by Ayad Akhtar
First Things, or Partition
To have heard my parents reminisce about medical school in Pakistan in the 1960s was to be treated to the aureate tones and hues common to most reports of halcyon days, though the lengthening view on Pakistan’s subsequent turbulent history has certainly made its ’60s era look like a never-again-to-be-seen high-water mark. In 1964, when my parents met—the same year my mother met Latif—one could have imagined that the rivers of blood spilled to found the Pakistani nation had finally dried, that the ghosts of India’s partition had wreaked their last havoc and finally decamped for the brighter beyond. It was not to be. For Pakistan’s late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century obsession with terror-as-tactic—learned of course from the CIA—was the paranoid calculus born of partition’s trauma, a self-corroding defense that speaks to the still desperate, still feverish Pakistani fear of its Indian progenitor. There’s no good reason to give short shrift to the story of partition, still too little known to most, of how India was sundered and Pakistan created by the beleaguered, ever-duplicitous British in the wake of the Second World War; there’s no good reason not to tell the tale in its epic amplitude, except that it’s been well told many times, and because these pages are not the place—and I am not the person—to attempt any such full account. My tale is entirely American. But in order to understand it, you’ll need to know at least this much: by 1947, Britain’s long-practiced imperial strategy of divide and conquer resulted in the to some ill-conceived, to others God-ordained decision to carve off zones of the Indian motherland so that Hindus and Muslims would not have to live side by side any longer. Little matter that Muslims and Hindus had lived together for hundreds of years in India; after a century of British policies pitting them against each other, stoking a constant conflict for which the British Raj offered itself as the only containing force, the king’s empire could no longer ignore the fact that the social fabric was on the verge of coming apart.
Before the Second World War, the British paid ample lip service to the idea of self-government in India, but granting full independence was never a serious option. The Raj was the jewel in His Majesty’s crown; giving it up was unthinkable. But by 1947, the British nation was exhausted and traumatized by German bombing; discouraged by the loss of so many of its soldiers; shocked by the desertion and mutiny of its Indian servicemen; benumbed by unprecedented winter cold and an energy shortage that had the population shivering and its factories shuttered; broke, owing not only the Americans for the money that was keeping its economy afloat but India, too; and disgusted by the growing violence between Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs for which it took no responsibility, violence that would shortly lead to a bloodbath of historic proportions. Overwhelmed by these troubles at home and in its disintegrating colony, Britain concluded that exit from the subcontinent was the only option.
This standard reading of the history was one Father hated. He called it the “blame game” and found faulting the British for partition’s violence particularly difficult to stomach. Who had done all the senseless killing? Was it the British hacking apart their former schoolmates limb from limb, beheading their Muslim or Hindu neighbors, roasting their infants on spits? Was it the British who had done all that—or had we done it? Sure, fine, yes, they had perpetrated evil and enslavement in their endless plunder of the Indian motherland since the early 1600s—but so what? Were we robots? Did we have to keep repeating the violence? And since we were the ones repeating it, what sense did it make to blame them for it? What was the value in it? Wasn’t the history clear? We’d long sued for independence; the British had finally conceded; we were the ones who couldn’t make it work without the bloodshed—so how exactly were they to blame? And if we hated them so much that we couldn’t see the facts for what they were, why, then, were we still speaking their language when we had so many of our own? Why were we quoting Shakespeare and playing squash and eating cucumber sandwiches? And why didn’t we tear up the roads they’d built and pave our own? Or fill the canals they’d dug to transform dusty Punjab into the most fertile land on the subcontinent? Why didn’t we complain about all this, too?
Father’s reading of the history had a particularly derisive view of the Muslims of prepartition India, a besieged minority, yes, but deeply deluded in their besiegement, still dreaming of the pre-British Mughal era, when Muslims ruled the land. He thought this a recollection of useless glory, one that echoed the even more futile Muslim exercise of celebrating the Islamic Golden Age, a long-concluded chapter of history that had Muslims ruling much of the then known world by the turn of the last millennium. We—and now the referent would slip, as it often did when he was on a first-person-plural rampage, “we” no longer pointing to all prepartition Indians but to “we” the Muslims—liked to spend our time yowling for a past that helped us not a whit, a past that only fortified our loftiest delusions and encouraged excuses instead of the work required of us if we were ever to catch up to the rest of the world. I remember a particularly violent tirade in late 1979, two weeks into the hostage crisis in Iran, when a mob of Pakistanis—after hearing (false) radio reports of an American military attack on the holiest of Muslim sites in Mecca—marched on the US embassy in Islamabad and burned it down. In fact, there had been an attack in Mecca, but the United States had had nothing to do with it—the perpetrators turned out to be Saudi. To Father, the knee-jerk violence was typical: “Blind and stupid! Caught up in the past! Can’t even tell the difference between their anger toward the British and their anger toward the Americans! Litigating crimes of history in a courtroom of fools! When are they going to understand the only ones they’re hurting are themselves?!?!” The referent would slip again, a new “we”—now referring to us as Americans—as opposed to the older one, which was now the “them” he wanted nothing to do with, namely, Muslims: “It makes you wonder, beta. Maybe that’s what they really want. To fail. Not up to the challenge, not interested in change. The whole Muslim world. Expecting failure, so failure they get. Pouring all their creativity into finding new people to blame for old problems.” It was during that very same fall of 1979—when my third-grade class was studying the American Civil War, and as he leafed through the pages of the textbook dealing with the American South’s agrarian economy one Saturday afternoon—that he would make the following memorable analogy: “Imagine, beta, the South had won. Alabama, Tennessee, all that backward nonsense down there. What did they have back then? Just like your book is saying—slaves and cotton. No manufacturing. No transportation. No navy. If they had won the Civil War and were on their own? It would have been a disaster for them. If they didn’t have the North to depend on? To hold them up like we’ve done for more than a hundred years? What do you think it would be like down there today? Hmm? A shithole even bigger than it is now,” he said with relish as he snapped the book shut. “That, my boy, is Pakistan in a nutshell. As pathetic as the South would be today if its every wish came true.”
With me, Father disparaged his native country often and without reservation, but he didn’t speak that way about it in front of his wife, my mother. She loved Pakistan, or at least was bound to it in a way that reached as deeply into her as anything could. Years after 9/11, she, too, would sour on the Pakistani experiment, saying she didn’t recognize the country she’d grown up in, but by then, battling cancer for the fourth time in thirty years, there were reasons for this shift in her feelings deeper than just the war on terror. Unlike Father, she’d grown up close to the line through Central Punjab that divided the Indian nation and had been old enough during partition to have seen horrors she would never forget. One of her earliest memories was of being in Lahore station the summer of the bloodshed, when fifteen million people were uprooted and migrating with their belongings, Muslims leaving India, Hindus and Sikhs fleeing what is now Pakistan. She’d strayed from her father briefly onto a quay where workers were pulling what looked like long brown heavy bags from a train. The workers were having difficulty tossing them as far as they seeme
d to want to. It wasn’t until she approached that she saw they were not bags but naked bodies. The heaps were of the dead. A woman’s corpse tumbled from the pile, her long hair falling away to show a face with a hole where there should have been a nose and two pink bloody circles on her chest. Her breasts had been cut off.
It was a summer of horrors. In their neighborhood—close to a Sikh holy site in Wah, where thousands of Sikhs had been maimed and raped and killed in their homes and in the streets—she came across dismembered limbs, hands and feet poking up from shallow graves along the road. She saw dogs gnawing at human heads. She found a Sikh mother in a blood-splattered shawl holding a disemboweled child. She was barely five years old when she saw this. And she wasn’t just a witness. Her family, too, had lost many to the violence. Her dear favorite aunt, Roshina—her mother’s younger sister—was living with her in-laws on the other side of the border and didn’t make it back alive. Set upon by a Hindu mob while hiding in the family home, Roshina was pulled through the living-room window and gang-raped in the front yard, then beaten to death. Her husband had already made it to Pakistan, and when he heard the news, he gathered a mob of his own and went into the streets. They brought a bloodied Hindu boy back to the house; Mother thought the boy somehow responsible for what had happened to Roshina; she pressed her face to the bedroom window facing the driveway and watched them chop the child down with an ax.
To have lived through events like these so young was to know that murder is not an abstraction or something perpetrated only by evildoers. Good people could kill and be killed. It also taught her a fear for her life, a fear her body would never forget. It was no surprise she was as paranoid as she was about India. Even as she sat in her suburban American kitchen sipping Sanka, a quarter century removed from the sights and sounds of trauma, even as she stared out at a quiet backyard hedged by protective cornfields half a world from any Hindus who might have wished her harm, even there, even then, she worried about them coming to destroy her. Like Pakistan itself, she’d been forged in the smithy of that mortal fear. And it wasn’t just Hindus. Lethal danger lurked everywhere, and any reminder of it could overwhelm her. She didn’t watch the news. She couldn’t bear any corporal image of atrocity, current or past, a difficulty especially pronounced when it came to the Holocaust. Even the mention of Auschwitz or Treblinka brought on a peculiar rush of mourning and resentment it would take me a long time to make sense of. Though she never directly suggested an equivalence between what happened to the Jews in the Second World War and partition, she implied it. And what seemed to bother her most was that it reminded her not of what she’d been through but of how little anybody in this country—by comparison—knew about it.
She rarely talked about all this. Much of what I know comes, as so much does to children, by learning the unspoken family rules, the assumptions gleaned from frowns of disapproval, shifts in mood at the mention of the wrong thing. I would piece together a better picture of her inner life from the dozen diaries she left when she died, diaries in which I would also discover that what she’d seen as a child during partition, she believed, was at the root of her recurring cancer. She wrote of her body being riddled with affective scars, buried feelings she’d never known how to feel, emotions she still didn’t know how to make sense of, a baleful store she worried was metastasizing into the tumors threatening her life every seven or so years. The picture my aunts—her sisters—conveyed to me of my mother as a child seemed to support at least the assumption of an early, powerful repression at work in her makeup. They remembered an often bold, always curious, lighthearted girl who bore little resemblance to the quiet, tense, reserved woman I knew, though I did spy that eupeptic person peeking through her eyes from time to time. The oddest things—polka music, Reese’s peanut butter cups, tea roses, and (later, in the era of TiVo) David Letterman—could conjure a softened, playful mien that made her look like a different woman entirely. The other thing that always did the trick was seeing Latif.
Zakat
By the time Mother met Latif, during her first year of medical school, he was in his third year and already betrothed. I don’t know the exact circumstance of their meeting—likely through the man who would eventually become her husband, my father, Latif’s best friend—but I do know what she wrote in her diary two days after Latif was shot to death, in 1998:
We knew when we met. But what could he do? He was already promised to Anjum. I thought if he loves S so much, there must be something more to him. Give him a chance. I didn’t realize it was nothing but selfishness. (You did know.) Quite the opposite of L. I still remember my hand in his hand, as big as a giant’s. That gentle smile. “I’ve heard so much about you, Fatima.” What he heard I never asked. And now he’s dead.
The S was my father, Sikander, whom she chose—according to more than one bitter entry in her diaries—on the grounds that Latif loved him.
Latif was big. Very big. A half foot taller than my father—who is almost six feet himself—and a hundred pounds heavier. His forehead, too, was tall, defined by a hairline set farther back on his head than seemed to make sense for a man still so young. His eyes were slim and brown, his face long, his mouth wide. He looked not unlike a Punjabi version of Joe Biden, which mostly accounts, I think, for my mother’s enduring love of the Delaware senator and eventual vice president. A big man with a big head and very big hands, but she was right: he was so gentle. It endeared him to me as a child, too. Sure, it was thrilling to be lifted aloft, to tower above everything nested on those massive shoulders, but it was the tender grip of those massive hands on my ankles as we walked that I recall most vividly, the pleasure of feeling such power so completely corralled, and not as a mitigation of the threat his size implied to others but as an expression of kindness—a kindness that, yes, you could absolutely see in his smile.
Latif and Father graduated from medical school two years before Mother did and were among the first recruited by American hospitals in the States under a new program that offered young foreign doctors visas, jobs, plane tickets, and apartments. Father found a position in cardiology in New York City, and Latif ended up as a resident in internal medicine not far from Trenton. (By then, Latif had married Anjum, the fair-skinned second cousin he’d grown up always knowing he would have to marry; Mother and Father had also wed, but she wouldn’t join him here in America until she graduated.) Trenton was close enough for Father to make a quick trip down for biryani with his friends on a homesick weekend but far enough for him to live his new American life unobserved, unimpeded. Latif was religious—always had been—and Father didn’t want him to know just how much fun he was having with whiskey and cards. Which isn’t to say Latif had ever been one to hector others about their faith, at least not back in Pakistan. But being here worried him, as he saw his fellow classmates taking the American lifestyle too much to heart. Remember the British, Latif would say. They mingled with us back home for centuries, but never too closely. They were careful to safeguard what was theirs. The lesson was one worth heeding, Latif thought, lest they forget who they were and where they really came from.
Whereas to Father, not forgetting who he was would have meant not forgetting he was Punjabi, to Latif it meant never forgetting he was Muslim. Land was an earthly tie; faith a celestial one. But if Latif never missed prayer, or a fasting day in Ramadan, it was not only—or even mainly—out of concern for his eventual entry into heaven. Heaven above, he would say, was an image from which to build a life here below. It’s true that my recollections of him—loping gracefully through his backyard (or ours) in shalwar kameez, exuding an inner quiet, in whose presence discussion of the higher things felt not only natural but also necessary—so many of my recollections are marked by something angelic, by which I mean nothing fey or diaphanous or otherworldly but potent, light-giving, concerned with helping others in the here and now. When he spoke about what it meant to be Muslim, he didn’t refer to the afterlife tomorrow but to the lives of those around him he wanted to make better
today. Above all, it meant a commitment to zakat. The term usually refers to the yearly Muslim tax paid from one’s assets and distributed to the poor, but in his family it had come to mean not just the redistribution of their (considerable) wealth but also active service to those in need—the Muslim version, if you will, of Christian charity. Latif’s zamindar (landowning) grandfather in North Punjab had started an orphanage—the care of orphans being a particular involvement in the Muslim world, as the Prophet was allegedly orphaned at the age of six—which his father continued to maintain. Latif grew up spending Sundays there, playing with the kids as his father did the rounds. It must have felt natural to him, later, in medical school, to give up what little free time he had on the weekends to volunteer at a local clinic for the poor. In Trenton, he would do the same through his residency and internship, and five years later, when he left New Jersey to join a practice in Pensacola, he initiated a free Sunday morning clinic at his office. Latif’s aggressive and entirely unselfconscious Samaritanism provoked leery reluctance in his new partners, but when word got out about the generous new doctor in the heavily churchgoing community, it started to bring in patients who could pay their bills, too.
I remember his office on one of those Sunday mornings. We were on our yearly visit to the Florida Panhandle to spend time with the Awans. It was one of two weeks a year that our families spent together. They would come to Wisconsin in the winter; we would visit Pensacola in the spring. I was breathlessly involved in a game of tag with the Awan kids that morning—there were four of them, twin sons followed by two daughters, all within five years of one another—when I fell to the ground and felt something pierce my knee. I looked down and saw a slim silver shank emerging from the fleshy bump just beneath my kneecap. A fishhook. I pushed at it, following the bend of the shank, thinking I could dislodge the barb. That’s when the blood started to bubble up and spurt. Soon, my knee and ankle were covered in it.