Homeland Elegies

by Ayad Akhtar

  “So this is really your place?”

  “I have a toothbrush in the bathroom and a rental lease to prove it.”

  She smiled. “I spent a good chunk of my childhood three blocks over. On One Forty-Seventh.” She got up from the table.

  “On Malcolm’s block?”

  Her eyes brightened. “My grandmother knew him. Used to see him going out with those crazy zoot suits—before he met Elijah.” She’d made her way to the window now, where I’d taped a faded snapshot of my mother to the jamb. The photo showed her as a young woman in a red-and-white shalwar kameez, with a white dupatta draped around her shoulders. “Who’s this?”

  “My mom. When she was twenty-three.”

  “Beautiful lady. Might want to find a nicer place for the photo.”

  “I—uh—she died a year ago, and…I put it there—I mean, I know it’s going to sound strange, but—I’ve been dreaming about her a lot…That she doesn’t want to leave. So I put it there by the window so she knows…I mean, if she’s still here, somewhere…” I stopped. I wasn’t sure why I’d told her this—and now I was getting emotional.

  “You’re letting her know it’s okay to go,” Zakeeya added kindly. “I get it.”

  “We’ve all got our magical thinking, right?”

  “Wouldn’t get through a day without it,” she said as she made her way back to the table. “Look. You’re probably going to hear about this in the next day or so. But those cities are filing a class-action suit. Your friend sold them a lot of junk debt, debt they’re convinced he knew was going to default. They think he did it to retaliate.”

  “Retaliate?”

  “For the mosque thing.”

  When she said it, I realized: Of course. Of course he did.

  I don’t know what warmed her to me—whether it was Harlem, or my humble surroundings, or my mother’s photo, or what I would come to suspect: that she was Muslim, too—whatever the case, Zakeeya sat down at the table again, and instead of asking me more questions now, laid out the class-action complaint as she understood it. The SEC was looking into it, too, she said, because Timur had taken out short positions against the debt they’d sold the municipalities. When that debt defaulted, Timur made a killing. All that said, she added, it still wasn’t clear if any laws had been broken.

  By now, I felt comfortable enough to hazard a comment I don’t expect many SEC agents would have appreciated: “I mean, honestly, what you’re describing doesn’t really sound any worse than what Goldman was doing in 2010,” I said.

  “Your friend’s no Goldman Sachs.”

  “That he’s not.”

  “Wrong color,” she said as she stood, buttoning her blazer. “And praying to the wrong God. But you didn’t hear it from me.”

  * * *

  The suit never made it past discovery. I sought out one of the court reporters who took and transcribed the depositions. She agreed to sell me copies for a hefty fee—$9,700—on the condition that I mask any details that pointed back to her if I ended up writing about the case. As I read through the transcripts, it was clear the decision makers on the various city councils in question had been duped, but more or less willingly. They’d taken gifts, had their “road show” trips paid for by the company, gone to the drunken parties, slept with the prostitutes. A city comptroller took her family on vacation for a week in Cabo San Lucas, most expenses paid; an alderman ended up with season tickets to the local NFL team, despite a ten-year waiting list. In almost every case, it wasn’t just that the fine print hadn’t been properly read: it was that the people doing the reading didn’t even seem to understand the very nature of the underlying security that they were about to purchase. What’s more, many of the “honorable” city officials implicated had already demonstrated less-than-honorable judgment in the allocation of city money; the rent-backed-bond buying spree was just the first time they’d all been burned so badly. As for Timur Capital, Riaz’s sales staff was covered. The fine print in the contracts was certainly convoluted, but unequivocal. The undersigned were duly warned about possible short positions that might be taken out against any or all of the securities being sold.

  In other words, there wasn’t a case.

  I was startled at the incompetence—even malfeasance—so abundantly on display at the municipal level. It was startling to see in this picture of America a nation so much like the one my parents described in Pakistan, where cutting corners, taking bribes, selling perks—all this was just business as usual. There was no honest way to make a good living back home, my father used to say. Corruption in Pakistan was endemic; escaping it was a good part of the reason he’d wanted to come to America in the first place. If those court transcripts are any indication of the larger state of affairs in American towns and cities, let’s just say my father may have been somewhat too rosy in his take on corruption in this country.

  Of course, there’s no excuse for Riaz’s swindle. The resulting deficits in those places hurt the people who live there—hurt their children, their elderly. In one of the cities, the situation was so bad that budgets were cut, a hundred public employees lost their jobs, and bankruptcy was averted only by raising property taxes 30 percent and lowering city salaries—including the mayor’s—to the equivalent of minimum wage, $7.25 an hour at the time. In another, the sewer and parking authorities were sold off to the highest private bidder; so were the water supply and the public parks.

  It may sound as if my outrage over all this is muted by the benefit I’ve reaped. It’s not. But it is the first time I’ve been forced to dwell so deeply in a fundamental contradiction of what’s become of our much-vaunted American way. Mark Twain doubted there was a writer yet born who could tell the truth about himself. You’ll have to make up your own mind about me—but I don’t believe I’m offering a defense of either myself or Riaz in stating what I take for the obvious: holding stock in Timur Capital isn’t any different from owning a stake in Nike, or Apple, or Exxon, or Goldman, or VW, or Boeing, or Merck, or any of the storied firms whose shares make up retirement nest eggs and college funds across our divided land, companies known not only for their progressive giving and canny political stances but also for cheating and abusing their workers, duping their customers, destroying the environment, selling goods that don’t work, manufacturing cars and drugs and planes that kill, profiting in ever newer, ever more ingenious ways off the bait and switch of the permanent corporate lie, namely, that the customer—rather than profit at any and all human cost—is king. In this era of capital’s unquestioned amoral supremacy, the only course-correcting moments of clarity—what passes for moral comeuppance, that is—are drops in stock price. Last I checked, Timur was still rising. Nothing unusual, then, about my unscrupulous gains except that I can’t ignore them. Still, I’m surprised Riaz got away with it. Milken did something similar in his own era—brilliant scion of a generation of Jewish fathers shut out by the white-shoe world, avenger of his tribe who found new ways to use debt, dodged the laws, pulled the wool over the nation’s eyes in his quest to torch the WASP establishment. But Milken paid for his rage. He paid dearly. Riaz is just getting richer.

  Footnotes

  1 If I’ve been drawn to fill more space in these pages detailing the various luxurious appurtenances of my time with Riaz than describing the man himself, there is a logic to it. I’m not sure my time with him ever really encompassed much more than my avid delight at the sundry rare benefits I enjoyed because of him. A flat, abstracted portrayal—punctuated by moments of ecstatic material wonder—is perhaps closer to the truth of so much of my actual experience of him, less a person to me than an idea, an object, a protector, a purveyor of fulfillments, a means to some ever-elusive end, and I suspect this was mutual, at least the means-to-some-end part of it. Of course, I’m leaving out the many episodes of human warmth that would have conveyed a fundamental tenderness beneath his otherwise almost mineral mien. I’m ignoring the moments of touching vulnerability, such as when, the morning after an all-night b
lowout at his palatial digs—replete with drugs and costumed dwarfs and a protracted donnybrook between two New York titans of debt over Benghazi and the Clinton emails—I walked into his bedroom and found him on all fours with a penis in each end. I’d long since concluded Riaz was gay—he never dated women, and I found his gaze often lingering on strapping young men like the two he was sandwiched between that morning—and I suspected, despite his fabulous wealth and forward thinking, that he still harbored a profound and crippling Muslim shame about it. In the days that followed, I saw a more fragile man than I ever had seen and ever would see again, his resolute core softened, his need for a real friend finally revealed—or so it seemed. It was during the first week of the US Open that year, and we spent two days wandering the grounds, eating hot dogs, drinking beer, dipping in and out of luxury boxes. He told me of his first crush, a boy in the fourth grade he still dreamed about; he told me he suspected his sister, too, had been gay, which he thought was why she’d killed herself. For those two days, he seemed like a different person to me, light, pliant, able to convey with little more than a sidelong smile that he appreciated—even needed—me. And then, just as suddenly, it all vanished. Had it taken two full days to sound me out? To be sure that I, a fellow Muslim, was more than happy to accept him as he was? Or was he fishing for something else? I would come to wonder if perhaps I’d been an object of sexual interest to him all along, if perhaps he thought I was gay, too, locked even deeper in that closet than he was. Whatever the reason for the brief window of his appealing availability, by Labor Day weekend, it was gone, and that dazzling, ceramic impenetrability was back…

  Pox Americana

  VI.

  Of Love and Death

  It is joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found.

  —D. W. Winnicott

  Of the women I slept with during my season of sexual fecklessness, I least expected Asha would have been the one to give me syphilis. Incidences of the so-called Great Pretender were surging in this era of transactional sex, and it was much reported that parts of Brooklyn were showing rates of the disease not seen since the nineteenth century. That year, I’d had quite a bit of sex in Williamsburg, where the numbers preponderated, and thus assumed—wrongly—that I’d contracted the malady somewhere between Bedford and Graham Avenues. After the diagnosis, I strained to recall even the most peripheral apprehension of an incipient chancre—a discoloration, say, on any of the various vulvic folds at which I’d slobbered, into which I’d pushed—but my recollections were vague at best, for by the time the panties were off I wasn’t usually much given to the inspecting mood. The shaved pubus was legion then, and I would end up suspecting I’d simply missed the lesion, mistaking it for yet another ingrown hair on the verge of releasing its pus.

  Asha was well and smoothly groomed, without so much as a bump or razor scratch from her mons pubis down to below her introitus. Every three weeks, she would pop two Advil and drive the mile and a half from the fourplex she owned in the Montrose section of Houston to the wax salon closer to downtown, where her aesthetician poured and spread scorching wax onto her labia, waited a half minute, then ripped the seal, which plucked every nascent hair from its follicle. Asha was long accustomed to keeping her genitals hair-free, though not as a capitulation—unwitting or not—to the pornographic ideal engulfing us all. No. Her bald sex was a Muslim thing. The trips to Apple and Eve Brazilian Wax were a holdover from her childhood years as a believer.1 There were others: the hodgepodge Ramadan fasting, the avoidance of pork, the use of her right hand when she ate and of her left whenever she reached for toilet paper, and of course, lingering guilt over the more than occasional indulgences in Cab Franc and Syrah. My point is she wasn’t exactly a believer, and she wasn’t exactly not. She’d grown up with these things (as had I), and they clearly still held some meaning for her (as they did not for me), even if that meaning had almost nothing to do anymore with a yearning for heaven or a fear about ending up in hell.

  I say “almost” only because Asha was never really clear about what she actually thought when it came to the end of life or the end of times. Both her parents are religious, though Asha used to joke that her mother’s faith had as much Oprah and Jeane Dixon in it as it had of the Prophet Muhammad. As a teen, she ran into some fairly baroque trouble with them over normal teenage things that only ever got her “American” friends yelled at or, at worst, grounded. There was more corporal punishment in her family than most in this country would be comfortable with (usually by her mother’s hand), and several times she found herself locked in her room for days at a time and occasionally starved (as her father had been as a child). Typical of Asha’s generous embrace of things as they are was that she never seemed bitter about any of it. She didn’t hold it against her parents that, as she put it, they couldn’t make their peace with the consequences of having had children in a culture that wasn’t their own. She saw their dilemma with compassion. At root, she believed, they never really understood how American they weren’t.

  In the four months Asha and I spent not quite dating and not quite not dating, I would meet her folks three times: twice at the ranch-style house in Spring, Texas, where she (and her two sisters) grew up; once when they all came through New York and we spent an afternoon wandering the halls at the Museum of Natural History. By that point, her parents knew I was more than just a “friend of a friend” who happened to be in Houston on the weekend of the Prophet’s birthday, which her family always celebrated by having friends and family to the house for dinner. I think they liked me, though mostly—I suspect—because I was nothing like the man they’d spent seven years desperately hoping their daughter would leave.

  More on that shortly.

  Her father, Haris, is not entirely dissimilar to mine. Though physically they look nothing alike—Haris is short and built like a barrel; he’d played rugby as a young man and then “put on the pounds,” he joked, patting his gut as we passed beneath the Blue Whale—he and my father share a fundamental optimism about this country that shaped their saucer-eyed, New World wonder as well as a blunt brashness encouraged by their adopted culture: sunny and sure to some, naive and cocky to others. Central to their ideas of themselves as American is that they “get” this country, “get” how the system here works, and, above all, that they “made it.” For Haris, “making it” meant growing that initial gas station–convenience store, for which he’d barely been able to gather a down payment in 1975, into a chain of a dozen such across the Houston area; acquiring more real estate—the reason why Asha owns a fourplex, living in one apartment, renting out the others; and, finally, what he was most proud of, the board positions at the local chapter of the Lions Club and the chamber of commerce. When he became a citizen, in ’86, Haris promptly raised an American flag in the front yard and began an epistolary second life that, when Asha told me about it, conjured up a middle-class Muslim analogue to Bellow’s maniacal, missive-writing Moses Herzog. Inspired, Asha said, by the judge’s stirring paean to America’s democratic ideals at his swearing-in ceremony, Haris started to pen fawning admonishments—and later, provocations—to famous now-fellow Americans: Lee Iacocca, Armand Hammer, Ann Richards, Muhammad Ali, John Wayne, Tip O’Neill, Lee Meriwether, James Michener, Ross Perot…just to name a few. Enshrined on the fridge door were two of his prized possessions: a signed reply from George H. W. Bush himself—with a blue smudge of ink the color of the autograph proving it was real—affixed by a magnet next to a snapshot of Haris posing with then vice president Bush at a Fourth of July parade in downtown Houston.

  Despite the accumulation of outward markers denoting his American belonging, Asha thought her father was still at heart an Old World man. The light of a Texas sun may have poured through their windows, but in those rooms, her father’s beloved Urdu ghazals drenched the family’s ears with loss, lamentation, lush and endless regret. His self-styled American extroversion, too, she thought was fundamentally Punjabi in origin, loud and warm and overly familiar, disarmi
ng to the stoic locals who came by to do house repairs or meter readings, an amusing eccentricity to his employees and customers alike. Even those letters to the powerful and famous that he spent so much of his time on—and collected into a self-published book that Asha kept on her nightstand—even these were quintessentially Pakistani in their themes, containing as they did: exhortations to recognize the border threat; warnings about corruption in politics both local and national; reminders of the myriad forms of succor America had enjoyed from Muslims during its long battle with the Soviets; and, most amusingly, abundant references to a rumor still current in much of the Muslim world, namely, that Neil Armstrong had converted to Islam.2

  As she did in her father, Asha saw signs of a less-than-easy Pak-American alloy in her mother. There were the obvious, amusing juxtapositions—a PTA president who wore shalwar kameez and dupattas to meetings populated with mostly white suburban Texas housewives; the horoscopes she brought to her weekly Quranic study group; the Iftar dinners that took place at Burger King—but the more telling contradictions were subtler, darker, and most encompassed, for Asha, by her mother’s inability to imagine that women had any other place than behind their men—and that those men must be Muslim. Indeed, trouble over the white boys who filled Asha’s girlhood dreams would be long, protracted, decisive, and violent.

  Asha’s parents didn’t let her leave town for college, so she went to the University of Houston, graduating summa cum laude. She aced her LSATs and got into law school at the University of Chicago, which made it hard for her father to stop her from leaving home, though before she left he wanted her to arrange her marriage to a first cousin in Pakistan. She refused. Unbeknownst to him or her mother, she was already in love with someone. His name was Blake. He was from Kansas and was playing basketball for Houston on scholarship. They met at a frat party her sophomore year. She got so drunk she passed out, and Blake took her back to his room, where he tucked her into his bed. She found him snoring on the floor on the other side of the room the following morning. So began a tumultuous on-again, off-again romance that would last through college and lure her back home once she took her law degree.