Homeland Elegies: A Novel

by Ayad Akhtar

  For months after that illness, I would dream of grandparents and grandparents of grandparents coming to visit; I dreamed of a desert vista filled with my ancestors praying in unison; I dreamed of the dejected Prophet wandering through the empty streets of my suburban subdivision at night. He had a green scarf on his head and looked like Tafi—the man I’d seen at the well as a child—but I knew in the dream it was Muhammad. This dream I relayed to my mother the following morning as she cracked eggs into a skillet for my breakfast before school. As she cooked, she asked me to repeat the dream again, and I wouldn’t understand the intent, furrowed look on her face as she listened until I heard her repeat on the phone—to what must have been a dozen friends and family over the next few days—almost word for word what I said. She was bragging: seeing the Prophet in a dream was a badge of honor in our Muslim faith, and especially so in her family. The most outwardly religious of my mother’s sisters, Khadija, had famously had her own dream about him and had this to say about mine: it was well known that the Prophet slept and rose early; for him to be wandering at night signaled turmoil; he was dejected, she believed, by the plight of Muslims in America; that I had seen him on our local streets meant that I would become a great American imam someday, perhaps great enough finally to make this nation of unbelievers see the truth. Of course, Father thought it was all nonsense, and not just of the usual unthinking Muslim grade; this “great imam” stuff was a particularly noxious form of nonsense he didn’t want repeated—he told Mother—as it threatened to “swell up” my head. She didn’t abide the warning, though I think my father was probably onto something.

  By the time I hit puberty, the dreams stopped—or at least I stopped remembering them, which is what Mary Moroni would suggest my sophomore year in college when she taught me the trick with the pencil. I alluded before to encounters and apprehensions prognosticated by my collegiate nightwork, but these were mostly visions of trifles: a classmate in the same blue sweater and orange pants she walked into the auditorium wearing the next day; the final score of an upcoming varsity football game dreamed about three days before it took place; a bazaar stand in an African country where I was haggling with a vendor over melons, this on the eve of an economics exam on which the final question involved the particulars of the East African melon trade (which we’d never discussed—either East Africa or melons). The only such college premonition to touch me in any personal way was of a violently pink room glimpsed during a wet dream and suddenly recalled by the offensively pink tiles of a bathroom on the third floor of the ladies’ dorm across campus where—later that semester—I was losing my virginity in a shower. Over the years, I stopped paying much attention to these inexplicable ruptures of the time-space continuum—stopped paying attention, that is, until attention was demanded. As a boy, I’d dreamed of my great-grandmother’s death, and thirty years later, I would dream of her daughter’s death. I saw her picking fruit in a pomegranate grove. She fell, and I awoke. The next day, my grandmother died of a heart attack. Two days before 9/11, I dreamed of an attack on Manhattan.

  I trust I’ve made my point, namely, that there was history behind my inclination to take Asha’s kooky confessions at face value. Perhaps our shared proclivity for omens was nothing more than self-involvement masquerading as communion with the numinous; perhaps it was a New World outcropping of our forebears’ superstitions. I’ve stopped trying to understand it all, and though I offer my account here with self-restraint (for, reader, I could go on), I can’t renounce this bizarre tendency simply for the sake of preserving what little reliability I may still possess as narrator of these songs and stories. I have to own it; this brand of crazy is fully baked into me.

  * * *

  Much of the foregoing I’ve shared in hopes of offering a bare minimum of context for a startling conclusion I would come to nine weeks into my relationship with Asha—if a relationship is what you could call it, considering that Asha was still very much with Blake the entire time we were together—namely, that she was my match, the person meant for me, and, against my better judgment (for I knew she didn’t feel the same way), that she was the woman I would and must marry. Our sexual connection, the quirky familial and orphic concordances, all these certainly fed my conviction, but the decisive piece was infinitely more banal, or at least less outwardly remarkable. And it crept up on me.

  We were in a Starbucks on the Upper East Side. We’d been walking for hours, and I was tired. We went inside, and I took a seat at an empty table. I watched her order herself a cup of tea and select a packet of chocolate-covered cookies for us to share. At the condiment counter, standing next to a hunched elderly Jewish woman, Asha tore open a packet of sweetener and mixed it into her cup. As she reached to toss the stirrer, the older woman stopped her and made a comment. Asha then handed her the stirrer, which the older woman now used to stir her own drink. When she was done, she and Asha shared a smile, and the older woman tossed the stirrer away. As Asha watched the older woman trudge to the open door, the expression I saw on Asha’s face was one of tenderness to which, I dare say, even the great Raphael could not have done justice. After the older woman was gone, Asha came to join me, offering her cup for a sip. As I drank, she ran her smooth, tea-warm palm along the side of my face. I felt simple, small, calm; without worry or complication; I felt at home.

  Back at my place, I chopped onions and garlic for the murgh karahi and dal tarka she made us for dinner. We ate with our fingers as we watched a true-crime special on TV. Yet another husband had killed his spouse to be with a new lover. Our sex that night was different. It was the first time I cried in her arms, and when I woke beside her the next morning, the light in the room—bleeding through the blinds—was a brisk, bright gray. It was a clear, quiet light I didn’t recognize. There was not a thought in my mind as I lay there listening to my heart thrum softly in my chest. I turned to face Asha’s sleeping profile, and a shard of a dream suddenly gleamed inside me: Asha and I are both in traditional Pakistani dress; I’m applying kohl to my eyes; she lifts her pink kurta to shave her underarms; I see her belly; she’s pregnant.

  I studied her face as she slept. By that morning’s unusually pristine semilight, her skin was the color of pekoe and turmeric. My own skin—darker, a shade of murky copper—had long been the source of a central confusion: since childhood, I’d felt a visceral disgust for the sickly tints of the white skin I saw everywhere around me, the blanched arms and legs, faces the color of paste, flesh devoid of warmth or human glow, a wan affliction incomprehensible to me except as something to be hidden; I’d felt all this since childhood, and yet, paradoxically, the fact that my own skin was not white had only ever seemed surpassingly strange. Indeed, later, through my adolescence and early adulthood, the experience of seeing myself in a mirror took me aback. It was nothing about my eyes or nose or lips—nothing about my face except for its tarnished-penny hue. In my complexion alone I saw a person I didn’t recognize, someone who, had I seen him in the school hallways or at the mall or municipal swimming pool, I would have thought did not belong here. I knew that about myself because I knew that was how I saw others who looked like me. My likeness in the mirror was a reminder of something about myself I always chose to forget, something never available to me except when confronted by my appearance: that though I didn’t feel “other” in any meaningful way, I clearly appeared only that way—at least to myself.

  Being confounded by one’s own appearance must count as among the most commonplace of human experiences, but the feeling has a special strangeness when coupled to the matter of race. Having grown up in the western suburbs of Milwaukee, endlessly encircled by whiteness, it stood to reason my darker skin would come to define me, but what still mostly eludes me is how exactly this came to pass. There were no traumatic episodes with cohorts in school; no well-intentioned teachers and mentors ennobling my difference; I had no problem fitting in or finding girlfriends; at home, my parents never complained about anything even remotely resembling bigotry. The Wis
consin of my youth was still proud of its homegrown progressivism. It was the birthplace of workers’ comp and Bob La Follette’s Wisconsin Idea, that academic and scientific research should be placed in the service of the public good, a place—so unlike the eastern Pennsylvania of Riaz’s youth—where the only tribalism I ever witnessed growing up concerned the local football team. And yet as my darkish body ripened, my disgust for white bodies was now squared by desire. My wet dreams were only white; I longed for white faces brightened by the sight of my darker one, imagined white breasts and thighs, white fingers on my thickened brown-red penis—all of which, of course, reveals a socialization into the politics of race touching the very core of my being. And yet that morning, as I lay beside Asha, our dark hands side by side against the snowy covers, I felt—for the first time I could remember—no confusion at all, felt that our brown hues looked unerringly correct, a conclusion that felt all the more convincing and forceful for proceeding not by a process of thought but from an afflux of feeling, a trickle of sudden wonder that had her as its miraculous source. Of course, it was love I was feeling, though I’m no longer clear what sort, exactly—whether it was love for what I’d never been able to accept about myself (my color), which I mistook for love of her, or whether (as I believed that morning) I’d fallen more deeply for another person than I’d known was possible.

  Asha wasn’t in a cuddling mood. She woke and turned away from me, pleading her bad breath. She grabbed her phone as she got out of bed and went into the bathroom. I heard the faucet, then the shower.

  I got up and started coffee, then chopped some of our leftover karahi into a bowl of eggs with chilies and coriander. I buttered two chappatis and heated them on a skillet as the omelet cooked. When Asha emerged in a towel, her wet hair slicked back, texting on her phone, she looked delighted to find breakfast ready. My heart leaped as she wrapped her arms around my neck and nuzzled her still-moist cheek against my ear. Her phone buzzed with a text. As she sat and tore a piece of bread for her eggs, her phone buzzed with another. She glanced at the screen, then turned it facedown on the table, annoyed.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  She shrugged and shook her head, by which she meant to convey, I think, both that her response would not have surprised me and that it was nothing worth talking about—which could only have meant it was Blake.

  “What does he want?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Fair enough.”

  I was feeling hopeful and defenseless—hopeful with my longing to speak even just a hint of what I was feeling for her that morning; defenseless from a growing sense that, in fact, she’d already picked up on something new in me, something needy and pleading, and was now plotting her escape from it.

  “So whose cross is that in the bathroom?” she asked.

  “Huh?”

  “On top of the vanity. I needed a Q-tip. I knocked the jar of coconut oil. There’s that silver necklace with a cross on it…”

  “Oh, right. That.”

  She misread my embarrassed smile: “What was she like?”

  “Oh, no. It’s not that…It’s mine.”

  “Really? Why do you have a cross?” she asked.

  On any other morning, I would’ve lied. But not on this one. Even if I couldn’t tell her I’d fallen in love with her, she deserved the best of me—even if only for my own sake. “It’s from 9/11,” I said. “It’s kind of a long story, I mean—”

  “It’s okay,” she said as she chewed. “We have time.”

  I took a breath. I began again: “Back then, I had a TV in my bedroom, and the first thing I would do when I got up was turn it on for the weather. That morning, though, I remember they were showing a live feed of a fire in the upper floors of the first tower. The announcers kept saying a small plane had hit the tower, and I remember thinking—as I went into the bathroom—of JFK junior’s plane going down in the Atlantic Ocean. I was putting toothpaste on my toothbrush when I heard someone cry out on the TV. I went back into the bedroom and saw there’d been a new explosion. Another plane had hit the second tower. I knew right then. I don’t know how I knew, but I did.”

  “Knew what?” she asked.

  “That it was us. That we did this.”

  She was quiet, but her guarded look wasn’t hard for me to read. If I was cannier, dear reader, I would recast that expression on her face, offer an airbrushed look of offense as prelude to a vociferous objection on her part, then follow it all with a concocted back-and-forth that made clear her Muslim horror over the attacks, no different in kind from that of any non-Muslim. If I cared less about it all, I would write it like that to save myself the likely grief ahead. But I won’t write it that way, because that’s not what happened. She didn’t speak because, like me, she was used to the sermons and family dinners replete with complaint about murderous American meddling; worry over Muslim land and lives lost; praise of Hitler and rage against Israel; self-reproach about the pathetic state of our own imperial destiny. Like me, she’d heard many times that a figure would rise among us to overthrow the illegitimate rule of these Europeans and neo-Europeans, that we were destined to take the world back from these spiritual ghosts one day. They’d turned their back on God for money, and we knew that could only end badly. They were a category of human with no measure beyond themselves. They honored nothing. It was no surprise the very planet itself was dying under the watch of their shortsighted empire. The day would come when we would take it all back and restore to it a rightful holiness. She’d heard it all so many times—though we would both hear it less and less after the attacks. She looked away now with the subtlest of discouraged nods, the expression on her face—I thought—charged with chagrin.

  I went on: “My phone rang. I only had a landline back then. It was my parents. They were scared. I mean, they were relieved I was fine. There wasn’t any reason I wouldn’t be. I mean, in all my years here, I’d only ever been that far downtown twice. But then again, you never know. They made me promise I wouldn’t leave the house. I didn’t tell them I was supposed to go to my friend Stewart’s place to print out a play I’d just finished. He was a graphic designer and had a fancy laser printer he was letting me use to print copies to send to theaters and festivals.

  “It was such a gorgeous day outside. Everybody remembers that. How clear and blue it was. Uptown, there was a gentle breeze coming off the river. It still felt like summer. People out in the streets—but nobody was going anywhere. I remember thinking that it didn’t seem like a Tuesday morning.

  “Stewart’s door was open. I found him standing in the hallway outside the kitchen, crying. He just kept repeating over and over that the tower was gone. I didn’t understand what he meant. I went into the living room, where his roommate—who was white; Stewart is black—was watching it all on their huge plasma screen, a thrill in his eyes. He turned to us: ‘It’s all happening now,’ he said. ‘The shit show’s finally started.’ Then he started laughing. Stewart screamed at him to stop. Apparently the guy had been saying that all morning. Stewart started crying again, and his roommate jumped up from the couch and stormed out.

  “I stood there and watched. Soon enough, the second tower just disintegrated. Right there. Right before my eyes. A column of smoke and powder tumbling down, like some terrible black flower collapsing in on itself. Stewart lost his shit. He howled and keened. I held him while I watched the footage of the second tower collapsing over and over.

  “I called my parents from his kitchen. I knew they would be trying to reach me. My mother was beside herself. ‘Where are you? Why aren’t you picking up?’ I told them I’d gone to a friend’s house to not be alone, and then she started crying. My father told me she was worried about my cousin Ibrahim, who lived downtown. He was at NYU, in his second or third year, living in a dorm down in the financial district, which I remember thinking was weird when he first told me—but NYU had started buying so much real estate in the city, and they had these empty buildings down
there they were putting students into. My father’d been trying Ibrahim, but it was almost impossible to get through to anybody’s cell phone that morning.

  “Once Stewart’s boyfriend showed up, I left his place and went out into the street. From where I was, you could see the smoke and smell the faintest traces of it on the wind, though that far north—I was in Morningside Heights—the wind was blowing in the other direction. It felt safer to be uptown, but something was pulling at me to head south. I don’t know why I wasn’t more scared about what was happening than I was. The only thing that kept going through my mind was how shocked I was not to feel even a trace of surprise. Some part of me, I realized, had been expecting something like this for most of my life.

  “The subways weren’t running. The streets felt strange. There were people in them, and cars, and buses. They all seemed to be moving at the same speed. I’d had a dream about there being an attack in the city a few nights before—”

  “You did?” she asked.

  “Yeah. That there was an attack and that people were buzzing in the streets like insects. It looked the way ants do after their colony’s been destroyed. That’s actually the thing that sticks with me the most, that animal sense of fear.