In the Light of What We Know (56 page)

Hello, Emily.

In the half-light, I could see him well enough. But he moved in the shadow cast by the floodlights behind me, my shadow, not Emily’s. When he came close enough, he strained to make out my face. My black hair, dark skin, and dark suit would have made it difficult for this man, I thought—and for Crane, for that matter—to see me. He was blond and handsome, his hair cut short, stubble roughening the edges of his youthful complexion. His khaki jacket was open and its collar was upturned. The pockets of the breast and waist were buttoned down, all four. There is method there, I thought. It was a jacket design with pedigree, tested and proven: Even the clothes have a colonial descent. His shirt collar was open, two, maybe even three buttons, so that a twist of jewelry in the nape of the neck, a gold chain perhaps, caught traces of light. He couldn’t have been more than thirty. Few expat men and women with families would do these development jobs, Hassan Kabir had explained to me back in Bangladesh. Marriages don’t survive the strain. What strain? Let’s be precise about this. The strain of infidelities within a band of danger junkies charged up every hour of the day with power, horny at the threat from dark alien powers, ancient and obscure, and aroused by the power they themselves command, which they could never wield back home in their established democracies.

Zafar, this is Maurice.

Emily introduced me.

I noticed the order because the usual pattern in social situations is for the new arrival to be greeted and then introduced to present company:
Hello, Maurice. This is Zafar.
But I could make nothing of it. Sometimes, a phallic object is just a phallic object.

Hello, Zafar. Pleased to meet you.

We shook hands, his firm and decisive, mine its usual rather feeble thing. Though I cannot know, I think I have never felt present at the moment a male sizes me up. I am only observing. Which is not to say that it is an unimportant moment. Quite the reverse. When a handshake has a sure and steady grip, it’s filled with the significance of how someone wants to be read, how he wishes to be regarded, even if it comes in the form of ingrained habit.

I’m sorry for the disturbance, he said in an accent that rolled the
r
into the beginning of a gargle at the back of the throat. Bloody Americans, he added.

He motioned his head in the direction of the gates. Crane was no longer there. Maurice held a bottle of champagne by its neck. Had he just bought it at the UN bar or had he brought it from elsewhere, unbagged, unveiled? In New York, liquor sold off the premises has to be packaged in a brown paper bag, but not here, far from the puritans.

I suppose that’s the price of having a bar, he added, referring to Crane’s behavior.

But who pays? I asked under my breath.

Pardon?

Indeed.

We continued toward one of the residential buildings.

Where are you staying, Zafar?

If Maurice had seen me at AfDARI, he certainly did not recognize me. If he’d been notified of my stay, perhaps he didn’t recognize the name.

I’m staying at AfDARI, I said, in one of the guest rooms.

His brow furrowed and there passed over him a look that lacked a precise definition. It contained puzzlement but also included recognition, a troubled element, identification, and even deduction. Something to do with me being at AfDARI? Was the crux of the anxiety to do with Crane or with Emily or with something else altogether? And in the midst of those fusing facial expressions, I wondered if I had perceived in him a question, too,
What did I know?
, though nothing of what I perceived could be relied upon, so complete was the confusion, his perhaps but mine certainly.

Barely had we entered the apartment and Emily completed the introductions to Joanna and Philip, when Maurice excused himself.

I’m afraid I cannot stay. The French ambassador, he has called me away and … well … you know. But I wanted to make you a small gesture.

He handed over the bottle.

There was the expression of regrets all round, and he took his leave. When he shook my hand, he made no eye contact.

The room was large enough for two beds, a small sofa, two chairs, and a table to one side, covered in files and papers. A naked lightbulb hung from the ceiling, and a large Afghani rug lay in the center. There isn’t anything remotely interesting to say about Joanna and Philip. I’m sure they are nice enough people, but I found myself in no mood to chat, no mood for conversation, either honest or polite. Philip was an earnest man in his late forties with the squat physique of a wrestler. He was thinning on top, and on his face lay a moist sheen that didn’t quite coalesce into sweat. He tried his civil best to get the conversation going, but I’m afraid to say I didn’t help. Technically, it was a dinner party, for there was dinner.

I asked them both what their work involved and how they’d got into the development business, and if I don’t go into that now, it’s because it bored me then to hear it. Joanna and Philip didn’t ask me what had brought me to Kabul. Had they detected my lack of interest? Or did they not ask because Emily had given them an explanation—did she represent me as her ex-boyfriend or her boyfriend?—or was it because she’d told them that she’d asked me to come—were they that close to her?—or was it because she’d told them that the UN rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan had asked me to come—but how would she know that?—or was it because there were already numberless new arrivals in Kabul, would-be development wonks, skulking about the city waiting for a Western development agency to throw some meat their way, and they, like all hyenas, needed no explanation when the smell was in the air? In those days, where else could anyone want to be?

Joanna wanted to know more about what I was doing in Bangladesh. That I was living there, Emily must have told her. I said that I was working on reforming the Bureau of NGO Affairs.

That can’t win you any friends, said Joanna.

Luckily, I’m rather antisocial, I replied.

I probably should have been more gracious. Probably I should have smiled.

What does the Bureau of NGO Affairs do? asked Philip.

NGOs have to be registered with the bureau, and foreign donors can only send money to NGOs in Bangladesh with the bureau’s blessing. So bureau officials hold up the process and demand bribes. There are activists in Bangladesh trying to push through reforms that would change the processes and eliminate some of the opportunities for corruption.

Who are you talking to?

Quite a lot of people in government and in Parliament want to see change, but they can’t speak out easily—they’d be fired of course, and then they’d have no influence whatsoever. The Bangladeshi constitution actually entitles a party leader to expel her own MPs from Parliament without cause, something you don’t see in most parliamentary democracies.

Is that true?

I don’t know. It’s what I’ve been told over and over and what I’ve read in the constitution. There’s a curious provision originally put there at a time when coalition governments were hugely unstable because of the large number of political parties. A single MP could cause havoc simply by threatening to switch to another party. The point of the constitutional provision was to stop self-serving, wayward MPs before they destabilized government and forced elections every ten days. When the provision was adopted, I don’t imagine anyone had given thought to perverse consequences down the road.

Why don’t they change it now?

It’s a constitutional provision, which means it’s hard to change, and for obvious reasons party leaders love it.

But you say some of these people will talk to you?

Yes. Some civil servants and politicians, braver than most, though not in public yet.

And what kind of changes are you talking about?

Nothing that hasn’t been thought of before.

Such as?

I’m sure this can’t be all that interesting to you.

No, it is. Go on, said Joanna.

Emily said nothing but just stared at me. She always fixed her stare on me if I was party to the conversation. I used to feel rather flattered by it, at the beginning taking it for admiration, as a man might do, but I soon began to wonder if she stared at me out of a curiosity, even a variety of perverse delight. Emily never said a controversial thing in her life, always the voice of moderation and good temper, politic and circumspect to perfection, and it occurred to me that her staring was evidence of some lascivious pleasure in the ever-present threat, whenever I was talking, that I’d drive a bulldozer over social norms.

If a donor wants to send a hundred thousand dollars to a Bangladeshi NGO, they have to submit paperwork to the bureau before they can do so. The bureau then goes through a rather mechanical process to make sure everything’s in order, ostensibly, for example, to make sure the money’s not going to fund some terrorist outfit and so on. What happens in practice is that some or other official holds up everything. The donors or NGOs know that a bribe smoothes things out. A simple piece of legislation could make quite a change, a bill introducing a deeming provision in the statute books, to be precise. If the bureau doesn’t inform the donor in, say, three months of any concerns it has, then the relevant paperwork would be deemed by law, the new law, to have been processed and the donor can go ahead and send the money in the safe knowledge that they’re in compliance.

But won’t the corrupt bureau official just say that he informed the donor that there were problems with the application and that the donor and NGO went ahead despite being notified?

That’s where technology comes in. Everything’s online and transparent so that anyone can log on and see what’s happening to a donor application for bureau clearance. If the bureau raises any queries, it would be required to specify those on the Internet file for that application. Again, if no queries are listed there, then the legal provision would deem there to be no queries at all. The key point is that the whole thing would be transparent to everyone and everyone would be involved in policing it. Actually, I think the donors rather than the government might be more uneasy about it.

Why?

Because everyone’s so fixed in a mind-set of secrecy. Even if there’s nothing underhanded going on, secrecy is the culture. I sometimes wonder if secrecy is an end in itself for all these people, donors, NGOs, the UN, the development community at large, if it confers some kind of reward on the human psyche. Perhaps secrets are power not because of their content but because only the select know. The bureau, by the way, could do a lot more positive things. Making the pool of information it gathers transparent and open to all, for instance, could help disseminate lessons learned from NGO projects, save the reinvention of wheels, and ultimately coordinate efforts for maximum impact.

It would need funding.

Possibly, but not necessarily a lot, and it would probably save many times its cost. Small but key changes in a system can have a huge impact. On the other hand, it might not work.

Too many obstacles?

No, it might not work even if we did get there. My reasoning could be wrong and my estimates of numbers might be wide of the mark. More than that, it’s the unknown unknowns that bother me even if I have no clue what they are—because I have no clue what they are.

Joanna and Philip chuckled. Donald Rumsfeld was loathed in Kabul, and his comically philosophical maxims were the butt of many jokes, but still I had to admit that his distinctions between known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns were insightful and useful.

Hindsight makes it hard to see what was predictable and what wasn’t. What worries me is that there might be questions out there that I haven’t thought to ask. Isn’t that the history of international development and Western beneficence: unknown unknowns invoked to legitimize excuses for what comes to pass when their preponderance should be a restraint on intervention in the future? I’ll tell you this, I added. One question I don’t know the answer to is what the hell I’m doing here in Kabul.

Isn’t there a lot to be done? Afghanistan needs good people, said Philip.

I looked at Emily.

I’m flattered, but it’s not my war. It’s dreadful, I said.

The war itself is over. The Taliban are ousted.

The war has only started.

And the country should be left to rot?

The white man’s burden. How far will he go in the name of helping his inferiors? The country should be left
alone.

Philip might have taken offense, but he had the self-restraint not to show it.

You’re in a better position to help than most.

How’s that?

Well, as a Bangladeshi and a Muslim you have a lot more credibility here, a lot more authority.

I don’t know where to begin with that one.

Begin where you like, he replied.

That—his tone—was, I thought, the first show of male aggression, the first display of antlers. He’d held out for quite some time (and much longer than me). This is why men of his class of Britisher make such fine diplomats.

Credibility with whom?

With the Afghans.

Because the new colonials care very deeply what the Afghanis think.

Philip didn’t seem to register my irony.

As for helping the people of Afghanistan, I’m not a missionary, I don’t have the faith in my own ability that you do in yours, faith to do good, faith in the rightness of your cause and the truth of your methods. Missionaries were at the vanguard of the British Empire, many of them genuinely believing they were doing God’s work and never questioning their role in sanctifying the exploitative project. You will know what Archbishop Desmond Tutu said:
When the missionaries first came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.

We should get out, I added, and steer clear. I have no place here.

The room became silent. Joanna, sitting on the sofa, had parked her eyes on her knees. Emily was looking at Joanna, perhaps, I thought, to apologize. Philip, the thoroughgoing Englishman, pretended that nothing had happened, and for that I was grateful. I had become carried away. Even in my agitated state it was evident to me that anger was taking over my bearing, and it alarmed me. Something was gathering in me, as if armies had been summoned from all corners and the ground bore the first tremors of their approach. Now I might call them armies of injustice, humiliation, and defeat, but at the time I felt them as only the beginning of a kind of end.