“Tell me about your time in America.”
“My family moved there when I was ten and my brother was eight. It’s been eighteen years. My uncle was a mechanic in Newark and he got a visa for us to immigrate. My father went to work for him at the garage.”
“Did you like America?”
“At first,” Khan said. “We had a television and I learned English by watching cartoons. I did well in school, but it wasn’t easy to fit in. We didn’t fall in with any of the established groups. Too dark for the white kids. Too Asian for the black kids. Too Muslim for the Asian kids. There were only a handful of Pakistanis in the school and we were the only Baluchs.”
“Were you pious?”
“Not especially. My family was not devout. But living among the godless Americans taught me the value of submission to the will of Allah.”
“How did your family react to the awakening of your Islamic identity?”
“Not well,” Khan answered truthfully. If anything, this was something of an understatement.
“You went to college in the United States,” Masood said. It was not a question.
“Yes. I studied math and computer science for two years at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.”
“Why didn’t you finish?”
“I heard the call for jihad.”
“What happened?”
Khan hesitated. His awakening to jihad predated his time at NJIT by several years. The decision to drop out of school had developed slowly rather than overnight. Like many who had followed a similar path, Khan had made a decision born of anger and pride. It was a story he had told to very few people.
Inwardly, Khan burned at the memory. He was sixteen. She was a pretty blond girl named Kathleen. Never Kathy. She insisted on Kathleen. They were lab partners in chemistry. She liked Khan, she was drawn to him, but she did not want her Irish Catholic friends to know that she was seeing a dark-skinned immigrant kid.
They thought they were alone in her house that afternoon. Kathleen’s shirt was off and Khan was fumbling with the unfamiliar bra strap when her father burst through the door of her bedroom with a look of anger and contempt on his face that Khan could easily recapture even though more than a dozen years had passed. Kathleen’s father had hit him with an open hand, but hard enough to give him a black eye.
“Get away from my daughter, you filthy raghead!” the beefy trucker had shouted, as Khan fled the house. Kathleen had never spoken to him again.
It was uncomfortable to think that the roots of something as pure as jihad could be grounded in the muck of teenage sexual humiliation. Khan had no desire to share this with Masood. It was, in any event, too American a story for him to really understand.
“There was a teacher in Newark, Janab,” Khan offered instead. “He opened my eyes and my heart to jihad. All the rest has been according to the will of Allah.”
Masood seemed satisfied with that answer and it was true, after a fashion.
“In India, I saw you fight in a manner I would not have expected from a student of math. How did you come by those skills?”
“The imam in Newark encouraged a few of us to study martial arts. He said it would sharpen our minds and would one day help us with jihad.”
This also was not entirely true. Khan had begun training in Brazilian jujitsu the day after Kathleen Halloran’s father had humiliated him. His teacher had been a Mexican immigrant with a run-down dojo in a strip mall in a low-rent part of a low-rent city, but he was an experienced semipro fighter and as quick as a bat. He had taught Khan well.
“And what did you do after you left school?” the mullah asked. “Did you work? At your uncle’s garage perhaps?”
“No, Janab. I joined the army.”
“The American army?”
“Yes.”
“The army of the infidel?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you do this?”
“Because they had much to teach me and I had much to learn.”
“What did the infidel teach you in their army?”
“Explosives, Janab. I was trained to dispose of unexploded ordnance. To do this, they must teach you about explosives.”
“And where did you apply these skills in the service of the army of infidels?”
“In Afghanistan.”
“And what did you learn there?”
“I learned how to hate, Janab.” In his mind’s eye, Khan could see the bodies and the pieces of bodies at the wedding party in Herat, the bride and groom and scores of guests blown apart by the powerful bomb. He could smell the stench of burned flesh and singed hair. He could feel anew the anger that flowed so freely through his veins, the source of his dedication to the mission. His call to jihad.
“And so now you have joined the army of the righteous?” Masood asked.
“Yes.”
They ate in silence for some time as Masood seemed to be weighing what Khan had said.
“Your name is auspicious,” the HeM leader offered, after perhaps ten minutes of contemplation.
This was somewhat cryptic and Khan was not sure that he had understood properly.
“Khan? How so?”
“Kamran Khan. You have three vowels in your name, all ‘a’s. The numerical values of the consonants total nineteen according to the system that I recently developed on the basis of revealed knowledge. It is the same as the numerical value for the word wahid, which is Arabic for one and representative of the oneness of God. The word wahid is used to describe Allah in the Quran exactly nineteen times.”
Khan nodded at this as though he understood what Masood was saying. In truth, he had no idea.
“The sum of the digits in the number nineteen is ten as there are ten digits in Kamran Khan and the sum of those digits—one and zero—is one, completing the circle. The Quran itself elevates the number nineteen. Sura 74.30 explains that ‘over it are nineteen. And we have set none but angels as the guardians of the hellfire.’ God has ninety-nine names, but he himself is one and loves odd numbers. There are markers in the physical world as well. The ecliptic cycle of the earth and moon is exactly nineteen years. The word year occurs seven times in the Quran and the word years twelve. Together they are a perfect nineteen.”
It was now clear to Khan what Masood was saying and why. He was a mystic. Numerology was a vehicle for the direct experience of the divine. This was Sufi stuff . . . and it was dangerous. It was a belief system that Salafist fundamentalists such as the Taliban would have considered heretical. And there was only one acceptable punishment for heretics. The Hand of the Prophet, however, was less dogmatic.
Masood wasn’t finished.
“Nineteen is an extraordinary number. It is matched only by the Basmala. In fact, 786 is the most sublimely beautiful of numbers. I have written many books and scholarly articles, but I never write the name of God. The number 786 preserves the purity of our prayers.”
This reference Khan understood. The Basmala was a kind of shorthand for one of the most common and yet most sacred phrases in Islam: Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim. In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful. It was the first verse of the first sura in the Quran. Believers recited the phrase at prayers, before meals, and before performing any important tasks. When the letters of the Arabic alphabet were arranged in their traditional abjad order, the assigned values of the letters in the Basmala totaled 786. Many Muslims in South Asia used the number as a substitute for Allah when writing on ordinary paper that might come into contact with unclean things. The name of God could not be used to wrap fish or line a parakeet’s cage.
“The Basmala is connected to the number nineteen, of course. There are nineteen letters in the Basmala. The root words appear in the Quran as exact multiples of nineteen. Isim is repeated nineteen times; Allah two thousand six hundred and ninety-eight times, which is nineteen times
one hundred and forty-two. Rahman is repeated fifty-seven times, or nineteen times three, and Rahim appears one hundred and fourteen times, which is the same as nineteen times six. But it is the Basmala in its totality—786—that represents the divine. Bismillah awwalahu wa akhirahu. I begin with the name of God at the beginning and at the end. Never forget this.”
They finished their meal. The steward collected the plates and then served coffee in the Pakistani style, a frothy mix of milk, sweet cardamom, and cinnamon.
“I do not believe that your presence in the guest house that night in India was an accident,” Masood said.
“No, Janab. You chose me.”
“Allah chose you,” Masood insisted. “It would be foolish for us to ignore this sign. We’ve been watching you, Khan. You are different than our other recruits. Most, I’m afraid, are village boys only recently moved to the big city. They come to us for reasons of clan honor. This is entirely legitimate. But you come to jihad as the culmination of a personal journey. You are educated. You have an American passport. And you feel jihad in your beating heart.”
“That is true, Janab.” And Khan knew that it was.
“You traveled a road similar to my own in coming to jihad. Men like us, we see more clearly, feel more deeply. We have tested you. You are, it would seem, extremely intelligent. That is good.”
“I am whatever Allah made me.”
“I have plans for you.”
“I am grateful.”
“What would you say if I told you that you could do something special, something spectacular in the service of Allah? Would you wish to do this thing?”
“I would.”
“What if I told you it was dangerous?”
“I would still want to do it, Janab.”
“What if I told you that it was more than dangerous, that you would surely die?”
“If it is Allah’s will, then, yes, I would do it.” And Khan knew that he would. His life was a relatively small price to pay. All men died. Not all could do so for a noble cause.
“You may well get the chance,” Masood said.
MUMBAI, INDIA
APRIL 2
Lena Trainor was cooling her heels. At least one part of her body would be cool, she reasoned, as the wait in the outer office of the commissioner’s deputy subassistant for something or other entered its second hour. It was well over a hundred degrees in the building, or at least it was in the waiting room. Lena suspected that the commissioner and his senior staff had air-conditioning in their offices. It was the hoi polloi and lower castes who came to pay obeisance to what remained of the License Raj who were made to wait in the sweltering heat.
If it was true that the Eskimos had seventeen words for snow, then the denizens of Mumbai surely should have at least as many words for heat. Lena killed another ten minutes coming up with an imaginary list of words to describe the different shades of hot that afflicted the city. She had just reached wet-and-steamy-hot-stinking-of-seagull-droppings-at-low-tide when the door opened and a thoroughly bored-looking clerk announced that the assistant to the acting deputy commissioner—or something like that—would deign to see her.
In truth, Lena did not have high hopes for this meeting. It was just one in a series of conversations with midlevel bureaucrats in the Mumbai city government who inhabited a world of process, stamps, and triplicate forms that she found maddening. At times, she felt as if she were drowning, held under the surface of a murky sea by thick strands of red tape wrapped like kelp around her arms and legs. She could see the sunlight above, but she was immobilized by the famously inefficient Indian bureaucracy.
The secretary—or maybe he was the secretary to the secretary, it could be hard to tell—showed her into Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sayyap Vamsam’s office. It was refreshingly cool in comparison to the waiting room, but it was still probably somewhere in the eighties. A single window air conditioner wheezed and gasped like an old man as it fought its endless losing battle against the tropical heat.
Vamsam was wearing a lightweight Western-style suit. Lena had learned early on in her battle with the city administration not to be fooled. A Western suit was not necessarily a sign of Western thinking. Indian political culture had its own rules and its own logic, and it had to be understood on its own terms. Vamsam did not rise to shake hands. In fact, he barely seemed to register her presence.
Automatically, Lena assessed her adversary; for whether he knew it or not, that was certainly what he was. Vamsam was a small man, which in her experience was rarely a good thing. That may have been why he did not stand up from the desk, so as not to draw attention to his size. He was middle-aged and might once have been handsome, but the comfortable life of a city official had softened him and given him something of a swollen appearance as though he were about to shed his skin. He would be cautious and defensive, Lena reasoned, concerned primarily with preserving his position of privilege rather than using it to advance some goal or even to pursue higher office. He had “risen to the middle” of Mumbai’s faceless bureaucratic hierarchy and that was quite enough, thank you very much.
She looked quickly around the office. Awards and decorations hung on the walls alongside pictures of Vamsam with various Indian dignitaries. A vain man, then. Maybe something of a weakness. She filed this data point away.
The name Sayyap Vamsam was also a marker of caste status. He was a Kshatriya, one of the four varnas in the Hindu social order. Traditionally, the Kshatriya had been warriors in periods of conflict and administrators in peacetime. Those traditions had long faded, but Lena had an intuitive sense that they would still matter to Sayyap Vamsam.
“What can I do for you, Ms. Trainor?” the bureaucrat finally asked, with an edge of impatience in his voice. Another weakness, perhaps?
“I’m here to talk to you about the Gummadi brothers’ development plans in Dharavi.”
“Yes.” He was suddenly wary. Everyone knew the Gummadi brothers, and their Five Star development was one of the largest projects on the city’s balance sheets. Vamsam sensed a threat, and Lena could almost see him pulling back into a defensive crouch.
“The Five Star plan would flatten six blocks in Dharavi. There are nearly fifty thousand people living there now who will lose their names if the development moves ahead. Instead, you’ll have housing for maybe a hundred wealthy families. The tens of thousands the project will displace will have nowhere to go.”
Lena was confident that she knew what Vamsam was thinking. What’s another fifty thousand low-caste homeless in Mumbai? Who will ever notice?
“What would you have me do, madam?” he asked instead. “All of the permits are surely in order.”
And therein was the problem. The Gummadi brothers were entirely devoid of scruples, but they were also careful and smart. They had spread their money liberally through the city administration to procure the necessary permits and licenses. Bundles of thousand-rupee notes were the only knife blade sharp enough to cut through the red tape of local government. It was all legal and it was utterly corrupt.
“No doubt they are. But the citizens who live there have a right to a public hearing before the final permits are approved. Any development plan should include compensation for the people who will be displaced. I want that hearing scheduled, and I want it open to the press.”
“And just what is your interest in this case, Ms. Trainor?” He elongated her name to emphasize its foreignness. Just who are you to be interfering in Indian business? he seemed to be saying.
“I am an Indian citizen. Dharavi was my mother’s home. My godfather still lives there. I run a school in the district with students whose futures matter to me. And you, Mr. Vamsam, are threatening their futures. I’d say that that’s a pretty significant equity stake, wouldn’t you?”
Lena was not at all uncertain about who she was. She was not half American and half Dalit. She was 100 percent American an
d 100 percent Dalit. They were not separable. At the same time, she recognized that the Indian elements of her identity and experiences were far more fragile than her Americanness, and she took care to nurture her connections to her Dalit self and her ties to Dharavi.
“We are only a few weeks away from the beginning of construction. It hardly seems useful to reopen debate and discussion on a foregone conclusion. In fact, it seems somewhat cruel, does it not? You run the risk of engendering false hope.”
“We are not weeks away from construction,” Lena shot back. “We are weeks away from destruction. The destruction of thousands of people’s homes and livelihoods.”
“Well, if you wish to request a hearing, there are procedures to follow; you will need to fill out the proper forms and submit them through the registrar’s office at the BMC.”
The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation was the real power in the city. The mayor was a largely ceremonial position. The commissioner of the BMC was a civil servant appointed by the Indian Administrative Service who was surrounded by other civil servants like Vamsam and charged with keeping the wheels of the country’s largest city turning smoothly. Vamsam’s reply was a classic bureaucratic brush-off. He was just a local ward boss. Lena should take her problems to the big boss in the BMC’s gothic-style headquarters in the city center. He seemed exceptionally pleased with that answer, as though it were something that would never have occurred to someone like Lena.
“I did that months ago,” she said flatly.
“Well, it seems like it’s all taken care of, then. Good day, Ms. Trainor.”
Lena protested, of course, but the audience was, for all intents and purposes, over. It had ended as the others had, with the buck passed to some other part of the system. Not infrequently, two offices would point directly at each other to assign responsibility for Lena’s request.
Frustrated and angry, Lena decided not to go back to the office. SysNet would survive an afternoon without her. Lena was on the long-range planning end of the telecom company’s operations. The work was important and challenging, but rarely urgent or short-fuse. Lena’s expertise was in hardware rather than software. She knew how to code, of course, but she preferred to make physical things, to hold the product of her labor in her hands as though she were a craftsman or a farmer rather than an engineer.
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