by Ayad Akhtar
Mother panicked. She tied my leg in a kitchen-towel tourniquet, and Anjum drove us both to her husband’s office. I limped up the driveway between them and into the long, flat building that looked more like a construction-site trailer than a doctor’s office. The waiting room was completely filled. There must have forty people there to see Latif. Almost everyone was black. What I remember most about that afternoon—other than the odd experience of feeling nothing in my knee as I watched Latif cut it open with a surgical knife and release the barb from the fleshy pink-and-white tendon in which it was embedded—the thing I most remember is his face as he emerged from the hallway, before he knew that we were there. He looked like a different man. Not gentle, but absorbed; not soft, but resolute; the usual ineffable inwardness now visible and thrust outward, pushed to every edge of his considerable frame, as if the sleeves of his soul—if you’ll forgive the awkward metaphor—had been rolled up in preparation for the real work of his life. Even his eyes looked rounder to me, more awake. It was clear he was at home here, surrounded by those who needed him, his true kin, the kind to whom he belonged, I think, more than he ever would to us.
December 1982
The Soviets had been in Afghanistan almost three years. I was ten. Latif and Anjum’s twin boys were twelve, the two daughters nine and seven. They showed up at our house a week before Christmas break, and I was surprised to find Ramla, the older daughter, wearing a hijab. I’d never seen any of the more restrictive forms of head covering—hijab, burka, purdah—on any of the women or girls I knew. Both Anjum and my mother would sometimes wear loose-fitting dupattas, for the sake of fashion, I always supposed, more than religion. Maybe that’s what was so surprising about seeing Ramla’s face tightly framed by that dull forest-green cloth: just how stark and severe it made her look. She didn’t like it, and she told me so more than once on that trip. I’d always thought her the most “American” of her siblings, more American, certainly, than I was. That December, she’d come to Wisconsin knowing the lyrics to most of the songs on Michael Jackson’s Thriller—no matter that the album had just been released or that her father wouldn’t let her buy it. She’d made a secret tape at a friend’s house and carried the cassette with her everywhere, always ready to pop it into a tape deck for a song or two when her father wasn’t around.
Latif was getting stricter, not only with his kids but also with himself. He’d taken now to wearing—when he wasn’t in scrubs—a loose-fitting white jalabiya. To a non-Pakistani, the nuance would have been lost. The long, free-flowing gown was Arab attire and tended to signify a deepened commitment to the faith. The battle with the Soviets in Afghanistan was transforming him, shedding new light on a more frivolous life in the West than perhaps he’d expected, more frivolous than he felt he could bear. Fellow Muslims were being slaughtered daily in their battle against an evil empire, and here he was raising children who complained there were not enough marshmallows in their bowls of Lucky Charms.
For us, the true Soviet evil wasn’t socialism—as it was for most Americans—but atheism. Even the least religious of us couldn’t imagine a fate more abhorrent than subjugation to those who imagined there was no God at all. And if the mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan were enacting a great American myth of demanding liberty or demanding death, it was in the service of a freedom uniquely creedal, a distinction ignored by Ronald Reagan a few years later, when he extolled the fighting Afghans—precursors to the Taliban—as freedom fighters, comparing them to the Contras and others, who were, in his words, “the moral equivalents of our founding fathers.” To us, the founding fathers had nothing on these holy warriors. Sure, those men in hoary wigs had fought, too, but not for God. They didn’t want to pay taxes to a king who they felt exploited them, so they took up arms. Where was the nobility in this? More apposite would be the future example of those first responders walking into the second burning tower knowing their attempts to save trapped souls were likely to end in an avalanche of fire and steel from which they wouldn’t return. This is what we saw in those Afghan fighters, an unflinching, inexpressibly noble willingness to die for something more important than their lives, or their liberty, or their happiness.
On the first night of the Awans’ visit that winter, the meal was long and splendid. Though she was a wonderful cook, Mother hated the kitchen except for those two weeks a year, when, on the contrary, she seemed, happily, to pass hours there alone (or with Anjum) absorbed in the preparation of what could only be called our feasts. For that first night, she’d prepared a sumptuous reminder of the Lahori past the adults at the table all shared—paaya, or hoof stew, which, as students, they would seek out on weekend mornings from street vendors in Mozang, Old Anarkali, along Jail Road, and even in the red-light district, where Father said it was best. The stew took a long time to make well, and Mother had had it simmering on low heat in the kitchen since sunrise the day of their arrival. When I saw her scrubbing the short goat legs the day prior, scraping the hooves clean in the sink, I couldn’t imagine putting anything like it in my mouth. But at dinner, Father and the Awans were all in a state, unaware how silly they looked as they sucked at the marrow and scooped fingerfuls of dripping, fatty paaya and naan into their mouths; I succumbed to curiosity. The rich flavor—round with familiar hints of clove, garlic, coriander seed, bay leaves—was astonishing.
As Latif served himself a second helping, he and Father traded news about their families back in Pakistan, bantering in the fluid admixture of Punjabi and English that was my parents’ usual lingua franca. It was while talking about his brother (Manan) in Peshawar—a city close to the Afghan border—that Latif first alluded to wanting to go back to Pakistan:
“They’ve been fighting Russian tanks and missiles with pistols, Winchester rifles. But Manan says the Americans are helping now. Bringing money, bringing weapons. Finally. They see that if Afghanistan falls, Pakistan will be next. That won’t be good for anyone. On Sundays, Manan said Americans are pouring out of the church in Peshawar. The city is filled with them. They’re opening camps to train jihadis—in Swat, in Waziristan.” Latif’s sons—Yahya and Idris—were listening, rapt. “It makes you wonder what we’re doing here when there’s so much more we could be doing back home.”
“Doesn’t make me wonder,” Father said, an ankle bone to his mouth. Anjum, too, seemed less than impressed.
“I don’t know why you keep harping on all the work to be done there,” she said to her husband. “There’s work to do here, too.”
“It’s not enough just to send money anymore.”
“I’m not talking about the mujahideen, Latif.”
“Right. But I am.”
“So the only solution is to go back?” She sounded exasperated; it was clearly not the first time they’d had this conversation.
He didn’t answer. Beside him, his daughter Ramla was looking down into her plate.
Anjum turned to my parents: “We’ve been here twelve years now. I don’t know how it is for you, but it’s just not the same when we go back. It’s not home for us in the same way.” She turned to her husband again: “Even you say the same thing every time we’re home. How much you miss it—”
“Air-conditioning, Anjum. Air-conditioning. That’s all I miss.”
“The fishing, the ocean…”
“They have ocean in Karachi.”
“Karachi?” Anjum snapped. “Is that near Manan in Peshawar?”
“No ocean in Peshawar. Other end of the country,” Father gibed gently.
Latif sighed, and all at once, his defensiveness was gone. He looked almost fragile: “The longer we’re here, the more I wonder…who I’m becoming.”
“You’re not the only one,” Mother said with a consoling tone. I could feel she was taking his side against the others. “It’s not our home. No matter how many years we spend here, it won’t ever be our home. And maybe this brings out things in us that were never meant to be brought out.”
“Like what?” Father asked.
&
nbsp; “Like regret.”
“You’re saying people back home don’t have regrets? Is that it?”
“I’m saying you can only regret what you chose not to do.” Her eyes stole a look at Latif. Anjum noticed. Latif looked away. “When we leave home, there are so many things we don’t have the luxury not to choose anymore. That’s a different kind of regret. A sadder, more hopeless kind.”
“Speak for yourself,” Father said. “I love it here. Like I never loved being in Pakistan.”
“They have whiskey in Lahore, too, Sikander.”
Father’s reply was swift and curt: “Fatima. Please. We have guests.”
I looked at Latif. He was chuckling. My parents’ testy dynamic was nothing new; it wasn’t even the first time I’d seen him appear to enjoy it. “Of course there are the comforts here,” he said, looking at his own wife now. “The freedom, above all—if you have money.”
“It doesn’t hurt to have money here,” Father said.
“Doesn’t hurt?” Latif repeated. “This country makes you a criminal for being poor. I see how the blacks are treated here. I see what they have to go through. It gives you a different picture of this place.”
“It’s true. It’s not easy if you don’t have money, but at least you’re free to make it here. As much as you can. As much as you want. And without cheating anybody to do it.”
“When I see what’s happening to our brothers in Afghanistan, freedom to be rich is not enough.”
“It’s not only money,” Father said. “The work I’m doing here I can’t do back home, you know that. We don’t have the labs. We don’t have the mentality. Back home, if it’s not already in a book, people don’t think it exists. No creative instinct.”
Latif nodded: “But I’m not in research. The only good I’m doing is for those poor people in Pensacola.”
“What about your children?” Anjum asked with sudden intensity, releasing the question like a rock from a slingshot.
Latif held his wife’s gaze for an uncomfortably long moment before replying, calmly: “They’ll do as well in Pakistan as they would do here. Better, even. Less confused.” Anjum looked away, her tongue playing along the inside of her pursed lips.
The younger daughter, Hafsa—who was nibbling at the plate of Kraft macaroni and cheese Mother had made for her—piped up: “I like Pakistan. Everybody looks the same. They look like us.” My parents laughed. I looked over at Ramla. A thin tuft of her brown hair was poking out from one side of that green head scarf. She was sitting back in her chair, away from the table. Father turned to her as well: “What about you, Ramla, beti? What do you think? How do you feel about living in Pakistan?” Her face filled with alarm, her lower lip now trembling. She looked at her mother, helpless, and suddenly erupted, screaming: “I hate it, I hate it, I hate it!”
Then she leaped from her chair and bolted up the stairs.
In the ensuing silence, Anjum shot Latif an angry look. Latif held her gaze, then quietly rose, stepped away from his place at the table, and went up the stairs after his daughter. Years later—long after the Awans had left America and relocated to Peshawar—I would learn from Mother that the head cook at Latif’s family’s estate back in North Punjab had been caught in the pantry with his mouth on the girl’s private parts. I don’t know when this discovery took place, though I suspect Ramla’s outburst was a sign that the molestation had already begun. I don’t know what happened to the cook, though I can certainly imagine Latif snapping a man’s neck like a twig.
Jihad
We never saw them again in America. The fight with the Soviets got worse that winter, and in the spring of 1983, Latif moved his family, as promised, to Peshawar. They stayed with his brother for a time, then took a house in the western outskirts of the city. The United States was doubling down on its support for the Afghans that summer, and Peshawar was awash with dollars. The Americans offered to pay, soup to nuts, for Latif’s new clinic, on the condition that it would also be used to treat wounded mujahideen fighters from across the border. CIA money, Father said. Latif was given enough to set up a facility without precedent in those parts, where he could help the poor, tend to wounded mujahideen, and train young field medics to care for ailing soldiers on the front lines. But apparently, the clinic would function as more than just a medical center. Rumor had it that a back room on the second floor of that two-story concrete-brick building operated as the Pakistani army’s preferred meeting point in Peshawar for exchanges between American intelligence and the Afghan tribal powers waging the war against the Soviet forces. Clearly, Latif was finally doing all he could—save picking up a gun and heading for the Afghan mountains—to battle back the Russian infidels.
He never picked up arms himself, but his twin sons eventually would. In 1989, when—to much of the world’s surprise—the mujahideen prevailed, the Soviets withdrew their troops. But the battles wouldn’t end; Russia and the United States continued to fund a proxy war for another three years through various intermediaries, and Latif’s sons would both join the fight under the banner of the Americans. It was a conflict being paid for by opium grown under the logistical guidance of American intelligence, and one of the twins, Idris, would get deeply involved in the production of the drug; by the mid-1990s he was dead of an overdose. The other, Yahya, would work his way up a complicated chain of command, eventually forging close relationships with militia leaders who found their way into power during the Taliban era. When we visited in 1990, Anjum traveled south from Peshawar to see us; I barely recognized her. It had been only seven years since I last saw her, but her youth was gone. Under the white wool shawl draped around her torso and covering much of her head, her once russet hair was fully gray, her face gaunt and drawn. Ramla and Hafsa were with her—both wearing hijabs—and seemed to be flourishing. Ramla had been accepted to medical school and would be starting in the fall. Hafsa, then fifteen, aspired to do the same. If the girls missed America, they didn’t say it, though it was clear from Ramla’s avid queries about New Kids on the Block and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids that she was still plugged into the American experience. (This was well before the era of the internet.)
Anjum was worried about her sons. She didn’t recognize them. They’d dropped out of college to become vigilantes out of some B movie, racing about on motorbikes with assault rifles slung over their shoulders. Latif, too, had changed, she said. His tenderness had hardened; he was more unforgiving now. He had no patience for her misgivings about their new life. Instead, he expected an attitude of sacrifice equal to the occasion, which, as he saw it, was warfare. He thought it a defect in her character that she couldn’t see the battle for Afghanistan as her own.
But wasn’t the war over? Hadn’t they won?
The only thing that annoyed Latif more, Anjum said, than her dismay over the endless fighting was her inability to understand the supposed complexity of it. “What’s complex?” she mused out loud over tea and sweets that afternoon. “Maybe it’s all very simple. Men love to fight. They want to fight. They need to fight. And what’s complex are the reasons they come up with to do the thing they really want, which is just to keep killing each other.” I remember Mother offering every sign of sympathy, but it’s clear from the entry she made in her diary that evening that she’d actually been thinking mostly about herself:
Anjum came to see us today. L is too busy with jihad. No message from him. Not even hello. The marriage is fraying. She never loved him. Foolish to think it would have been different for me—but you’ve always been foolish.
In the days after Anjum’s visit, I heard Mother tell her sisters she thought Anjum would leave Latif and return to America. She was wrong on both counts: Anjum would stay with her husband until his death, in 1998; then, when she tried to return to America, she would discover that she couldn’t. Her naturalized citizenship had been revoked.
The Abundant Idyll Despoiled
I’ve held off long enough. Here’s what happened to Latif:
Once the Sov
iet empire collapsed—and with it, the covert war with America in Afghanistan—the United States discontinued its support for its partners in the region. Robert Gates, then deputy director of the CIA, would later confess the mistake the United States made in walking away from the groups it had funded all those years, a mistake that would lead directly to the first World Trade Center bombing and eventually to 9/11. The straight line from the American-backed mujahideen to Al Qaeda is still a story little told, little understood; in his way, Latif’s fate is emblematic of it. For once the American money dried up, like everyone else who’d depended on that cash, Latif pivoted. His allegiance didn’t change. His fundamental loyalty had always been to the Muslim rebels fighting the irreligious onslaught of the Soviets, not to the Americans. Now their wrath had turned from the Soviet empire to imperialism of the American variety. How this substitution took place is not particularly complicated. It was 1991, and George H. W. Bush made a fateful decision to intervene in the affairs of a regime the United States had put into place and supported for the better part of almost thirty years. Since the ayatollah’s ascent to power in Tehran, the Americans built up Saddam Hussein even further to keep the Iranians weak on their western flank. Iran and Iraq warred for eight years, and Iraq would eventually prevail in this proxy war on behalf of the Americans—so, of course, it was now time for America to get rid of its “friend” in Baghdad.
The abandonment of Afghanistan and the first war in Iraq sent a clear message: whatever the Americans said meant nothing; whatever they promised was a lie. If you paid in blood to help them manage their interests, they poured money down your throat and invited you to Washington to fly your shawls and head scarves like flags of freedom; when you tried to manage your own interests, then your Islam was backward, unruly, oppositional, an excuse to kill you. Warnings about American influence were nothing new for Muslims of the Levant and its eastern beyond, and some had long been advocating resistance, violent or otherwise; for many more, the first Gulf War was a moment of truth and gave fresh, decisive life to the old argument that the West’s welcome was predatory and that Westernization would cost Muslims their land, their beliefs, and their lives. Osama bin Laden was only the fiercest, most partisan spokesman for such views, which had (and continue to have) deep support in much of the Muslim world. Case in point: above the patients gathered daily in the waiting room of Latif’s Peshawar clinic, a framed photograph of the holy mosque in Mecca hung, and alongside it, a portrait of bin Laden.