In the Light of What We Know (12 page)

Did you get home that night? I asked him. It was home you were going to, wasn’t it?

My friend, you know me well enough to know that I couldn’t possibly use the word
home
without couching it in so many caveats as to make it useless. I was going back to my father’s village, the family homestead, the place where I had lived as an infant, the place where I believe I was born.

After the train crash, I spent a few hours trying to help, but I was an outsider, a small boy from Bilaath, who didn’t know how to steer a boat, who couldn’t pull a body out of water. When I began to feel I was getting in the way, I stepped back from it all. The townspeople were incredible; they’d quickly taken control of the situation and seemed to know exactly what to do, as if their collective consciousness preserved the means to meet such adversity.

I started walking along the railway track toward Kulaura station, where I was supposed to meet my uncle, my father’s brother. I did of course look for the rumored telephone, but when I found it, a man was busy trying to get through to Sylhet city to inform the authorities of the disaster, and my own needs seemed to me petty. My bag was gone, of course. I had nothing other than a wad of cash in my pocket, a penknife, passport, notebook, and a pencil.

I pushed what I had seen out of my mind because it was so big and I did not know how to think about it. The pure night was rolling in, and though it would not be cold, I knew that I would be afraid of the dark.

The clouds had now dispersed, revealing the blue night that kept the stars apart. There were so many stars. City dwellers see this rarely, on vacations when their senses are addled by many new things at once. They cannot dream of the clear darkness, how the stars emerge only when everything else in the world is held at bay.

I remember it all so well, but I also know that I cannot recall the memory with the character of perception I had then, the way we see things as children. I saw the moon in its near-fullness and understood that though we call it moonlight, it is, after all, only sunlight and that we’re always living in the glare of one star, reflected or not. Don’t they say that even the oil in the ground is just the compressed energy of the sun?

Two people can see the same thing differently—that is obvious—but the notion that the same person can see the same thing utterly differently, something about it unsettles me, leaving a vacancy between me and those days, like an empty chair between two people.

An hour or so later, I came to a level crossing, a patch of crumbling tarmac. In the distance, on a ribbon of mauve hemming a hill against the edge of the sky, I saw a light moving at the pace of a star. It grew brighter before dividing in two. The car was a white Land Rover, which, I would learn, was in the service of the UN, much like the Land Cruisers and Pajeros so ubiquitous among aid organizations in the third world today. As it drew near, I waved it down and, after explaining my predicament to the driver and offering to pay him something, I jumped in. He’d take me to the village, which involved a considerable detour, he explained, and his employers would not be happy if they knew. I understood what he was saying.

It was a terrible ride, the roads entirely unsuitable for cars, made worse by the rains.

The driver dropped me off about a mile from the village. He’d not heard of it but he did know the post office station that I was able to name, and that is where he set me down, before turning back. As I watched him drive off, I was startled by the oddity of a large white car in an area of the world that I knew was without electricity, without running water, without decent roads, generations away from modernity.

There was only one route ahead, past the brick and tin-roofed hut of the post office, down the road of broken earth, which narrowed into barely more than a footpath. This eventually led into a forest of bamboo thickets, in which the path became more solid, being shielded from the rains by the tall, overhanging stalks, lunging upward, striking each other, to cut the sky above them into star-encrusted blue-black shards.

There were pineapples growing in the wild among bamboo and shrubs, in what I first thought were areas of darkness but what I would discover in time were patches of soil, often in elevated mounds, thereby draining well, that received shafts of light at the time of day when the sun was high. They were red, these pineapples, with traces of the yellow and the green you know of pineapples but much more of an ocher red, blossoms of rust. And they were not the monstrous things you find in supermarkets here, but small, scarcely bigger than an orange, all the better for sneaking into the small spaces where the light made it to the earth. In later months, when I saw a pineapple shining in a cone of sunlight, I would pick my way through the undergrowth, come up beside it, and look up to see what the pineapple could see, to find the sun that found this fruit.

When I think of those pineapples now, I always think of a hand grenade. It is an image seen somewhere, almost certainly later, an image written over memories already laid down.
*

I remember so much. There is a woman squatting at a fire, her sari pulled around her, and she is blowing through a piece of bamboo into the base of the fire. There was less oxygen in her breath, it occurs to me now, than in the air around her, since it was exhaled breath. But it was flowing fast through the length of the bamboo and so the flames grew greater.

As an adolescent back in Britain, I believed that what I saw in boyhood was a representation of a beginning, a homeland without politics, that such memories built up a picture of a time and place, that these things I had seen, these things I had tasted and smelled, the stuff set down in the store of memory, that they were an ark from which a whole world could be re-created. But my belief in this idea waned as I grew. It was an ambitious idea to begin with, but even before the ambition perhaps it was simply wrong in its root, a false premise: to think it possible to re-create a world. Whatever the why, I lost faith in it as I came to construe the meaning of memories ever more narrowly. Some pineapples grow in the wild in one corner of a remote part of the world—remote from me.

I remember a joke about a mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer riding a train in Scotland. Looking out the window, the engineer sees something that catches his eye.

Look, he says, it’s a black sheep! It seems the sheep in Scotland are black.

The physicist shakes his head. Nonsense, he says. All we know is that there are some black sheep in Scotland.

The mathematician looks at his two friends, sighs, and with all earnestness observes: All we can say is that there is at least one sheep in Scotland, one side of which is black.

At every stage, the world that breaks in through our senses struggles to find a footing in our brains. We might liken memories to the messages recorded on a tape, but we mistake the message for the medium, or the other way around, for memory is the tape itself. When I listen to my memories now, I believe that all they tell me are stories about themselves. All I know is that in a corner of Sylhet province in Bangladesh, moved first by the sight of pineapples, there was a little boy, one side of whom turned to face the sun.

As the tangle of forest gave out to an open space, there came into view a long, wide field with the orderly appearance of cultivation. At its far end it swept into a hillock, on which there squatted a low tree, with long branches reaching out like the wires of an umbrella.

Aubergines were, as I came to learn, grown in that field, and over the next four seasons, when they were chest-high, I would help to harvest them. To the side of the field, in a depression in the soil, which was otherwise unmarked, was the grave of my grandfather.

When King Fahd of Saudi Arabia died in 2005, he was buried the following day in an unmarked grave, in accordance with the austere practices of the dominant Wahhabi variety of Islam. Saudi Arabia did not declare a period of national mourning, the national flag was not lowered, and government offices did not close. The idea is that we return to God with nothing, each standing equal to others; Death, the great leveler, treats king and pauper alike. At the other end of the spectrum, let me add by the way, if you visit the Ottoman cemeteries in Istanbul, such as the vast grounds at Eyüp and Karacaahmet, not only will you see elaborately carved stelae marking the site of the Muslim dead, but you will also find many headstones topped with carvings of hats and headgear corresponding to the deceased’s station in life: the pasha’s fez, the janissary’s börk, and the bashlyks of courtiers. Ottoman class was preserved in death, a heresy, presumably, in the eyes of Saudi Muslims.

The hillock at the end of the field belonged, as I would learn, to the family, but it was where, with my grandfather’s blessing, the local Hindus would bring their cows to die, in a part of the world where, historically, varieties of religious practices, not just Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, but varieties within each, carried on side by side. In fact, many intermingled to form syncretic faiths, which is even apparent today in the practices of Muslim Sylhetis in London. My own parents, I remember, once attended a convention of some visiting Hindu guru or swami, held at Wembley Arena, and my mother used to visit Hindu fakirs in London to have her future foretold. All this is by the by and, indeed, I came to learn these facts only later, and only later still would I grasp the significance of such things in the war of 1971.

On emerging from the forest of bamboo, then, I saw to my left the field and hillock, as I say. To my right was the hamlet. My body sensed imminent relief, and I could feel the sinews of my legs begin to yield to their tiredness. I approached the cluster of mud huts and shacks that comprised the family homestead, my grandfather’s and his sons’. Perhaps it was a kind of home. Something from infancy came down to me, not a memory but an echo heard many years later.

The moonlight threw a blue-white powder over the area, and I saw the moon itself glancing off the taut skin of the pond, bursting on the leaves of the coconut trees, transfiguring them into torches of velvet green. From time to time, I could hear the somersaults of fishes in the pond, while all around from everywhere and nowhere came the croon of crickets, geckos, and tree frogs, fused into a purring song.

A memory inside me was trying to wrestle its way through to consciousness. But to know that you once saw the same things, a landscape, a hamlet, and a house, in an altogether different way from how you see them now, and to know this without being able to recall the former memory itself, can cause a disembodying sensation. It is as if over time the self has divided in two, a mitosis of the man and his memory, that leaves the boy parting from his infant self, and later the adult from the youth, like the image of human evolution, from primate on all fours, through the savage half man, bent double, to the proud heir to earth,
Homo sapiens
, who walks tall, each man abandoning his predecessor, each stage only preparation for the next, and in the end childhood left behind, put away.

I saw, then, a form on the veranda of the main house, sitting on the step. I could make out a dash of long black hair, iridescent in the darkness, and the drape of a white sari over the bent form. The woman’s head was nestled in her crossed arms, which braced her hunched-up knees. She has not seen me, I thought. I stood there taking in the gifts of my senses, crickets plucking the air, the forest rising behind the huts, the treetops knitting into the blue fabric of the night, one moon shimmering in the sky and another floating on the surface of the pond. I picked up a loose stone and tossed it into the pond to watch the water strike up in a vibrating luminosity, a remarkable geometric precision.

The woman was now standing a few steps off the veranda, the whites of her eyes catching the light, her hair shining. I tried to imagine how I must have looked to her, but I was so tired all I could see was my body crumpling.

We both walked and, when we met, we stood for a moment, each regarding the other. She was in her midtwenties in those days, slender and beautiful, and I do not think I will ever forget the tenderness in her eyes. She lifted her hand to cup my cheek and then curled it around the back of my head and pulled me into her breast, holding me tightly. My body gave way, and the exhaustion from the day folded over me. This is how I began the next four years of my life in a village in the northeast corner of Bangladesh. They were the happiest years of my life, but they began with tears.

4

Welcome Home or Mother of Exiles

Knowledge, and especially disagreeable knowledge, cannot by any art be totally excluded even from those who do not seek it. Wisdom, said Aeschylus long ago, comes to men whether they will or no. The house of delusions is cheap to build, but draughty to live in, and ready at any instant to fall; and it is surely truer prudence to move our furniture betimes into the open air than to stay indoors until our tenement tumbles about our ears. It is and it must in the long run be better for a man to see things as they are than to be ignorant of them.

—A. E. Housman

The picture of the human condition presented here is in many ways disturbing. This might be a reason for some people not to read the book—perhaps those who lack familiarity with the ways of philosophical discourse, for the young, the very sensitive, and for those who are liable to depression. I ask the prospective reader to bear this in mind.

—Saul Smilansky, philosopher,
Free Will and Illusion
, author’s note

And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

—Ecclesiastes 1:17–18 [KJV]

In the month that passed before Zafar first spoke about Emily, he and I settled easily into a pattern. I gave him his own set of keys to come and go as he pleased, and at my insistence he took up the mansard of our house, which was maintained as a virtually self-contained flat for visitors and consisted of a large bedroom, a bathroom, and a box room under a south-facing window, which served as a study-cum-lounge. There was even a kitchenette, though Zafar would take his meals with me and, at the beginning, with Meena, when she happened to be home in time.