Home Boy

by H. M. Naqvi

  It was my turn to pay my respects to the Pathan patriarch. Raising my hand to my forehead, I approached him and said, “Salam, Khan Sahab.”

  Waving his arms in the air, he cried, “What happened, beta?”

  “I, um, got mugged, Khan Sahab.”

  Leaning forward, Old Man Khan crushed his fingers in two veiny fists and said, “You went down fighting, did you?”

  “Yes, Khan Sahab,” I replied, lying baldly, blushing.

  “That is my boy!” he exclaimed, running his heavy, calloused hands over my head. I could not help loving the old man in spite of his temper and idiosyncrasies and peculiar attachment to Jersey City. He was genuine, affectionate, like a father should be. “Now tell me,” he said. “How is your mother?”

  Old Man Khan always asked me about Ma, as if they were old friends from back home, even though they never met. Although he might have imagined her to be like his late wife, from what I could gather, the two were nothing alike. Referred to only as Begum, Mrs. Khan had been short and dark, the eldest of a brood of seven. After their houses had been burned down by a Hindu mob in India, her parents escaped to Pakistan in ’47, only to spend years in the wilderness of early Karachi, residing in makeshift housing outside the city with no running water or electricity. Eventually her father managed to secure some clerical position with the government and modest accommodation in the middle-class neighborhood of Paposh Nagar. Despite their circumstances, her father made sure Begum received a “first-class education.”

  Even though Old Man Khan hailed from a part of the country where women were not generally encouraged to attend school, he took great pride in his late wife’s academic accomplishments. Ironically, Begum may not have amounted to much without the Pathan. As Old Man Khan told it, she dropped out of Inter to take care of her siblings when her mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. The two met in the emergency room of the Seventh-Day Adventist Hospital, the night he had checked in for a knife wound to the gut—suffered during a dustup with the “Chinese ruffians of Saddar”—and the night she had brought her mother in to die. They fell desperately in love. Except Begum could not simply leave her siblings or “marry below her station.” Consequently for years they maintained a secret affair, “through the thick and the thin,” warding off suitors and other tribulations while meeting weekly at Hill Park.

  When circumstances finally permitted, they decided to immigrate to America and up and left in the summer of ’72. Old Man Khan took the first job a ruffian could attain—in an Irish-owned construction outfit—and supported Begum through her bachelor’s and subsequent master’s in psychology. She bore him two children on maternity leave from Hudson County Community College, where she taught till 1989, when, like her mother before her, she succumbed to cancer. “I don’t know why God did not take me,” Old Man Khan once said to me. “But who am I to question Him?”

  “My mother is well,” I replied, remembering that I had forgotten to call her back. “She was asking after you.”

  “You will give her my salam,” Old Man Khan instructed.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Then in a tone meant for recalcitrant children, he boomed, “Why are you all around standing like this? Sit down! Dinner is served.”

  We squeezed around the table before the feast that Old Man Khan had prepared (because he maintained modern women should not cook) and Amo had quickly laid out. There was saffron-spiced lamb biryani, chicken karahi with tomatoes, cilantro and green peppers, bite-sized shami kababs; and an earthenware pot of daal garnished with fried onions and garlic. As usual, I was informed that everything was halal, and as always, Old Man Khan proclaimed, In the name of God, the Beneficent and Merciful, before digging in. Before he could reach for the chicken, however, Amo said, “Baba jan, you know you can’t have any of that.”

  “I made it, beti,” he replied.

  “Y’know you’ve got to watch your cholesterol, and the karahi is like swimming in ghee!” Glistening with clarified butter, the chicken was killer. “You can only have the daal and biryani.”

  “When my time comes, beti, God will take me.”

  “Yeah and then what will happen to me?”

  “Acha, acha,” Old Man Khan muttered, browbeaten, “I will do as you say.”

  As we ate, we heard the muffled thumps of the Davises walking about above and the occasional but palpable screech of chairs across their parquet floor. “Jamshed Lala,” Amo began, “d’you know Myla just had a baby? They named him Anthony, and he’s like one of those Cabbage Patch Kids. You gotta see him.” Hunched over a heaping plate of biryani, Jimbo grunted, “You should have a baby.” I couldn’t tell if Amo was messing with her brother. “Jamshed Lala,” Amo repeated, craning to get his attention, “when do I get a nephew?”

  With his big head bowed, Jimbo muttered, “Gotta get hitched first, sweety.” Just then Old Man Khan looked up fiercely, his bushy white eyebrows meeting in a tight knot on his broad furrowed forehead.

  “Then get married,” Amo chirped. “You’re the right age and everything. You just, like, need to find the right girl—”

  “Aamna khanum,” Old Man Khan growled, “eat your food.”

  “Baba jan,” Amo said, “sometimes, you’re such a killjoy.”

  In an attempt to change the subject, perhaps, Old Man Khan turned toward me and asked, “How is the hotshot banker?”

  All eyes were suddenly on me, and for an instant I considered what reaction my turn as a cabbie would bring. “Well,” I began, “actually, I’m kind of on sabbatical, Khan Sahab. I thought it was time for a change,” I continued, “for something better.”

  My disclosure met with a general consensus of silence, as if the Family Khan had at last discovered that I was a fraud, a failure. Old Man Khan’s eyes narrowed as if processing the information word by word. Then he proclaimed, “Bravo!”

  Jimbo looked up, like What the?

  “My only regret in life,” Old Man Khan continued, “is that I didn’t have the courage to change my profession. It was too late for me … but, ma’shallah, I have lived a full life in America. I have raised a family. I will not cry crocodile’s tears.”

  “You mean you won’t cry over spilled milk?” Amo chimed in.

  Old Man Khan looked at her quizzically. “Why would I cry about the spilling of the milk?”

  “Any-way, they say that college grads today change jobs like five point six times, on average.”

  Sitting opposite me, Jimbo made a funny face, probably because he had had more than five point six jobs since graduation—more like nine or ten—none to his father’s satisfaction. Admittedly, Old Man Khan was a difficult man to please. Once upon a time he had had elaborate plans for Jimbo, managing somehow to get him into P.S. 6 where, he would remind you, Kramer vs. Kramer was shot (though he’d never seen the movie). Every morning at seven little Jimbo would board the PATH, change trains twice, sometimes take a bus, hauling a backpack and an Indiana Jones lunchbox that alternately yielded peanut-butter-and-jelly and shami-kabab-and-butter sandwiches. Within a year he made it into the Gifted and Talented class and school band, requiring him to haul a tuba. After Begum’s death, however, Jimbo fell in with the “bad crowd” in junior high and once, while “tagging” a train, was even arrested. Old Man Khan had decided then that Jimbo was a bad seed. He remained one ever since. The two years he spent at CUNY, Jimbo took courses that sounded like mumbo jumbo to Old Man Khan: ear training, music theory, acoustics engineering, mastering, multitrack recording. Jimbo told me that his father once said, “Fifteen years I worked for you, and you are going to play bongo drums?” Ironically, Jimbo attributed his innate musical sense to listening to his old man hammering nails into joists and rafters.

  Careers and plans were fraught issues. Gardening, on the other hand, was uncontroversial, and if you cared to listen, Old Man Khan could and would hold forth on plant husbandry methods that he claimed to have pioneered over the years:

  Crushed ground coffee sprinkled in topsoil helps plan
ts grow better.

  Crushed cayenne pepper works as a pesticide.

  Cinnamon halts disease.

  Milk can be used to clean plants (because it possesses the requisite acidity).

  “How is your gardening coming along?” I asked.

  “Only yesterday,” Old Man Khan gushed, “I ordered a very specialized plant that is inavailable in all the United States of America! Can you believe it? Something that is inavailable here!”

  “What is it called, Khan Sahab?”

  “In China it is called mudan. Mu means male and dan means red. Together it means ‘the plant that can reproduce by sucker and seed.’ They also call it Hua Wang, ‘King of Flowers.’ In English it is only called tree peony. Peony! Everything is lost in the translation.”

  “Why is it so special?”

  “It is like an orchid. It is beautiful and incommon.”

  “Uncommon,” Amo interjected.

  “You know, Shehzad beta,” he said, squinting philosophically, “you feel like you are doing God’s work, making Heaven on earth. This has always been my jihad.”

  I nodded vigorously, as if I understood exactly what he was trying to say, but didn’t quite get it. It didn’t jell with the modern connotation of jihad that had entered discourse with a bang: waging war against errant Muslims and non-Muslims alike. “You have to be productive in life,” he continued. “You have to struggle against yourself.” And suddenly the penny dropped. I was reminded that the term translates to “struggle,” the struggle within: the struggle to remain moral and charitable, acquire knowledge, and so on.

  While I mulled what my jihad should be, Amo passed the dish of biryani. “You must try it,” she insisted. “It’s Begum’s recipe.” Although stuffed, I took the casserole because Amo had such delicate wrists, I was afraid they would snap right off. “It’s not delicious,” I said, shoving a spoonful in my mouth. “It’s out of this world.” Amo beamed again. She had a winning smile.

  During dinner, I caught her stealing glances at me. In turn, I smiled tightly, politely, pulling my chin in to hide the lump in my throat. There was no doubt that Amo was beautiful and vivacious, a firecracker in hijab, but she was off limits, not only because she was my pal’s sister but because she was Old Man Khan’s daughter. If something untoward happened, he would make boti out of me.

  Besides, I figured, Amo and I were not on the same page anyway. The hijab weirded me out. Donning the thing was a matter of interpretation, faulty interpretation; Ma, a paragon of virtue and grace and sensibility, never wore one.

  Like most Muslims, I read the Koran once circa age ten and, like some, had combed through it afterward. There were issues in the Holy Book that were indisputable, like eating pork, but the directives concerning liquor could easily be interpreted either way. You should not, for instance, pray when hammered. As for the hijab, the Koran mentions that women should cover their “ornaments,” and any way you look at it, that means breasts and beyond. Men are exempt because they do not possess ornaments.

  Moreover, unlike Amo, I did not care to wear my identity on my sleeve.

  When Old Man Khan withdrew to the bedroom after dinner to say his prayers, and Jimbo and Amo cleared the table, I snuck out for a smoke on the way to the restroom. There are few pleasures in life comparable to smoking after a Pakistani meal. Indeed, it was a rare event, like sitting at a proper table with a fork and a knife and a folded napkin; but the best smoke I had had in years did not follow a Pakistani meal but a traditional American one: after spending Thanksgivings with Mini Auntie and the Khans, my gay friend Lawrence né Larry had invited me to Omaha the year before to a real American turkey dinner, complete with stuffing, cranberry sauce, and a drunken uncle swinging elbows, knocking down bottles and chairs. As Thanksgiving was around the corner again, Lawrence had informed me that he would be “delighted” to have me once more. Last time his mother had said, “He’s so well-mannered. “Maybe,” she mused, “it’s because he’s Mooslim.” Those were the days.

  Jimbo joined me halfway into my Rothman, and together we watched the massive violet cloud that hung above us. After some time he asked, “Whaddya think?”

  “Don’t think it’ll rain, yaar, at least not right now.”

  “That ain’t what I’m talkin’ about, dude.”

  “Oh. Sorry. You mean, about the Duck situation.”

  “Wake up ’n’ smell the chai!”

  Don’t ask me, I thought. I don’t know nothing. AC was the go-to guy for advice and instruction. I was a village idiot. “I don’t know, I mean, it’s not like the end of the world,” I said, feebly parroting AC’s words of wisdom to me. “He’ll eventually come around, right?”

  “Negative.”

  “Of course, he will, yaar. You’re his only son. Give him time.”

  “Too late, dude. Duck’s on the warpath, throwin’ fits, givin’ ultimatums. She asked me before, and I kept tellin’ her, just wait, gimme time, I’m going to talk it over with the old man, you know, get his blessings an’ all, but he never did, and she can’t wait no more. She’s five years older an’ wants to make babies ’cause her ovaries are dyin or dryin’ up or somethin’.”

  “Right. Okay. So I guess you have to figure some things out. I mean, maybe you should think of it as an exercise, in terms of absolutes, Old Man Khan versus the Duck: who can you do without? It’s a rhetorical exercise, because your father’s your father—”

  Jimbo sighed. “I kinda love her, dude …”

  My cigarette had burned to the filter, but I kept sucking on it for inspiration. “Then tell him,” I managed to say.

  Just then Amo’s voice rang like an alarm through the corridor. “Jam-shed La-la! Sheh-zad La-la!” Handing me a pod of cardamom for my breath, Jimbo stomped deliberately inside, muttering “Gotta go in.” Popping the pod in my mouth, I crushed the cigarette under my heel and followed.

  They were in the living room—Old Man Khan leaning forward on the sofa, Amo curled by his feet like a Siamese—watching the ten o’clock news with the volume turned way up. The news was all bad. There were reports that the tap water might be poisoned, that anthrax permeated the air; reports of strange occurrences just outside our field of vision or the purview of our consciousness; sightings of dark men with dirty bombs and devices in their shoes. Planes appeared and disappeared over the horizon. Our nerves already frayed, we were told to report suspicious activities, to be vigilant. Above all, death recurred on TV, in vivid color, charred bodies among concrete ruins, like pornography.

  “Allah rehem karay,”proclaimed Old Man Khan. God have mercy on us all. Apparently Rumsfeld had announced a major offensive against the Taliban. It would be a good war, a just war. “Is it right?” he cried. His face had turned beet red. “Can anybody tell me?” Reaching for the remote, Amo turned the TV off. “I don’t understand, Aamna khanum. Why bomb? Why break? Why destroy?”

  Although I had no particular sympathy for the Afghans—they had been shooting thmesleves in the foot for the last thirty years—Old Man Khan was as much a citizen of Jersey as a Pathan, which commentators were reporting “is the broad ethnic umbrella covering a portion of northern Pakistan and most of Afghanistan.” Old Man Khan sympathized with his people even if they contributed to the Taliban. But it wasn’t that he was simply torn between here and there; I think he was cut up about watching the edifices he had built with his own hands being razed again and again. “We should plant seeds in the mountains, grow flowers. Imagine, beta, trees everywhere and orchards, gardens … What do you think?” he asked nobody in particular, holding his chest. “What do you think?”

  “Baba jan,” Amo pleaded, “you’ve got to chill out. It’s not worth it. You’re gonna get another heart attack.”

  As Old Man Khan took deep yogic breaths, I gave Jimbo a look that said this probably isn’t the best time for a chat about the Duck situation, and he looked back as if to say hey, no shit. Then I excused myself to make a phone call and called AC from the wall phone in the kitchen. “Hel
lo? You there? Okay, well, anyway, we’re on for the Shaman Run. Connecticut, or bust.” In Jersey that night, I had figured out my jihad. “But there’s no way I get the cab before tomorrow night. All right, yaar, gotta go. Ciao, for now.”

  When I returned, I found the three sitting on the divan, Old Man Khan in the middle, flanked by his children, as if they were posing for a family portrait. Old Man Khan was smoking one of those short filterless cigarillos that smelled wonderful, like a night out in Lisbon or something, but tasted like pure crap. Peeling himself off the sunken seat, Jimbo said, “Gotta jet.”

  “But you haven’t even had dessert yet, Jamshed Lala,” Amo interjected.

  “Next time, doll face.”

  “Okay, just like wait a second.” Running into the kitchen, she returned with a Tupperware container of sweet carrot halvah that she placed in my hands. “This is for you.”

  “Thought you didn’t cook.”

  “This is dessert.”

  “Well, um, thank you, Amo, for your hospitality.”

  “You’re very welcome, Shehzad Lala.”

  After Jimbo kissed his father and sister, I salamed Old Man Khan and patted Amo on the back, who raised her shoulder in appreciation. As we were walking out, Old Man Khan yelled out, “I am looking forward to seeing you again next month, Jamshed beta.”

  Jimbo turned around and smiled.

  Outside, he started talking, as if addressing his conscience: “But like the old man’s got blood pressure, and when he gets angry or choked up or whatever, he starts holdin’ his heart and his face turns red, and he starts breathin’ like a warthog. It happened a couple of times. It’s crazy scary. He says it’s nothin’, he pretends he’s still tough but he ain’t, and I don’t want to make him suffer. He’s already suffered a lot, y’know?”