“The Dastoors?”
“Yes! Their apartment always smelled like fish. They were a quirky family. I remember how much the son liked cake. And what about here? The Farukis.”
“They didn’t live as close as the Dastoors. You don’t remember them? They lived several buildings away. Why are you asking?”
“No reason,” I said. “The Faruki dad popped into my head yesterday. I was wondering what happened to him.”
“I don’t think he was quite prepared for the hardship of coming to this country. His father was high up in the military in Iran. From what I gathered, they had lived a very comfortable life there. He’d never held a job before coming to America. And working at Radio Shack was probably not what he had envisioned when they moved here.”
“I remember their apartment. All those beers and Cokes in the fridge.”
“For a while there, he and your father became fast friends. Your father wasn’t the type to have friends. He didn’t have time, or maybe he didn’t trust the idea of a friendship. But he always liked walking over to Reza’s for a beer and a chat after work. He tried helping him when he lost his job. Tried to find him something new.”
“Did you keep in touch?”
“No.”
I finally told her the story of going into his apartment.
“Why didn’t you tell us then?” she asked, sounding concerned, even alarmed.
“I thought you’d get mad at me for going in there.”
“Of course we wouldn’t have been mad. I wish you’d told us.” She paused. “Though we never told you what actually happened to him. And we probably should have. It was just too much, and you were so young.”
My mother was skilled at speaking in a variety of emotional registers, but nervousness was rarely one of them. Hearing it in her voice now was making me anxious.
“When you saw Reza, his wife would have already left with their daughter. After he was fired from Radio Shack and couldn’t find work, she went and got a job at that Kmart near us, in curtains and bed linens. She knew her way around fabrics. But he refused to let her take the job, saying he would find one soon enough. The idea of her bringing in the money, and the possibility that he might never find another job, terrified him, though he’d never admit it. We went over there one evening to help them work through it. He was overly cheerful, insisting that everything was going to be fine. That he had some solid leads—which he didn’t. We tried convincing him that women work in America too, but he wouldn’t listen. And so she took the job anyway. And she found an apartment for herself and the little girl. That’s when he sold us all that furniture. He kept saying he didn’t have any use for it anymore. We didn’t need it, but knew he wouldn’t accept money from us otherwise, and we wanted to help. We were really worried about him. And then a week or two later, he killed himself.”
“Wait, what? What do you mean?” All this time, I’d assumed Reza was living out his life somewhere. I was probably one of the last people to see him alive.
She didn’t respond.
“How?”
“I don’t remember.”
I think she did, but wanted to spare me the details. “In that apartment?”
“No.”
“Why didn’t you tell me then?”
“He was such a decent man, and you were so young. We didn’t want to scare you.”
“Did Swati and Rashmi know?”
“Yes.”
I wasn’t sure what disturbed me more, Reza’s death or the fact that my family had kept the circumstances from me.
“Don’t think about him too much,” my mother said. “It was a sad situation.”
“Indeed.” I had reached the campus and needed to get off the phone. “I have to go, Mom. I just got to work.”
“OK, Raj,” she said. And then, in a softer tone: “It wouldn’t have made a difference.”
“What?”
“If you’d told us then. Reza was very depressed, and we couldn’t have offered him the help he needed. We didn’t know how to help him.”
“Right. OK.” I wasn’t sure what to say. I just wanted to get off the phone. “I’ll talk to you later. Let me know if that man starts to bother you again. I can have a chat with him. But he sounds fine.”
She hung up, and my mind circled back to Reza, to the deep despair he must have felt as he lay there in bed, knowing that he had nowhere to go, and no family to support or be supported by anymore. Maybe I was having a particularly shitty week, but at least I had Eva. She and the boys were still by my side, and I knew they weren’t going anywhere.
I parked and walked to my building, my new desk lamp in hand. I was still several feet from the entrance when I saw the sign.
Every morning, there was a different flyer taped to the glass in the main door, announcing a talk or a club meeting or a film showing. Neel hated school now, but I knew that he’d thrive once he made it to college; there would always be something for him to do, some new taste to develop, some new source of dopamine, at any hour of the day. If radio stations were still around then, I could see him filling the 1–4 a.m. slot with nineties hip-hop.
Usually I glanced at the flyer on the door and walked right through. Lately there had been a surplus of talks with “anthropocene” in the title, a word I knew but didn’t fully understand. And before that, it was “affect.” Everyone was giving papers on how much “affective labor” everyone else was doing. For a while, the hipper, younger scholars were stylishly barking for a return to the “aesthetic.” I predicted that “boredom” would be next.
Regardless of the buzzword, as soon as the advertised event had ended, the flyer went down. On the bulletin boards spread throughout campus, there was a clear warning that only “authorized persons” could add or remove flyers. It was a rule that students followed with surprising fidelity. Except this time.
Someone had taken the turbaned-man emoji that had been so prevalent in the comments section of the story about me—I’d started to call him Haji, because it was so similar to the clichéd image of the bearded, screaming Middle Eastern man ubiquitous in recent American war movies, always being mocked by the troops—blown it up to fill an 8½ x 11 piece of paper, and carefully taped it to the glass. My first instinct was to assume it was some mildly anarchist kid, sick of how only certain people got to post certain things. It couldn’t possibly be targeted at me.
But what if it was?
Someone had to know that I came through this door at about the same time every Monday and Wednesday morning. I turned around and searched behind me. There were some students walking in the distance, but no one close by.
I looked back at the flyer. The color gradation was set as dark as possible. I saw my reflection in the glass and then moved over so that my face was superimposed on Haji. Certainly this was no noose or swastika; it was an emoji, one of countless images available on all Apple devices. I was about to reach out and rip it down. But instead, I took a photo with my phone, to keep as evidence.
I didn’t know what to do next. Maybe I should call the campus police to make sure no one took it down while I went upstairs. The effect of it was far more powerful when you came upon it as I had. But what would I say to the police? How would that conversation go? The flyer was meant for me and me alone, and yet I knew that someone else, someone removed from all this, wouldn’t see it that way. I’d tell them someone was taunting me. And how do you know it’s meant for you? they would ask. If it was on your office door, that might be different. But this is a door that hundreds of people go through each day. What is so offensive about it? You don’t even wear a turban.
I made my way upstairs.
I walked up and down the hall, not knowing what to do or whom to talk to. I knocked on Cliff’s door. No answer, which wasn’t a surprise. He wrote at home in the morning and came to the office at ten thirty.
I went to my office, removed the desk lamp Mary had returned, and plugged in my new one. I was going to get productive work done under this new soft
light. I had to.
I turned on the computer and checked in on my new online presence. Six thousand comments. Not too shabby, but I wasn’t the hottest story on the internet. The story about how Jews had founded and now controlled the major Hollywood film studios had north of ten thousand comments.
I closed the tab and worked through the driest, most uncontroversial lecture in my files. I could introduce it in class by saying we were going to back up a bit, get some background context that I felt the students needed, and then I’d tell them about kinship patterns among the Nuer. Basic, uncontroversial Evans-Pritchard. Today and for the rest of the term, I wasn’t going to say a single memorable thing. My job now was to become profoundly boring and unremarkable.
I had written the lecture, and created the accompanying PowerPoint slides, several years earlier. But I hadn’t read it in a long time. As the years had passed, I’d let some of these basic ideas go, incorporating them into other, more complex lectures. Some of the slides had photographs of the Nuer that Evans-Pritchard had taken during his fieldwork in southern Sudan. The people were all minimally dressed. I’d explain how these photographs represent the gaze of the anthropologist on the native, but no matter the context or the explanation, the images would float away on their own and someone would surely accuse me of displaying exploitative, racist images of Africans. As I went through and removed all the photographs, I wondered if this kind of second-guessing was going to be my reality in the classroom from now own.
Just as I was finishing, Dan appeared.
“Three days in a row,” I said. “I could get used to this.” He was dressed in ironed khakis and a tucked in, light green gingham button-down shirt. “You getting ready to sell a house?”
Dan closed the door behind him.
“I may be on the dating scene soon,” Dan said. “Need to adjust and think ahead.”
“Stop.”
“You never know. Her silent treatment is deafening. I’m sorry I’m here again on your day. I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
“I’m glad you’re here. Did you see the email?”
“Of course.”
Cliff was very diligent about sending department news to the whole faculty. A new book. An email. A fellowship. An email. An impending clusterfuck. An email. Cliff thought the department ought to know what was going on.
“It’s horrific,” Dan said. “I’m sorry. And the comments. Please tell me you didn’t read them.”
“Every last one,” I said. “I can’t help it. I keep refreshing it to make sure I don’t miss new ones. It stopped stinging after the first thousand. Now I just want to be the most hated man on the internet.”
“I would have read them too.”
“Did you see that flyer downstairs? At the main entrance?”
“What flyer?”
I took out my phone and showed it to Dan. He looked at it closely.
“Holy shit,” Dan said. “You need to show this to someone right now. Who’s doing all this?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think Cliff knows either. Somebody in my class complained to the dean’s office. But I don’t even know if it’s the same person that sent in the video and put up the flyer.”
“Is Cliff here?”
“No. I’ll talk to him after my morning class.” I gave Dan the once-over again. “Seriously. Why are you dressed so well?”
In the gingham shirt, Dan looked very much the patrician he actually was, but didn’t want to be. He had gotten through Choate without being inappropriately touched, drank his way through Haverford, and had done his dissertation fieldwork in Costa Rica because the surf was so consistent.
“I don’t know,” Dan said. “Maybe the not-caring shtick is getting old.”
Dan made wisecracks about everything. The fact that he hadn’t about the article made me feel even more worried than I already was. We’d had plenty of conversations about how neither of us had any protective layering in our jobs. I wondered if Dan was trying at least to dress the part of someone who took his job seriously. Because he thought my job was in jeopardy, through some sort of associative logic, that might mean his was too.
“You going to be here all day?” I asked.
“Yep,” Dan said. “Lunch?”
“I’d like that.” I didn’t want to be alone.
I grabbed my satchel and the old lamp and walked to Mary’s office. She noticed the lamp in my hand.
“I returned it,” she said.
“And I’m returning it back to you. Enjoy.” I put it down on the floor next to her desk and walked out without waiting for a response. I wasn’t feeling good about much of anything, but it did feel good to give back the lamp. What was mine was mine, and what was not was not.
Cliff’s door was still closed.
As I headed to the lecture hall, I was sure that students were either staring at me or going out of their way to avoid me. Usually I had to maneuver past skateboarders, students on their phones, and indifferent, slow walkers. But now there was a clear, unobstructed path in front of me.
I’d left my office a little late and got to the lecture hall just as class was supposed to start. I didn’t want to linger onstage for too long before I began talking. I would give my lecture and go right back to my office.
When I walked in, things were quiet. And somber. I reached the front, got my notes ready, and scanned the room. In the back left-hand corner of the lecture hall, the seats were oddly empty. A small pod of students was missing. Robert, my salary tracker, was not in his regular seat. I checked my watch: I was five minutes late. I saw my TAs sitting together in the front row. Carla shrugged her shoulders. Normally the chatter wouldn’t die down until I was a few sentences into my lecture.
“What’s going on today?” I asked aloud, knowing very well that most of them had probably seen the video online.
No one replied. If I was being paranoid, I’d say that they were avoiding making eye contact with me. And who’s to say I wasn’t being paranoid? I eased into Evans-Pritchard and theories of kinship.
“Who do you consider your kinfolk?” I began. “Blood relations? Friends? Community?”
It was an interesting enough question, but for the next hour, I kept my talk as dry, clinical, and unremarkable as I could. Plenty of charts. Discussions on matrilineage and patrilineage. The second I was done, the students left the hall as if they’d heard a fire alarm. It was just the three TAs and me.
“Were you actually trying to be boring today?” Carla asked.
“Did I succeed?”
“Exceptionally well. Is this because of that stupid article?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I guess. No more thought and analysis and critique for me. Just anthropology straight out of the 1950s, further sanitized for today’s viewers.”
We headed to the exit. When we stepped out of the hall, the first thing I noticed was how quickly the morning clouds, still overhead when I’d walked into class, had burned off. The sky was blue and brilliant.
The next thing I noticed was the crowd of roughly forty students gathered right outside the lecture hall. I recognized some of them from the class that they’d just skipped. A lot of them had signs: Christian Hater. Not a Safe Space for All of Us. #FireDrRaj. It was the nickname some of my favorite students had given me over the years; a term of endearment and respect rolled into one. I’d loved it when they’d called me that. To see it used as a weapon was unnerving.
“What the fuck?” I said, louder than I’d intended. During the lecture, I’d started sweating whenever something I was saying didn’t seem to be going over very well. Now, I could literally smell the stink on me.
“What’s going on, Raj?” Carla asked.
I was about to respond when, to the left of the crowd, I noticed Robert. He stood there, signless and expressionless. I couldn’t figure out if he was there as a protester, witness, or passerby. He didn’t say anything, didn’t pay attention to anyone around him. He just stared at me disapprovingly, as if he were try
ing to reject me before I could reject him further.
“Professor,” one of the protesters from the crowd said, “why do you hate Christians so much?”
I turned to Carla, who was as perplexed as I was with the question.
“I don’t hate Christians,” I said, addressing the crowd. “When did I ever say that?”
“You say it all the time.”
I recognized this guy from the class. He was a soft-looking kid with a friendly face and a big, overgrown beard. I didn’t have the strength that morning to talk to all of these students—or through them, as the case may be. From what I could tell, none of them had been listening all that carefully in class. They’d tuned in for a few key phrases and run with them, completely omitting any sort of context.
I started walking away without saying another word. But as I walked, the whole group moved with me. Robert followed along. I couldn’t see Carla anymore, or the other TAs. Despite the fact that I was in a safe public place, with the protesters and plenty of other regular students passing by, I suddenly felt incredibly alone. I picked up the speed of my step.
“You can talk all day in class, but you can’t stop and talk to us now?” another student asked. “We’re the ones paying your salary.”
It was hard to know whether to be touched or offended that so many of my students were concerned with my yearly take. Maybe I should just embrace it. Maybe Robert could be my own personal union leader. As I looked around at the rest of the crowd, I supposed they wouldn’t be fighting the good fight with him.
I kept walking. If I could only make it to my building, I could leave all this behind me.
“Man up and talk. Look at us. We’re waiting for you to talk to us.”
It was the bearded kid again, but this time his voice had the menace and swagger that come from having several dozen people supporting him. Man up? I knew the smarter, wiser thing would be to keep walking. But, of course, I stopped; I was too weak. I turned to the group. They all stopped as well.
When I’d first seen them, before I’d read their signs, they’d seemed like a bunch of kids waiting to get into an alternative hip-hop concert, languid, milling about before the show started. But now, there was something different about them. The crowd was mostly young men, but there were plenty of women too. And they were entirely white. Before, there’d been some distance between them and me. Now, as I’d walked and stopped and the crowd had swayed along with me, they were quite close. Most of them were still in front of me, but several were behind. I was surrounded.
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