by AMITAVA KUMAR
Author Zia Haider Rahman PHOTO/Katherine Rose
In the Light of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahman
Another month, another bright young star in the firmament of Indian writing.
I didn’t write that sentence. It appeared in these pages almost 14 years ago, in August 2000, opening a review of a debut novel written by a young writer who was an investment banker on Wall Street. When I first read that line, I remember wondering how long it would be before the lights were turned off and the attention of the literary marketplace moved to another patch of the sky.
I had reason to be nervous. At a writers’ festival I had attended in Connecticut earlier that summer, a leading literary agent had told the audience that editors and publishers were turning away from Indian fiction — as well as homeopathy books.
I can’t speak on behalf of homeopathy books, notwithstanding my fond nostalgia for the slim, corked vials on my mother’s night stand during my childhood years, bearing poetic names like Belladonna, Arnica and Pulsatilla. But books in English with their origins in the Indian subcontinent are an entirely different matter. Since the year 2000, there has continued to be a lot of planetary motion in these skies.
In diverse genres, but primarily in fiction, writers from India and (especially after the attacks of Sept. 11) from Pakistan and Bangladesh, as well as Sri Lanka and Nepal, have released work that is riveting, often formally inventive and certainly relevant. Mohsin Hamid, Kiran Desai, Arundhati Roy, Suketu Mehta, Sonali Deraniyagala, Mohammed Hanif, Monica Ali, Samrat Upadhyay, Nadeem Aslam, Rahul Bhattacharya, Siddhartha Mukherjee — these are only some of the glittering names to glide into view alongside older, bigger planetary bodies like Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Vikram Seth and Anita Desai.
“In the Light of What We Know” is a debut novel whose author has worked as an investment banker on Wall Street. Like its protagonist, Zafar, Zia Haider Rahman was born in rural Bangladesh and educated at Oxford and other places before following a career as a trader and lawyer. The novel’s narrator is a Pakistani-American friend of Zafar’s from his days at the university, a rogue banker in London who has taken a fall after making a lot of money for his firm from mortgage-backed securities. The narrator’s task is to listen as Zafar tells his story after showing up at the door early one morning in 2008, disheveled and apparently destitute.
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(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)