Homeland Elegies

by Ayad Akhtar

  By the time we got home, it was time for late-afternoon prayers. Sultan asked if we had a prayer rug he could use. If not, a clean towel would do. I went searching through the house. In my parents’ room, I found my mother’s red-and-black rug—given to her by her parents on the eve of her departure for the New World—still laid out, its top left corner folded over, indicating a final interrupted prayer she intended to come back and finish but never did. Father hadn’t picked up the rug since her death. We’d both avoided dealing with her things for more than two and a half years now—her closets were still full; so was her vanity counter in the master bathroom; even the glass tumbler she used was still perched on her nightstand. I muttered an apology to some imagined maternal ghost, folded the rug up, took it down to Sultan, and pointed him in the direction of Mecca. I lingered in the hall just beyond the doorway and watched him lower his head and bow, then prostrate himself, his lips silently moving with ritual verses; the calm that came over me was hard to ignore. It had been two decades since I’d prayed in the Muslim way. Perhaps, I thought, it was time to try again.

  Back in the kitchen, I found Father tinkering with a cocktail set, measuring out vermouth into a jigger, then dumping it into a shaker. “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Making martinis,” he said with a puckish grin.

  “Since when do you drink martinis?”

  “I don’t. But he loves them.”

  “Sultan-Uncle?”

  “First time I ever had a martini—it was with him,” he said as he screwed on the cap of the shaker. “Back then, he was a martini junkie. We’ll see how serious he is about all this new holy baloney,” he said as he started to shake the mixture.

  To my surprise, Sultan didn’t refuse the glass Father offered him when he showed up in the kitchen after his prayers—though it was just to taste. He brought the wide-rimmed glass to his lips and sipped. “Too much vermouth,” he said with a frown.

  “Just what’s in the recipe,” Father said.

  “Maybe there’s something wrong with the vermouth.”

  Father took the glass and sipped. “I like it,” he said. “But I’ll make you another if you want…”

  “Enjoy it, Sikander. Even in the unlikely instance you can get it right, which I doubt, I’m not interested.” Sultan turned to me: “Come on, beta. Let’s give you your present.”

  Upstairs in the guest room, he pulled a gift-wrapped book from his Vuitton duffel and handed it to me.

  “Pretty big,” I said, weighing it in my hands.

  “I hope you don’t have it already.”

  I tore off the wrapping. It was an old edition of Rumi’s Mathnawi.

  “I don’t. I’ve always thought I needed to read it.”

  “That’s what I thought when I saw your play. You know, they did it in Omaha.”

  “You thought I needed to read Mathnawi?”

  “You’re making fun of him at one moment in the play, and I just thought, ‘He doesn’t know Rumi, because if he did, he wouldn’t want to make fun…’”

  “I don’t make fun of Rumi. I make fun of the guy who thinks he knows something about Islam because he’s reading Rumi.”

  “But anyone who reads Rumi does know something about Islam, beta. Something good, something important. For me, that book is my Quran.” He’d started emptying his bag, removing socks and underwear, his shaving kit. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I liked your play. It was wonderful. Funny and sharp. But here and there, a little shrill. You know what I mean?”

  “Shrill?”

  “Everybody has flaws—we’re no exception. But we’re under attack in this country now. We have to stick together. It was clear to me that audience of Nebraskans had no idea what you’re writing about. They were thinking, ‘He’s Muslim. He’s saying Islam is bad. He must know. He’s on the inside.’”

  “—Which is, of course, not what I’m saying.”

  “And I know that. But they don’t. In this time, you have to be careful. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a wonderful play. You’re a wonderful writer. Just wonderful.”

  “Thanks, Uncle.”

  He stepped over to the dresser and pulled open a drawer to stow his things.

  Of course, it hurt to hear him speak about my work this way. I didn’t think he was right, but the kindness with which he offered his criticisms—which, I knew, were evidence of his having somehow been hurt by the work—left me feeling there was no point in arguing. “Uncle, thank you for coming. He needs the support. It’s been complicated…”

  “I know, beta. We talk.” He turned back to his bag for more things: “You’re a good son to be taking on this chaos he’s putting himself through. I mean, to lose all that money. He’s so lucky to have you. I could never expect the same from my kids—but then again, they’re not you.”

  “What money, Uncle?”

  Sultan looked up at me. “He hasn’t told you?”

  “Told me what?”

  “Hmm. I see…I know he was going to tell you. He told me that.”

  “Tell me what, Uncle?”

  “I don’t think it’s my place.”

  “It sounds pretty serious. You’ve got me worried.”

  “I’ll talk to him. I’ll encourage him to tell you now.”

  “Uncle—”

  “And if he doesn’t, I will. I promise.”

  * * *

  Father suggested tandoori for dinner, and I knew it was to get under Sultan’s skin. Sultan was thinking of shutting down Trunk Road, the restaurant in Omaha he’d left his practice to open. Like Father, Sultan was a fanatic for the Lahori style of North Indian cuisine, and according to him, his restaurant was the only place in Nebraska (or neighboring Kansas, for that matter) where you could get a proper Lahori meal. Since the recent clampdown on immigrant visas, staffing the kitchen with a cook who really knew how to make the food properly—and part of the whole point for Sultan had been to have a place where he could get his beloved Lahori paaya and lamb chops!—was now increasingly complicated. The few such cooks still legally in the country had jobs in the bigger cities, and for around a year now, the food at Trunk Road had suffered. It wasn’t just work visas for the cooks that were the problem; dealing with patrons was harder and harder, with everyone so quick to anger over the smallest things. Worst of all, no one seemed to have the money (or time) to be eating out anymore—at least not at the sort of place like Trunk Road, neither particularly cheap nor particularly expensive. Less and less place left in America, he said, for the middle class of things.

  Predictably, Sultan complained about Trump over our seekh kebabs and sabzi masalas. We listened as he laid out just how unreasoned and self-defeating the administration’s anti-immigrant logic was to him: “It’s not just that they won’t let anyone come here now. They’re trying to make it so no one wants to come. Graduates like us? If we’re young, coming out of medical school, why would we want the headache? We’ll try somewhere else. And do they think that will be good for the country? At least fifty percent of the best doctors in America were not born in America. At least fifty percent. That’s just a fact. I mean, correct me if you don’t agree, Sikander.”

  “In research, probably higher.”

  “Right. And what could be more important than that? New cures, new vaccines—where are they coming from if not from the immigrants? He doesn’t like Mexicans, he doesn’t like Muslims, he doesn’t like Africans—in the process, he’s making it more and more unlikely that any good doctor, good scientist, will come here. No matter where they’re from. And who will suffer the consequence? The American patient suffers. That’s who.”

  “But Uncle, I mean…since when has the system cared about the American patient?”

  “Okay, beta. But I’m not just talking about people from North Omaha. I’m talking about the ones with money, too. The ones who can get the best care. They’ll suffer like everyone else. I mean, when that bastard in the White House had a heart problem, who did he call? Your father. First in his clas
s at King Edward Medical College. That’s who. You get rid of that pipeline, who benefits? No. One.”

  “Then they’ll be stuck with the local boy who postpones a procedure so he can get an extra day on his ski trip in Aspen,” Father said acerbically.

  “I guess I’m just saying, patient care has never been a priority,” I said.

  “I’m not sure that’s true, beta. Democrats have tried. They have. Obamacare—”

  “What a disaster,” Father interjected.

  “Okay, Sikander. I get it. But at least he was trying. Right? At least it was an effort.”

  “You left medicine before that debacle started. Okay? You don’t know the first thing about it. Don’t lecture me about—”

  “I’m not talking about your salary, Sikander. I’m talking about the system. They can put a man on the moon, but they can’t solve health care in this country?” Father signaled his lack of interest by waving at the waiter and asking for another beer. Sultan continued: “Look, this country has been good to us. I had my children here. They’re miserable—there’s no secret there—but they would have been just as unhappy back home in some different way.”

  “What’s your point?” Father was irritated.

  “You know what my point is.”

  “Our lives are here, okay? Our kids are here.”

  “No one’s saying they’re not.”

  “We don’t like what’s happening politically, so we jump ship? Is that it? After all this country gave us?”

  The conversation between them had taken a sudden turn I wasn’t following, as if they were picking up an argument they’d been having for some time.

  “We paid our taxes, Sikander,” Sultan said. “At least I paid mine. I took no money from the state. I cared for these people, their children. I don’t feel I haven’t given back. Maybe what I didn’t do—and what you didn’t, either—was give back to the country that really needed us.” Father shrugged. Sultan turned to me: “The thing I never got used to here was not really understanding what people are thinking. Everybody coming from so many different places, so many different experiences, everybody looking at the same things in completely different ways. For years, people are telling me, ‘You don’t smile. You have to smile more.’ I heard it so much I ended up taping a note card on my bathroom mirror to remind me. ‘Glue a smile to your face before you leave the house.’ If you smile like that in Pakistan all the time? They think you’re a fool. But if you don’t smile like that here, you have an attitude problem.”

  “You do have an attitude problem,” Father said playfully.

  Sultan ignored him. “They call it a melting pot, but it’s not. In chemistry, they have what they call a buffer solution—which keeps things together but always separated. That’s what this country is. A buffer solution.”

  “Are you taking notes?” Father asked, turning to me as his beer arrived.

  “He doesn’t need to,” Sultan answered for me in a tone somewhat sterner than I thought made sense. “Your son knows these things already, Sikander. He’s writing about it. We’re the ones who didn’t know.”

  Father sipped, sipped again, then placed his beer carefully on the napkin before him. He looked up at Sultan with a wooden stare. He didn’t speak.

  I finally asked the obvious question: “Are you thinking of going back to Pakistan, Uncle?”

  Sultan’s reply was careful, cagey, intending—I realize now—a meaning beyond its words. In retrospect, it’s hard for me to believe that I didn’t divine what he was trying to tell me, but I didn’t: “So many of us are thinking about it, beta. We’re all wondering in our own different ways about how to find our way back home.”

  7.

  October was the cruelest month that year, with our country awash in violence. Back on the first of the month, in Las Vegas, a shooter had opened fire on an outdoor country music festival from the makeshift turret of his thirty-second-floor hotel suite. For ten minutes, bullets poured onto an unprotected crowd, injuring 441 and taking fifty-nine lives. The following twenty-eight days would see a further twenty-four mass shootings in fifteen states, bringing the month’s toll of fatalities to eighty-two, with 532 injured.

  On the last day of the month, Halloween, sometime after 3:00 p.m., as my father was likely returning from lunch for an afternoon session of his second week in court, I was waiting for a latte at a West Village coffee shop when I heard an onslaught of passing police sirens. I went to the window to see what was going on. Behind me, a patron announced there’d been an attack of some sort along the West Side Highway. The barista behind the counter—now staring down into her phone—read out a bystander’s description on her Facebook profile of a pickup truck plowing into pedestrians along the Hudson River bike path. Within minutes, eyewitnesses on Twitter were being retweeted, their accounts already referring to a “terrorist attack.” Some claimed they saw the perpetrator escape from the truck—dark-skinned, long-bearded—and heard him shouting “Allah-u-Akbar” just before being shot in the gut by the city police. I retreated from the ad hoc comity forming itself in that coffee shop; I didn’t want to pick through the details with my fellow patrons. I’d learned my lesson on that day sixteen years earlier when my curiosity led to a downtown encounter from which my American self would likely never entirely recover. I went out into the street and flagged the first cab home.

  Over the next few hours, I monitored the story’s developments from back at my place in Harlem. Sure enough, the attacker was Muslim, an immigrant from Uzbekistan approaching the end of his Saturn returns. He’d rented a truck in Passaic, New Jersey, around an hour before driving it into Manhattan, where he killed eight and injured eleven. According to pundits, he was the second mass-murdering Muslim immigrant to come into this country on what was known as the Diversity Immigrant Visa lottery, the other being the Egyptian shooter who attacked an El Al counter at Los Angeles International Airport back in 2002. We were told our beloved Halloween parade was to proceed as scheduled that night, though not before the governor took a moment to sing the city’s praises and remind us how truly exceptional we were, which, of course, was why we’d been attacked, a sentiment shared by the mayor, who added to the usual formula about the attack’s cowardly nature only that it was “particularly” cowardly. Ever since Susan Sontag was pilloried for suggesting, in 2001, that coward surely wasn’t the right word for men who fly themselves into buildings, I knew it was better not to be too bothered by this habitual misuse of a word whose actual meaning was never relevant to the situation at hand. When people are in pain, they don’t always mean what they say.

  I’d left a message for Father shortly after getting home earlier that afternoon, but it wasn’t until much later that night that he rang me back. Or his phone did. When I picked up, Sultan was on the other end. He was calling from somewhere in public, and it wasn’t easy to make out what he was saying over the surrounding din.

  “Got your message, beta. Thank you. We were worried when we heard the news.”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. I mean, I wasn’t that far from it this afternoon.”

  “Tragic. Just tragic.”

  “I know. —So how’d it go in court today?”

  “That’s actually the reason I’m calling.” I thought I heard concern in his voice.

  “What happened? Did it not go well?”

  “No, no. It went fine. I mean—so what happened, after the session, they heard the news about this attack near you—your father’s attorneys, well, the guy with the long hair, who’s in charge…”

  “Thom Powell…”

  “I don’t know his name. Your father calls him Quaker Oats—”

  “Same guy.”

  “They made a new offer to settle with the patient’s family. And the family accepted.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, I’m not. Your father’s lawyer explained to me they were in a similar situation before because of an attack that happened in the middle of the trial.”

  “Yeah. It was S
an Bernardino. Hannah told me about it.”

  “Well, they didn’t want to take a chance on a repeat.” On my television screen, local news flashed once again through a montage of smartphone clips shot in the aftermath of the attack. Bike parts and other debris were strewn along the green path, as were the dead bodies.

  “Is he there?” I asked. “Can I talk to him?”

  “He’s upset. I don’t blame him. Now it’s in the database for everyone to see. But the good thing is—it won’t hurt him. He’s at the end of his career. And maybe this is just the extra push he needs to finally get out.”

  “Are you with him? Can I talk to him?”

  “Yes, I’m with him. I’m not sure it’s the best time.”

  “Where are you guys?”

  He hesitated before saying: “A casino not too far from the hotel…”

  “Yeah, I know where it is,” I said, disheartened by the reliability of my father’s new dysfunctions. “Okay, well, I’m around. Whenever he wants to call.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll keep an eye on him. And I’ll make sure he calls you tomorrow.”

  * * *

  The rest of what happened for my father transpired in rapid succession: barely a week after the malpractice settlement, Sultan’s ninety-two-year-old mother fell in her Lahore bathroom and broke her hip. Indebted, he said, to Sultan for his visit and seeing an opportunity to put some healthy daylight between himself and what had just happened in La Crosse, Father decided he was going to join his friend for his trip back to Pakistan to deal with his mother’s situation. In order to do so, though, he would have to resign his position at Reliant effective immediately. Leaving when there was still time on his contract would mean losing his retirement bonus, but so be it. At seventy, he was already a year into the maximum Social Security retiree payout, roughly $3,600 a month. It was time to start a new chapter. Father explained all this on the phone in a tone that was now delighted, now defensive, as if he were hoping for my encouragement but expecting my censure. His tone and the jumble of ill-advised options all started to make more sense when he finally got to what I gathered was the real reason for his call: