things they wanted, they wanted. What could I know of their needs? What could she imagine I might know? I was in Bangladesh applying my legal training to fight corruption in government, in the police, against the rackets in education, the massive government contracts for schoolbooks to primary schools, in a country that had an established civil society with many NGOs and aid agencies, the largest recipient of British aid after India. But she couldn’t know that, could she? She couldn’t know that Bangladesh had the world’s largest NGO, that in fact within a few years that NGO — a Bangladeshi NGO — would be running development programs in Afghanistan, that it already did so in other countries, alongside the likes of Oxfam. She was no expert herself, armed with just a graduate degree in economics from Harvard, legal training, and then a year working for Jalaluddin developing training programs for UN staff, flowcharts, brainstorming sessions, and role playing. What could she know? Not long enough for a budding doctor to get in the same room as a patient.

But then there was a line near the end of the email, after saying she wanted to hear from me, a throwaway all-important line, a casual remark that had all the weight of the comment that isn’t measured but delivered direct from the unconscious. Not an error, for there’s nothing else that some part of her wanted to say; not a Freudian slip, not when you mean one thing but say your mother. I’m curious to know what it’s like to go back home. That is what she’d said.

At the root of it, was it that? An idea that I’d know about these things because I was going back, like Jalaluddin, the Afghani who lived in New York and D.C., and worked his whole adult life in the U.S., straight out of graduate school, married an American, had American children, and yet came back home to Afghanistan, the authoritative voice with credibility, with legitimacy, because that’s where he came from, so he must know a thing or two, and could be relied upon because he was educated at an American university, from that buffer class of native informants. Was that it? I must know because I was back home, too, in the same part of the world, also at the brink of the British Empire.

So when she says that, writes that, thinks that, does she think I’m not British? Or am I both British and Bangladeshi, the favored two-step of the dancing liberal? You can be both. Who’s to decide what you are? You can decide. And that liberal never for a moment imagines himself to be dancing the same dance of the bigot, the dance of language and labels and names because everything’s in a name — that’s what he decides.

I listened to Zafar without interrupting him, noting the change in his tone and demeanor. He had delivered the story of Suleiman, Crane, and the envelopes calmly, even, I might say, without drama, however horrific that business about Crane might have been. Yet now, as he talked about Emily, he seemed agitated.

This ruck between the liberal and his antithesis, continued Zafar, never touches the thing that the liberal and bigot take for granted, which is the feeling of belonging, his own feeling of belonging and another’s lack of such feeling, which is a question not of what ought to be but of what is, an epistemological question, a hard question, no doubt, but isn’t that the beginning of wisdom, to see how it is?

Is that what Emily thought, that in going to Bangladesh I had made a romantic journey home? But what then had she made of everything I’d told her? What did it mean to her when I told her one rainy afternoon as we lay in bed after making love — I can’t remember how it came about — that I spoke another language from the language they spoke in the capital, Dhaka? I said the capital, Dhaka in case she didn’t know, not to save her the embarrassment but to save me the embarrassment. What did she understand then, when I told her that the corner of the country I was born in was once so unsure of joining the rest that it almost didn’t, that I came from a corner of that corner that actually voted against joining the rest? What did she make of that?