In the Light of What We Know: A Novel
Zia Haider Rahman
Picador India
R599
Pp 556
IF THERE were as many epiphanies as there are epigraphs in Zia Haider Rahman?s debut novel, we would hail him as a writer of indubitable genius.
We might describe him rising phoenix-like from a nest of burning thorns from a distant hilltop in a remote corner of Bangladesh, taking wings and flying amongst the greats. Or even compare him to the strange salamander-like creature?one he describes as an ?axolotl??he invokes in one of his densely-crammed chapters. It must be admitted that Rahman?s ability to introduce random observations about the world, about his own reading, famous propositions, ideas or theorems?like the one about mathematician Kurt Godel?s ?Incompleteness Theorem? that he flings at the reader right at the start of the book?is both exhilarating and irritating.
Would it have been apt to include an index at the end along with page references for the numerous notes that ribbon the text? Does it indicate a lack of confidence in him to communicate the many layers of experience he had to traverse before being able to present himself as a fully-grown participant in the world of letters? Or is he the 21st century?s version of Nirad Chaudhuri, the diminutive Bengali who climbed up the storied mansions of European culture and sipped at its fountains with an irrepressible glee? Probably not. The world has become a much darker place since then. Rahman and his object of study, Zafar, the polymath scholar-activist, are too burdened with the scars of their blood-soaked beginnings. Zafar?s inheritance forms a part of the traumatic aftermath that he shares with the numberless orphans born out of the 1971 carnage that led to the breaking away and formation of Bangladesh.
Like the axolotl, Zafar?s is a type of forced coming-of-age, with western education forming the stimulant for his growth. Perversely, the extra edge that his intellectual abilities give him is also the one that makes him most resentful of the privileges that allow him to trawl the higher echelons of academia?his adoptive parents took up lowly jobs in the UK after fleeing Bangladesh?but never enjoy it.
Or to quote from his analogy: ?An axolotl is a kind of salamander. Salamanders start off as one thing but at a certain stage in development they metamorphose into another, rather like toads from tadpoles, very much like them in fact. The interesting thing about the axolotl is that somewhere along its evolution it decided that it wasn?t having any truck with this change thing and it remained at that tadpole-like stage before metamorphosis??
?So how is it a kind of a salamander if it can?t do that?? asks the narrator of the book, whose story along with Zafar?s twists and turns through the book, so much so that often the reader does not know who is picking up the thread.
While Zafar?s interaction with the world is fuelled by his sense of ?entitlement?, as he calls it, the narrator is presented as one emerging out of a privileged background of genteel academia-groomed parents, who may have left Pakistan for their own reasons. They are presented as examples of the noble bien pensant intellectual elite of the subcontinent who are at home as much in Princeton as they are in a pub at Oxford, where they eventually settle. All this even while their son, the unnamed narrator, slogs it out as a banker in London with a wife called Meena, whose background, not being quite what they might have liked it to be, has a tendency, as noted by Rahman early on, to not just smile, but ?to let out a laugh?.
Zafar?s upper-class girlfriend Emily has, what we are told, ?the Duchenne Smile??never mind if you don?t understand what it means, as Rahman has provided a note on it.
?Ah, well, here?s the interesting thing?, replies Zafar. ?If you inject an axolotl with a solution of iodine and a thyroid stimulating hormone, and you shouldn?t try this at home, then the axolotl does in fact metamorphose; it goes through a radical transformation in hours or days and turns into something very much like a tiger salamander? But once an axolotl is induced into metamorphosis, its life span shortens and it can never go back to what it was.?
If we are to read this right, Zafar?s English education has been the stimulant that has transformed him from a harmless axolotl into a tiger salamander. With passing references to the Twin Towers and America?s role in Kabul, we are given to understand that there are several tiger salamanders roaming the planet?s troubled spots. Would they have been happier being left to remain as axolotls?
This is just one of the many examples of his vast learning that Rahman dangles before us. When he tells us in his narrator?s voice that Zafar ?seemed to be raging against some unseen enemy and spoke of such things as class, privilege and networks with shocking ferocity? or that in one encounter he managed to almost throttle a pair of skinheads, as they were walking down the mean streets of London, it could be his pent-up rage that he is channelling. Nonetheless, Rahman is enough of the polemist to make real the ride from Bangladesh to Kabul and to describe the nuances of sipping tea and eating Bath Oliver biscuits in the hallowed sitting rooms of the English upper classes reviled so long ago in John Osborne?s Look Back in Anger. As for the epigraphs by the end of the book, you realise that his use of epigraphs is, in fact, the epiphany.
Geeta Doctor is a Chennai-based writer
