Homeland Elegies: A Novel

by Ayad Akhtar

  “Unlimited thistle delivered to your East End Avenue doorstep anytime.”

  He smiled, but thinly, as if battling a disturbing thought. Back at his seat, he poured himself—then me—more whiskey and, setting the bottle down on the floor alongside his chair, began to tell me a story in which I would eventually descry the outline of all his essential choices. It was about his father’s attempt to start a mosque, first in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and later up the road in Scranton. His father’s name was Aftab, and he’d never been particularly religious back in Pakistan—or so Riaz had been told by people who’d known his father back then. In America that all changed. Homesick, Aftab substituted faith for his homeland, Riaz believed, and became the sort of Muslim who always fasts and never misses a prayer.

  Back then, there was nowhere to pray with the community on Fridays, nowhere to take your kids to learn their Quran, nowhere to practice your Islam with others like you. As the Muslim population in the Lackawanna Valley grew—and it grew quickly—Aftab became fixated on the idea of opening a mosque. He was no imam, so he didn’t feel he could do it on his own, but he knew a grocer in town from Egypt, Alaa Ali, who’d studied at Al-Azhar University, in Cairo. Aftab approached Alaa Ali, and the two of them plotted to get something going.

  On Main Street in Wilkes-Barre, not far from the barbershop where they both got their hair cut, there was an empty storefront. Both had the thought it would make a perfect little mosque. They walked by it together one Saturday morning and noted the phone number in the window. Aftab called it when he got home. By week’s end, they’d put a deposit down on a lease.

  Word got out through the chamber of commerce that a mosque was going into the empty storefront, and neighboring businesses went to the city council to stop it. But Aftab and Alaa Ali prevailed; in less than two months, after a modest build-out, their new mosque was open—and there was trouble from the start. It was early fall, 1979. There was no longer a shah in Tehran, and Khomeini was saying lots of very nasty things about what America had done to the Iranian nation. Then, of course, came the hostage crisis. That first week in November, the front door of the mosque was spray-painted with silver crosses; not too long after that, someone smashed a window and tossed a pig’s head into the foyer. Riaz remembered helping his father scrub at the bloodstained grout between the tiles. It wouldn’t come out, and they would end up retiling the entry.

  Police reports were filed, but nothing was done. The local sheriff looked like Mr. Clean and knew what he thought of Muslims, namely, that they needed to go back to wherever they came from, which is what he told Aftab to his face when he tried to follow up about the complaints. On the last day of Ramadan that year, the congregation at the new mosque was so large there wasn’t room inside for everyone to pray. Worshippers spilled out onto the sidewalk and front lawn, prostrating themselves in unison, muttering Arabic verses—to the abject horror of many a Main Street onlooker that day. Sheriff Clean showed up with his men in the middle of prayer, barking orders and manhandling the prostrated Muslims to their feet. Riaz was twelve and saw his father thrown against a squad car and cuffed.

  A year of harassments followed, culminating with his father being accosted by the aforementioned sheriff when Riaz’s younger sister—then fourteen—attempted suicide and ended up in the ICU. It seems the sheriff had seen some Nightline piece about a Muslim honor killing in Germany, which convinced him there was more to the girl’s attempt on her life than adolescent angst. He stopped Aftab in the hospital corridor and demanded to know how often he beat his children. The episode would turn out to be one humiliation too many. Aftab resigned his position at the Wilkes-Barre mosque, which shuttered its doors.

  At that point, Aftab was working in Scranton. Interest rates were falling, and the junk-bond craze had begun. Young financiers were flush with easy money and using it to take over companies, chop them up, sell them off, and pocket the proceeds. The glass manufacturer where Aftab supervised operations was just one of countless companies to succumb to this, the era’s poisoned fate. For months Aftab worried about what would happen to his job until he realized his managers would keep him if he helped them figure out how to cut costs. Aftab worked up a solution to increase the plant’s efficiencies that resulted in eighty-five pink slips, and now the Rinds became local pariahs for a reason other than their Islam.

  As all this was transpiring, Aftab was hatching plans for a new mosque in Scranton. He found a small building on the city’s north side he expected would draw less attention. He collected funds from the community for a deposit and was waiting now for approval of the land-use permit allowing a mosque on the premises. All the trouble down the road in Wilkes-Barre meant that the Scranton city council was treating the issue with extra attention. At the council hearing, a group of locals from the glass plant who’d lost their jobs thanks to Aftab’s memo showed up and caused a ruckus. They jeered and chanted against Iran, though of course Iran had nothing to do with any of it. Aftab wasn’t even from Iran, he tried to explain when it was his turn to speak. But one of the city council members had a sister who’d also lost her job at the glass plant and moved for a vote to adjourn the hearing. For months to come, Aftab’s permit would languish, neither approved nor denied.

  It was early 1983, and the season of the Rinds’ misfortunes had only just begun: Though the nation’s economy was finally recovering from the oil shock, the new owners of Lackawanna Glass Works were flirting with insolvency from all the debt they’d taken on to buy the company. It was time to sell it piecemeal. The complex was shut down, and everyone lost their jobs—including Aftab. A few weeks later, Riaz’s sister attempted suicide again and, this time, succeeded. Aftab fell to pieces. He and his wife sold their house and moved to Arizona to be close to relatives who’d settled there. It helped his parents to be near family, Riaz said, but neither of them would ever truly recover.

  And neither would he, I thought.

  Night had fully fallen over the East River, and the lights along Astoria’s waterfront twinkled, sparse, serene. Riaz stood and emptied what was left of that sublime whiskey into our tumblers. Throughout his telling, I’d watched the flashing anger in his eyes grow stronger, steadier, watched the incandescence of his rage brighten and consume some essential kindling that, now spent, left him looking enfeebled next to that vibrant magenta thistle. “You can probably understand why I wanted a life for myself where I was never at anyone’s mercy,” he said. “And I mean never.”

  I certainly could. That and more.

  He proposed we go out for dinner; I accepted. Over a dry-aged rib eye and a Duckhorn Merlot our conversation wound its way back to the money my mother had left me. He was spinning off a division of his fund, he said. The new company would do exactly what his fund already did, but now for itself rather than for client investors. When you ran a fund, he explained, you saw fees, which were great, but no one went supernova on fees. But that—going supernova, that is—was exactly what was about to happen to him. “We’re going public in two months. We’re oversold. I’ve been turning money away from people I owe big.” He paused and smiled at me before completing the thought: “But if you want to give me the three hundred K, I’ll wedge you in from my end.”

  6.

  My $300,000 bought me 125,000 shares of Riaz’s new outfit, Timur Capital, at the pre-public-offering share price of $2.40 a share. On the first day of trading, the price jumped to just north of five dollars. Riaz warned me this might happen, that I would be tempted to double my money, but he didn’t advise it. If I could, he said, I should resign myself to holding on through the inevitable ups and downs for twelve to eighteen months. The company was putting together something big, which, once announced, would change everyone’s perception of what could be done in the space. At that point, he thought a share price closer to $20 was likely.

  The following year I saw less of him. I had plays going up all over the world, and what time I didn’t spend traveling I spent trying to write. I was in Finland when the
announcement finally came, the one that Riaz had promised. Timur Capital had been buying apartment buildings in advantageously priced urban upmarkets: Chicago, Austin, Charlotte, Minneapolis, Orlando, among others; they bought the buildings outright, lowered rents modestly for tenants who never missed payments, then bundled the accumulated rent payments into bonds they sold on the open market. The demand was startling. Renting was the new long-term housing paradigm; fewer and fewer could afford to buy. Figuring out how to transform rent payments into liquid bonds was a lucrative—and news-stealing—alternative to the much-maligned bundled mortgage bond. Within a week, Timur was trading at $16, and then, after making the front page of the Wall Street Journal two months later, the price would jump to $22. That’s where I sold, in January of 2017.

  I was in Medina on the afternoon I officially became a multimillionaire. As I stepped out into the blue dazzle, a chorus of muezzin calls filled the air. I felt a pleasure as subtle and complete as any I’ve ever known; I felt bright and safe and whole. What an extraordinary irony, I thought, to receive this news in the Prophet’s own city, of a fortune made through the purchase and sale of interest, so forbidden, so reviled in our faith. So perhaps it was fitting that when I got back to the hotel, the first thing I did was search online for a Manhattan liquor store that had Pappy Van Winkle twenty-three-year in stock and could have it delivered to Riaz before close of business that day. There were two. I put the $12,000 bill on my Amex as a token of the gratitude that—I wrote—I had no words to convey. The next morning I awoke to an email from him. It read: “As long as you keep writing, it’ll be thanks enough. And now you’ve got no excuse!”

  7.

  By that time, though I had no way of knowing it, Timur Capital was under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. A handful of small municipalities had invested in the company’s rent-backed securities and lost their proverbial shirts. The communities in question alleged they were steered toward higher-yield, higher-risk assets without a full disclosure of just how high-risk those assets actually were. This part of the complaint was hearsay, as the complainants had all signed on various dotted lines, and it was just as likely that the fine print warning them about the risks had gone willfully unread, busy as all these small-town big shots were being wined and dined by a big-city company sales staff. Where the SEC got involved was in how Timur managed its own relationship to these particular sales. They apparently took out insurance against the riskiest of their bonds—but not for the buyers’ sake. In market lingo, they “shorted” their own securities, which meant, in layman’s terms, they peddled wares they knew were worthless, bet against them, and when the wares in question lost their value, as expected—or so it was alleged—Timur Capital made a killing. “Betting against your clients” is what it’s also called, and it got regulators interested. Some of this I would learn when a rangy agent from the SEC showed up on my Harlem stoop one afternoon the summer after I sold my shares. She flashed a badge and a perfunctory smile. “Mr. Akhtar?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry…Can I help you?”

  “Agent Watkins, SEC.” I must have looked as confused as I felt. She clarified: “The Securities and Exchange Commission.”

  “Okay, right…”

  “I was hoping you would have some time to talk to me about Riaz Rind. Maybe tell me a little bit about your involvement with his foundation and Timur Capital, LLC. As I understand it, you sold a very large block of stock in Timur Capital just this past March.”

  “So, um, is there a problem? Do I…need a lawyer?” On my lips, my questions sounded like lines badly delivered in a turgid potboiler.

  Her reply was no less hackneyed: “Not unless you’ve done something you don’t want me to know about.” She shot me a reassuring smile. “Honestly? I’m just here to talk to you about Mr. Rind, and any time you can spare’d be appreciated. I mean, you can call a lawyer if you want, of course. I can’t stop you from doing that.” Tossing her cigarette to the step, she crushed it underfoot, then looked up at me with sudden worry: “I’m not supposed to do this—but do you mind if I use your restroom?”

  “No, no, sure—Agent Watkins, is that right?”

  “Zakeeya Watkins,” she said, showing her badge, grateful. “New York office.” How to process the flurry of mixed signals, now threatening, now conspiratorial, now solicitous, now vulnerable? I stepped aside and let her pass. Inside, she followed me up three flights and stopped, visibly winded, as we got to my apartment door. “Gotta quit those damn things,” she said, rubbing her palm across her forehead. Once we were inside, she disappeared into the bathroom. I waited nervously for the flush to sound, realizing her ruse of needing the toilet—rudimentary as it was—had worked. When she emerged, she sat down on one of the two folding chairs at the folding table that passed for my dining table. I asked if she wanted coffee. “Sure, if you’re making it—This it?” she said, looking around. “This is where you live?”

  “As you can see…”

  “There another room?”

  “Well, just the bedroom,” I said, pointing at the room’s only door. “It used to be a studio. They put up a wall, but it still doesn’t feel like a one-bedroom. It’s big enough for me, though.”

  “Not the place I expected for a person like you.”

  “What kind of person is that?”

  “The kind that sells one hundred and twenty-five thousand shares of a stock he got before the IPO.”

  “It was a friends-and-family thing.”

  “But you’re not family.”

  “No, ma’am, I’m not”—I found myself “ma’am”-ing her—“but I’ve known him a few years now.”

  “How’d you meet?”

  As I made her coffee, I shared the outline of the story. The meeting at the theater; the gala events that led to a board appointment; my involvement with the foundation as an advocate and executive committee member; the money my mother left me; Riaz’s offer to invest it; the ups and downs of Timur stock; and finally, and most important, Riaz’s early prognostication of a $20 share price, which he said was likely, but not certain, and which had predated my sale by fourteen months. There was no way any of it could have been construed as insider trading, which was the only thing I thought she was wondering about.

  “You know where it’s trading today, right?” she asked.

  I told her I hadn’t kept track since the sale.

  “Forty-five dollars as of an hour ago,” she said, watching for my reaction. “Kinda makes you wish you hadn’t sold, huh?”

  “I don’t know. Not really,” I said with a shrug. “I barely know what to do with the two and a half million I made. I’d have no idea what to do with five. It might actually make me want to start spending it.”

  She shrugged and pulled out her notepad. That’s when I realized she was only now getting to the real reason for her visit: “Did Mr. Rind ever mention anything about Wilkes-Barre or Scranton, Pennsylvania?”

  “Well, I mean, sure. I mean, that’s where he’s from.”

  “But anything about selling product to those municipalities?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “Not that you remember?” She didn’t believe me.

  “No. I mean, no. Not about selling product.”

  “So what did he say?”

  “Is there a reason you’re asking?”

  She paused and, instead of answering, asked another question: “He ever talk to you specifically about Temecula, California?”

  “No.”

  “Murfreesboro, Tennessee?” I shook my head. “Sheboygan?”

  “Sheboygan, Wisconsin?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “What’s this about?”

  “You really don’t know?”

  “No,” I said emphatically. “I really don’t.”

  She’d pulled out another cigarette and tapped it against her thumbnail as she studied me, still waiting—it seemed—for some sign that would indicate, once and for all, whether I could be trus
ted. “Did you ever discuss Timur Capital business in your capacity as a board member at the foundation?”

  “Never did. I didn’t even know about it until Riaz offered to invest the money I got from my mother.”

  “But you did purchase shares while still on the board?”

  “Yes, but like I said, there was just that one conversation before I invested. He told me he was happy to look after my money. I gave him the cash. I got a notice I was a shareholder. After that, from time to time I would get an email update. That was the extent of it.”

  “You never asked him any questions about the business, or…”

  “I probably did. But nothing specific. ‘How’s it going?’ ‘I really hope you don’t lose my money.’ I mean, I had a Google alert on the company, so when something came out in the press, I’d shoot him a message to congratulate him if the news was good. I thought I understood the business pretty well, but not well enough to pester him about it.”

  She nodded, slipping the cigarette behind her ear. “So there was never any discussion of these municipalities I mentioned, no discussion that you were a party to—or that you overheard during your tenure at the foundation?”

  “Well, no, that’s not true. I did hear about each of those places. Just not from him.”

  “Because…”

  “Because those towns blocked mosques from being built in their communities.” She nodded, clearly aware of the fact, making notes as I spoke. “We’d hired a PR firm at the foundation to work on placing a story about what was going on in those places.”

  “And?”

  “That story got placed. Got a fair bit of traction, actually.”

  “And that’s all you heard?” she asked, looking up from her pad; her tone was skeptical.

  “That was it. Honestly.”

  She checked her notes again, then took another look around the apartment.