Syed Muhammad Hur Jaffri — The Open Manuscript

Two — The Report Card

I was nine when I first understood the mechanism.

I had brought home a report card. Not a perfect one — I want to be accurate: it was not perfect. But it was good. Better than the previous one. Better, in two subjects, than my cousin Tariq's, whose academic performance my father referenced with a frequency that suggested Tariq existed primarily as a unit of measurement rather than a child.

I put the report card on the table in front of him. He was eating. He picked it up without putting down his spoon. He read it the way he read everything — with the expression of a man reviewing a bill he suspects has been padded. Looking for the problem. Organizing his attention around the assumption that a problem exists and that the problem, once found, will explain everything.

He found it. He always found it. This time it was mathematics — a seventy-four where, I would learn later, Tariq had scored an eighty-one.

He put the report card down. He said: "Mathematics is weak."

Not: you improved. Not: the other subjects are strong. Not even: we will work on mathematics together. Just: mathematics is weak. The statement of a deficiency, clean and complete, delivered with the tone of someone confirming a long-held suspicion.

I said: "I went up in Urdu and Science."

He said: "Mathematics is the foundation. Without the foundation nothing else matters."

He picked up his spoon. He resumed eating. The report card remained on the table. Later I picked it up and put it in my room and sat on my bed with it and tried to feel the thing my mother had said he felt — the pride she said existed somewhere, inaccessible, locked away. I pressed the report card against my chest and tried to feel it through the paper, the way you try to feel warmth through a wall you know has a fire on the other side.

The wall was very thick.

I began to understand the mechanism more clearly over the following years. It operated like this:

There was always a counterweight. For every thing I did well, there existed, somewhere in the landscape of my performance, a thing that had not been done as well, and this thing — however small, however peripheral to the actual achievement — would be located and placed on the scale opposite the achievement, and the scale would be tilted toward it, and the achievement would be found, by comparison, insufficient.

The counterweight was not always academic. Sometimes it was behavioral: I had been too loud at dinner the previous week. Sometimes it was comparative: a neighbor's son had done the same thing at a younger age. Sometimes it was predictive: this was good, but what about next time, what guarantee was there that next time would be the same, excellence is not a destination it is a discipline and one good result proves nothing about discipline.

The counterweight was never the same weight twice. It was always exactly heavy enough to tip the scale. This required, I realized much later, a form of precision that was itself a kind of skill. To consistently locate and deploy the specific counterweight that neutralizes any particular achievement — this required attention. It required knowing what the achievement was, how much it weighed, what would be needed to offset it. He was paying attention. He was always paying attention. He simply directed the attention not toward what was there but toward what was missing.

A man who looks only at the gap in a wall will never see the wall.