Two years later, it was time to act on that old promise. Rais studied for the exams for as many as sixteen hours a day in searing heat, with two of the family’s fans deployed to cooling him. He attended a coaching class in the winter and stuffed himself full of the lessons found in textbooks custom-made for aspiring cadets. He took the exam early in the new year. When at last the verdict came, it offered admission. Rais hoped the news would restore the family’s confidence.
“I remember the day I was selected, I told my mom, ‘Never give up. That my brother couldn’t do, that doesn’t mean that no one can do. You should not give up. You should try. I tried, and God helped me.’ ” These were Rais’s lessons from the incident: to try and try; and, no less, never to confuse the fate of others with his special own.
When he got into Sylhet, the first victory in his streak, his mother could have filled a teacup with her tears. They were of joy, but also of anxiety about her Ripon’s moving a full day’s train journey away. “You are happy; I am happy, too,” she said. “But I’m going to lose you.”
AMONG THE COMPLICATIONS of Rais’s approach to life was this: chasing a thing with such fervor could distract you from considering what the thing, once captured, would be like. On joining day at the Cadet College of Sylhet, in the spring of 1986, little twelve-year-old Rais sobbed. A seventh-grader and brand-new cadet was beginning to realize what he had committed to in trying to please his mother. Like a stack of old family letters, precious but without use, he would be lock-and-keyed away in this cupboard for six whole years. Rais’s dada, the rejected one, must have had his own complicated feelings about having to accompany Rais on the Surma Mail train to Sylhet, 150 miles to the northeast.
The cadet college was a universe unto itself, insulated from the larger country, with its own cinema, mosque, hospital, and dormitories—not to mention courts and fields for basketball, soccer, hockey, tennis, and volleyball. Its rituals were designed to harden boys and, equally, to apprise them of their mutual dependence. They awoke before six every morning, starting out with calisthenics and a run on some days and mock military parades on others. After the younger boys went to class, their dorm rooms underwent inspection by the seniors, who made sure that bedsheets were tucked tightly-tightly under mattresses and shoes lined up heel to heel to heel. Failure on this score or various others brought swift and bracing punishment: perhaps frog jumps while holding your ankles, or push-ups in the hallway, or rolling yourself across an open soccer field. For the crime of speaking out of turn in the classroom, the penalty might be a tugged ear or thwacked buttock.
“Military school taught me lot of things: discipline, team-building, leadership, patience,” Rais said. He remembered everything being very precise. After classes and athletics, the boys had two hours, and only two, for homework. Then came dinnertime, to which they had to walk in formation, as Rais recalled it: “Not just walk on the street, holding hands or gossiping, chatting loudly—not like that. You go in a nice formation on the side of the street, where you walk in a line, and the leader”—typically, one of the seniors—“he makes sure the discipline is maintained and nobody makes any kind of chaos.”
In general, the cadets left the campus only on Thursday mornings, for a race of about three miles up Airport Road, past the small airfield, into some tame hills and back. Guards stood along the route to protect the future soldiers of a newly independent republic and to ensure that they weren’t making too much mischief.
Rais sought to be guarded in his self-admiration, but he made an exception for his prowess as a runner at Sylhet. “From grade seven, I used to always come at the beginning of the race,” he said. He still remembered the seniors taking wary note of a boy many years their junior finishing within a few feet of them: “It was amazing thing. They said, ‘Wow, this kid is something.’ ” Rais grew slightly embarrassed by his retelling: “I should not be talking more on this, but I got attention by that. From seventh grade to twelfth grade, I was always on the first row.”
He recalled with special fondness the day when he was in seventh grade and an eighth-grader injured himself and had to pull out of the 600-meter run. Somebody suggested Rais as a substitute, despite his relative youth. The cadets belonged to rival “houses,” which competed to accumulate points through the school year. Rais’s Shahjalal House needed him to come in fourth, fifth, or sixth to secure enough points to win the day. Rais convinced an eighth-grader in the race to take a junior under his wing and help him achieve that goal. The eighth-grader agreed, and so Rais followed him around the track for most of the race. On the homestretch, with the finish line drawing within sight, Rais decided to sprint, even as his eighth-grade buddy languished, “completely out of his stamina.”
“I came first,” Rais said. “That was a disaster and that was a happiness as well, because it was a shock to the entire school that a seventh-grader who was sitting on the sidelines—he came first.” He still chuckled thinking of the eighth-graders who confronted him back in the dorms: “Who told you to come first?” He said, “It was a shame for the eighth grade; it was a joy for the seventh grade. People are holding me above and laughing and dancing, saying that, ‘You broke the history today. No seventh-grader did this in history.’ ’’
When Rais told a story like this, sometimes he would catch himself and tell another, contrary one. Thus the tale of his 600-meter upset led to one about the limits of talent.
Rais said he learned, while ascending into seniority, that running his fastest kept his house from winning. He would finish early and secure applause and sometimes a medal, but the late finishers on his team prevented personal triumph from becoming collective victory for Shahjalal House. He found that if he ran more slowly, he could stick with them and galvanize them as they ran, goading them toward the finish line. Very often it worked. “If I give up my medal, if I bring these kids in front, it made my house go up,” he said.
This was one of Rais’s major lessons from that time—and it related to another lesson once imparted to him by a harsh teacher. The teacher pulled his ears and spanked him because of a noise in class that was in fact bleated by Rais’s neighbor. When Rais later went to the teacher to protest the injustice, his teacher responded that, as with a contagious house fire in a congested quarter of Dhaka, in life sometimes you get burned for no sin of your own, simply because of where you’re standing.
After six years at the college, Rais graduated. He came out feeling pulled this way and that by rival goals. He had dreamed of being an airplane pilot at least since he accompanied his father to Dhaka airport as a boy and watched the sky swallow him up and take him away to the Arab Emirates. In time the dream had grown more vivid: he wished to attend the Bangladesh Air Force Academy. But this vision now had to compete with another, inspired more recently by returning alumni of Sylhet, who visited the school to give pep talks about the world beyond it. The most impressive of them had gone off to America for higher studies. This appealed to Rais, too. The best approach, he felt, was to pursue both ambitions at once and defer to God’s preferred timetable. “If I don’t get to this dream, maybe that’s the next one,” he said. If not piloting here, then studying in America.
Rais cast his entry into the Air Force Academy as another story of improbable triumph. He reckoned himself to be among the shrimpiest of his classmates, short and slender, which he imagined would make it difficult to pass the academy’s extensive scrutiny and testing: “It’s very hard to go to Air Force, because it’s very limited openings. You have to have a very good health, very good vision, and also have to be highly talented. Your IQ has to be more than 175.” Setting aside that possibly inflated figure, the Air Force did have a reputation for difficulty, which led Rais to this observation about his peers: “Those who want to escape the military, they choose the Air Force, because they will be kicked out.”
But Rais made it through the exams, and then three months of grueling joint-force training in southern Chittagong, where he lost so much weight—his cheeks looked
sunken, his eyes darkly recessed—that his visiting mother wept at the sight of her little skeleton. Rais fractured his wrist two months into the three-month program, but he told no one. He was stubborn, and he feared falling behind in the daily points tally or being removed; the important thing was to keep moving. He pushed himself ever harder in the mile tests and, as at Sylhet, found success: “I was coming first every single day.” Once again, it seemed to Rais proof of some special destiny.
When at last he saw a doctor for his wrist, two weeks before the training’s end, he received a scolding and some damning news: “Your hand will never be OK. You took such a long time to come back and the fracture has spread so much, it’s very unlikely that you’ll be able to get it back the way it was before.”
But this was, as ever, just the prelude to the story. The wrist did heal, and after three months in a plaster cast and a suspension of his training, Rais formally enrolled in the Air Force Academy.
The next victory involved the undoing of the last. Rais put in two and a half years at the academy in Jessore, studying aerodynamics and navigation and meteorology, collecting dozens of flight hours learning to pitch, roll, and yaw in Chinese-made PT-6A prop planes. He received his commission as a pilot officer. Then, a few months in, while undergoing further training in radar and air defenses, he simply changed his mind. If not this dream, then the other one, he had once said. The other dream—studying in America—had again begun to nibble on and whisper in his ear.
Rais described the change as a natural evolution of his ambitions. Still, it was an abrupt and uncommon shift: men trained up by the military system seldom left it so quickly. Rais couldn’t fully explain what had come over him, even years later. It just became clear that this life wasn’t for him, he said. Maybe it was the two plane crashes—one killing a teacher Rais knew, the other a fellow student. Or maybe the sense he suddenly had of whiling away his life cut off from the world—first in Sylhet, then in Jessore, now on base after base. “I was out of my house at age of eleven,” he said. “I missed all the good times from my family—missed all the programs. Now I’m in the military last two and a half years: missed my sister’s wedding, my brother’s wedding, this and that. So now when I am going to have my personal time, some free time—what I wanted to do?” A military future would bring what he called a “tight life.” He asked himself: “Do I really want to lead a life like this?”
As it happened, getting out of the Air Force was harder than getting in. His comrades tried to deter him. One senior officer warned that his likely career alternative was the venal life of a businessman: “If you do business, you have to be dishonest.” Rais would fall from the height of prestige—from the pride of defending Bangladesh, from those government cars and colonial club memberships and foreign educational courses, from that look people give an officer—to its depths. Nothing seemed to convince Rais. Shortly, as per procedure, the air secretary of the country contacted Rais to inquire about his request for a discharge. He asked the young man to come to headquarters and bring his father along.
At the meeting, the official looked to the father: “Can you ask your son what we can do for him to stay?”
Rais was impressed by his father that day. “You raised my son,” Rais remembered his father telling the air secretary. “You made my son an officer the last two and a half years through vigorous training. You made him a gentleman. And I think you also made him enough responsible to take his own decision. As a father, I think I did my part. And now you’re the guardian, and I think you trained him enough. So I leave it unto you and him.”
The official looked to Rais for his final answer. He wanted to go. Within six months, he had his release papers. Rushing to fill the void, a new striving took over: “Next goal: come to U.S.A.”
Before that bit of fortune could arrive, however, another would complicate it. Rais, now twenty-two, had known Abida for years, but only as an acquaintance from the neighborhood. Their relationship had consisted of passing in the galis and saying hello-hello-hi-hi at most. On auspicious occasions, his family might call on hers, or vice versa. But Rais had been out of sight at boarding school for years. When he returned home, in the middle of 1996, thinking of higher studies, he bought a computer and became taken with programming. He was into dBase and FoxPro in particular and figured they might help him get to America. One day, in one of their passing encounters, he learned that his neighbor Abida was a computer junkie in her own right and had been dBasing and FoxProing for much longer than he. They exchanged programming books, which led to Abida troubleshooting for Rais over the phone, which led to her coming over from time to time to help him in person.
“That computer brought us together,” Rais said. One day Abida, unprompted, told Rais that she used to have a crush on him back in childhood, but he was always gone, and she never had her chance. It would be an unusually forward move for a woman in that setting, but Rais insisted that this was how it happened. He asked her: “Do you still have the feeling, or is it already gone?” And he remembers that dazzling look on her face that made a man like him rush to seek his mother’s approval.
Abida soon began telling her own mother that she had classes on days when she really didn’t. She and Rais would linger at an ice cream parlor or a snack bar, or at a waterfront place called the Harbour Inn, which was owned by a retired Air Force man and where Rais was thus confident of getting service that would impress Abida. Their courtship went on for more than a year in this manner.
He found Abida “beautiful, friendly, romantic, talented, and religious-minded.” As with his mother, he struggled to describe her with richer specificity; in his corner of the world, women were often characterized in this way, judged by their skills at blending and smoothing, not by how they stood out. He did say that she was ever “in a jolly mood” and that she could “make any situation easy.” Even without talking, each knew what was running through the other’s head. “We had that kind of mental adjustment,” Rais said. The courtship was of the hybrid traditional-modern kind now gaining acceptance in Dhaka—a few droplets of allowable romance, fast merged into the rapids of arranged matrimony. It was unlike what Rais would later observe in America: “There was no checking out whether the chemistry works or not. The chemistry already worked. We are in love. It’s not that, OK, check out ten girls and find one girl. It’s not like that. We were already in love, and love is respect.”
Rais did what he believed an upstanding man in his place must do: solicit his mother’s view. “My mother is on one side of the scale and the entire world is other side of the scale, but still my mother’s side is heavier,” Rais liked to tell people. His mother was fond of Abida from what she’d seen of her growing up and from her more recent tech-support visits. Early in 1999, Rais arranged a small get-together at a restaurant for him and Abida, his brother, and his mother. The couple wanted Rais’s mother’s blessing for their relationship, and at the restaurant she formally gave it. While Abida’s mother was known to feel differently about the match, thinking Rais unworthy of her godly daughter for reasons unsaid, the young couple decided to proceed. They promised their lives and hands to each other. They would coax, outwit, and bypass dissenting elders as needed.
The fifth victory concerned a visa. Even as his relationship with Abida blossomed, Rais had been consumed by that recurring need of his: to leave. It wouldn’t be enough to fly fighter jets all his life, and wouldn’t be enough to be some plump, routinized salaryman. He wanted more—to study in America, learn computers, get in on this IT boom that had the world vibrating in the late 1990s. Or at least he could study commercial aviation over there and return home to be a pilot for Biman Airlines. He had heard, from schoolmates who emigrated and came home to tell about it, tales of abundance and greatness in places with names like St. Cloud, Minnesota.
Morning after morning, sometimes at 4 a.m., Rais joined the visa line outside the American embassy compound. Sometimes, three or four hours in, with the line finally slithering forward, he wo
uld learn that he was too far back. On other occasions, he got into the building, only to have his interviewer scoff at the notion that any young, unmarried Bangladeshi would actually study and come back to his country. To work for Biman? Yeah, sure. Visa rejected. Then again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again.
In the meanwhile, Rais took advantage of his early adoption of technology, writing a pleading e-mail to a U.S. State Department official whose name he found on the Internet—one Cynthia Haley. His bureaucrat uncle helped him draft the message in the government-sounding language that such people use, and it elicited an encouraging but noncommittal reply: something circular and elusive along the lines of “We encourage you to go again if you feel you still have enough reason to go and apply for a visa.” Still, the fact of a reply did impress him. And when he returned to the embassy for his eighth visa interview, he found that the man of seven rejections was gone, replaced by a new officer who seemed impressed by Rais’s military background and his score on the TOEFL, or Test of English as a Foreign Language. He asked about the young man’s dream. To study aviation, Rais said. All the wiser for his previous visits, he downplayed the IT idea and added, “So I can return to fly for Biman.”
“Well, good luck with your dream, Mr. Bhuiyan,” the officer said. Visa approved.
Rais came out of the embassy into the syrupy Dhaka air and went to the home of relatives who lived close by. He asked for their prayer rug, dropped to the floor, and gave God his thanks. At home later that day, he realized that he would have to give his mother two pieces of news. The first was that he had continued pursuing a visa even after he ceased to tell her about it, since the rejections had pained her. The second was that he had gotten it. He bent and touched her feet. His father seemed skeptical at first, then incredulous at his son’s way of operating.
The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas Page 2
