by Ayad Akhtar
Father abandoned us to our conversation shortly after Naseem’s mention of FDR. After I went to bed, I heard him talking softly with his sister in the backyard late into the night. I didn’t see him again until the following morning at the same dining table, where, after fried livers and parathas, we said our goodbyes. My cousin Yasmin—on two hours of sleep after her all-night duties at the hospital—was particularly moved and having some trouble feeling her arms. Emotions, she said, aggravated her MS symptoms. Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in her midtwenties, she’d spent four weeks with my parents in Wisconsin in the mid-1990s seeing specialists and depended now on the American medications Father sent her regularly, medications she could neither get in Pakistan nor afford on her own and that had put at least fifty pounds on her otherwise delicate frame. She joked about the weak embrace as she hugged me, then kissed Father, her face slick with loving tears. Father’s parting with his sister was especially moving. By daylight, my aunt Ruxana looked even gaunter than she had at dinner, but as she held her brother, her eyes blazed with grave and vivid joy. Naseem watched the siblings touch foreheads, my father’s hand to the back of his dying sister’s bald head, their eyes filling with tears.
After the crying and the goodbyes, we walked out to the car Naseem had hired to take us back to Rawalpindi, a midnight-blue Mercedes sedan driven by a dark young man with a shawl folded across his shoulder. His name was Zayd, a cognomen of the Prophet’s beloved adopted son, Zayd ibn Harithah, whose pulchritudinous wife—Zainab bint Jahsh—Muhammad would marry and make his seventh spouse after his Zayd divorced her, to my knowledge the only instance in which our Prophet married a sometime daughter-in-law. Our Zayd was clearly a religious man, his dark shoulder-length locks fanning out from beneath the strict enclosure of a tight white kufi on his head; every effort he made—opening the trunk, lifting and laying our bags inside, shutting the lid and opening our car doors—was accompanied by a quiet invocation: “Bismillah al-rahman, al-rahim.”5 Once we were settled in our seats, Zayd took his own in front and paused ever so briefly before turning the key to start the ignition: “Bismillah…” he whispered.
Father shot me a look and rolled his eyes.
The drive out of the northeastern part of the town took us past the dirt-road entrance that led to the compound where, at that very moment, Osama bin Laden was residing. We couldn’t have dreamed it. After wending our way along the side streets, past fields and houses surrounded by mud-brick walls, we found the main road. We drove until we came upon the military academy where Naseem taught—which Zayd pointed out—and where we paused for a cavalry unit at least forty strong to trot across the asphalt. Once we were moving again, it wasn’t long before we’d left the city limits and were speeding along the Karakoram Highway back south. That was when Father turned to me—irritated—and asked what was wrong with me. I told him I didn’t understand the question.
“I don’t remember the last time I got a word in without you adding your overeducated two cents—”
“Overeducated two cents—?”
“For a change you butting in would have been welcome. All that phony military talk, pontificating. I don’t know how Ruxana’s put up with him for so many years.”
“I wanted to let him speak.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to know what he thought.”
“Thought? Is that what he was doing? Thinking?”
“Dad—”
“Ingrates. That’s all they are. When he had heart trouble a few years back? What did he do? Came to America. The medication that helps his daughter? Comes from America. It doesn’t matter how much money they take from us, how much support—”
I cut him off; I knew this drill: “He wasn’t saying anything against America. All he said was that 9/11 was a brilliant tactical strike. That’s hard to deny.”
Father was incredulous. “So you agree with him?”
“Agree about what? I was trying to understand where he was going with it.”
“I know exactly where he was going. He was taking a highbrow shit on our country. It took all I had to keep out of it.”
“I think it was wise you did.”
He glared at me, then shook his head. “Unhappy. Both of you. You and your mother. You don’t know how to be happy. You don’t even want to be happy.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You think it’s so much better here than back in America?”
“I never said that. I don’t know why you’re—”
“Trust me, you don’t have a clue how terrible your life would have been if I’d stayed here. Not a clue.”
“Dad. Stop.”
“A writer? Hmm? Theater? You think they have that kind of bullshit here? Thirty-six years old and still asking me for money? You think anybody here would let you get away with it? You’d get laughed off the streets. If we were here?! You would be supporting me! Do you understand that? Why do you think Yasmin is still living at home? She goes to the hospital, makes her salary, brings it home, and puts it in her father’s hands. That’s how it works in Pakistan.” I’d heard it all before: that my mother pined for a Pakistan that no longer existed; that I’d stupidly bought into her nostalgia; that I was avoiding the hard truth about myself as a writer—if I still couldn’t make a living doing it, I probably wasn’t any good—and of course, above all, that I always failed to recognize just how much I owed my life to his decision to come to America. This last matter was a point of often injured pride with him. He’d been brandishing my supposedly unprecedented privilege and his exclusive role in it—for indeed, my mother had never wanted to leave their homeland—since the moment I could understand language. This line of attack always hurt, and this instance was no exception. But he’d paid for the trip, and I was only too aware that the familiar slights and complaints and his pleas for credit were part of the cost to me. Perhaps what also made it easier to bear with grace was knowing where the emotional strain in his voice was really coming from. He’d already lost one sister—when he was twenty-four—a wound he used to say would never heal. Yes, he’d been irritated by Naseem’s pedantry, but at root, even this irritation was about his sister’s illness. I knew it the night prior and knew it now as I listened to him go on: “Roosevelt? What does that stooge know about Roosevelt? What’s the use spending all that time reading those books about Roosevelt if you can’t be bothered to use the information when it’s needed?”
“What books?”
“The ones about Roosevelt you were carrying around every time I saw you.”
“Those were about Teddy, Dad.”
“Mhm?”
“The first Roosevelt president? Teddy Roosevelt? Not FDR.”
A brief pause would be his only acknowledgment of the misunderstanding: “It makes no sense. What’s it good for? All the education and you don’t say a useful thing when the idiot starts in with the nonsense. A fool like that will never understand the first thing about a man like FDR. That was a great man.”
“Ronald Reagan wasn’t such a fan, Dad.”
“Now you’ve got the wisecrack?—That’s nonsense, and you know it. Reagan voted for the man every time. I know for a fact.”
“And then spent every hour of his political career undoing the man’s legacy.”
He stared at me now, blankly, then turned away in disgust.
Out the window, the dramatic mountain vistas had given way to the familiar concatenation of sometimes ramshackle roadside constructions, stores and schools and homes, tea stands, food stands, pumping stations; the earlier evergreen of the Hazara steppes now replaced by sundry shades of drying earth, from ecru to umber, mud-brick walls and sand-brown lots and road shoulders, tan trails leading into the darker sunbaked fields beyond, and everywhere around us, clouds of turbid beige kicked up by the chaos of jockeying buses and painted trucks passing, honking, themselves dun with dust; even the late-morning sun seemed to color everything with a straw-taupe hue.
We rode in silence until Z
ayd’s flip phone sounded with a call. He answered in a dialect—Gujarati, Father would later tell me—I didn’t follow. But Father did, and when the call was over, he leaned forward to ask—in Punjabi now—for details about Zayd’s son. The boy had been burning up with fever since the middle of the night. Zayd and his wife had been trying to get a doctor to see him, but no doctor had shown. Father pressed him for details, and when he realized we weren’t far from where Zayd lived—outside the town of Hasan Abdal—he offered to take a look at the boy himself. In the rearview mirror, I saw Zayd find Father’s eyes, his hooded gaze bouncing from the road to the mirror and back. He seemed to be working through his surprise at Father’s kindness. There was no need for that, he finally said; the doctor they knew would eventually come and the boy would be fine, of course. Zayd was clearly moved by Father’s offer but didn’t seem to know how he could possibly accept it; the gap between us—poor rural driver in front, wealthy urban American expatriates in back—was not a gulf easily bridged.
But Father was insistent, and finally Zayd relented.
It was another ten minutes before we slowed and turned into a steep dip off the National 35. The bottom of the car’s front end scraped against the pebbled shoulder, and its wheels now searched for new purchase on a pockmarked path in the dirt. We sped up again, moving past a row of stores selling cell phones, wicker beds, fried fish. The road—if you could call it that—narrowed as it passed through a grove, and beyond it was what could only be described as a shantytown.
We slowed to a crawl as we entered. Everywhere around us were makeshift one-story structures built from soiled cloth, worn straw, broken bricks, rusting tin, plastic sheets, cardboard. They were tied with twine, bound with mortar, wrapped with ribbons of duct tape. Dogs rummaged and children played in eddies of debris—paper, plastic, rags, bags, bottles, the discarded appurtenances of modern, disposable life. From within these poorest of poor houses, families looked out at us as we passed, dozens at a time crowded into the tiny threadbare rooms. I’d been to my parents’ homeland many times but not once to a place like this.
As we crept along, our car wheels sloshed through a runnel of thick black standing liquid on the left side of the road—from the smell, clearly human waste—and children started to gather around us. They pressed their smiles into the glass. Two of them, a boy and girl, mounted the back fender, and the girl stood and waved like a festival queen on a parade float greeting her onlookers. Zayd honked lightly, and the children spooked—but not for long. Soon there were more of them than before, some now holding sticks they used to urge us along. Their heads were tousled, their clothes smudged with dirt, their faces lit up with a joy particular to each—the half-held smile of one, the crow’s-feet already forming at the edges of another’s eyes, the dimples, the delighted gazes. They were singing now, a song whose words I couldn’t follow, and as they sang, more faces appeared in the open doorways and windows with only hanging cloths to keep the heat and cold and fetid odors out. More children appeared, dozens and dozens of them, their gathered voices ringing out with a melody everyone knew.
And then, all at once, the singing stopped. They scattered and were gone.
I looked over at Father. His eyes were wet. “So poor, but still so happy,” he said with a sniffle. I wasn’t sure what he was crying about, really. I doubted it was the children.
We’d turned off the main artery onto a path just wide enough for the car, and shortly Zayd stopped before a large rusted box—what looked like the severed back third of a shipping container—with a clean green curtain mounted at the mouth, drawn shut now, the whole structure lifted from the ground and perched on a set of concrete blocks. The elevation, the simplicity of the single window treatment, set this shanty apart.
Zayd hopped out and pulled the door open for Father, muttering his bismillah. At the curtain’s edge, a woman’s small face appeared. Like Zayd, she was dark; her nose was pierced. As Father and I emerged from the car, she adjusted her dupatta to ensure her hair was fully covered. Zayd spoke to her in Gujarati and lifted himself up—there was no step—then reached back to help Father up as well. As they disappeared inside, I peered after them. The single room was spare, a faded red carpet covering much of the floor, shelves bolted into the walls, holding clothes and pans, a mattress barely large enough for two in one corner and, next to it, another much smaller one where their boy lay inert. Father’s fingers were already on the child’s neck, checking his pulse, prying open his sleeping eyes to inspect. There was a small box fan mounted on the right wall, and it kept the air inside the container surprisingly cool. Zayd saw me and approached. He kneeled at the opening and asked if I wanted tea.
“I’m fine,” I said in Punjabi. “But thank you.”
He pulled his cigarettes and held them out to me. I took one and let him light it.
In the alleyway, I smoked as I waited. It was cleaner here, the sickening odor of human waste easier to ignore. Across the way, an old man with a thick henna-red beard squatted against a plywood wall, a hookah to his lips. I nodded a greeting, which he didn’t acknowledge. Farther on, a trio of women leaned over a metal basin, washing clothes. From afar, I heard the children singing again, their motley chorus riding the breeze. Zayd appeared in the alleyway, lighting a cigarette as he joined me. His demeanor was different from the way it had been earlier—warm now, nervous, talky. He asked if what Naseem told him was true, that my father was a famous doctor in America.
I told him he was.
“Mashallah,”6 he said. “Are you a doctor, too?”
“Oh, no,” I said with a laugh that visibly perplexed him. “I’m a writer,” I said, which only seemed to confuse him more. My Punjabi was iffy at best, indulged and gently mocked by my extended family, most of whom had good English of their own. And though I’d been in Pakistan now for three weeks, it was only in speaking to Zayd that I truly realized just how bad my Punjabi was. “Yes. He’s a very famous heart doctor where we live in America. But he’s a good doctor for everything; very good with children who are sick. He loves children.”
“Mashallah,” Zayd said again. “Osama always has luck on his side.” Seeing my surprise, Zayd laughed. “My son, I mean. Not bin Laden Sahib.” I noticed him watching for my reaction as he took another drag. Exhaling, he brought his hand to his chest to indicate himself: “I’m Zayd. The Messenger of God, peace be upon him, had a Zayd, too.” He spoke now in a more formal, Urdu-inflected register, and his demeanor changed: “The Prophet’s Zayd had a son—and his name was Osama. Hazrat Ali was one lion of God. Osama is the other. A baby lion,” he said with a smile as he tapped away the ash at the end of his cigarette. Across from us, the old man was still squatting, lips affixed to his pipe as he watched us talk. The children’s melody sounded closer now, as if they were approaching from the alley’s other end. “It’s a beautiful story. Can I tell you?”
“Of course.”
“When Zayd’s Osama was ten years old, he started praying. One day he asked the Prophet, peace be upon him, if he could join the men in battle. ‘I am old enough to stand alongside you, the Prophet of God, in prayer, so why am I not old enough to join the war against the enemies of our Lord?’ Can you believe it? He loved our Messenger, peace be upon him, loved him so much that he wanted to be by his side even in the fight. Of course, he was too young. So the Prophet, peace be upon him, said no. But every year Osama would ask, and every year the answer was no—until he turned seventeen. And then our great Messenger, peace be upon him, said yes! And what a great fighter Osama became! So good that he became the youngest general in the army. Can you believe it?”
I offered a quiet mashallah of my own in response, not knowing what else to say.
Just then, the gaggle of children raced past us—no longer singing now—chased and chasing, slamming the Mercedes with their palms and sticks as they passed, screeching with unbridled glee. Zayd shouted at them as they disappeared down the alley. Across the way, the old man smoked, watching.
As
Zayd inspected his car, I burned with a question, mentally framing it in my meager Punjabi, searching for the proper measure of deference in my word choice to be sure I didn’t give offense. By the time I’d settled on the form my question would take, he’d returned to his place alongside me, satisfied, it seemed, there were no new scratches. “Do you hope your Osama, too, becomes a great fighter one day?” I asked. My worry had been needless; he was visibly pleased. And I couldn’t have expected how uncomplicated his reply would be:
“If he can give his life to make the world a better place, inshallah, if he can live up to the name he has—what more blessing could a father ask for?”
Footnotes
1 Thus it is that armed prophets succeed where unarmed prophets fail.
2 When I was in college, Surah Al-Muzzammil would end up on my reading list for the Meccan unit of my Islamic Studies class in the history of the Quran. I recall sitting in the first-floor reading room of the university library, looking up from the pages of the translation we’d been assigned, catching hold of the image of my uncle turning in our guest-room bed mixed and mingling with the picture of the person who, since childhood, had always been the Prophet to me. That image was, itself, some version of a person I’d known who had no connection to the Prophet whatsoever. He was a man I’d seen as a very young boy in my father’s village whom my father seemed to love. We were by the village well; they were laughing; then they hugged. I remember the green scarf tied to this man’s head, a long black mustache above his lip, a booming laugh his joy released. I remember looking up to see a metal pail pouring water into an earthenware jar as large as I was. For some reason, this man I would remember being called Tafi, though my father recalls no such person. I can’t tell you why Tafi somehow became the Prophet in my mind, but he did. Whenever my mother—or her sisters, or her mother—would tell me tales of the Prophet, I saw Tafi in the role, which meant my every thought of the Prophet was dressed in some version of that green scarf and handlebar mustache, not to mention ringed with a liquid, unbridled joy.
