In the Light of What We Know

In the Light of What We Know (2014) is Zia Haider Rahman’s critically acclaimed debut novel. Drawing from his own biography—born into rural Bangladesh, Rahman became an extraordinary academic success, with stints at Oxford, Cam

bridge, and Yale, and a career as a Wall Street banker and human rights lawyer—Rahman constructs a narrative that balances several genres: unreliable first-person narrator confessional, mystery novel, and novel of ideas. In it, a well-established but recently disgraced investment banker encounters an emotionally damaged and angry mathematician with whom he had a brief friendship earlier in his life. As the visitor lays out his life story, he and the banker ruminate with erudition on questions that range from philosophy and mathematics to the relationship between Britain and its former colonies—conversations that are dense and heavily footnoted. The novel won the prestigious British James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature.

The novel is wide-ranging and broad, enough so for some reviewers to claim that it “challenges any attempt at summary.” Nevertheless, here are the broad strokes of the plot.



We meet the unnamed narrator in 2008, just after the financial crisis. He is the scion of a wealthy and privileged family: His grandfather was the Pakistani Ambassador to the US and his father was a physicist at Princeton and Oxford. After an academic career at Eton and Oxford, the narrator became an investment banker. Now, his wife is in the process of leaving him and he has just been fired for trading the mortgage-backed securities that brought down the world’s financial system. In disgrace, he retreats to his luxurious house in London’s swanky South Kensington neighborhood.

One morning, the narrator is surprised to find a disheveled man at his door. Eventually, he recognizes the man as Zafar, a friend from their time in Oxford in the 1980s, whom he hasn’t seen in many years. Zafar is a math prodigy whose life never lived up to its promise and is now shrouded in mystery. Over the next three months, Zafar tells the narrator his life story, using his diaristic notebooks to supplement his story. The contents of these notebooks make up the rest of the novel.

Zafar grows up in poverty, born in a Bangladeshi village that was “a corner of that corner of the world.” When he is five, his family comes to England, where his father works as a bus driver and waiter; he describes his parents as “staff,” or as “peasants in the sense that connotes nothing pejorative.” When he is eight, the family goes on vacation where Zafar tells white would-be friends that his name is George. Zafar grows up deeply aware of class and status, especially as he is isolated and bullied at his mostly white London school; his origins mark him in a significant way.



When he is 12 years old, Zafar returns to Bangladesh when his parents decide that he should get to know “someone in particular.” The whole experience is traumatic. After a plane ride and a long car trip with a distant uncle, Zafar takes a train to the countryside. Shocked to see a crowd of people that all look like him on the platform, he befriends a boy his age. The train halts when it comes to a rickety-looking bridge. Zafar walks over it, waiting for the train on the other side. However, as the train starts to cross, the bridge gives way and the train cars plummet into the river below. Zafar never sees the boy again and walks the rest of the way. Once he is in the village, the “someone” turns out to be his biological mother—Zafar learns that the man who raised him is actually his uncle, whose sister was raped by a Pakistani soldier (Zafar is the product of that rape).

Zafar grows up vaguely ashamed of his parents, who continue wearing traditional clothing and never fully enter his intellectual world. After he gets into Oxford, they react with the mildest of interest and then only visit him there once. At Oxford, Zafar and the narrator both meet Emily Hampton-Wyvern, a beautiful and cold woman whose effect on Zafar will drive most of his future decisions.

After Oxford, Zafar becomes a derivatives trader in New York, where he again encounters Emily. She is deeply, inherently upper-class English, and although she is never really described as having any personality or character traits aside from perpetual lateness, Zafar falls madly and borderline unrequitedly in love with her. One stringent criticism of the novel from several reviewers is its treatment of female characters, who are almost universally treated as objects for the male gaze and never have even the slightest interiority.



In the 1990s, Emily and Zafar have a short-lived relationship and get engaged two months into their relationship. Nevertheless, even when they are together, she never seems warm toward him. She doesn’t introduce him to friends and laughs at his expressions of love. He, however, sees in her the “allure of the aristocracy and of Oxbridge […] bastions of Britishness,” as the critic James Wood puts it.

Zafar ends up in a mental institution, where Emily never visits him. Instead, she is unfaithful and becomes pregnant (possibly, although the novel never fully specifies, the narrator is the father). When she tells Zafar, he is overjoyed and imagines them as a family. However, without much explanation and after indulging Zafar’s paternal fantasies, Emily decides to get an abortion—and a few months later, Zafar learns that the baby wasn’t his in the first place.

A few years later, still obsessed with Emily, Zafar leaves Wall Street to become an international human rights lawyer. Learning that she has traveled to Afghanistan as part of a UN reconstruction effort, he also goes to work there on behalf of the UN Rapporteur on Afghanistan. Seeing the Western agencies’ greedy and self-serving dealings with the country, Zafar hates them—although at least a part of his reaction is the transference of his feelings about Emily.



At one point, this anger and hatred boil over, and after a bombing, Zafar attacks and rapes Emily—something he only confesses to the narrator at the very end of his narrative. Zafar is unable to describe the rape in detail, and the narrator is very eager to forgive his friend. The narrator is far more concerned with the effects of the rape on Zafar’s fragile psyche than on Emily’s—something that the novel doesn’t seem to wonder about much.

Zafar doesn’t seem particularly repentant or remorseful about his actions. Instead, the novel ends by celebrating the two men’s friendship and their intellectual match. Zafar leaves the narrator’s house and sends back a thank-you postcard with a picture of Einstein and Gödel walking arm in arm.