Homeland Elegies: A Novel

by Ayad Akhtar

  While she was away in Chicago, Blake, passed up in the NBA draft, signed a two-year offer to play professionally in the Baltic States, and the consequences of his itinerant life in the arena towns of Latvia and Lithuania would affect not only Asha but also, eventually, me. Baltic life offered few consolations: the hotel rooms were frigid and small; the food was revolting; worst of all, almost no one spoke English. Longing for comfort and distraction, Blake found it the only place he could, in the arms of local girls bewitched by the spindly, redheaded young American grimacing through the pork-and-herring salads and sipping lager in their town squares in his down winter coat. This was where Blake developed the sexual habits that Asha would complain to me about—the choking, the wanting to be choked, the video cameras through which they watched themselves in the act, the prostitutes. In Minsk, he tore his ACL at a playoff match, extinguishing his hoop dreams for good. Back in Houston, he took a job at a Honda dealership, where he was still working when Asha accepted a position at the Houston-based Saudi-American oil services conglomerate Aramco so she could move back home to be near him. It was through her job at Aramco that I met her.

  * * *

  I’ve given you a picture of at least part of Asha’s birthday suit but no proper sense of what she looks like: an abundant head of dark brown hair with honey highlights to match the sparkling hazel of her wide-set eyes (which are her mother’s); an upturned snub nose that almost looks like it was broken once and never correctly reset; a short mouth with a pouting lower lip much fuller than the upper; and something wild and welcome about the way these all come together that lends a hardscrabble grace to her beauty. Like her face, her body brims with defiant life: she has her father’s build, athletic, almost stocky, a short torso with wide hips—like those fertility figurines excavated from the Indus Valley ruins at Harappa, not far from the plains that were her father’s ancestral home. The night I met her at the Harvard Club, in late November of 2014—where Riaz had sent me to mix and mingle at an oil industry event on the foundation’s behalf—she was wearing a form-fitting gingham dress, and her striking figure was very much on display. I noticed her immediately in that dreary bay of navy blazers; I noticed her and thought I noticed her notice me. I tarried, palavering with a Saudi executive whom Riaz and I had met in Dubai. Later, as she headed to the bar for a refill, I sidled up alongside her. She was getting a mojito; I asked for the same. She complimented me on my jacket—a Nehru in a calico print. I told her I loved her dress, and she smiled. There was, then, that inevitable lull when a mutual yearning for intimacy has clearly announced itself but when even the earliest rudiments of a shared language to enable it have yet to be found. She lingered in the pause, sipping. There’d been much chatter in the room that night about the price of oil, and so I leaped into the breach by asking where she thought it was headed next:

  “Oh, God. I have no idea,” she said with a self-deprecating laugh. “What is it now?”

  “I think it’s lower than people like. They seem pretty upset about it.”

  “So you don’t know, either?”

  “I was just trying to impress you.”

  That seemed to bring a twinkle to her eye: “Now, why would you try to do that?”

  “I think the question is why wouldn’t I?”

  “Well…that’s very flattering. But you might want to slow down.”

  “Seventy in a fifty-mile-an-hour zone?”

  “More like eighty in a twenty-five.”

  “Ouch. Okay. Got it.”

  “Good,” she said. “’Cause I do think you’re cute.”

  Across the room, I noticed a white-haired man staring at us. He was wearing a pin-striped suit somewhat too small for his portly frame, and his face was covered with the splotchy bloom of a hardy Scotch habit. “So what is it you do?” she asked.

  “I’m a playwright,” I said.

  “A playwright? I didn’t even know that was a thing.”

  “It’s definitely a thing. It means I write plays.”

  “I just meant I didn’t know someone could, you know…”

  “Make a living at it?”

  “Yeah, exactly.”

  “Hard to believe, but true.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply—”

  “No, no. You’re right. It’s not really on the radar here. In this country, I mean. If you mention Broadway, people usually think you’re talking about musicals. Most of us actually make our living in television.”

  “Is that what you do, too?”

  “Last few years I’ve been lucky. Haven’t had to.”

  She lifted her glass. “Here’s to continued good luck, then.” She touched her glass to mine, and the gesture appeared to stoke the ire of Ruddy Face, who was still glaring and making no attempt to hide it.

  “That guy keeps looking over here—”

  “That’s my boss,” she said, shooting him a short, inattentive smile.

  “He doesn’t look too happy about something.”

  “About the fact I’m talking to you, probably.”

  “Me? Really? Why?”

  “Why do you think?” she responded, with a weary look.

  “He have a thing for you?”

  “I mean…not really…but yeah. Inappropriately possessive. Constantly needing credit for not acting out. You know, the usual.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  She shrugged. “Let me go do the rounds. There’s some people I’m supposed to connect with. Unfortunately, you’re not one of them—at least as far as he’s concerned.”

  “Do your thing.”

  But instead of leaving, she lingered: “Can you stick around? Maybe a drink when we’re done? I know a great place in Chinatown.”

  “I’d love nothing more.”

  And with that, she smiled and marched off, stopping—I assumed—to placate her boss before heading off into another room. He shot me a look once she was gone, then turned and walked off, too.

  I meandered, mingling, took cigarette breaks, came back, circulated some more. It was two hours before she was done. By that point we’d both had more to drink than I think either of us realized. She took my hand as we stepped out onto 44th Street, her fingers electric in my grip. We found a cab on Fifth Avenue and ended up on a narrow side street in Chinatown in front of an unmarked door guarded by a bouncer in a bow tie. He recognized her and let us in. At a covered booth in back, we sat side by side—shoulders touching, arms grazing—and had more drinks. We talked about our families and our apartments. She told me about her shih tzu, Tucker, and how much she hated leaving home because she knew how much he missed her. I confessed the only pets I’d ever had were fish. At one point, she asked when my birthday was. I deflected; I’d never liked birthdays, I told her, even as a child. The day’s preordained centrality always struck me as coercive; at best, I sensed people were happy about a thing they knew they had, too; I felt them celebrating themselves. Seeming amused by what she would later describe to me as my “fetching pretension,” she didn’t relent. She wanted to know the date.

  “End of October,” I offered.

  “After the twenty-second?” she asked playfully. I nodded, finally sharing the date, and I saw her eyes soften with a thought. She blinked twice now as she looked at me, then blinked again. I noticed her lips barely part, and the tip of her tongue dart in and out between her teeth.

  Feeling her hand on my knee, I leaned in for a kiss.

  Back in her room at what was then still called the Trump SoHo, we fucked twice that night on a bed that was bigger than my bathroom, then fucked again on the couch as the sun came up over her staggering view of lower Manhattan. I loved how she tasted—sweet and clean, like mountain water—and I ate her out as we waited for the eggs and pancakes we’d ordered from room service. We kissed as we chewed. I confessed that I couldn’t remember ever feeling so knocked out by someone. She smiled coyly and complained about her all-day meetings and a late-afternoon flight back to Houston she couldn’t change.


  “It’s fine,” I said. “I’ll come see you this weekend in Texas.”

  She looked surprised to hear it. Pleasantly, I thought. “Really?”

  “I mean, if it’s okay…”

  “Of course it’s okay. I mean, I’d love it. I just—”

  “What?”

  Her pause lasted long enough for me to register a doubt. “If you change your mind, I want you to know I’ll understand.”

  “I won’t change my mind.”

  “But if you do, it’s okay. This was great. Really great. And if you walk out of here and realize you got caught up in a moment and didn’t really mean it—”

  “I do mean it,” I said forcefully. I was being sincere and wanted her to know it. I didn’t want her to think I was going to disappoint her. But I wasn’t reading her right. She wasn’t actually afraid that I’d lose interest. If anything, she was afraid I wouldn’t.

  * * *

  Our night together had been unusual for her, I would discover. I was only the fourth man she’d ever slept with and the only one she’d ever slept with on a first date. Why me? Because, she said, she was completing her Saturn returns. And: with Venus dominating her chart and now in transit through her fifth house, she was entering a period of unusual upheaval and singular encounters. A psychic she consulted at least once a month predicted that, on an upcoming trip, she would meet a “dashing Scorpio” who would “sweep her off her feet.” The personal theme for the period ahead was embodiment; if life was a school, it was time to take the curriculum. She should allow herself to enjoy her time with this man fully, the psychic (named Nancy) said, for though the connection would present as uncommonly strong, it would likely be fleeting. He might fall for you, Nancy said, but don’t worry about breaking his heart—he can take it. Besides, he’s nowhere near ready to settle down…

  “Duly noted,” I quipped, not without some irritation, when Asha told me all this that following weekend at a resort built to resemble a Renaissance palazzo in the Central Texas town of—I am not making this up—Florence. Initially, she’d told me she was going to be in Austin, an hour away, on business and wanted us to have time together without any distraction. Once I’d gotten there and settled, and once we were both sore from an afternoon and night of sex, she confessed the real reason for the remote location: she hadn’t wanted us crossing paths with anyone she knew back in her hometown. It was then that she also told me about Nancy, about our predicted encounter, and—mostly crucially—about Blake, who, it turns out, she was still very much seeing.

  She’d been with him for the better part of nine years. They’d broken things off for the umpteenth time in the weeks before the trip to New York, where she’d met me, but gotten back together two days before I’d landed in Texas. She knew it wasn’t fair not to have let me know before I left—she said—but she didn’t regret it. She’d wanted to see me again, and now that she had, she was certain she wanted to keep seeing me. She knew it would sound strange and probably more than a little fucked-up. She’d never cheated before in her life, she said, adding in a hushed tone that she would understand completely if all this turned me off.

  It didn’t. It gave me a hard-on, actually.

  After we had sex again, we talked more about it: she told me Nancy didn’t see things being over with Blake, not even close; they were meant to be together, though it wasn’t clear from their astrological charts they would weather the considerable planetary impediments in their way. “I know I probably sound bat-shit crazy,” Asha said as I nibbled her shoulder, “and maybe I am; I mean, Blake thinks so, and so does pretty much anybody else I ever tell about Nancy, at least when they realize I’m actually making real relationship decisions based on the advice I get from her—but whatever, I’m used to it at this point. I don’t know why people think I haven’t gone through this myself—I mean, really looked at it. I have. I’m a lawyer. And it’s not like I don’t know that Nancy knows how I feel about him. I know she knows. And of course, it’s occurred to me maybe she’s feeding me that line because she knows it’s part of what keeps me coming back at sixty dollars a session. I know all that. But I listen to what resonates and what feels true. And there’s a lot of that in what she says. That’s a fact. It just is. I mean, it’s hard to argue with results like her predicting I’d meet you. Right? I mean, okay—so let’s pull that one apart. Maybe I just needed to be encouraged to step out of my comfort zone. Maybe that’s all Nancy did, open me up to the possibility of meeting someone—which she knows I’m generally not. Maybe she just gave me permission, and that put me at ease, and that’s what led to me doing something I never do. I mean, never. When I hear about my girlfriends’ one-night hookups? They sound like nightmares! So if that’s part of it, I mean, my suggestibility, fine. But it doesn’t account for the part that’s you. Right? A Scorpio? Okay, so sure, there was a one-in-twelve chance of that; so maybe the numbers came out in Nancy’s favor—like they pretty much do all the time. Fine. But what about Venus transiting your fifth house, too? I checked your chart this week. I mean, that’s weird. And it starts to make you feel like you have to do more work to explain it all away than just accepting it for what it is. So whatever. If that’s all it is, some combination of suggestibility and coincidence, so be it. I’d rather live this way than the alternative.”

  One of the reasons Asha could go on without so much as a hesitating pause had—I suspect—something to do with what she was reading on my face as she spoke: interest, encouragement, assent. I, too, had long harbored a secret penchant for this sort of thing. Though never tempted by psychics or tea leaves or tarot cards, I had always gone about my days with the assumption of some unseen but dimly legible order beneath the bright clatter of Creation. In leaving the theism of my Muslim childhood behind, I never did entirely abandon its deepest underlying logic. I didn’t know if there was anything like a God. I didn’t care. But it was mostly clear to me we were not just castaways in some tohubohu bearing an ensign of meaning only for those desperate enough to concoct one: I felt mostly certain more was going on than met the eye—despite not having a real clue just what that “more” might entail. My assuredness on these matters owed less to faith than it did to experience, for I’d been hearing echoes of the uncanny since early childhood. Indeed, coeval with the birth of memory itself is the steady, reassuring recollection of my dead older brother, Imtiaz, already deceased when I was born; a recollection not as a figment of family lore—my parents rarely spoke of him; had no pictures of him up on our walls or shelves—or as chimeric companion; rather, as a presence: soothing, inquiring, somehow noble. I knew he was mine before I ever thought he might be my brother. I called him Joe. My parents called him my imaginary friend. When I was four, I asked my mother if we could have the fish tank back. She looked at me, horrified. Joe said we had orange fish in the room, I said, and he wants to watch them again. She asked me to repeat it. I did. Then she slapped me and started to cry. Apparently, before I was born, there actually had been an aquarium in the room beside the bed in which I slept, and Imtiaz would gaze into it endlessly. Father and he would go to the fish store to pick goldfish for that tank, and when Imtiaz died, it bubbled softly away in that now empty room, too painful a reminder for both of them. Father released all the fish into a local pond and hid the tank in the garage.

  I’d never known any of this.

  When I say I felt him as a presence, I don’t mean to imply that I ever spied his form or heard him speak in any other voice than my own. Even so, his tenor and texture were not of me. To become aware he was present felt like a kind of play initiated by something only different from myself because it felt like him. He’s with me still, an aegis, a daemon, a mood of particular calm, a name I give to the great-hearted goad—not heeded often enough—to hold my tongue, to wait my turn, to stop and inquire. As I grew older, I would learn more about my brother from my mother’s sisters, from my father—and, once my mother died, from her journal. I was told he was thoughtful, affectionate, graceful
beyond his years, that he loved to draw and would spend hours a day absorbed in the pictures he incessantly made—mostly of fish. No doubt there was much idealization in all their recollections of him, bereaved as they were by his death at the shocking age of five, but notwithstanding, so much of what they said to me I felt I somehow already knew. As an adult, I would wonder if I’d picked up on some still palpable emotional residue, still carried, still felt by my parents—the raw data of their grief, if you will—that I made my own. This vaguely conceived notion was certainly infinitely less objectionable than the entirely indefensible conclusion that I might be actually communing with the gracious spirit of my fish-adoring dead brother.

  When I was eight:

  I dreamed that my mother’s mother’s mother was being chased by God. In the dream, God was a large, angry cloud, so large, in fact, I couldn’t see Him. I saw her running and saw that everywhere she ran, she couldn’t escape Him. The next morning, I came into the kitchen to find my father consoling my mother. Her sister, my aunt Nazneen, had just called from Rawalpindi. Their grandmother—my great-grandmother—had died that night.

  There’s more:

  The following winter we were in Pakistan for Christmas break and staying in my father’s northern Punjabi village. I remember a meal in the courtyard with the village imam. He was a slight middle-aged man with a long bister face framed by a henna-red beard. His teeth were square and orderly and flashed in his mouth as he spoke. I wondered if they were real. At some point during dinner, my legs got sore. And then the soreness spread through my body. That night I came down with a fever that lasted two days. On the second night, my temperature spiked to 104. As I lay sweating in a wicker bed in my grandmother’s room, I started to hallucinate that the sky was coming apart into chunks of bread and bone. I was scared one of these would crush me. My father climbed in beside me, caressed my forehead, sang quietly into my ear to calm me. I fell asleep and dreamed of the same village imam with the curtain beard and square teeth, accompanied by a throng of elders—men and women—in shawls and beards. They had all come to see me, forming a line so long it led out of the bedroom, through the courtyard, and into the village square. They were all holding water from Zamzam3 in their cupped palms, and one by one, they dripped the holy water on my forehead. Finally, my bed was taken out into the courtyard, where they all gathered in a circle that turned quietly around me.