In the Light of What We Know (21 page)

6

Blood Telegram or Bill and Dave

The very fact that the totality of our sense experiences is such that by means of thinking … it can be put in order, this fact is one which leaves us in awe, but which we shall never understand. One may say “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”

—Albert Einstein, “Physics and Reality”

The earth is home to a creature, a great ape he calls himself, that has taken on the task of explaining the universe, of accounting for all that there is, his world, his social world, his physical world, the fall of empires and apples alike. The creature is now wending his way along the corkscrew path of his evolution, inside a few splintered years hewn from a vast time line not of his own making, a time line that goes back to some soundless bang venting all the nuclear waste studding the voids of space, a time line that goes far forward, beyond the day when this creature’s biological changes will make him as charming to his descendants as his artists’ impressions of the first biped hominid are to him now—a time line that will long outlive the hour his planet perishes in the final blaze of a dying sun. Does it not strike him as disturbing that the explanations of the world he finds are intelligible to him? Has he not paused to consider that if he finds an answer, it is only to a question he is capable of asking? Until he learned better, he said that man was unique among creatures for having language, unique among creatures for having reason, unique for the gift of conscience, unique for conceiving other minds, unique it seemed in every way. The animal’s hubris now persists in his idea that the truth beneath what he perceives, from the cosmic out there and forever to the mundane here and now, and even the man-made, that such ever-present truth as he believes there could be will not exceed his capacity to understand.

—attributed to Winston Churchill in Zafar’s notebooks

The first time, said Zafar, that I visited her mother’s home, Emily, her mother, her brother, and I sat in the drawing room nibbling at Bath Oliver biscuits, sipping dusty Earl Grey, and discussing nineteenth-century novels, apparently only the four of us in the house. At that moment I had no reason to think otherwise.

In a room that took up virtually the entire floor, we were settled into a sprawling arrangement of sofas, enough for us all to maintain a decent distance from one another. The furnishings of the room could have placed it at any time within a hundred years. The salmon and peach upholstery, the fireplace and its brass guard and magnificent stone surround, the pleated pelmet concealing the curtain rails above the mullioned sash windows, the shiny black Bösendorfer piano watching us silently, its fall board shut, its rack empty of sheet music, yet its great lid open pointlessly, like the unfurled sail of a boat on a windless sea. Everything in the room sounded the measures of inherited wealth. On one wall there was a small display of portraits of Emily and her brother as children, and of Fitzwilliam, the border terrier, all three portraits evincing the same weight of brushstroke, unadorned by color, the same regard for light and shade. There were side tables here and there. One beside me bore several stiff white cards, leaning against three vases, invitations to events with words printed in great swirling flourishes, the Lord and Lady So-and-so request the pleasure of the company of the Honorable Penelope Hampton-Wyvern, “At Home” on the next line. The dates for all, I noticed, were past. And there was another table that caught my eye, made of mahogany with an elaborate ivory inlay, which might have looked ostentatious, I thought, if much of its surface had not been covered by images. Beneath the cream shades of a table lamp cast in wrought iron and porcelain and another lathed from dark woods, there were photos in small gilt frames, some old and gray, some in sepia, and a few in color. I took in all the photographic images as one impressionist claim on my senses. Only months later, when I came closer to them, would I look upon one of these photos, a photo of Emily, with, well, nothing short of horror.

Apart from the lighting, the only other traces of modernity were tiny white speakers mounted on the wall above the white bespoke bookcase that was seamlessly merged into the wall, which was to become, as I’ve explained, the subject of conversation with Penelope. It was this bookcase itself that commanded my eye the longest, enough to register its form and to recall how I spent the summer vacation before college.

I began that vacation working at the same restaurant as my father, waiting tables alongside him. The plan was to earn a little money to help the family, as during the previous Christmas and Easter vacations, but on this occasion my father hinted that I might also get to keep a portion of the pay to supplement the bursary that was to see me through college. In those days, a means-tested award from the state meant that nothing, not one penny, would have to come out of my parents’ pockets; tuition and maintenance expenses would be covered. But after one week at the restaurant, everything came to an end.

The staff referred to my father, who was the head waiter, as “the Major.” Though my father was never, as far as I know, a major in any army, the proprietor, an old man who had fought for the British in Malaya, and whose son had served in the Indian army during the 1971 Indo-Pakistan War, had given my father a rank and title that fitted his sturdy frame and the authority of his voice.
*
I think that for the old man, as for all men whose wars have made them, time pivoted on an hour when he was tested.

Down in the kitchens, at a small round table in a corner, against jute sacks of rice, drums of vegetable oil, and tubs of ghee, beneath a fluorescent tube, where staff took turns to grab a half hour for lunch, I sat with my father and the head chef, each of us with a plate of rice and the “staff curry” of mutton and stray vegetables, eating with our hands.

Between mouthfuls of food, with particles of rice trickling from his mouth, the head chef gave me some advice.

I hear you’re going to university, he said.

Yes, I replied.

A good man, your father, he said. Not many of our people send their children to university.

He lifted another handful of rice and curry to his mouth before he continued.

They all want their boys to go into this dreadful restaurant trade, he said. But what good can come of it?

The chef had no children of his own.

I hear, he added, it will be expensive for your father. You must work hard to fulfill his hopes just as he is working hard to pay for your tuition.

My father did not say a word and neither did I. But later, after midnight, as we returned home, he suggested that I might want to think about doing something other than waiting tables that summer.

I did not express any emotion then, when my father made his suggestion. I simply did not feel anything I recognized as anger, and even if I had, I knew of nothing in him to appeal to. But when the head chef praised my father for an unearned credit that my father then failed to deny, I did feel something. I now know the meaning of the flash of tensing in the muscles across my chest, the name of the quickening of breath and pulse. I know also that the only anger I was aware of in those days was my father’s, my mother’s, too, as she goaded him on, and that I had always been holding back an anger—the anger I owned—that was only growing. For a long time, including the day I met Emily, I believed that decent people did not wish to cause suffering. This I now know not to be true. I know also that within me a rage was building, gathering mass and momentum from the varieties of injustice, with each humiliation—humiliations we shrug off because, we say, we’re better than that, better than them. But how arrogant is it really to think we’re above anger? Arrogant and incorrect. In fact, my true self always knew better. That self was acquiring the psychological means for wreaking utter violence. The fury, in fact, was never far away.

That night when my father suggested I look for work elsewhere, I accepted his suggestion without debate. And so it was that I came to work on the renovation of houses. In July 1987, on a day not nearly as warm as it was bright, I took a bus from Willesden Green to Kensington, uncertain what it was I hoped to find there, but like the economic migrant who travels to the West, I thought vaguely that opportunities abounded in the streets of the affluent royal borough. Besides, I wanted to see more of Kensington. I had been there once, that winter when I hitched a ride to go to my college interview in Oxford. Kensington, I had thought then, seemed a world away from Willesden.

When I arrived, I walked through the streets, through its many mews and lanes, and I saw scaffolding and boarding and Dumpsters in the roadside, mounting with the rubble of construction, so many that they might all have submerged themselves beneath my senses had I not been specifically looking. I saw numerous renovation projects, and so I knocked on doors and asked if there was any work. No, mate, and Nothing here, mate, came the reply over and over. And then I changed my tack. I’ll work for you for nothing, I said, and if after a week you like my work, you can pay me whatever you think is right.

*   *   *

I joined Bill and Dave, carpenters—chippies, they called themselves—from opposite ends of Essex, two giants in tough canvas shorts, pockets full of tools, and leather belts studded with clasps for mallets, chisels, and screwdrivers. One wore a red Arsenal shirt. Bill and Dave were working on the renovation of a five-story Georgian house on a crescent-shaped terrace.

The building was legally protected by English Heritage, so any renovation work was subject to rigorous controls. Bill and Dave were highly skilled: Later, I’d see that the fact that their vans always looked spotless told you everything about their clients, the buildings they worked on, and the streets on which the vans would be parked.

Because the terrace of adjoining houses followed the curved contour of the street, the rooms in the house weren’t entirely square, which presented certain difficulties in the construction of furniture fitted into corners. This fact became useful to me.

Bill and Dave had come in near the end of the renovation project to deal with various woodwork, such as bespoke furniture, skirting, dadoes, and picture rails, and to reconstruct four flights of stairs. The existing staircases, while sturdy, were irretrievably damaged by carpet adhesives and decades of tread. Moreover, since the carpet had been removed, successive repairs over time had left the stairs with a mishmash of materials, including a number of makeshift chipboard risers and treads. All the furniture—bookcases, cabinets, and wardrobes throughout the house—would be constructed on site, except for the kitchen cabinets, which the two men later confided to me were actually off the shelf. Nine times out of ten the owners can’t draw, said Bill, and can’t even describe what it is they want. They’re bankers and lawyers, he said. Bill and Dave would then show them a catalog, just for ideas, and right as rain the owners would pick something out and say they wanted that, just that, and no they didn’t want to buy it off the shelf but wanted it made to measure, tailored to their lovely house, so that it had that personal touch, the real thing, not something you could find in any house in the area. Exactly like that, they’d say, still pointing to the picture in the catalog.

They can’t tell the difference, said Bill.

Can’t tell their arses from their elbows, said Dave.

At first, all I did was clear up after these two men, fetch tools and materials, and maintain a steady supply of tea and custard cream biscuits, as Bill and Dave went about their diligent business of bringing wood and other materials to life, while plumbers, electricians, and painters came and went around us. When the day ended I’d pack the power tools into the two vans, and in the mornings I’d unload them again and set them out where they’d need them in the house.

I warmed to Bill and Dave quickly. I remember that both of them always said “thanks” or “cheers, mate,” even to each other. Such words did not seem to figure in the vocabulary of Sylheti, a language in which, rather than saying thank you, one balanced the whole sentence on terms of deference to age or class. This had the effect, I had noticed, that those who were senior in age or higher in class weren’t required by the language to indicate deference and were therefore saved from stooping for the tools to express gratitude.

My mother had always winced when I said please and thank you. Thank you, I’d say when she gave me a second helping of rice and curry. Or thank you when she handed me a lightbulb as I stood on a chair to change the ceiling light. Thank you was an English phrase that ruptured my spoken Sylheti. My mother would grimace and insist that I stop saying it. Because we never had that kind of relationship, I could never ask her why. I have thought that she couldn’t bear to hear me say thank you because it signified how far away I’d moved from the culture and values she had inherited, even then. But over the years that have passed since boyhood, I have come to regard such explanations, where mere cultural difference is invoked at every turn, as facile and unilluminating. I now consider her distaste as having had a quality of depth I had not attributed to it before. I think the woman who had raised me, who had provided a family for me, however flawed that family was, was offended that I had turned the web of duties, which bound a family together, into the mere exchange of favors, thank you and please standing for reciprocation. In her mind, I believe, a network of duty and service, tightened under centuries of evolution, had been reduced by my thank you to the trading culture of the West. It was duty and obligation, not measured gains, that reinforced the bonds within the extended family to make something stronger than there would have been otherwise, strong enough and large enough to endure hardships. My understanding came much later, though. But in the summer before college, when I heard Bill and Dave say please and thank you, occasioned at every turn and gesture, I was charmed.