by H. M. Naqvi
Busting into the cardiology ward on the seventh floor like an escaped inmate, disheveled and harried and out of breath, I discovered Amo in the waiting area, hugging her legs atop a hard orange plastic chair. Gently rocking back and forth, she was murmuring something under her breath—the lyrics of a song, the last words she had said to her father, a prayer. When I called out her name, she looked up with startled feline eyes and cried, “Shehzad Lala!” Springing into my arms, she held me tightly, nuzzling my sweat-blotted chest. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” I cooed. We stood glued in embrace for some time until I could hear her heart beating like a clapping wind-up toy. Finally I said, “Tell me what happened.”
We sat down beside each other. I crossed my legs and produced a folded tissue. Amo wiped her eyes and nose and began: “So I woke up like I do every day to make Baba breakfast—he has Weetabix and low-fat milk, and a bowl of mixed fruit, and tea, black tea—except, I guess, my alarm didn’t go off, so like when I went out, I noticed that the kettle was already on the stove and the TV was on and the phone was off the hook—”
Amo broke off the narration to stare at a weirdly Jersey-shaped dent in the opposing wall. I wondered what could have precipitated the attack—something on the news, somebody on the phone—before laying a reassuring hand against the small of her back. Determinedly pursing her lips, she continued: “Baba was on his back, and his face was all red and puffy and … and the teacup had broken.” Stifling a sob, she rubbed her eyes with the soft of her palms. “I was thinking, I dunno, if I’d just like woken up earlier—”
“You know, there’s nothing you could have done.”
“Y’know,” she continued as if she had not heard me, “he’d already had a heart attack when I was in junior high, and he’s had high blood pressure for as long as I can remember. The doctors always tell him, ‘Mr. Khan, gotta change your lifestyle’—change of lifestyle is like key with coronary artery disease—but you know how he is, Shehzad Lala. When Ami was alive, he’d listen to her, but now everything’s different, and I keep an eye on him, and he listens to me when I’m around, but sometimes it’s like he’s just humoring me, and I can’t be there all the time, I just can’t. I wish Jamshed Lala—” Turning to me, she fixed me with a teary accusatory look. “I’m so mad at him! Where is he? Why isn’t he here?”
Scratching the hook of my ear, I stared vacantly back at her because I didn’t have the heart to tell her that her brother had been nabbed on some crazy terrorism charge. She might not have even believed me. Clearing my throat, I told her that I had not heard from Jimbo for a few days, that if he knew, he would be here. “You know that, don’t you?”
Amo heaved a sigh in response: “The doctor’s saying he’s got something like a thirty percent chance.” Bowing her head, as if peering into the void that was opening beneath her Pumas, she sighed again. We peered in together. I had been there. I decided I was not going to allow her to lapse into despair.
“Look, Amo,” I said in a tenor that made her perk up like a prairie vole. “All we can do right now is sit tight. It’s silly to review and reassess what you could have done yesterday or the day before. You need to be here, right now, alert, in the present. You need to be strong because when Khan Sahab gets out, he’ll need you to be strong. Do you understand what I’m saying?” Amo nodded. “He’s very lucky to have you.” Amo smiled for the first time that afternoon. She had a wonderfully winning smile. “You haven’t had anything to eat, have you?” Amo shook her head. “Wait here. I’ll grab lunch.”
“Don’t leave, Shehzad Lala,” she said, balancing her chin on the crescent of her open hands.
“I’ll be back before you know it.” Taking the elevator back down, I flew through the passage toward the entrance, searching for signs for the cafeteria. The octogenarian was where I left him, misdirecting somebody else. I accosted a passing male nurse, who pointed me in the right direction. The cafeteria was dark and smelled of stale cold cuts, and the lunch fare appeared particularly unappetizing: the soup du jour, Cream of Vegetable, was the color and consistency of soap water, while the Cajun Style Fish Special was baked to a leathery wafer. I decided to try my luck outside. Amo needed sustenance.
Down the length of Palisade Avenue, I happened upon a Chinese restaurant advertising a uniquely revolting American hybrid—Kung Pao Fried Chicken with Cheese Fries—but to my relief, I eventually happened upon a Subway wedged between a condemned three-story Tudor and a hardware store featuring a solitary dungareed male mannequin in the window. There was a line of locals inside, so I dug in my heels and folded my arms, surveying the menu overhead. I remembered that Amo only took halal, so the turkey boloney or roast beef or chicken salad was out of the question. Scrambled egg on a croissant would pass muster. And a cup of minestrone. I picked up a half-foot sandwich and a fountain cola for myself, and a cup of hazelnut coffee for later, in anticipation of my interview and certain collapse.
When I returned, Amo was nowhere to be seen. A wiry mullet-headed man sat in her place. Striding up to him, frowning and mildly mystified, I surveyed the area as if expecting to discover Amo under the row of chairs like a lost pen or a fallen button. “You got a problem, amigo?” the man asked. I had many problems, but I didn’t want to add to the laundry list. Raising the flats of my palms, as Jimbo might have done, I backed into a uniform-clad member of the hospital’s janitorial staff who had been hovering on the floor earlier, trailed by a squeaky-wheeled pail containing a mop and, it seemed, the cafeteria’s soup du jour. When I asked the lady if she had seen the girl who had been sitting “on that chair over there,” she steadfastly squinted as though I were speaking a foreign language.
“You know, she’s about this tall,” I said, raising my hand to my forehead in a half salute, “very pretty, wears, um, a thing on her head,” a description accompanied by a circular motion that might have suggested a halo, or insanity. “No se,”she said. “Okay,” I persisted, drawing on my Telemundo Spanish, “¿un poquito catalina?”
Just then Amo beckoned from behind a curtain as if playing a game of hide-and-seek, then guided me past a nurse’s station to an examination room furnished with a bed, chair, and desk. Spreading the contents of the brown bag on the desk, we lunched hungrily under a life-size poster depicting cartoon figures administering the Heimlich maneuver.
Amo told me that she “came in here cuz that guy was looking at me kinda funny … I get that a lot these days … I don’t let it get to me.” Suddenly I found myself empathizing with the hijab. “I’m so happy you’re here,” she added. “You’re like my knight in shining armor.”
Blushing, I changed the subject. “How’s your father?” I asked.
“No news, yet.”
“Guess we just have to wait.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah …”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Ask me anything.”
“Why do they call you Chuck?”
“You, um, really want to know?” I asked.
“I’m all ears.”
The etymology of my ostensibly all-American sobriquet had been informed by my mythical appetite for mother’s milk. Apparently, I was known to feed up to thirteen, fourteen times a day. Although Ma never denied me her sore, bitten breasts, she figured there was something awry, and after consulting with aunts and squawking sundry, she took me back to her old-school Anglo gynecologist at the hospital. “Madam,” he stated, “the child latches ineptly. We can work on that. But there is no cause for alarm. You have, I believe, a very affectionate son.”
Ma narrated the story to me before I left for the States. She also told me that the noisy sucking sound that I made might be phonetically transcribed as chucka-chucka-chucka—a sound subsequently sweetened and distilled to Chuck. All of this entertained Amo to no end, so when I glanced at the wall clock and told her that I had to run, she seemed nonplussed, overwrought even. “Where? Where d’you have to go?”
“Look, Amo, I’ll be back soon.”
/> “Don’t leave, Shehzad,” she said for the second time that afternoon.
“I wouldn’t if I didn’t absolutely have to, and I absolutely have to.”
Abandoning Amo, I raced out. It was after three. I had less than an hour to get back to the city for my only interview, less than an hour to get my life in order.
I had no suit, no plan, no prayer, and careening toward the city in a cab, I had this sinking feeling that I should have stayed back, because if something untoward happened that afternoon, something tragic, something horrible, I would never be able to forgive myself. As the road blurred by, the yellow dashes merging into one, it occurred to me that I was no longer a good man. In a way, my jihad had stopped short. I was certain that I would fail Amo when she needed me most and fail to make the most important interview of my life. I had, however, promised the cabbie an extra tenner if he got me into the city on time. Miraculously, he did. It was quarter to four when we emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel. Venturing uptown to change was not an option, as the avenues were choked with tourist buses and the beginnings of rush hour traffic. I had to think of something else, something fast. Crossing Fifth, I yelled, “Stop here,” and pulling out a fiver, added, “Be back in four.”
Entering the nearest shop from the corner, I grabbed the first size-thirty-six suit from the rack, then whipped out my only functioning credit card at the counter. “Would you like to try that on, sir?” asked the saleswoman, which may have been more advice than inquiry, but I waved my hand like I’m a high roller, darling. Eyebrow arched, she announced, “That’ll be one thousand nine hundred and ninety nine dollars … tax not included.” The figure was greater than my life savings, a months rent, a round-trip ticket to Karachi, Moscow, and most parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Smiling bravely, I told her to make sure she included the receipt. As she rang me up, I glanced around. I was obviously in the wrong place: the floors were Boticena marble, the ceiling tinted glass, and everything in between, from the curtains to the clothing, was, rather dramatically, either black or gold. On the far wall hung an enormous gilded V, like a totem. “Come again,” the saleswoman said, handing over the garment bag, probably worth its weight in gold. “I will,” I replied.
Changing in the backseat like a contortionist, I was careful not to crease or drag the material on the floor mat. The suit appeared to fit well in the rearview mirror—snug on the shoulders and fitted around the waist—but there remained two problems with my attire: I did not possess a tie, and beneath the hem of my extravagant trousers, my lizard-skin cowboy boots were conspicuously visible. Resigning myself to the latter sartorial faux pas, I spent the last three minutes haggling with a rotund security guard in the lobby.
“I wanna make sure I get what you’re saying,” he said. “You gonna pay me three bucks to rent my tie for half an hour?” I made an offer for four. I did not have the cash flow to buy it outright. “This is my lucky tie, bro.”
We settled on five, a handsome return on investment for the doorman, considering that the shiny acrylic number would have fetched an even ten bucks on the sidewalks of Chinatown. It didn’t really matter. Somehow I had made it to the interview and somehow looked the part.
The offices of the boutique research house were wood-paneled and spare, suggesting an old-fashioned objectivity, an anomaly in an industry that had contributed to one of the greatest asset price bubbles in recent history. The ambience of the lobby was further defined by a tall, leafy money plant and a realist rendering of a tan colt grazing in a meadow pocked with white pansies. Asked to have a seat, I did as I was told, then promptly nodded off, dreaming of life as a pony. After a fiber-rich breakfast of dewy grass, I might canter over hillocks to hang with my pony boys. We would horse around all day, graze some more, and sleep. It would be a genial existence.
When I was finally called, I followed the secretary to a conference room in the back, past a set of cramped cubicles and a half-empty water cooler, glimpsing into the secret lives of analysts. A thin man with a mop of thinning reddish hair got up to extend his hand. “Last but not least,” he said. We both laughed politely. “You must be Shay-zad,” he continued. “Why don’t you take a seat?”
As he positioned himself at the head of the oval mahogany table before a neat stack of papers and a dog-eared manila folder, I sat diagonally across from him, clasping my hands over my stomach and crossing then uncrossing my legs, conscious of my boots.
“Let me tell you a little about myself,” he began. “I’m originally from the West, but I joined the firm, oh, in 1991, right after school, so I now consider myself a New Yorker. Over the years, I’ve worked in the biotech, emerging technologies, and specialty chemicals spaces—traditionally our fortes. We primarily look at middle-market companies, publicly held of course, for institutional investors. We’re a niche player, one of few independent research houses left. We’re a small shop—I’m one of four directors here—and we’ve been looking for an analyst to run numbers as well as assist us with the, oh, more qualitative analysis we do here.” Reclining in his chair, the Director said, “So tell me, Shayzad, what’s your story?”
For a moment, I felt myself clam up like a child told to recite verse for a guest. Then, coughing into my fist, I collected myself and began speaking in paragraphs. “Well,” I replied, “I arrived in New York four years ago to attend college, which I completed in three. I majored in literature and graduated magna cum laude, then was offered a job at an investment bank. As an analyst, I’ve closed one acquisition, two debt offerings, and an IPO. I’ve participated in all stages of M&A transaction processes, from drafting offering memoranda to conducting due diligence sessions to valuation. I’ve worked with clients’ corporate finance departments to develop earnings models and have also created discounted cash flow models, performed comparable company analysis, and run leveraged buy-out sensitivities to value public and private companies—”
“Let me cut you off there, Shayzad,” he interjected, and I was grateful for it. It had, at best, been a lackluster performance. “I’ve got an idea of the type of work a financial analyst does on a day-to-day basis. I’m more curious about what brings you here, but before you answer that question, I want to know why you decided to get into banking after studying literature.”
The tone and construction of the query seemed benign but wasn’t. My VP had been blunter: Why the hell do you want to do banking if you studied literature? Either way, there was a lot of explaining to do.
“Literature,” I began, “and banking are thought to be disparate or mutually exclusive but you can make connections. I mean, somebody could teach a course called ‘Masters of the Universe: The Making of the Myth of the Modern Banker.’ The course would trace the construction of the idea of the banker in fiction, and nonfiction, and its, um, resonance in the popular imagination. You’d look at Bonfire of the Vanities, and American Psycho… you could even look back to Whitman’s Wall Street … and then there are canonical treatises on the industry like Barbarians at the Gate and Liar’s Poker. But that’s the long answer. The short answer is I needed the money.”
The Director nodded ambiguously, which I understood as an indication for me to continue pontificating. “And though it was demanding—as you know, we work fourteen-, fifteen-hour days—I did enjoy the work. I enjoyed participating in the development of an idea from the chalkboard to its execution as a tangible event. I enjoyed re-creating a company before me, factoring in everything from the costs of raw materials to macroeconomic forecasts. I enjoyed the caffeine-fueled camaraderie among bankers. I can go on …”
Nodding thoughtfully, the Director said, “That’s an, oh, unusual take on the industry. And now, I take it, you’re interested in ours?”
“Yes. Very much so. In research I can draw on my background in literature and finance in a way that I couldn’t in banking. I believe I write well. I’ve written essays, criticism, expository papers, research reports, and although they may not be exactly the type of literature that you produce here, I have ask
ed the same questions that any good company or industry report should ask: how and why.”
“How and why,” the Director repeated in agreement. I was finally on a roll.
“And there’s more to a company than numbers, a mistake both the layman and the expert make. I mean, you’ve got to look at more qualitative issues, including the experience and capabilities of its management team, client relationships, potential litigation, issues you can’t simply reduce to a ratio or tangible dollar value.”
“You can’t, Shayzad, that’s right,” he said, jotting something down in the folder before him.
“You can call me Chuck.”
“Chuck … Can I ask where you’re from, Chuck?”
“Pakistan.”
“Pakistan. Wow. How are things over there these days?”
“Well,” I began like a sententious TV pundit, “if you really want to know, there’s a war on our border, again. There’ll be an exodus of refugees and fighters, again, an influx of drugs and arms. We’ve had a war on our border, on and off, for the last thirty years. We live in one of the toughest neighborhoods in the world: we’re bordered by Afghanistan on the north, a collection of warring fiefdoms, then there’s nuclear aspirant and fundamentalist Iran to the west, and on the east there’s India, a country with a million-man standing army. The United States is lucky that way. You’ve got Canada, Mexico, and the sea.”
“The sea,” he repeated, as if he had often made the same observation to unsympathetic audiences. “Do you like it here?”
“Yes, of course. I mean, some of my fondest memories reside in the streets of this city.”
“Oh, I know what you mean,” he said with a knowing smile. “Well, our time is almost up, but before you leave, I want to ask you whether you have any questions for me?”