by H. M. Naqvi
Although the test was challenging, Kojo and I finished on time and passed with flying colors, getting only two questions wrong between us. We hugged and high-fived outside as if we had just won the green card lottery. Kojo’s palms were sweaty, and he seemed to glow with a halo of joy. “You need calling card?” he asked.
“Huh?” I replied.
“You call yo fada,” he said. “I call mine’s. Fadas be proud.”
When I smiled and shook my head, he sprinted to a nearby phone booth, holding his pockets to keep the change from jangling. I watched him dial excitedly, massage his shapely bald head as he waited for the line to go through, and yelp into the receiver like a child when he heard the voice on the other end.
I pulled out a smoke, lit it, and inhaled deeply.
The day after the night at Jake’s, I stayed in bed, insensible and inert, but when the phone rang later that afternoon, I moved slightly, stretching my stubby legs and straightening my hairless toes, and when the answering machine switched on, I turned over on my stomach and buried my head under the pillow but could still hear AC’s voice. “Rise and shine, chum,” he began in a rasp that suggested that he hadn’t slept or had just woken. “You know, you shouldn’t pick fights. You have neither the physique nor the talent.” After a sigh, he continued, “I’m, ah, sorry about what happened … I should’ve seen it coming … but didn’t, or didn’t want to … and there I was, like some kind of moron, caught between aggressor and victim, arbitrating with brute force, like an animal …” Blowing smoke into the mouthpiece, he added, “Let me tell you this much: when push comes to shove, we’re all the same. When somebody hits you, you hit back.” There was a long contemplative pause, followed by the characteristic sound of chewing. He had probably been chewing things over for a while. “Anyway,” he added, “I’m calling to tell you that I’m headed to the Shaman’s and would like you to come along. Do you think you can secure your, ah, conveyance?”
Rolling out of bed half-dressed and half-asleep, I reached for the receiver, but prudence dictated delaying the discussion. The idea of an expedition deep into the heart of Connecticut on some wild goose chase unnerved me. The Shaman Run was some wacky, misguided project, born, perhaps, of AC’s recent anxieties and crusader kick. Besides, taking Abdul Karim’s cab would have been irresponsible of me. It would have been wrong. I would have to come up with an excuse, something plausible yet airtight, but my head was cloudy, and I needed to be fully conscious and caffeinated before calling AC back. In the interim, I performed my waking rituals—drinking a half gallon of cold water, urinating, smoking by the window, sipping a mug of muddy Lipton—and checked the other messages on the machine.
Somebody from the “boutique research house” where I had interviewed several weeks ago had called, and a terse electronic voice informed me that my credit rating would be adversely affected if I did not pay up immediately. Ma, in a voice stretched over thousands of miles, time zones, static, exhorted me to have multivitamins daily, say my prayers, and make reservations on PIA, the national carrier, for the winter. As always she also relayed the news: “Things are tense here, beta—there is talk of some Afghanistan campaign-shampaign. I don’t know what it means for us, but it is not good. But don’t worry. Musharraf is going to make a speech any day. Take care of yourself, Shehzad, say your prayers, and remember, you are my life. Khuda-hafiz.” About to call her back, I remembered that I had cut long distance (and made a mental note to buy a calling card).
Jimbo had phoned four times and left two messages. In the first he sounded rip-roaring drunk and sang the fragment of a song that went I said no no no no baby, please don’t cry … ’cause all the leaves come down, but in the next he soberly reminded me that I had to accompany him to his father’s in half an hour, a monthly event I had been roped into soon after we became friends. I had become an integral part of the ceremony. Left to their devices, Jimbo and “Old Man Khan” typically yelled at each other from across the table or, at best, dined in silence. I enjoyed dinner at the Khan residence, the company, the food, and the attention of Amo, Jimbo’s hot kid sister. “Din-din dude,” he said, “same bat time, same bat channel.”
“Shit,” I said, smacking my head. I was late. And you do not want to keep Old Man Khan waiting. In twelve minutes flat, I showered, changed, and donned my Superman T-shirt, a pair of jeans, and lizard-skin cowboy boots. Then, surprisingly, having time to kill, I cracked open a Corona, lit another cigarette, and turned on the TV. A sullen meteorologist on New York One announced that the weather would remain warm and overcast, “temperatures in the mid-seventies with a fifty percent chance of rain after midnight.”
When the news followed, I had the urge to flip, tune out, watch Telemundo. Since I had cut cable, however, I had to contend with network programming: talking heads and reality shows and advertising. Instead, I switched the TV off, grabbed a jacket, patted myself down for wallet, cigarettes, and keys, and headed out.
At the Moroccan’s newsstand down the street, I found myself leafing through dailies and weeklies when I should have been in and out with the calling card. It was compelling reading: a columnist for the Post wrote, “The response to this unimaginable 21st-century Pearl Harbor should be simple and swift—kill the bastards … As for the cities or countries that host these worms, bomb them to basketball courts.” In Time I came across a piece entitled “The Case of Rage and Retribution” that began: “For once let’s have no ‘grief counselors’ standing by with banal consolations … no fatuous rhetoric about ‘healing’… What we need is a unified, unifying Pearl Harbor sort of purple American fury—a ruthless indignation that doesn’t leak away in a week or two, wandering into Prozac-induced forgetfulness … or into corruptly thoughtful relativism—”
The exercise was interrupted by the Moroccan, who emerged from the booth, asking, “What happen?” A voluble, inquisitive guy, he wore round professor’s glasses, a perpetual five o’clock shadow, and a checkered button-down every day. He allowed me credit if I left home without my wallet and took the liberty of reporting whether Pakistan had figured in the headlines. In recent weeks, there was much reporting to do. Consequently, I attempted to be quick, repeating his query, “What happened?”
“I,” he replied.
“I?”
“Your I?”
“My I?”
“Is busted.”
“Oh!” I blurted, tracing the ring of soreness with my fingertips. It was a simple question and begged a simple answer, but I found myself lying. “I fell,” I said. “It’s fine … it’s healing.”
“You falling down,” he asked, or told me, I couldn’t quite tell, but his voice betrayed palpable concern, perhaps the concern one Muslim has for another. Sucking his teeth, he scrutinized my face, waiting for me to add something, but I pursed my lips, maintaining a poker face. I was in no mood to solicit sympathy or assign fault. As my VP would say, You gotta roll with the punches. Purchasing the newspaper of record, and the latest edition of Big Butt, I marched off, duly forgetting the calling card in all the excitement.
Then leaning on the derelict scaffolding outside my apartment building, I awaited Jimbo, shielding myself from the world with the open newspaper, with one eye on the street, the way private dicks posed in the movies. At precisely seven-thirty a behemoth schlepped heavily toward me in hand-stitched moccasins, listening, as it were, to his own theme music. There was no mistaking Jimbo. We hugged, high-fived; he complimented me on my shiner. As we started toward the 72nd Street subway stop, he absently inquired, “What news, dude?” I told him that there was a chance of rain tonight, realizing we did not have an umbrella between us.
4.
Old Man Khan lived in a neat narrow two-story, three-bedroom row house on Woodland, a street lined with solid leafy oaks not more than a ten-minute walk from the PATH station in downtown Jersey City. Jersey City was like Manhattan gone awry. I always found this strange, not only because they are separated by the same river but because of their proximate and parallel histories. Old
Man Khan would tell you that like Manhattan, Jersey City was settled by Indians (the Lenni Lenape) and colonized by the Dutch, as if he had been around then. He derived this weird sense of pride from having lived in Jersey City for twenty-five years. In fact, after politely refusing his offer many times, one precious Sunday afternoon I found myself in the Jersey City Museum—situated in the historic Van Vorst district—alongside Jimbo and Amo, shepherded by the patriarch. It was an underwhelming experience at best and a peculiarly stubborn memory. I gave Jimbo crap about it whenever I got the chance. The three of us shuffled around the cramped rooms like schoolchildren who need to pee, gaping at maladroit sketches of local historic figures such as Burgermeester Reyniersz Puaw and Paulus Hook and lithographs of Jersey City through the ages in sepia—beginning with the first settlement at Communipaw or what’s now Liberty State Park (but was, till the seventies, quite literally a dump). We learned that other settlements followed adjacently, suspicious of each other, often at daggers drawn. In the early nineteenth century, they were, I imagine, forcibly incorporated into the unimaginatively named town. There was a brief Golden Age of Jersey City, when the town had a certain role in regional commerce, but Jersey City was where the railroads ended, and toward the end of the Great Railroad Era, it fell into decline. It hadn’t been a pretty place to begin with. Then it became ugly.
Since Jersey City is about as close to Ellis Island as Manhattan—you can see the Statue of Liberty’s backside from Liberty State Park—waves of immigrants washed ashore. Till about World War II, they were mostly German, Italian, Irish. Subsequently they were Filipinos, Indians, Cubans. At one point of the tour, a recorded female voice informed us that Jersey City is one of the most diverse towns in the States: “Like parts of California, Caucasians are a minority, or less than a third of the population, outnumbered by African-Americans and Hispanics.” Old Man Khan would tell you that during his watch, the city had also become one of the largest American hubs of Arabs and Muslims. These communities, like their antecedents perhaps, remained largely insular, sequestered, grating against each other. From the thirty-year tenure of the infamous Mayor “Hanky Panky” Hague (who harped about “darkies” and outed commies) in the first half of the century, to the reign of the murderous Dotbusters (the gang who stalked and killed Asians with clubs and boots and pipes) well into the eighties, Jersey City has been defined by a decidedly troubled bustle.
You could feel it walking down some streets: people didn’t avert their eyes or nod when you walked past but often stared, either tacitly claiming you as their own or dismissing you as the Other. You couldn’t be sure if it was the ingredients or the pot. The skyscrapers downtown were erected in the seventies and looked it: you didn’t see any stucco or stonework, only steel and darkened windows. At night, the buildings seemed to brood. And despite the gentrification of Jersey City through the Great American Bull Run, there were boarded-up storefronts in the side streets, closed movie theaters, bodegas with iron grills. Except for a Duane Reade and a McDonald’s, there weren’t many familiar signs.
We walked fast because we were running late, and when Jimbo was running late, he would stick his head out and teeter on his toes, compelled, it would seem, by a formidable gust. Usually he would point out the ramshackle mosque implicated in the first World Trade Center bombing, as if it were part of a walking tour, like the Jackie Robinson statue or the “world famous Colgate Clock.” The mosque—which appeared about as sinister as a walk-up dance studio or a karate dojo—had been stoned back in the day, and for months its windows remained cracked. Before the calamity, Old Man Khan would attend the mosque for Friday prayer, pubescent Jimbo in tow.
But Jimbo had not said much during the hour-long commute, save yeah, whatever, as I reviewed, for my own benefit mostly, the Girl from Ipanema episode, the incident at Jake’s, the exchange with the Moroccan, and most urgently, the developing Shaman Run. “Don’t you think,” I continued, “it’s unfair of AC to ask me to drive the cab to Connecticut? It may mean a lot to him, but it would be reckless of me. I mean, what if something was to happen, like we get pulled over, or have an accident?”
Jimbo grunted in response. It was as if he were orbiting another planet. Gee, I thought, thanks. He spoke up only when I asked, “What am I supposed to tell your father about my eye?”
“You got mugged, dude.”
When I reminded him that Giuliani had largely purged the city of muggers, Jimbo said, “He don’t know that.” Apparently the last time Old Man Khan had been in the city was during the tenure of Mayor Dinkins, as part of the construction crew that culled the wreckage from the first attack on the World Trade Center.
As we turned onto Woodland, we walked passed the suburban artifacts that always seemed odd to me as a denizen of Manhattan, or Karachi, for that matter: barbecue sets, bicycles, tricycles, plastic slides, lawn furniture, a hammock, a gnome. There weren’t any such items outside the Khan residence, but the tapered patch of grass where Old Man Khan spent his summer evenings had recently been shorn, the tiger lilies and gardenias watered, and the small hedge expertly manicured. On tiptoe, you could peer into the spare Khan drawing room through parted curtains and iron bars. A pea green sofa and a tall shelf housing a TV and VCR were the only furniture pieces of note. The floor was covered by wall-to-wall pine shag, and the walls were bare but for a wide-angle picture of the Kaaba surrounded by specks of pilgrims.
Pausing to collect himself before the door, Jimbo mumbled, “Dude, don’t like mention the Duck or nothin’.”
“You know I’d never do that, yaar.”
AC would. AC was also persona non grata in the Khan household. Not only had he shown up four Wild Turkeys into the evening one night some years back, but he had over dinner announced that Jimbo had been going out with the Duck for years. He also called legendary leader Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the Pathan Gandhi, a pansy. AC and Old Man Khan reportedly came close to blows.
Slapping me on the back, Jimbo said, “You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.”
Suspecting something afoot, I asked, “What is going on with the Duck?”
“Nothin’ dude, nothin’.”
“Bull. Something’s not right. It’s obvious. If you don’t tell me, I’ll start howling.”
“Okay, okay, simmer down, dude. I’ll tell ya: the Duck popped the question.”
“Whoa!” I exclaimed. “Congrats, yaar!”
“Shush!”
“When was this? What did you say? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Like a month ago,” he said, biting his lip. “I told her, gimme some time to think about it, so I thought about it, but when I asked Old Man Khan, he shot it down, like fuggettaboutit!”
“So?” It seemed that I could only manage either monosyllabic exclamations or exasperated queries when I should’ve uttered some appropriate words of support or consolation.
“So nothin, dude,” he said, ringing the buzzer. “Gotta go in.”
We made our way down the wainscoted hallway wafting the heady aroma of fried onions and garlic, passed the door on the right that led up to the Khans’ tenants—Eddie and Myla Davis, a smart young African-American couple—and down, to the basement, which housed a broken bamboo furniture set, Jimbo’s Ping-Pong table, and miscellaneous Pakistani memorabilia. On the left-hand side, there was a superfluous door that was always kept locked and led to the “living room” and “study,” although the living room and study were not more than a stretch running parallel to the hallway, divided by an ornate walnut screen. The place was simple, even humble, but from the way Old Man Khan held himself in supreme equipoise, gripping the arms of the leatherette armchair as if it were a throne, you could be sure that he believed his home was his castle.
A bald, fair, barrel-chested man with arching eyebrows, fierce blue eyes, and a bulbous nose set in a corrugated face, Old Man Khan had the bearing of a bull and, except for his clipped white beard, reminded me of a textbook picture of Mussolini. Jimbo told me that he passed for Italian in Bensonhur
st, Greek in Astoria, Russian in Brighton, Jewish on the Upper West Side (or the old Lower East Side) and was always told that he did not look Pakistani, which of course meant nothing. Any Pakistani could tell you that the population of the sixth-largest country in the world ranges from black, kinky-haired Makranis on the southern coast to blond, blue-eyed descendants of Alexander’s armies in the snow-streaked valleys of the north. Unlike most Pakistani men, or Mussolini for that matter, Old Man Khan would usually be found wearing a tight little apron over a wifebeater, a faded, singed fuchsia thing that read KISS THE COOK in white letters across the front.
When we entered, he growled. “I have not seen you in a long time, Jamshed beta.” The month before, Jimbo had canceled our visit without explanation. I guessed it had to do with the Duck. “Sorry I’m late, Baba jan,” Jimbo replied, kissing his father on the forehead. “The trains ain’t runnin’ right.” Not only were trains still running irregularly, but the detour through 34th Street had taken longer than the usual Chambers Street route. Chambers Street was rubble.
Jimbo circled around the breakfast table to Amo, who had been standing by the stove, beaming, held her by the waist, and kissed her on the forehead: “Hi, hot stuff.” Amo rolled her eyes before glancing over at me. She had a thing for me. When we had entered, she did a sort of half wave, like, hi, you, before coyly averting her narrow, beryline eyes. Each feature on her face was arranged with great precision. With her long neck and high cheekbones, she was reminiscent of an eighteen-year-old Vivien Leigh—a young Vivien Leigh in hijab, blue jeans, and red and white Puma sneakers. In family photographs, however, Amo had been a chubby kid, wholly unremarkable (not unlike her mother), who had only recently metamorphosed into a swan. Consequently, she was still getting used to her body, as if she had just been bought an expensive new dress. A few weeks into her freshman year at Rutgers (where she was studying to be an actuary, of all things), she donned a hijab. I did not know why she did it. I did not particularly care for it. When she noticed my bruise, she had covered her open mouth, but I had shrugged and coolly grinned, like I was a tough guy, and these things happen to tough guys.