In the Light of What We Know

After going through the book Professor Mohitul Alam realizes that perhaps we do not know much. It is now up to the readers to decide.

In 1981 I got admitted in a Canadian university for postgraduate studies. Having attended my first class, I saw my professor beckoning to me to follow him. He led me into his office and there was a world map on the wall, and he grabbed a pencil from his desk and told me, “Show me your country.”
Thirty-three years after I find a similar question bothering Zafar, the alter ego of the unnamed hero, now-emerged as a foremost modern classic, In the Light of What We Know (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. Pp. 555), written by a Bangladeshi expatriate, Zia Haider Rahman.
Zafar says, “The point I want to make is that when I'm specifically asked if I was born in India (sic), my reply--that I was born in Bangladesh—generally meets one of three reactions” (p. 389). The three reactions are (1) recognition, knowing where Bangladesh is, (2) acknowledging being corrected, that is not confusing Bangladesh with either Bhutan or Burma, and (3) satisfaction for being corrected.
“Which used to be India, right?”
“Correct, I replied.” (p. 390)

This bit of patriotism is what the book is pervaded with, and along with raving reviews it has received from the likes of the Guardian and the New Yorker Review of Books claiming that it is an astounding debut novel, where, as Salman Rushdie once said, everything happens, the book with its crispy language, sharp observations and insightful comments, and deft characterization in one or two strokes, is a fascinating read. The story develops through an anxiety line: the narrator is on the verge of not only losing his high-profile corporate job but also his wife Meena by a divorce, and amidst this arrives his long lost university friend, Zafar, one morning in September, 2008 at his South Kensington house, completely disheveled and unkempt.
From this reunion proceeds the novel on a parallel track, the unnamed hero merely posing as a prober of his friend's rather mysterious life, while his friend covers most of the narrative, and who also reports that he worked in Afghanistan as an adviser to the new administration. Interestingly enough, he was practicing law in Dhaka, when Emily invited him to work for the Afghanistan children. But this plotting based on the creation of an alter ego necessitates the narrator assume an enforced parentage of Pakistan origin (“My father was born into a well-known landed family in Pakistan, where he met and married my mother,” p.3), but it hasn't quite worked as the ambience of the book suggests that the unnamed narrator sounds more like a Bangladeshi rather than his friend, Zafar. On the other hand, Zafar is conceived as a Bangladeshi, of Sylheti parentage, who arrived in Oxford in 1987 to study Mathematics, but who doesn't sound like a Bangladeshi for the very fact that on his return to his home country, he meets with a woman, and then the novel doesn't elaborate anything further in this respect. The writer obviously has adopted the alter-ego technique to avoid making the novel sound autobiographical, but the reader finds himself being challenged in acquiescing to this arrangement.
Giving testimony to the writer's great intellectual capacity, every chapter of the novel is decked with epigraphs from the likes of Edward Said, Sir Winston Churchill, W. H. Auden, etc., while serious excogitations too take place on items from insurance to profit making, from corporate chicanery to individual dishonesty, as well as a three-page comprehensive discussion on Mercator's maps, triggered by the memory of a passage from Maugham's novel, The Razor's Edge, appears with remarkable aplomb merely as a footnote. But constructionally all this pales before the enormous capacity of the writer for digressions, which yet do not detract from the mainline theme. The best example of the employment of this technique is found in Zafar's recounting his journey to Sylhet, his birthplace, where he was sent by his parents to stay for a few years. As the train carrying him approached a bridge near Srimongol that had a girder missing, he got down from the train and decided to walk across it. The bridge broke down and the train fell into the river. Partly intuitive, and partly cognitive as the decision was, its emphasis, however, is strengthened by a digression to the story of Joya, a neighbour's daughter in London, whom the writer's family knew during his childhood, who one day jumped from her flat to death, and the thought of Joya comes here because of the similarity between the height of the bank of the river from which the people were looking down at the submerged compartments of the train and that from which Joya jumped. This is stream-of-consciousness nuanced by Hartley's concept of association of ideas.
Zafar is a first-class Mathematics graduate from Oxford, and Einstein's friend, the great mathematician, Kurt Godel, is his guru, whose Incompleteness Theorem has possessed him and seems to provide him with the guidelines on how to live. The theory in the writer's paraphrase is this: “Within any given system, there are claims which are true but which cannot be proven to be true” (p. 10). While the narrator spends about four hundred more pages to grasp the implications of the theorem, only at the end of the book does he seem convinced—as Zafar also understood—that life is not a matter of understanding, but rather a declaration of ignorance and uncertainty of knowing, like the confusion one can make in distinguishing Einstein and Godel from each other when they are seen from behind walking “on the path from Fuld Hall to Olden Farm” (p. 555) in Princeton, New Jersey. This theory, if I understand correctly, questions every received idea, every final decision, every final settlement as being only half-true, and thereby it reflects the Tagorean philosophy as explicated in his famous poem, “Sonar Tari” (The Golden Boat), that life is basically an unending affair, in the sense that one toil ends to begin another toil.

The writer Professor Dr. Mohit Ul Alam is Vice Chancellor of Jatiya Kabi Kazi Nazrul Islam University.