The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas

by Anand Giridharadas

  It took another year—until late 2009, with a new, declaredly antiwar president in office, and this era of conflict seemingly on the wane—for Rais to feel settled enough to fulfill a pledge. Now thirty-six, he had promised years earlier to take his mother to Mecca on the Hajj pilgrimage. Until now it had been close to impossible, given their distance apart, the expense, and Rais’s injuries and dedication to work. His mother knew that Rais couldn’t find the time to eat well or sleep enough or find a wife, let alone organize a pilgrimage to Mecca. For his part, Rais had been unwilling to go while in debt: among the faithful, there were divergent views on whether debtors could go on Hajj, and Rais, as was often the case, found himself on the conservative side of the argument. His view was that a person had to settle his liabilities before taking off for a faraway kingdom, lest piety become the refuge of deadbeats. Now debt was behind Rais, and he was financially sound.

  Late in 2009, Rais flew to Dhaka. He stayed there a few days and caught up with the family. Then he and his mother boarded a plane, bound for Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. It was the first time for both of them. They were going a few weeks before the official Hajj dates, so the place wouldn’t be “fully loaded” with visitors, as Rais put it, borrowing the language of the American car dealerships he had come to know. Theirs was one of the special Hajj flights, and already packed with pilgrims, who began performing their ablutions and rituals on board.

  Amma had flown before, but she was overcome with nerves. When the plane shuddered from what Rais called “a little turbulence,” she asked him why, with such a big sky, the pilot couldn’t find any other, nonshaky path. They were sitting near the wing, which Amma eyed warily to ensure everything was as it ought to be. As the plane swooped down toward Jeddah, a chunk of the wing began, ever so slowly, to detach from the rest of it. Amma became convinced that the wing was falling off. Rais tried to reassure her: it was just a flap coming down, and very much intended.

  When they landed, a wave of feeling, which had been rising and gathering force over years, crashed over mother and son alike.

  “It was the most beautiful thing in my life,” Rais said. “The feeling that finally I’m going with my mother, which was a promise to God—that I wanted to take care of her and to take her with me. So I was crying the day we landed in Mecca. We both, mom and son, were crying, because we never thought that it will come true one day.”

  RAIS SPOKE OF tending to his mother in Mecca in a manner that in his adopted country was reserved for the first days of romantic courtship and the lyrics of songs: anything for you; money is no object; whatever your heart desires. It was part of what still separated him from an America to which he was growing accustomed: a devotion to his mother that would never be diverted toward a woman of different blood—a love that would instead remain a bulwark of resistance against such latecomers, fickle as life had shown them to be. He pleaded with his mother to enjoy herself to the fullest. “Whatever she wanted to do, wherever she wanted to go, I told her, ‘You just tell me,’ ” he said. “Because there are so many holy places around Mecca and also in Medina. I said, ‘Well, you just name it. Money’s not a problem. Time’s not a problem. We’re here for a month. We’ll do it.’ So wherever even the Hajjis cannot go, we went there.”

  Upon landing on that first day, mother and son boarded a bus from Jeddah airport to their hotel, in the Misfalah quarter of Mecca. After checking in, they went immediately to the Haram Mosque—sprawling over an area the size of several stadiums, its six towers poking finger-like into the sky. It overflowed with worshippers all day. Rais and Amma made their way toward the Kaaba, the giant black cube that is the mosque’s centerpiece, decorated with golden calligraphy. Pilgrims worshipped around the Kaaba in rings: the innermost group stood close enough to embrace the cube, their hands pressed into the black stone; behind them, a more populous ring circled it in prayer; and beyond them was the remainder of the visitors, hundreds of thousands strong.

  “When we’re near the Kaaba, my mom told me to ask something from God when I see His house for the first time,” Rais said. “I asked for His mercy, forgiveness, guidance, and paradise in the next life. While I was asking something from God, my mother looked at me with eyes full of tears and rubbed her palm on my face and head.” When she drew close enough to touch the Kaaba, she rubbed her hand against it, and then against Rais’s face and head. She kissed him on the forehead.

  Rais had heard from people that prayers given from Mecca had 2,700 times the efficacy of prayers offered elsewhere. Here, unlike in Dallas, where dealing with server problems often got between him and his ability to pray, Rais set an alarm in their hotel room for 3 a.m. every day. He and his mother would bathe and then walk together to the mosque. Rais relished the sight of hundreds of thousands of people, most of them in white, coming from all directions at that early hour, bound for that one mosque—Muslims from Asia, Africa, South America; descendants of the original Arab Muslims, the conquered peoples, the Western converts; the covered and uncovered, the tunic-clad and shirt-clad, the rich and the subsidized poor—a mesmeric reminder of the power of the faith, of the enduring and transcendent appeal of His message.

  Day after day, amid the crowds and the chanting loudspeakers, Rais’s churning mind stilled. “Once you’re in that mosque,” Rais said, “anything, everything except praying to God is restricted. You’re not supposed to think anything about this world; you are not supposed to think.” He and his mother would stick around until the second prayer at 5:30 a.m. (Sometimes, it was actually Rais’s third prayer, because he often woke up for an unprescribed extra-credit prayer in the middle of the night. “If instead of sleeping, because of your love toward God, your respect, you wake up in the middle of the night and then you pray, it is extra special,” he said. He offered an analogy to office life: “It’s like, I don’t have to work at one o’ clock in the morning, but if my boss sees that I’m still working, I build trust, right? You build the relationship.”)

  At an ordinary mosque, Rais and his mother wouldn’t have prayed together. In Mecca, however, the sexes could pray side by side, because who on earth would think sexual thoughts in such a place? “That time, you’re not in your normal mental stage,” Rais said. It was also, presumably, dangerous to part with loved ones in a swarming, seven-digit-strong crowd. What impressed Rais, though, was how orderly the place was. Crime was rare, he heard. The merchants—selling tunics and prayer beads and T-shirts and handbags—left their stalls unattended when they prayed, and no one thought to steal. Plus, everyone knew that around here they cut your hands off for behavior like that.

  The pilgrimage was chiefly a spiritual endeavor, but it also gave Rais a chance to show his mother how he had grown since leaving her. Almost every meal of his mother’s life had consisted of Bengali food. Now here in Mecca were restaurants from all around the world: Pakistani, Indian, American, European; there was that halal KFC; there was the restaurant at the Hilton, with its tiramisu and chocolate mousse cake. (When they visited the Hilton, his mother suggested that they get one dessert to go with their coffee, but Rais insisted on their tasting several.) He longed to expose his mother to these exotic foods. He suggested they try a different place each day. She was concerned that he was wasting his hard-earned money. He countered that food here was so cheap. If money wasn’t for tending to his only mother, then what was it for?

  His mother was particularly bothered by Rais’s liberal tipping. He had returned from America with a penchant for sheikh-like behavior, spitting out money to anyone who did anything for them, even just pour a glass of water. At one restaurant, the waiter served them coffee, and Rais gave him money in multiple currencies for his trouble. He explained to his mother that the waiter would appreciate this and give them good service, but she was skeptical. Rais couldn’t be stopped, though, and had taken to using airline frequent-flyer analogies to explain how God rewarded virtue. “The more you give,” he told her, “the better is your mileage.” He had also worked in a restaurant himself, an
d done so in America, where, more than back home, the waiter is recognized as a person with a life and needs and maybe his own children. “I know that I don’t have enough money,” Rais said to his mother, “but I have the heart to give money. And you know Allah will give me if I give to others.”

  For Rais, this chance to serve and honor his mother was as important as the journey to the center of the faith. He hoped the month together would make clear to her what separation otherwise obscured: “I wanted to give my Mom the feelings that she raised a good son, and I am at her service. I’m not here to give her company; I am here for her service, as her servant. Because that comes from this teaching that your heaven is under your mom’s feet.” For Rais, who felt more acutely than most the preciousness of time, the pilgrimage was an opportunity for spiritual multitasking—honoring his mom while ostensibly on a mission to honor his God. “I thought that was the time I should earn some frequent-flyer miles,” he said. “My mom is there, I’m showing her Mecca, so I should serve her the best way I can.”

  The religious instruction of his youth came vividly to life in Mecca. He had known, for instance, of the magical well called Zam-zam that had slaked the thirst of millions of pilgrims with the holiest water on earth. It was Abraham’s son Ishmael who was said to have discovered it, miraculously, as his mother ran through the desert searching for water for her boy. In the version of the story Rais knew, Ishmael dug his feet into the sand while waiting for her, and there it was: so much water that his mother urged the well to “stop, stop,” which is how they say it got its name. All these years later, believers couldn’t fathom that it still hadn’t stopped, recharged somehow despite the extraordinary demands on it.

  One day during the crowded prayers, an old man collapsed and fell on Rais’s head, which was inches from the ground. Rais could feel his nose break into pieces. He saw blood pouring out, dyeing his shirt. At the first-aid office, he asked for antibiotics, which they informed him weren’t necessary. It was a minor break. Just clean it with the Zamzam water, they said. Within five or six days, Rais said, the nose had healed, without surgery or medication. How great was God. Convinced of the Zamzam water’s signal powers, Rais bought two 20-liter containers for five riyals each and filled them at the public sinks for the return trip to Dhaka, where the water would be given to cherished friends and those in medical need. The episode left Rais with a strange feeling. God had healed him, yes. But why did God want to hurt him in the first place—and here, in His own house? It had to have a meaning.

  Rais organized some trips out of Mecca to show his mother holy sites nearby. She especially longed to climb Jabal al-Noor, the Mountain of Light, upon which the Prophet Muhammad had received the first of the revelations that would grow into the Koran. Rais pointed out the obvious: her knees, which struggled with walking in horizontal situations and seldom managed a few stories of stairs, could not endure a climb of a few thousand feet. She insisted, and in that insistence Rais saw flecks of himself. “Like mother, like son,” he thought. She told him, “If you can, I can.” So they did a flash prayer at the foot of the mountain and pushed their way up and reached the summit in less than two hours. His mother felt an unaccountable surge of energy and, she claimed, no pain.

  The mountain’s Hira cave was what most called to Rais. There, in a dark little pocket among the rocks, too small for more than a few people (and now under a painted red, white, and green inscription), the Prophet had sat and meditated, and early verses of the holy scripture had come to Him. As Rais reflected on the Prophet’s time there, and on his wife’s service to Him in that hour, it seemed to remind him of the contrasting example of Abida. “How many wives nowadays would make that sacrifice?” he said. “That their husband is sitting in the mountain and she go and drop the food? The hardship, the extra task, that he’s not at home, the sacrifice.” As Rais interpreted the story, the Prophet had sat high up in that cave and stared down at a tribal world seething with hate. He was “sitting here, thinking of mankind, thinking for mankind, that why do people do these bad things to each other? What is the solution?”

  Something in this picture of the Prophet—in His mix of anguish and ambition for a torn-up world—profoundly affected Rais that day. It was something new he felt in himself: a permission he was giving himself, after long years spent pursuing health and stability, to think more broadly about the kind of vengeful world that had hurt him—and what better world could be built.

  “When I entered the Hira cave, I felt a heavenly peace in my heart,” Rais said. He looked through a small hole in the mountain and managed to see the Kaaba. He prayed and tried to figure out what lay ahead. “I realized that God wanted me to come here one day to seek guidance, and that’s why He did not take my life eight years ago,” Rais said. “Definitely there is something good going to be done by me and that’s why He put me through terrible pain and sufferings first, so that I could feel for others when they go through pain and sufferings—and now brought me here to fill my heart with peace, forgiveness, and love for His creation.”

  Foreigners visiting Mecca weren’t encouraged to roam around the kingdom, but Rais’s gallantry toward his mother dismissed such rules. A cousin who worked at the Hilton arranged a car to take Rais and his mom to the city of Ta’if, a few hours’ drive away. They drove on the sparkling Saudi highway across the bleak, empty land, past half-done concrete buildings, over low and flaky brown hills, up and around the Möbius-strip turns, and into that mountain city.

  Muhammad had once gone there seeking converts. In the version of the story that Rais remembered from childhood, the people of Ta’if were vicious to the Prophet: insulting Him, abusing Him, throwing rocks. He left the town bloody and stumbling. The angel Gabriel came to save Him, offering to bring the mountains crashing down on Ta’if. This the Prophet declined; Rais imagined Muhammad holding His hand up to Gabriel, telling the angel to back down. The Prophet wanted to forgive. “He not only raised His hand,” Rais said, “but He prayed the maximum in His lifetime for the people in Ta’if, that God have mercy on them. What they did, they did not understand.” The journey to Ta’if, this story of forgiveness, the incident with his nose and the Zamzam water, those moments spent in Muhammad’s lonely cave—Rais felt God to be telling him something, but he couldn’t decipher what.

  SOMETIMES, IN THE middle of the night, Rais would awaken with a start to find his mother beside him, rubbing his head and crying. She still couldn’t believe that she’d gotten him back: “She used to tell that I miss you so much, and that in all these years I could have been spending time with you, take care of you, cook something good for you, and rub your head while you sleep.” They talked and talked the whole time. Discussion of the material world was haram for pilgrims, so they dwelled on loftier subjects. She explained to him the significance of the places they were visiting, the rituals they conducted. They spoke of the afterlife, but also of how Rais might serve God in his remaining years on earth. They spoke of the role of mercy in the faith. Rais told her of a peculiar feeling that had begun to stir in him—a call to do something for others.

  These words—“to do something for others”—had played on a loop in his mind throughout the pilgrimage. And he knew where they came from. As he lay dying years ago, he had looked to the sky and proposed a deal: if You save me, I will dedicate my life to doing something for others. This journey to Mecca had reminded Rais that he had strayed from that pledge. Life after the shooting became, more than ever before, about himself. It had to be so. It had been a time for recovery—for surgeries and rehabilitation and the securing of bread and roof. God couldn’t begrudge him that. But what he felt now was that he had crossed some invisible line separating the moment of rebuilding from a new phase. What or why or how, he didn’t know. The debt was gone. The right eye, mostly blind, was what it was. The more Rais prayed, the more God elucidated the message He had been sending. God was calling in an old favor. He was telling Rais it was time.

  Rais’s father had told him, before
he left, that whatever he asked for in Mecca would be granted. One day Rais and his mother were praying at the Kaaba. His mother was chanting. Rais remembers her asking God: please help my son to fulfill his promises to You. Rais, feeling the summons of a new mission, asked God for the resources he might need to serve others. He asked Him for mental, physical, and financial strength, so that those basics could recede from his attention and free him to concentrate on service. He asked for guidance about where his life should go, knowing that it had to travel in new directions: “I said, ‘Help me to lead a respectful, good life, and keep me from all evils. Give me the power and the strength to help others. Once I come back to You, You put me in the highest Heaven that You have created.’ ”

  He had told his mother of his long-ago promise, and she encouraged him to bring it up with his God, which he now did. “Before I close my eyelids forever, I want to do something for others,” he whispered.

  They were not idle words. Rais couldn’t explain it, but as the pilgrimage ended, he felt very different. It was perhaps the prompt for another of his leavings, though he didn’t yet know what he was escaping or where he was bound. For now he knew only this: “My heart feels softer than ever before.”

  Gadfly

  “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think of what I’m here for,” Stroman wrote in 2008. Six years at Polunsky had given him plenty of time to stew. He felt himself occupying a front-row seat at a spectacle of self-examination. He pondered what he was, what else he might have been. Not that he could have been a lot else, he figured. Not with the “liars” who called themselves his family. Not with the mother who wouldn’t come visit him: “Every time I try to write her anything, I always get the same story: ‘It’s too hard. It’s too hard to accept this.’ ” Not with the boys who were all about him when he was buying rounds but melted away at the first inconvenience. He hadn’t seen anybody from the family, besides his sister Doris, whom he couldn’t trust after she testified before the grand jury: “I still got love for her because we’re blood kin, but that respect’s gone.” It wasn’t that Stroman didn’t understand their behavior. They were doing him like he’d done them. That’s how they would explain it. He just wished they’d remember that “every flower that ever bloomed had to go through a whole lot of dirt to get there.”