Home Boy

by H. M. Naqvi

  “What? Oh. Well, I know him through AC, I mean Ali, Ali Chaudhry.”

  “You messin’ with me, aren’t you? I told you not to mess with me, buddy.”

  “I’m not messing with anybody–”

  “Listen,” Rooney said conspiratorially. “You admit that your pals were involved in terrorist activities, and we’ll go easy on you. We’ll plead for leniency. Don’t protect your friends, because they aren’t gonna protect you. All right, all right?”

  “Terrorist activities?”

  “What were you guys planning at Shaw’s? Don’t bullshit me because we’ve already busted into your pal Aly’s apartment over in the city. We found books, books in Arabic, and bomb-making manuals. So do yourself a favor and cooperate.”

  “Bomb-making manuals?” I repeated incredulously. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You speak English, don’t you? What fucking part didn’t you understand? You understand that you’re in deep shit, right? You understand that if you cooperate, we’ll go easy on you?”

  “I think you’re mistaken—”

  “I’m not asking you what you think, buddy. I’m asking you what you know. There’s a difference, a big—”

  “But I don’t know anything about—”

  “You know what? I’m done with this fucking guy,” declared Rooney. “Lock ’em up. Throw away the key.”

  After a quick conference of murmurs, I was grabbed by either arm, lifted up, and led out. Wait, I should’ve said, let me explain myself, or something else, anything else—who I am, what I do—but I just shuffled along blindly and dumbly, angling my head to one side for fear of walking into a wall.

  In another room, I was uncuffed by the guards, then commanded to strip. They must have watched as I reached around my waist, unbuttoned my shirt, kicked off my lizard-skins one by one, and then unraveled my belt and slipped off my jeans like a pantomime getting into a tub of hot water. “Take off everything, sand nigger,” they instructed. I repeated the creative slur in my mind as I stood before them in sagging black polyester-blend socks, my limp head dangling between my thighs. “He’s cut, he’s cut,” they cried, clapping or slapping fives.

  Clad in a cold, coarse, loose body suit that zipped up from the crotch, and fitted with flip-flops that were two sizes too big on my feet, I was led by the arm down a series of interconnected corridors. When the hood was whisked off my head like a magician’s handkerchief, I found myself in a cell. The door shut emphatically behind me.

  Sliding against the wall, I shrank into a corner, dragged down by gravity and fatigue and the weight of my bladder. In my mind, I measured the confines of my predicament with my soles. About eight by eight feet, the cell featured a metal cot, a tawny, seatless toilet, and swimming-pool-green walls. Paint flaked across the granite blocks where other prisoners had rested their backs before me: thieves, thugs, pimps, pedophiles, rapists, murderers. Like them, I considered how fate had conspired to put me away, and for the first time anger welled within me. If AC really was a terrorist, I thought, why hadn’t he enlisted me in the cause?

  “Fuck the police,” I said out loud, pleased with the concision with which the phrase conveyed my sentiment. “Fuck the police comin’ straight from the underground / Young nigga got it bad cuz I’m brown …”Although I’d been listening to N.W.A. since I was a teenager, it was the first time I understood where they were coming from. The anthem’s resonance was no longer mere novelty or a boyish sense of affinity with the hood; no, it put things in perspective.

  But anger requires stamina, and I had none. It took Herculean effort just to drag myself to the toilet, which, to my horror, was backed up. My fractured reflection floated on the muddy surface, and below it, shreds of the Sun flailed in slow motion like seaweed. Struck, I just stood there, dizzily hovering above myself. I appeared criminal: my hair had congealed in thick clumps, and a film of beard covered my jaw like a growth of moss. For a moment, I considered dunking my head in the toilet bowl, but the urge passed and I urinated. Cascading over the rim, the overflow spread on the floor in an expanding puddle, the color but not the consistency of maple syrup. Then collapsing on the cot, I passed out.

  9.

  When I woke, it was bright, and I was numb, and for an instant I thought I was dead, but then the stench of cold urine filled my nostrils, and feeling returned to my body like an ache. There was no way to tell what time it was since the quality of light was unchanged, but I wasn’t rested, and my mouth was dry and tasted like shit. Shutting my eyes, I watched chimerical shapes shift in the electric darkness.

  After my father’s death, I would shut my eyes, sometimes in broad daylight, sometimes in bed at night, and imagine traveling at the speed of light, past planets and brightly lit stars and galaxies whirling in slow motion on an invisible axis. There would be high adventure, an urgent mission to save mankind, a chase by aliens, close encounters with meteor storms, requiring routine feats of dexterity and great presence of mind. Tossing in bed, I would issue muffled orders, make beeping sounds and sounds of things blowing up. My imaginary flights would stir restlessness and inevitably make me thirsty and want to pee, but I’d hold it in because I didn’t want to upset Ma.

  At some juncture, however, I’d find her hovering above me in her red caftan with a halo of hallway light around her head. Of course, I’d pretend to sleep, attempt evasive maneuvers, but it would be too late. “What were you doing, baby?” she’d ask, sitting down beside me. Inspired from the sci-fi serial on Pakistan Television, the story usually but not always involved the Cylons—evil robots who speak like this—and Baltar, the bald overlord who always sits on a high chair. Together they would launch a sneak attack on Planet Earth, and even though I was young and inexperienced, I was good and brave and fighting back.

  Running her fingers through my hair, Ma would listen with mild amusement, and after I was done, she would say something like “Listen, baby, space is very, very far away. You and me can’t worry about things so far away. We have to worry about right now, and tomorrow. You have school tomorrow. You have to do well in school. You are the man of the family. This is more responsibility than saving the universe.”

  My universe had diminished: after my father died, we moved from our house off Tariq Road to a two-and-a-half-bedroom apartment in an apartment block off Bandar Road, on the other side of town. We no longer had a garden, no place to make mud men or loaf or play cricket; instead, there was a common concrete yard downstairs where teenagers often scuffled, and there was the street. I had no friends in the neighborhood, and it took almost an hour to get to and from school by van. When things changed, they seemed to change for the worse. But I made do.

  There was also a tragedy of a different scale. We had spent almost a month packing our lives into cardboard boxes and steel trunks, and it took us another month to unpack. I’d insisted on doing my room myself: the clothes in my closet, the books on my bookshelf, my dinky car collection, toy soldier battalion, Mechano set, Chinese checkers board, karram board, two teddy bears—fat Chumpat Rai and slight and hairy Mr. Butt—and the cereal-box-toilet-paper-roll-and-Styrofoam model of Battlestar Galactica, which was about as large as me. It had taken six weeks to construct, paint, and perfect, through the funeral, mourning rituals, and condolence visits. When I opened the carton marked FRAGILE and THIS SIDE UP, I discovered it had been irreparably damaged in the move, somehow crushed by an unabridged edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Legs folded, I sat quietly on the floor of my new room among brown paper and open boxes contemplating what was and had been. It was a sign to move on.

  Sensing the gravity of the situation, Ma went to town and within a fortnight presented me with a secondhand, garbage-can-size replica of R2-D2 and a functioning, battery-operated lightsaber. Although the items might have been from a different galaxy, a different war, and I had moved on, to other exercises of the imagination, it was a winning gesture. There were always consolations then.

  As I lapsed in and out of conscious
ness, reconciling where I had been and where I was—two worlds separated, as it were, by light-years—the door banged open. Two guards entered—one black, one white, one with a goatee, one with an Afro—bearing chains like gifts from the Magi. Swatting the back of my head, the white guy cried, “You pissed yourself, pencil-dick! I’m gonna make you pay for my kickers!” It seemed routine, the invective, the casual violence, the way things are, the way things are going to be: doors would open, doors would close, and I would be smacked around, molested, hauled back and forth between cells and interrogation sessions. The black guy pinned me with a knee. “You like that?” he inquired. “Get the fuck up!” Shackled, I could barely move, much less put one foot in front of another. Consequently, I was dragged down one corridor and then another, slipping and scraping against the linoleum.

  I found myself in a small, well-lit, windowless room furnished with two chairs on either side of a desk. In a corner of the ceiling I could observe my diminutive reflection in a translucent orb. “Sit your ass down,” the goateed guard instructed (and grabbing a handful of hair, reminded me that he’d see me soon). As per his instructions, I sat glued to the seat, braced for the worst: hamstringing, kneecapping, garrotting, shock therapy, Chinese water torture. In a changed America, it seemed anything could happen. I could abide the cursing and spitting and casual violence, but the threat of systematic brutality stirred a profound sense of panic, so when the interrogator shambled in, I found myself trembling.

  A manila folder was placed between us in a gesture that suggested that we had convened to discuss its contents, though the two sheaves of yellow legal and folded fax didn’t appear to be particularly incriminating. Beyond my immigration record, they couldn’t have had much more on me than my height, weight, color of eyes, and distinguishing characteristics, but I could imagine Rooney penning a damning missive in red ballpoint, with the words uncooperative and obvious terrorist leanings double-underlined. Presumably, it was the interrogator’s job to dot the is and cross the t’s.

  The graying, fiftysomething grizzly bear of a man crossed his arms, took a deep breath—something between a wheeze and a whistle—and peered at me from under unruly eyebrows that met at the middle of his brow. “You wanna start talking?” My mouth was dry, my saliva warm, viscous. “About what, sir, exactly?” I asked. The interrogation that followed could be read like some warped catechism:

  Grizzly: You a terrorist?

  Chuck: No, sir.

  Grizzly: You a Moslem?

  Chuck: Yes, sir.

  Grizzly: So you read the Ko-Ran?

  Chuck: I’ve read it.

  Grizzly: And pray five times a day to Al-La?”

  Chuck: No, sir. I pray several times a year, on special occasions like Eid.

  Grizzly: You keep the Ram-a-Dan?

  Chuck: Yes, sir, I usually keep about half, sometimes more but mostly less—

  Grizzly: D’you eat pork?

  Chuck: No sir.

  Grizzly: Drink?

  Chuck: Liquor? Yes, sir.

  Grizzly: Won’t Al-La get mad?

  Chuck: I don’t think it’s all that important to Him, sir, you know, whether I drink or not.

  Grizzly: (Interrogator scratches cleft of his chin.) What’s important to Him then?

  Chuck: (Subject scratches himself as well. The suit makes him itch.) Well, I suppose … that I’m good … to people.

  Grizzly searched my face for an unnervingly long time with sunken blue eyes ringed with freckles. “What’s your story, kid?” The timbre of his voice did not suggest empathy or curiosity but invited exposition. Unsure whether the question demanded exposition or some sort of map of my sociopolitical coordinates, I found myself saying, “I was born in Karachi, in Pakistan, in 1981.” It seemed natural to begin at the beginning. “My father died when I was five and a half.” I paused. “It was tough,” I added, but what more could I have said? That we ate meat twice a week? Saved on toothpaste by brushing with salt? Preserved toothbrushes to polish my school shoes? I wasn’t going to talk about the move, the Battlestar Galactica tragedy. I certainly was not going to tell him that I missed my father desperately but it pained me to recall him.

  “We got by,” I continued, dehydrated and a little delirious. “Ma always told me: you’ve got to work really, really hard. And I did. Ever since I can remember, I’ve been a pretty good student. I suppose the single guiding motivation of my life has been to impress Ma. I never rebelled as a teenager, never shaved my head or came home at dawn, whatever. Instead my mother and I cooked together, we watched movies, went on drives. Of course, once in a while I went to have ice cream with friends, with cousins, I played cricket, but you could say I was kind of straightlaced. I read a lot, anything I could get my hands on, Reader’s Digest, Moby-Dick, the odd Archie comic. I got ten A’s in my O-levels. When I turned seventeen, I secured a scholarship to study lit, English literature, at NYU that met almost eighty percent of my needs …”

  Although I was babbling, Grizzly had not interrupted once. He had been listening intently, almost avuncularly. “Hold on, son,” he finally said. “So you’re telling me you’re a literature student?”

  “No, sir,” I replied, “not anymore.”

  “Then?”

  “I graduated last year and became an investment banker.”

  “So you’re a banker?”

  “Not anymore, sir. I was fired, in July.”

  “And now?”

  “I’m a cabbie.”

  “Let me get this straight: you were like some Wall Street banker, and now you’re a cabbie?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s one hell of a career change.”

  “Yes, sir, but you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. It’s not that bad. I like driving.”

  Grizzly began massaging his eyelids. “All right, this is what I’m going to do. I’m gonna get you a glass of water. In the meantime, I want you to help me out here. I’m trying to understand why Muslims terrorize. I want you to think about this issue, and then tell me what you think.”

  As a Muslim, he figured, I would have special insight into the phenomenon—knowledge of the relevant fatwa or some verse in the Koran—just like a black man, any black man, should be privy to black-on-black violence or the allure of a forty-ounce. But like everybody, I figured the hijackers were a bunch of crazy Saudi bastards. Although Grizzly might have agreed, my analysis was admittedly cursory.

  But I couldn’t think straight. I had a headache, a hard, precise pain like a pair of tongs clamped on my temple. Consequently, when he returned, I was less prepared than when he left. Placing a paper cup on the table, he sat down and folded his arms again. “So where were we?” Raising the cup to my lips with both hands as if it were a chalice of sacramental wine, I gulped the contents in one go. The water was cold and sweet and tasted like freedom. “I’m not sure,” I said.

  Frowning, Grizzly said, “Wrong answer.”

  “Okay, sorry. I think you asked why do terrorists terrorize?” Closing my eyes, I attempted to channel AC, channel history. “Well,” I began, “I guess you could trace it back to when it all started. That’s one way of going about it.”

  Grizzly almost shrugged.

  “As far as I understand, Islam, historically speaking, was not associated with terrorism. It was like associated with empire—the Ottomans, the Mughals in Pakistan, in India, the Safavids next door. I guess the first terrorist of the twentieth century was that Serbian guy who kicked off World War I by assassinating the archduke, I don’t know. Anyway, the whole Palestinian-Jewish thing began next. Funny thing is that before 1948, the Jews were the terrorists. Palestinians became terrorists later. They weren’t blowing themselves up though. The Japanese started that, and I suppose suicide bombing was pioneered much later, in the eighties, by Hindus, the Tamil Tigers. Muslims are like Johnny-come-latelies. We, I mean, Muslims, only picked up on it recently—”

  Grizzly: Okay, okay, why don’t you just stick to the Islamic religion?


  Chuck: Okay.

  Grizzly: I want to know does the Koran sanction terrorism?

  Chuck: I’ve read it. I’m no terrorist.

  Grizzly: Then why do Moslems use it to justify terrorism?

  Chuck: It’s all a matter of interpretation, isn’t it? I mean take the Bible. It’s interpreted differently by, like, Unitarians and Mormons, Lutherans, Pentecostals—

  Grizzly: Okay—

  Chuck: Eric Rudolph, Mother Teresa, Jerry Falwell, the Lord’s Liberation Army—

  Grizzly: I said okay! Look. All I want to know is why the hell did they have to blow up the Twin Towers?

  Chuck: Your guess, sir, is as good as mine.

  Grizzly: Can’t you put yourself in their shoes?

  Chuck: No, can you?

  Grizzly: Okay, just take it easy, boy, just take it easy.

  Hunched over the table, Grizzly scrawled something into the folder—two or three sentences in ballpoint cursive—muttering to himself as he wrote, like a poet reworking a sentence by utterance. Boy’s excitable. Spoke about childhood, history. Defended Islamic religion, terrorism. I didn’t really mean to but didn’t mean to apologize for myself either.

  When he was finished penning the profile, he got up and left without uttering a word. The guards followed after. They smacked me around, dragged me back to my cell. It was bright as day inside, and bleak as hell.

  There is no meaningful way to convey the abjectness of prison life. You review the events that led to your incarceration again and again and again. You dwell on permutations that could have led you to another place, a better place, home. You calculate the probability that the door will open. You imagine defying gravity, walking upside down, flying. You count anything, everything—the blocks in the wall, the marks sketched across the blocks, the metal teeth in the zipper of your suit, the lines across your clammy palms—comparing the latest tally to your last count to make sure you’re sane before you realize that keeping count of the unchangeable is a telltale sign of madness.