In the Light of What We Know (16 page)

My favorite was his pronunciation of the
h
in words like
how
or
help
—he pronounced it like the
ch
in
loch
, a wet, rasping sound. I used to taunt him with my imitation: Chello, Sergey, chow can I chelp you? I would say.

Did you know, he asked me once, that there are eight ways of pronouncing
o-u-g-h
in the language of the English?

He proceeded to recite them, while counting each one off on his fingers.

Yes, he said, there is
tough
,
cough
,
through
,
though
,
bough
,
ought
, and, finally, there is
borough—borough
the way the British pronounce it.

I looked at his hands.

That’s seven, not eight, I said.

Okay. Seven or eight, what does it matter?

Sergey loved my mother’s cooking and wanted to learn how to cook “the Asian food,” as he called it, even though in America in those days, and still today, “Asian” is used to refer to people from China, Japan, and other parts of East Asia. I often came home from school, one street away, to find him in our kitchen hovering about her, helping my mother prepare a meal, my father still at the physics department; inevitably she would be laughing. He described her cooking as “chemistry with flavor,” though, in his pronunciation,
flavor
rhymed with
hour
, which mystified me until my mother explained that he was rhyming the British spelling,
flavour.
Why that was an adequate explanation to me attests to Sergey’s eccentricity in my eyes.

When my mother teased him about his pronunciation, he would threaten to teach her “horrible Russian words and you would not know what you are saying.” My mother had taken up learning Russian around this time—she’s a superb linguist, fluent in French and German, as well as in South Asian languages, of course. Sergey would declaim in Russian—“unspeakable words”—with riveting melodrama. My mother’s hand would jump to cover her mouth and, taking a step back, she would feign horror.

Sergey was also something of a handyman around the house. He put up shelves and even did a bit of plumbing, replacing the taps in the kitchen sink, as I recall. He helped me make a sled for the winter snow and hung a swing in the garden, a tire at the end of a rope tied to the branch of a tree. Then Sergey suddenly left. I remember asking my father if Sergey was going to bring back my bike, which he’d taken away to mend, to be told that he’d already left for a professorship somewhere. My father was cross that Sergey had failed to return the bike, but within minutes we set off to replace it, and, after my initial distress, I was rather pleased by the whole deal. The new bike was a lot better than the old one, and I remember that my father insisted we also buy a chain and lock for it.

In Princeton, our circle of friends included graduate students and professors, people from the four corners of the world, as I say, and our house was always an open and friendly place. But I see now that in the absence of all things Pakistani, an aspect of my parents’ lives was kept at arm’s length. For Friday prayers, my father did not attend a Pakistani mosque, as he does now on the Cowley Road in East Oxford, for there were none in Princeton, nor did he meet with other Pakistanis to pray. Instead, he would drive to Lawrence, outside Princeton, where a small Arab Muslim community would assemble in someone’s home, an immigrant outpost clustered around one family.

There were rare episodes when I sensed what might be pictured as a tiny hollow space within me, along some inward edge, a sensation that I have struggled hard to describe in my own mind. To borrow language from my father’s world of physics, a black hole might make its presence felt by its gravitational effects on something nearby. The black hole itself is by its nature incapable of being observed because nothing can leave it, not even light or any electromagnetic radiation. It is the feeling of missing something without conscious awareness of what it is you’re missing, though even this, I think, rather overstates it. Perhaps that’s what friendship can do: the presence of another indirectly giving us better access to the hidden parts of ourselves.

I remember an assembly at the beginning of the school year when I was seven or eight. The teacher explained that our grade was going to stand up on the stage, and one by one we were to say “Welcome” in our mother tongues. When the teacher asked me to speak in Pakistani, I certainly didn’t know what to say. For that matter, I didn’t even know to correct the teacher and say that Pakistanis might speak Urdu or another language but never Pakistani, just as Belgians might speak French or Flemish but not Belgian.

We left Princeton for the U.K. in 1981, and my parents slowly began to express again their Pakistani heritage. Then, entering my teens, I sensed their transition, while at the same time I grasped that during the years in Princeton my parents had shut something out. There was, I understood later, a reason for it all—for holding Pakistan at arm’s length: We had been ostracized.

5

The Situation in Our Colonies

And what you thought you came for

Is only a shell, a husk of meaning

From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled

If at all.

—T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

Sometimes, Tom, we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.

—John le Carré,
A Perfect Spy

Would you care for a Bath Oliver? said Penelope Hampton-Wyvern.

In a restaurant in Knightsbridge, Zafar related his first encounter with the Hampton-Wyverns—with Penelope and James.

I’m sorry? replied Zafar.

Would you like a biscuit? she asked.

You should try one, said James—that is, if you haven’t had one before.

I took a biscuit from the plate. Very nice, I said.

A bite crumbled in my mouth.

They’re made, said Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern, to the same recipe William Oliver of Bath confided to his coachman in 1750.

I’ve never had such an old cookie before, I replied.

Do you like the books? asked Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern.

I’m sorry?

You were looking at the books. Some marvelous first editions. Trollope, Thackeray, and Eliot among them.

T. S. Eliot?

No, George.

Yes, of course, I said weakly.

The conversation fell away, as if my error had marked a precipice. Of course it’s
George
Eliot, I thought. You idiot. Those three were contemporaries. T. S. Eliot came later. And he wasn’t even British—at his end maybe, but not at his beginning.

Have you read
Daniel Deronda
? I asked, breaking into the silence.

The tale of the Jew, replied Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern.

Only he discovers he’s Jewish much later, chimed in James.

These days every man’s discovering the Jew in himself, said Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern.

I liked it, said Emily.

I did not ask what Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern meant; I didn’t want to risk finding out.

Wasn’t he illegitimate? said James.

The Victorians, said Emily, were obsessed with illegitimacy.
Bleak House
and
Little Dorrit
and
The Woman in White
are all about that—illegitimate children with maids and fallen women. It was quite personal for some of these writers—some of them had illegitimate children themselves.

Oh, yes, now I remember. The Bastardy Laws, said James.

This drew a smile from everyone.

Illegitimate children inherited nothing, Emily said.

Emily sat with her knees pinched together, her hands resting on them, fingers interlaced, and her heels backing up against a foot of the couch. Her elbows were pulled in, almost touching.

They had no legal standing, continued Emily, unless the father made some specific provision for them.

Yes, but when he did, said James, it made for excellent drama at the reading of the will!

Don’t forget, I interjected, the drama of someone trying to bridge the class divide.

I preferred
Middlemarch
, said Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern. It’s always nice to learn a thing or two from a novel, don’t you think?

The Great Reform Bill, which broadened the electoral franchise, said Emily.

The Act, not the Bill, Penelope pointed out.

But not to women, added James.

Even so, the Tories were quite resistant to the Bill, I interjected.

Yes. I suppose I should declare a family connection of sorts, said Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern. A great-uncle of mine, Lord Launceston, was one of the few Tories who supported it.

James snapped up from the sofa, plucked a book from the shelf, and handed it to me.

The hard cloth-bound cover fell open, like the lid of a cigar box. I drew the tips of my fingers over the coarse paper and let the pages leaf out until the title sheet appeared.
Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life, By George Eliot
.

It’s lovely, I said.

Thank you, said Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern. It’s rather a nice collection, if I say so myself. Took some time to put together. My grandfather was quite a bibliophile, you know.

Zafar is incredibly well-read, said Emily.

I was actually admiring the bookcase itself—I mean the furniture.

James grinned. Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern looked at me earnestly.

What do you like about it?

It has a good finish. Someone has taken care and I like that.

But it’s nothing special. You don’t think it’s special, do you?

It’s effective and sometimes that’s enough to make something special. Neither ostentatious nor, nor—

Reticent?

Exactly. It has the right molding for the room, picks up the dado, and all the edges are properly chamfered so the eggshell won’t chip or wear for a while yet. You can see, too, even at this distance, that the paint’s been sanded between coats.

You’re able to see that?

Bad paintwork shows a mile off, I replied, especially on MDF, since it absorbs so much paint. In fact, if you don’t give MDF a heavy primer to begin with, I continued, you end up having to lay on five or more coats of emulsion, which in turn increases the risk of paint runs.

Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern was nodding agreement, as if already familiar with this. For the first time, but not for the last, I wondered if I was being manipulated.

You then have to take even greater care to sand between coats, I added.

As I talked to Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern, I noticed Emily’s posture: her eyes fallen to the floor, her shoulders slumped.

It’s a nice bookshelf, I added inanely.

How do you know it’s made from MDF and not pine or a hardwood or even ply? asked Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern.

MDF, I replied, is a standard material for this sort of furniture. It’s cheap—if it’s going to be painted, it doesn’t make sense to splash out on wood, so to speak. Bookcases and cabinets make good use of alcoves either side of a chimney breast. You can see, by the way, that the bookcase wasn’t installed at the same time as the rest of the woodwork in the room, such as the architrave around the door and the dadoes, because its skirting doesn’t precisely match the skirting boards where the walls meet the floor, although, very sensibly, the carpenter who built this didn’t try to form a ninety-degree miter joint where the two skirting boards meet, which would simply have failed to key up, but instead scribed the skirting of the cabinets at the bottom of the bookcase over that of the wall.

I wanted to ask a question, but I knew that to do so would be to call attention to something potentially embarrassing. How does someone of her background—her social standing, which defines so many Brits—how does she know about MDF and ply? Brits are embarrassed—are required to be embarrassed—about showing they know about something that doesn’t properly belong to their orbit in life. And here I knew it in my bones that there was some kind of embarrassment just around the corner. I don’t know what tipped me off. I cannot point to anything specific that signaled the presence of a potential embarrassment in the room, but the presence was unmistakably there. It might have been the way Emily leaned forward in the same moment or the way James’s eyes glanced upward or perhaps it was the ear recoiling from the dissonance between the rugged contraction “ply,” instead of “plywood,” and the rest of the honorable Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern’s speech. I don’t know. Embarrassment is possibly the paramount emotion of the English, and efforts to avoid it account for many of the small peculiarities of social life in England.

Mentioning “miter joints” and “scribing” should have called forth questions from Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern, if she had been unfamiliar with those terms of trade, if only to ask out of surprise how
I
knew about such things. People do that, they ask you how you come to know about something, whenever the conversation shows you know a thing or two about a field of which they themselves know nothing.

It is possible, looking back, that the fact that I hadn’t hesitated to use such language—miter joints and scribing—might have suggested to her that I’d noticed she had a knowledge of the carpenter’s vocabulary, that perhaps I had caught her reference to “ply” and caught her familiarity with things of which she
ought
to know nothing. It’s possible she was sitting there wondering why I wasn’t asking her how
she
knew about MDF.

Therein lies the heart of the matter: England and an English education, in which to carry knowledge was a social act, a statement of class and position. At Oxford, young men and women sat on oak benches in the wood-paneled dining hall, beneath large gilt-framed paintings of great men. Here were Adam Smith, Cardinal Manning, and Charles Algernon Swinburne peering down the lengths of their noses, knowingly. Over there were three prime ministers of Britain, there were writers, judges, and field marshals, and there were dukes and earls, enough to fill an entire legislature. One day Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, more recent old boys, may join them, but for now, beacons of the age of Empire illumined the great hall, their white flames of hair, their ermine, their cocked heads full of mission, their fucking belief and self-belief commanding obeisance. And beneath these paintings, beneath the vast vaulted ceiling, there sat men and women—boys and girls, many still in their teens, for God’s sake—speaking as if their every utterance was borne aloft by God’s grace, as if their opinions resonated reflection and scholarship, effortless superiority in the place of effort. They inflated what little they knew to fill the voids. Because everyone knew and accepted this—a prerequisite of being in denial—no one upset the precarious suspension of disbelief, everyone was complicit in a stage-managed pretense. This then, right here, against the stone and ivy, beneath leaded windows and time-beaten timbers, is where my hate began. In England, the root of true, rightly guided power, the essence of authority, was not learning but the veneer of knowledge, while projecting genuine ignorance of all that is vulgar. This applies to the new aristocracy as much as it ever did to the old, to the
neoaristocracy
, an international elite waving passports bloated with visas and residence permits, permanently everywhere, shielded from the vulgar by fast tracks and VIP lounges.