In the Light of What We Know (29 page)

I overheard two young women sitting at an adjoining table.

My friends think I’m mad, said one. They’re always saying, Cheryl, you’re mad, you are. But I think it’s all right, you know. It’s like you got to be a bit crazy, otherwise you’d go mad.

Mayonnaise is just posh salad cream, innit?

I suppose so, replied the one.

It’s American, right?

No, I think it’s French.

Yeah, but why do they say, “Easy on the mayo,” then?

On the telly?

Yeah.

Americans like French stuff.

You like it, don’t you?

It’s not as greasy.

You mean salad cream?

Greasier than mayo.

What’s pastrami?

At another table, a young American was talking about his yoga class. He complained to his friend: It was like someone in the room was draining my green energy.

So why, Zafar asked after he returned, did the meritocracy matter to you back then? It’s not as if you’d suffered because the world had failed to recognize your merits.

I expect you’re going to tell me.

I think it’s tougher for people like you. You guys make the right calls and things happen, whereas regular folks—
like me
, he said, shooting me a grin—regular people have grown up knowing full well the world is unfair. We don’t expect anything different, and we’re so battered by the unfairness that we don’t even hope for anything better. The world is—and I’m not trying to use your words against you; or were they my words?—anyway, for most of us, the world is what it is. You guys are the idealists.

Finance, I said, is by and large a meritocracy, and that’s a good thing. You can’t fault me for wanting to be a part of that. After all, you got something out of it, didn’t you?

But you weren’t really attracted to finance because of what it was but because of what it was
not.

Here we go again, I said. I think I might have rolled my eyes.

Finance is not about connections, it’s not about who you know but what you know, it isn’t like your grandfather’s world, with secret deals on golf courses and in country clubs, kickbacks and Swiss bank accounts.

You don’t know him.

I don’t have anything to protect by lying to myself.

I think Zafar was wrong, but the irony is that I so wish he’d been right. The fact is that my own early success in finance did owe something to connections, connections that have now come home to roost.

What’s your point? I asked.

You could have tried for academe, but what if you’d failed? Or worse still, what if you’d ended up with a second-rate lectureship at a second-rate university somewhere? What would your father have thought? Ivy League or why bother? Now, finance, on the other hand, that was safer. At least you couldn’t be compared to your father or grandfather.

Or maybe I just knew what I wanted, I replied.

The conversation now taking place did not feel like two friends trying to figure something out. It had none of that affection and trust of conversations on our walks everywhere else all those years ago. There was instead an earnest, impatient drive to get to the root of things, dispensing with the markers of friendship. More than once, he’d asked me,
Why does it matter to you?
, a mischievous question that he loved. But this time there were no accompanying smiles, no unspoken gentleness. If anything, his comments and questions seemed presumptuous; I hadn’t seen him in years. One of those articles my father sent was about some studies that show that while every person thinks he himself has changed hugely over time, those close to him typically think he’s changed very little. Was that it? Did he think that he knew me because he believed people didn’t change?

Do you look down on Meena?

The question caught me by surprise, but that was Zafar’s way.

You think I do.

You don’t want children with
her
, do you
?

Come on, Zafar.

Class isn’t something you look at, it’s not stuff around you. It
is
you, it’s the eyes with which you see the world. And you have to look in the mirror to see your eyes. Do you know what Bertrand Russell said about mathematics?

I expect he said a lot about mathematics.

About why he liked mathematics?

No, but I bet you’re going to tell me, I said, slightly irritated by the all-too-familiar didactic tone.

A hundred pounds?

Tell me.

Russell said he liked mathematics because it was not human and had nothing in particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe—because, like Spinoza’s God, it won’t love us in return.

That may be true, but how is it relevant?

You know that Russell was a philosopher and a mathematician, but he was also the grandson of a prime minister and in fact he was an earl himself. Mathematics is as far removed as you can get from that background.

But there have always been aristocrats in mathematics.

Yes, there have, in the one field where station and position and authority don’t matter a jot. Who you are counts for nothing. In 1900, at the second International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris, David Hilbert gave the keynote address and set out his famous ten problems, mathematical propositions that needed to be proven. Hilbert, as I’m sure you know, was the towering figure of mathematics in his day, a man of huge authority and unrivaled mathematical intuition. One of the problems was proving the consistency of arithmetic, and Hilbert believed the proof was close at hand.
*
But within thirty years of Hilbert’s challenge, a young man by the name of Kurt Gödel, at the very outset of his career, a man with no record of achievement, let alone anything to rival Hilbert’s, showed that the great master himself was wrong and that mathematics could not be proven to be consistent. And that was the end of that. Mathematics doesn’t care about authority, it doesn’t care about who you are, where you’re from, what your eye color is, or who you’re having supper with.

*   *   *

Zafar’s conversation seemed that day to amble here and there, but as I come to consider it again, I find two strands joining together—the impossibility of correcting the misperception of optical illusions and the question of authority for truths. In his notebooks is this note:
In order to catch even a fleeting glimpse of the world, we must break with our familiar acceptance of it.
Is such a goal beyond our ability, beyond mine?

My parents were born in West Pakistan, one half of an improbable state established at the partition of India in 1947 amid the hurried retreat of the British Raj. Pakistan consisted of two regions separated by all of twelve hundred miles, the width of modern India. East Pakistan was to become Bangladesh, where Zafar was born. These were, as he described them, two wheels unconnected by an axle, two wheels that were bound, and not only in hindsight, to go their own ways. The peoples did not share a language, they did not share the same food, they did not even share the same religious attitudes.

In 1971, West Pakistan sought to suppress what it saw as rebellion in the East. My father and mother, then recently arrived in the U.S., opposed the militarism of the West Pakistani junta and made their feelings known to fellow Pakistanis in Princeton and farther afield.

All this had come out before I went to Oxford. At a certain point I started to ask and my father answered, at first with a trickle of information. When I returned with more questions, he and my mother spoke about it extensively, even when, I must say, to recall those days caused visible discomfort.

My father once asked Zafar where he was born. It was late in the spring of Zafar’s final year at Oxford, and we had both been invited to supper at my parents’ house. As I recall, the evening was unusually warm and so we sat in the garden, although every few minutes my mother asked whether we should move inside.

By that time, the years of my parents turning their backs on Pakistan had long ended. Talk of Pakistan and events there had been brought back into the home. When my father asked Zafar where in Bangladesh he was born, I saw that the past, Pakistan’s past and his past, were not so distant, for it struck me that my father had never before asked Zafar what was an obvious and natural question, especially among South Asians. I had been foolishly slow about all this. The war of 1971 and the holocaust of West Pakistan’s conduct in East Pakistan, his criticism of his homeland, the ostracism and then my parents’ disengagement—all of this was a history of personal suffering that my father carried with him.

I had never connected the dots before, but when I considered at that moment my father’s affection for Zafar, my friend who was born in Bangladesh, I could trace back the warmth of feeling to their very first encounter, and I saw that my father’s attitude had always possessed an aspect of hope.

I was born in the northeast, in Sylhet, replied my friend.

I know Sylhet, said my father.

Your grandfather, said my mother, directing her comment to me, was stationed there briefly in 1943, in the dog days of the Raj. I believe it was a staging post for the British campaigns in Southeast Asia, she added. Sylhet was part of Assam in those days, I think, she said, turning to Zafar and my father for confirmation.

It was, said my friend. As a matter of fact, in 1947, two parts of British India were allowed referendums to decide whether or not to join Pakistan. One was North-West Frontier Province, whose Pakhtoon majority threw in their lot with Pakistan rather than neighboring Afghanistan. The second was Sylhet, which was cut out of Assam after the population decided to join Pakistan’s eastern wing. But the referendum wasn’t quite a resounding victory for accession to Pakistan; in fact, the part of Sylhet where I was born voted against joining Pakistan and for remaining within Assam and therefore within India.

This I did not know, said my father.

Loyalties were quite divided but in a way that was masked by outcomes.

That can’t have helped the people there in 1971, said my father.

When East Pakistan seceded? I asked, keen to join the conversation.

Yes, said my father.

No, I expect it didn’t help, said my friend.

Over the course of the evening, we talked about South Asia, about its troubled history, about my grandfather’s service for the British during the Second World War, and about the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, which led to the Indo-Pakistan War at the end of that year.

My father explained that in 1971 he was a critic of West Pakistan’s military suppression of East Pakistan. Although he himself had nothing to apologize for, there was a note of regret in his voice.

In the first few months of the war, he explained, he wrote a letter to
The New York Times
—we were in Princeton then—condemning West Pakistani aggression. To its credit,
The Times
published it. Why, he continued, should the editors have bothered? After all, this was a war in faraway lands of which they probably knew nothing and cared less. British necks, not American ones, carried the chain of colonial guilt, and America had nothing to do with Pakistan.

But the truth of the matter was somewhat different, as we now know, said my father. In 1971, while the butchery was in full swing, Pakistan was a conduit for secret negotiations with China. In July, Kissinger detoured to China in total secrecy while visiting Pakistan to clear the way for Nixon’s visit. The Americans, you see, were relying on Pakistan as an intermediary, even as the slaughter was raging.

We all listened to him quietly.

On the morning of March 25, 1971, under plans drawn up on five sheets of paper by two majors in two days, the army put into action Operation Searchlight. Perhaps Zafar knows about this, said my father.

But Zafar said nothing. I’m not even sure that my father was expecting a response. My father was talking as if talking were necessary, and perhaps Zafar had understood this. I wondered how much my friend already knew about those events. I myself was ignorant of so much about Pakistan. That day I told myself I would set aside time to remedy this, but the years came and went and I never did. I’d made the same promise to myself before but never kept it. Only now, prompted by Zafar’s return and the circumstances of work and marriage, not to mention the world’s new interest in that region, have I gone back over the past and taken time to discover more.

Under Operation Searchlight, my father continued, every Hindu and every potential opposition element in Dhaka was to be killed. Journalists and lawyers were systematically hunted down. Doctors and engineers were killed, academics and other professionals.

You spoke out against this, didn’t you? I interjected.

Many others also did. There were American diplomats who wanted their government to condemn Pakistan, but Nixon was playing Cold War games.

It must have been very difficult for you in the Pakistani community, said Zafar.

It’s all past now, but yes, it was hard at the time. I’m afraid to say we were shunned by Pakistanis in Princeton and New York.

We received threatening letters, said my mother. But, she continued, your father knew he had to speak out.

My father poured us all some more tea. The garden air was perfectly still.

When India intervened in December, I was relieved. Of course, I was sad for my countrymen, sad for the poor soldiers, as ever fighting wars for idiotic leaders, but I believed that it would be over soon, which it was, and that Pakistan would emerge from it all, from its own moral reckoning, a wiser and less belligerent nation. It was naïve idealism.

My father stopped there and poured some milk into his tea. The rest of us were silent.

But you know, even two days before the final surrender, when Pakistan had no hope of victory, the army carried out one last operation in Dhaka, rooting out as many intellectuals as they could and killing them.

From her slight leaning toward him, you could tell that under the table my mother had taken my father’s hand.

Well, the war ended, continued my father, but Pakistan’s troubles were only to carry on in one shape or another. As for Bangladesh, with three million dead, hundreds of thousands of women raped, and an entire generation of its professionals, its engineers, its doctors, its thinkers and doers exterminated, that poor country was hobbling on its infant feet.