Homeland Elegies

by Ayad Akhtar

  “Sultan’s flight is leaving day after tomorrow. I want to be on it with him. The only thing is…”

  “What?”

  “My credit cards.”

  “What about them?”

  “Maxed out.”

  “Yeah? What’s going on with you and your money, Dad? Everything okay?”

  “Why?”

  “You’re the one calling to ask me to buy you a ticket.”

  “If you don’t want to help, then just tell me.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying.”

  “Well, then we need to book the tickets. On this kind of short notice, they’re expensive.”

  “How expensive?”

  “Um, you know, five thousand?”

  It wasn’t the number that fazed me; it was his blasé manner: “What do you mean ‘maxed out,’ Dad? You have an Amex platinum. They don’t have a limit, right?”

  “I don’t have it anymore,” he replied lightly.

  “What happened?”

  “I stopped paying. They canceled it.”

  “Why did you stop paying your Amex? What’s going on?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Sultan mentioned you were having some trouble with money. He wouldn’t tell me what it was. He said you were going to tell me.” I waited; Father was silent on the other end. “Do you want to tell me what’s going on?”

  His reply was wan: “No.”

  “Maybe you should tell me.”

  “Another time.”

  “Dad—”

  “I’ve done a lot for you. How much money I’ve given you over the years. No questions asked—”

  “Dad—”

  “Now I’m asking, and you’re behaving like I owe you something? Forget it! Just forget it!”

  “It’s fine. I’ll buy it for you.”

  “No questions asked!”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m your father.”

  “I said okay.”

  “Good. Thank you. How do you want to do it? I mean, if you just send me your credit card information I can book?”

  “Send me an email with the details, and I’ll take care of it.”

  He hesitated, then said “Fine” and hung up.

  Twenty minutes later, I got the promised email. He’d lied about the departure date, which wasn’t for another three days; he’d also lied about the availability of cheaper tickets. A search online showed an ample supply on at least a half dozen flights for the date listed, most costing no more than $1,500. But Sultan was flying on Emirates into Lahore, he explained when I called him back; he needed to be on the same flight so they could travel together. I didn’t want to argue with him. I read him my credit card information, and he bought the ticket himself—$5,700 with fees and taxes.

  The following day he called with more disconcerting news. He changed the date of his flight into New York. He would be in the city tomorrow afternoon. He used my card for the $250 change fee; he hoped I didn’t mind. And: Was I free for dinner? I was. Did he want to stay the night at my place? No, he replied gaily. He’d booked a room at the Plaza. They were having a special rate, and he couldn’t resist. “Did you use my card for that, too?” I asked, irritated.

  “I hope you don’t mind.”

  * * *

  I don’t know how Father scored a reservation at Eleven Madison Park for a 7:00 p.m. dinner on a Thursday night. I’d only been for lunch—appropriately enough, with Riaz—at a table just a few feet from James Murdoch, his wife, and Google’s Eric Schmidt; there hadn’t been an empty table at that lunch hour, and I recalled Riaz telling me it could be even harder to get in for dinner. Somehow, Father got a table. The choice didn’t surprise me. His hankering to mark his status was as innate to him as his Punjabi accent. And in theory, I didn’t mind the notion that we were meeting for dinner at Eleven Madison Park, where a meal for two could easily set us back three bills. But why now? Why the needless luxury when he didn’t have the money to spend on it anymore? For years, I’d been hearing tales of my friends’ parents getting older, the bizarre moods, the night terrors, the disturbing lapses in memory, the peculiar new inclinations, the mottled new colors to their personalities. I assumed at least some of Father’s behavior around money was related to his advancing age. As I walked over from the subway, crossing Madison Square Park, I resolved to force the conversation with him that night. I needed to know what was going on.

  But he wasn’t alone.

  He was sitting in a corner at a table for four, and beside him was a woman in red. Across the room, I couldn’t tell if her hair was white-blond or white-gray, but even from a distance, her face was striking—round eyes and a long face I recognized at once from her daughter: it was Melissa’s mother, Caroline.

  I could hear my heart inside my ears.

  Father saw me and rose. There was something spry about his escape from the corner, something firm in his embrace that I didn’t recognize. I smelled the alcohol on his breath, but he didn’t seem drunk. “Ayad, there’s someone I want you to meet,” he said, holding my arm now, his voice quivering just enough for me to notice that he was nervous.

  “Yeah, I think I got that already…”

  He turned back to the table, still holding my arm. “Caroline,” he said, presenting me, “this is my son.” She stood, her small, veined fist closed tightly around her napkin, her striking face softened with a searching half smile. She reached her other hand out toward me. Her grip was warm and wet.

  “It’s so nice to meet you,” she said quietly. As I began to take my place, Father lingered beside me with a vacant look. “Sikander,” she said, again softly. “You can sit down now.” The way she pronounced his name—with the proper emphasis on the second syllable and its gentle d, and all the correct proportions to the vowels, all the more striking for being spoken with an American accent—signaled an intimacy between them I couldn’t deny. She encouraged him to sit again, but he didn’t move.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said.

  Once he’d disappeared beyond the row of tree-tall bouquets dividing the dining room, I realized just how angry I was.

  “I’m sorry,” she said softly.

  “For what?” I asked. I heard myself. I sounded like an asshole.

  “I asked him to make sure you knew. I didn’t want you to be blindsided. I wanted to be sure you knew. So you had a choice.”

  “A choice?”

  “About whether you were okay meeting me or not.” She paused. “You’ve been part of my life for so many years. I just…I feel like I know you. I know how much he loves you. How much you love him. I just want to…” She stopped, her lips holding in—it seemed—a feeling of sympathy she wasn’t sure I would want to feel from her.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “It’s not you. It’s him. He’s been very unpredictable lately.”

  “I know,” she said with finality.

  And that was all we said. I sat there in silence and stared down at the table. I could still feel my heart in my ears. I realized I couldn’t stay, but I knew I couldn’t leave until he returned. And then, all at once, he was back, slipping into the corner place beside her. He still looked nervous, but I couldn’t deny what I saw before me: he’d never looked so much himself—which is to say, that face I’d known my whole life seemed more clearly what it was, what I’d always known it to be, as if some intervening, disfiguring filter I’d never understood to comprise so much of his appearance had fallen away, and, for the first time, I was beholding him without it. “So,” he began brightly. “The bathrooms are stunning. I highly recommend the trip.” Neither of us replied. He pulled his readers from his breast pocket and picked up a menu just as the waiter appeared and asked me what I was drinking.

  “Not sure yet.”

  The waiter nodded and turned to my father, indicating his almost finished drink: “Another vodka gimlet, sir?”

  “Please,” Father said politely, tossing back the r
est and handing him the glass.

  “Go ahead and bring the whole bottle,” I blurted out to the waiter, who looked understandably startled.

  “I’m sorry, sir?”

  “I said, just bring him the whole bottle. He’s probably gonna go through at least that much by the time he’s done.”

  “Ayad.”

  “What, Dad?! Hmm?”

  He looked up at the waiter. “Just the gimlet will be fine. Thank you.”

  Caroline was moving along the bench to the table’s edge. “I’m just going to freshen up. I’ll be right back,” she said meekly as she got out and left us.

  “Can you be civil, please? Can you stop behaving like a child?” Father glared, then took up the menu.

  “Civil?!” I yelped. “I’m the one behaving like a child?! Me?!—”

  “I said stop it—”

  “I’m the one who needs babysitting through his court case? Drunk in casinos, in jail? I’m the one who’s supposed to be civil?!” If I’d been paying attention, I might have noticed the silence growing around us.

  “That’s enough.”

  “You’re right. It is enough. You mind telling me what’s going on with you?”

  “With what?”

  “What happened to all your money?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Isn’t that exactly what it’s become now that I’m paying for all this ridiculous stuff—”

  “Ridiculous? You think I didn’t pay for you? For years?”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  “‘Just one more month, Daaad. I’ll have rent next month, Daaad.’” His high-pitched, open mockery of my American accent continued to draw the notice of those around us.

  “You’ve been using that one on me now for ten years. I couldn’t make it on my own. I needed your help. I know that. I’m sorry! I’m sorry it took me so long! How many times do I have to thank you before you’ll leave me alone about it? I couldn’t have done any of it without you! You’re the only reason any of it happened! Okay!? Does that make you happy!?” I was shouting, and around us, the dining room had gone silent. I thought I felt Father’s impulse to strike me—or maybe this was only the consciously admissible form of my own long-buried desire to hit him—and saw the scarlet bloom rushing up his neck. My heart lurched, stuffing my ears with its relentless throbbing. “You’re an embarrassment,” he said nastily as he lifted the menu again and hid himself from me. I saw the waiter heading for our table with the maître d’ in tow. I wasn’t about to be chastised in public any further.

  “Fuck this,” I said, then got up and walked out.

  The night was brisker than I recalled. At the corner, whatever was coursing through my veins pushed me into the oncoming traffic. Car horns blared as I wove my way across Madison Avenue back into the park, defiant. The rage felt like a heat that would burn me if I didn’t release it. But where? How? On whom? On what? A young couple passed me, arm in arm. I suddenly wondered if my fists could be used to shake the feeling. To ask the question—I knew—was already to avoid it. I wanted to scream; I knew I wouldn’t do that, either.

  I staggered a little farther into the park and fell onto an empty bench. My eyes burned. I buried them in my palms and rubbed, and kept rubbing. There, inside, I saw him. He was large, and I was small. I remembered watching him from a doorway in our first house, standing by a window, impossibly grand in the daylight, opening and reading mail. I longed for him then, to be lifted in his arms, in that light. It was a yearning I’d felt my whole life. Hadn’t he done that? Hadn’t he and Mother given all they could? Why hadn’t it been enough? Why, despite all they’d given, all they’d done—both of them, their whole lives—why had it still never felt like enough?

  The tears were coming up now from a pain in my chest, from a longing fissure in a heart I’d always known was broken.

  I felt my phone vibrating in my pocket. I pulled it out to see two missed calls from him. I had to go back inside. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t want to. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t need him.

  I headed back to the restaurant.

  As I emerged from the park, I saw him on the other side of Madison Avenue. He was standing beside a cab and helping her into the back. It looked like he was going to follow her in. “Dad!” I cried out. And again: “Dad!” He heard me and looked up. I saw her long, worried face appear in the window. He leaned in and spoke to her, then shut the door and stepped away from the car, watching it pull off and disappear up the avenue.

  I crossed the street and found him leaden, retreated.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, starting to cry again. I didn’t know what I was apologizing for, but I knew I had to apologize.

  “No, no,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “No,” he said again.

  “Dad, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” I said again, grabbing his coat and pulling him toward me. He resisted my embrace.

  “No, beta, no.”

  But I pressed in and drew him closer, pressing myself to him, feeling him as tightly against my body as I could. I held him there until he stopped resisting. It wasn’t until he tried to speak that I realized he was also crying now.

  “I lost it all,” he moaned into my shoulder. “All of it. I lost it all.”

  I didn’t ask for an explanation. I didn’t want one. I didn’t need one. I was sure I would find it all out soon enough. Only the embrace between us mattered now. If only I could hold him closer, I thought, hold him longer, maybe what was broken in both of us would finally be mended.

  Footnotes

  1 After three years of passing on offers from Tinseltown, I’d finally capitulated. The project was an adaptation of a French detective novel in which one of the protagonists was a Muslim. The producer who’d persuaded me to come aboard was, like me, the child of Pakistani immigrants. She didn’t last six months on the job. After she was fired, I started to get notes from the studio about adding a terrorist subplot. I refused. And then I was fired.

  I don’t know if, when he boarded that plane for Pakistan the next morning, Father knew he wouldn’t be coming back. Some part of me thinks he did. He left behind a Gordian knot of liabilities, unpaid bills, and loans—the second mortgage he’d taken out on the house was three months in arrears, and foreclosure proceedings were already in the preliminary stages—and his bank accounts were empty, even his IRA, to fund a gambling habit that had enriched the coffers of our local casino by almost $2 million. It was all so clear in hindsight, the disrepair into which his life had been falling for some time; I was angry at myself for not noticing the magnitude of the problem in time to do something.

  I won’t bore you with the details of how his legal and financial troubles were eventually untangled, but the fact that his attorneys in America had been fully empowered with the necessary authorities before he left indicated to me—despite his protestations to the contrary—he’d been thinking about an escape for some time. The process of discarding his and my mother’s things—he didn’t want anything saved except the family photographs—was undertaken on the weekend of April Fools’ Day in 2018. By the second week of May, the house in which I’d grown up was sold and painted a bright new shade of gray. As for Father’s situation, his Social Security benefits were enough to ensure a secure, if modest, life on sixteen acres of mango groves in Bahawalpur. I missed him, of course. And he said he missed me, too. But in our Skype sessions and phone calls, I could tell he was doing better than he had done in years. He wasn’t drinking nearly as much, though finding a drink when he wanted one wasn’t as hard—he was happy to relate—as he worried it might be. He was also relieved there was no way to gamble away what little money he had left. Islam had at least that much going for it. “Better than a twelve-step program,” he joked as the muezzin’s call sounded from the village mosque in the background. Yes, the Pakistani homeland he’d hated for the entirety of his American life—or so he’d led us all to believe—was now his homeland again. And it didn’t seem to bother him one bit.r />
  He’d been in Pakistan just about a year when I finally confessed I was almost finished with a book in which I wrote it out—what had happened to him and her and to me in our American journeys. I was surprised how lackadaisically he took the news. There was no entreaty to deal with him justly, no admonition to strike a fair balance about my American homeland. Instead, he had this to add about his own experience and suggested I might not want to leave it out: That when he thought of the place now, America, he found it hard to believe he’d spent so much of his life there. As much as he’d always wanted to think of himself as American, the truth was he’d only ever aspired to the condition. Looking back, he said, he realized he’d been playing a role so much of that time, a role he’d taken for real. There was no harm in it; he’d just gotten tired of playing the part. “I had a good life there, so many good years. I’m grateful to America. It gave me you! But I’m glad to be back in Pakistan, beta. I’m glad to be home.”

  Free Speech: A Coda

  When the theatricality, the entertainment value, the marketing of life is complete, we will find ourselves living not in a nation but in a consortium of industries, and wholly unintelligible to ourselves except for what we see as through a screen darkly.