The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah

by Adam Valen Levinson

  The other lakes are called Band-e Haibat, “Grandiose Dam,” Gholaman (slaves), Qambar (Ali’s personal slave), Zulfiqar (Ali’s sword), Pudina (wild mint) and Panir (cheese).

  The view farther along the entrance is enough to make your eyes explode—a second lake actively sloshes into the desert, accented with bright white rock and thick verdure that follow no natural pattern, all flanked by mountains that will spoil the surprises of any Martian mission. In the winter, all of this is spectacular snow and ice.

  Restaurants in the area offer bread and thick local butter that tastes almost like cheese, with black or green tea and jars of blood-red jam. In the nearby town of Qarghaneh Tu, we picked up lunch: tender chunks of lamb on the bone, wrapped in a container of fresh Afghan bread, and packed with salt and spices to sprinkle on liberally by the lake.

  From the end of the road at the Grandiose Dam, Mokhtar, the driver, and I clomped in sandals down the short trail that hugs the cliff face and drops down to the ice-cold lake. But no Afghan weekend getaway is complete without a swim. In its perfection, the park offers shallow and warmer crystal clear pools with sandy white bottoms, each a secluded beach, surrounded by geometric rock formations, trickling streams, and near mosquito-less greenery. We swam, we ate lamb until we needed to lie down, I covered my face with a scarf, and the fish nibbled politely at my feet.

  Across the water, a shrine venerating Ali offers shelter when the afternoon gale whips dust and rain across the water on the heels of Afghanistan’s 2 P.M. black clouds. The clouds pass, and picnicking families return to the flotilla of colorful paddleboats and kayaks that the park rents out for a small, negotiable fee.

  THE DEPARTURE HALL of the Kabul International Airport had three gates, all without numbers. All three open onto the same hallway, to be followed past the signs marked EXIT/BAGGAGE CLAIM (this is also the arrival hall). There are no TV screens, no lists of departure times, no announcements; the scheduled boarding, check-in, and flight times come and go like summer rains. An hour or two late, the flight is announced in Dari. Maybe English, too. Plainclothes guards search bags and give blasé farewell pat downs onboard the small prop plane while passengers squeeze by into creaky seats. Pat, pat. And off we go, over Tora Bora and the scruff that looks like Arizona, above the hills where we had thought Osama might be, and was.

  CHAPTER 8

  |

  PAKISTAN

  COOL WIND

  I HAD PLANNED TO ride over the river (a narrow offshoot of the Indus) and through the woods north of Islamabad to my friend’s grandmother’s house in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The wolf would’ve been Osama bin Laden—and he was already dead.

  I landed in the Islamabad airport, only two hours away by local taxi. But word in the garrison town on the Karakorum Highway, and now on news channels across the world, was that “they” were watching out for foreigners. That day, Pakistan had arrested five CIA informants who contributed to the raid in Abbottabad. In recent weeks, camouflaged military lurking in the grass around the compound had undertaken to confiscate and smash cellphones of the curious. Iman told me that even in shalwar kameez and dirty sandals, I was an American danger to myself and to everyone I came in contact with. Grandma called her daughter, Iman’s Aunt S., who called Iman, who texted me with extreme embarrassment: I couldn’t come for lunch—I was on my own.

  I thought I’d go to Abbottabad anyway. How often are we given the opportunity to gloat at the death site of humanity’s worst offenders? If I could see the tiered private retirement home where Osama spent his final years with porn and videos of himself . . . maybe the world Nine Eleven had shaped for me would dissolve. If I faced the fear of getting to this place and saw that there was nothing left but cricket pitches, maybe the restlessness would be gone. My constant hope: that I could report back to my twelve-year-old self that the world had not been reshaped that day, and he would abstain, for the very first time, from saying “Prove it.”

  But . . . I’d upset what personal connections I had here if I disobeyed Grandma. I could put the family in danger, too, just to find selfish relief. It was like having Masha in a car with uncertain brakes that I hurtled down a desert road just to keep myself in motion. Plus, to visit would be to perpetuate the legend, to submit to a terrorist’s posthumous power, to gawk at cordoned-off property like the encased relics of saints. I convinced myself so, and took the bus away to Lahore.

  Instantly: waves of regret. So much talk about this place and I wasn’t going because I told myself I shouldn’t. And because I had been disinvited to lunch. The regrets gathered their reasons: the deed was done up there; there was no reason to think there would be any real trouble in this Boca of the North-West Frontier Province; the Pakistani government wouldn’t want much with me, and the regular folk didn’t even believe Osama had been killed—at least not in Pakistan. And there couldn’t be any trouble I wouldn’t get out of with an American passport and my one well-practiced phrase in Urdu, “Yeh kittana hota heh?” (“How much does that cost?”).

  I had forgone doing something for the choice not to do it. I followed a stubborn will to ignore the figure some Pakistanis called OBL and aggravated an even more stubborn one to do more, more, more!

  LAHORE WAS blisteringly hot.

  In all white, I adopted the look of the bluer collar while two men escorted me across the city. Iman had mobilized social networks and family ties for me: the men worked for her friend’s friend’s father, the president of the oldest and largest university in Pakistan. I e-mailed Masha from the president’s guest house. “Got into this city with 20 cents—still havent spent it.”

  You can’t get far without hearing, “Lahore nahin dekha tou kuch nahin dekha” (“If you haven’t seen Lahore, you haven’t yet seen the world”). The city is peppered with gardens and architecture left by the Mughal empire and parallel kingdoms. The Shalimar gardens are green even in the June broil, and families picnic and sit by the fountains. A couple of couples nap in piles.

  I drifted through it in the comfort of the air-conditioned Camry. The driver was in traditional shalwar, the president’s assistant was in slacks and a shirt. They were the consummate tour guides when they spoke to me, and to each other they bantered in Punjabi. A member of the Indo Arian family to which Hindi and Urdu belong, Punjabi appeared to be a language, at least before dark, that must always be spoken very, very loudly in someone’s ear.

  They whisked me into the Badshahi Mosque, cousin of the Taj Mahal, with its walled courtyard for a hundred thousand people. Across the scalding stones the guide pointed out a very special relic in a small room: “The Underwear of the Prophet Muhammad,” the label said. “No pictures,” said the president’s man. Back to the car, in and out of a fried chicken joint, and back to eat in the Camry because it was the coldest place in town.

  We asked out the window for a lanky boy to bring us mango milkshakes in tall glass mugs. Ambrosia against the 110-degree heat, made of mangoes from the interior of Sindh Province, with a blender powered by a generator, and ice cut from chunks delivered by a truck that dripped steadily onto the pavement. The boy knocked on the window carrying three more glasses. “More?”

  With such treatment, lounging in the passenger seat of an imported car, sipping the sweetened juice of the sweetest fruit, I noticed the cocktail many tourists must certainly perceive in the Asian subcontinent: utterly deferent service and automatic, maybe involuntary hospitality. I had no idea who we really were to one another.

  And then we drove thirty minutes from the city to the Wagah border with India, where every evening at 5:30 the two countries profess their friendship for each other, and for the world to watch. Indian and Pakistani border guards in peacock hats goose-step and high kick and make exceedingly silly faces at one another and lower their flags as the sun goes down. They come back to do it again the next day, just as they have done every evening since 1959.

  “I like India,” the president’s man said. I ballooned with good feeling. “Just Hindus: no, no.” Popped. �
��Suicide bombings—money, planning: India background,” the man said. “All India.”

  The driver pitched in: “India and Israel.” There were murmurs from the back in Punjabi, but I could recognize shush in a thousand dialects. The man in slacks leaned forward to pat me on the shoulder. “Israel, no, no.”

  And there it was: a critique hidden, a feeling suppressed. There was no joy in having this instant without masks on because I knew we were just about to put them on again, more firmly attached.

  But Iman was one of the most open books I’d ever met. I flew away to find her in Karachi.

  “Jewish population of Jinna Airport = 1,” I texted.

  I FELT BETTER when Iman’s guard opened the door. Aurangzeb held an old shotgun, and smiled so lightly it seemed he might disappear. The upper middle class is well staffed and well guarded in Pakistan, even if Aurangzeb’s shotgun wasn’t loaded. Income inequality makes this possible and necessary.

  In one corner, the Afro Pakistani maids from the interior of Sindh Province speak Sindhi to one another. Downstairs, the driver jokes with a guard in Pashto. A Punjabi Christian comes in two hours each week to help clean. Iman’s family are known as Delhi Wallas because they moved from Delhi after the India Pakistan partition, and speak Urdu, brother of Hindi, natively.

  The diversity in Iman’s house wasn’t an accident. Her dad said that he thinks it keeps things in balance. (Apart from the Christian cleaner-cum-chatterbox, though, he doesn’t trust Punjabis.)

  Every once in a while, old ethnic conflicts flare and the caste system is made manifest: no amount of washing will get the cook to share a mug with the trash collector. Maybe that was part of the balancing act—little outbursts kept the pressure at bay.

  I floated apart from all of this, a white man entirely outside of caste, and everyone offered me mango juice in all kinds of mugs. It let me be a wild card of sorts. My tailors in Abu Dhabi had given me the right suits to wear: I sat cross-legged happily on the floor and picked at fried pakoras with my hands—like a native, Iman’s uncle said. The maid Amina said I was just like them: I was always barefoot.

  It was so much easier to mirror their hands and clothes and eyes than it would have been to decide how to use my own. What did I really care what kind of utensils we used for fried foods? (And how much easier to click into a new home, when we could not find ways to judge one another for the way we used a fork or chopsticks?) If it was the normal thing to do, and it would’ve freed me from judgment for a moment longer, I would’ve gnawed cans open with my front teeth.

  Parsi, Hindu, Sikh, and Christian are all within striking distance in Karachi.

  Twenty minutes away from Iman’s, around the Jail Road roundabout and through the city’s infamous traffic are the gates to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. A man with a dark, happy face guarded the impressive grounds with his sleepy dog. Diego Rodriguez welcomed us inside, to admire the stately staircases of a white marble monument, and said the rest was off-limits. The church was closed except for Sunday mass because of two recent attacks. “It is sad,” said Diego.

  The city was bursting with disaster- and desperation-driven immigration, from rural poverty toward urban possibility. In the town of more than twenty million, one of the world’s ten largest, attacks were frequent. It was too dangerous to walk on the street—one of the reasons Iman’s family had a driver. Robbery murders at stoplights were frequent. Most families were one or two degrees of separation away from a kidnapping. Still, notable attack sites carry special weight.

  As we parked and approached another, the site of a double suicide bombing that claimed dozens of casualties in 2010, I felt naked on the Karachi city streets. I tightened and swelled against the dangers I imagined. If they were coming, they would come instantly and without warning.

  Iman, a born-and-raised Karachiite, seemed nervous. “Don’t tell my dad we went here.”

  The monumental Sufic mausoleum of Abdullah Shah Ghazi looks out over Sea View Beach from its hilltop on Firdousi Street. Crowned by two solid green flags, the exterior is entirely navy-blue tile and patterns of thick, white zigzags. All day and night, crowds leave their shoes beyond the defunct metal detector and climb to the shrine to pray to the ninth-century mystic saint, under whose aegis, many believe, tropical disasters have spared Karachi for more than a millennium.

  At night, Iman’s father and I drank Gordon’s gin and tonic with no ice. The next night, we danced. Iman’s family dressed me in elegant shalwar for a prewedding party with whisky on draft. Black Label in highball glasses with ice cubes almost too big for them, and orange dresses swirling in the generator’s breeze—that was the picture I took from Karachi nights.

  I DIDN’T COME TO PAKISTAN to drink, though. Sure, the tang of twelve-year-old scotch was one more arrow against simple stereotypes of a teetotaling Islamic Republic, but that was no more a discovery than it was to have BLTs with my Israeli cousins.

  Four days earlier, I had tried to tell myself I could ignore him, but I was feeding myself lies. Maybe I could have learned to believe them with years of therapy or meditation or medication. I could have put regret aside and left the past behind like an unrequited high school crush, or an unwise war. There was a far deeper obsession here than my usual addiction to saying no to noes. The target was more focused, and the treatment seemed clear.

  Hours before the return flight I’d just booked, I e-mailed in sick to work in Abu Dhabi. I wasn’t going to stick out the way they’d thought, the Karachi family told the Abbottabad family. After all, I was barefoot and eating pakoras with my hands.

  I followed Iman’s aunt who I knew only as Aunt S. onto a night flight to Peshawar and into a car through the blackness to Abbottabad. Sometimes a man wants to be stupid . . .

  To the west was the notorious Swat Valley, once dubbed by Queen Elizabeth the “Switzerland” of the former empire, but now primarily in the hands of the Taliban. But Abbottabad was still a destination for vacationers from Lahore bouncing up from the Potohar Plateau to escape twenty degrees of summer heat.

  According to Grandma, my presence was no longer impermissibly dangerous; with the right clothes, in the right company, I was invisible. I could blend in with the young laborers returning from Karachi, or the day-trippers, or with the out-of-towners from Lahore and Islamabad who posed for pictures in front of Osama’s house in the wake of his death.

  Still, camouflaged Pakistani military lurked in tall grass on all sides of the house, hands clutching rifles, eyes scouring the intentions from our faces. Grandmother’s friend, Osama’s onetime neighbor, spun by in the morning to take us to the site. I asked if I could take a picture quickly from the car. “No.” He was firm. “Someone is watching.”

  There it was: white, boxy, suburban. The compound looked smaller than on TV. I didn’t speak to a single Abbottabadite who believed Osama had actually been there: “We would have known,” said everyone. “We are nosy people,” said Aunt S.

  It was true, in this town that had grown immensely in recent decades, that old families remain connected and infinitely knowledgeable about local comings and goings. But there was a paradox: Grandmother pointed to the fourteen-foot walls. These are typical of large families that have moved in from Waziristan, not a sign of reclusiveness or hidden secrets. Abbottabad locals feel more tribal kinship with Waziris, she said, than they do with city folk and vacationers pushing in from the capital—for this, the little birds on the grapevine might have left these closet Saudis alone. Secrets can live in Abbottabad.

  For Pakistani or American, believer or skeptic, this empty house was the site of a brief and powerful global focus, an instant memorial to the day when America won a war against a symbol.

  And there I was, staring at it.

  THE GRASS WAS GREEN on the short drive home and we took tea in Grandma’s brick house and I melted into the cool couches and asked questions to my younger self.

  He was unimpressed. September 11 had never been my impulse for travel, it had only been its ad campa
ign, an excuse, fears of the other substituting cheaply for real fears of myself. It was me on all sides.

  As a good American, I set out to defend my freedom against the threat of the ultimate constraint: death. By imagining that some Others could bring death to my doorstep, I flew to challenge them on their own turf, to see whether the existential dangers were truly there. I faced my own doubts by giving them faces that weren’t mine.

  And like this, I made each person play devil’s advocate to a stereotypical devil. Every little girl and old man stood in comparison to a deadly archetype—if the girl was sweet, she was also not prejudiced; if the man was a kind host, he was also not a murderer. I took the humanity out of the world I wanted to prove was human.

  When over and over and over and over again the devils were defeated, I was unmoored. I flirted with the deadly just to steady myself against the dizziness of freedom.

  It had taken so much energy to keep that charade alive. Try it—try pushing against your own hand as hard as you can. If I saw that I was really fighting me, I could stop pushing long enough to actually decide on a direction. I’d have to actually choose between go/don’t go without resorting to the infinite simplification where the only paths are life and death, and where something else always has a hand in rolling the dice. Decisions. I’d have to pit abstract absolutes (“All good!” “All bad!”) against each other and come to land somewhere on terra firm enough.

  IN THE AFTERNOON, Aunt S. took me on a drive for the real reason people came to Abbottabad beyond local claims to the world’s best pine nuts—to have lunch of freshly slaughtered chicken nine thousand feet up in the foothills of the Himalaya—and to make metaphors out of topography. As we climbed off a branch of the Karakoram Highway and looked down on the city, Osama’s compound was hardly visible.