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  The Internet was where many other single Asians were retreating in their search for someone with whom they had something in common. I clicked on one of the more popular sites, registered and uploaded a photograph. Once logged in, I began to trawl for a potential bride. In my everyday life I knew hardly any other Pakistanis, but online I was deluged with choices. Each entry was accompanied by a postage-stamp-sized photograph and a brief paragraph in which the woman invariably mentioned how hard it was to reduce her personality to a few sentences before revealing that, in fact, a few sentences were more than ample to describe her job in local government and her fondness for R&B. There were suggested ways to filter possible candidates on the basis of star sign, monthly salary, profession and even skin tone, but not being a superficial vulgarian with a fondness for astrology meant this was no help at all. The website, I concluded, was offering a twenty-first-century method of finding partners that my parents would approve. I began to fantasize about a website where, alongside members’ photographs, one could upload photographs of book, music and film collections, where one could search for someone based on a shared love of eighties power ballads and late-period Philip Roth.

  But, sadly, the websites did not offer such search functions. Instead they threw up interminable pages of women who all wanted to tell prospective partners that they enjoyed the same dreary list of interests – travelling, keep-fit and socializing – while reassuring them that they were as happy curled up with a good book. Everyone seemed to want someone who was ambitious, did not take himself too seriously and did not play games. I signed off from the website and began actively to try to meet other British Pakistanis. I accepted invitations to book events and parties in search of an eligible woman. By now most of my friends were married or in serious relationships; it felt like time was running out.

  I went on a succession of dates.

  One woman was an observant Muslim who was disgusted by my lax attitude towards fasting and prayer. Another was appalled by how traditional I was in not drinking. ‘So let me get this right,’ she said, circling the rim of her wine glass with her index finger. ‘You’ve never tasted alcohol in your life?’

  ‘That’s right,’ I told her. She looked at me like I was a living example of a species long believed extinct. ‘So do you like old Indian films?’ I asked, trying to change the subject.

  ‘I did when I was young, but who watches that shit any more?’ she said, lighting a cigarette, ‘I mean, all the best cinema is coming out of Korea right now.’

  She was a beautiful girl with a heart-shaped face and indecently full lips, but every time she opened her mouth she became less attractive. ‘I don’t have anything in common with you,’ I remember thinking. ‘All we share is a skin colour.’ The things that connected me to my heritage – my mother tongue, eighties Indian films, Asian food, a working-class preoccupation with money – failed to find resonance in this girl or in any of the other Pakistani girls I met. I wanted to believe I had more in common with them than I did, perhaps because I wanted to believe I was more Pakistani than I was.

  By this stage, my family was engulfed in a fog of gloom. ‘Some people never get married,’ my mother said, staring out of the window with a look of disappointment.

  ‘I want to get married,’ I told her. ‘But it’s not easy meeting the right girl, someone I have something in common with.’ My failure to find anyone who was British Pakistani was leading me finally to countenance what had always been impossible. ‘Maybe she doesn’t need to be Pakistani,’ I said to my mum, releasing the kite to see if it would catch the wind or be ripped to shreds.

  ‘You’re getting old,’ she said. ‘You don’t have time to waste. You need to get on the last train before it leaves without you.’

  It was a warm Sunday afternoon in the first weekend of June and the train was about to leave. I leapt out of the taxi and ran, the wheels of my rollercase rattling along the platform. The whistle screamed and I boarded the train as it slowly pulled out of Hereford station. I turned to find the nearest spare seat in the carriage and that was when I first noticed her. She had wild green eyes and golden-blonde hair and she was reading a copy of Mary Barton. I was returning to London from the Hay-on-Wye book festival and, from the fabric bag at her side, I knew she too had been at the festival. ‘She is beautiful and she likes books,’ I remember thinking. I stared intently at the front page of my newspaper and pretended to read it while all the time stealing glances at the girl and thinking, ‘Who gets to be with someone as beautiful as you?’ She was not just out of my league – she looked like she had descended from another universe.

  In any other situation I never would have had the confidence to talk to her, but somehow that day I stumbled upon a hidden stash of courage. I still don’t know where I found my voice that afternoon and, given the way it all turned out, I cannot help but speculate how tragically different my life would have been had I failed to strike up a conversation. That day the wind was behind me; something was saying to me that this was one of those times when the universe hands you a gift and all you need is the confidence to take it.

  I looked at her again. I took a deep breath, forced my mouth into a smile and said, ‘Hello.’ She looked up from her book, smiled and said, ‘Hello.’ We started talking and I learned the following about her: that she lived in London; that she had a buttery smile that spread easily across her face; that she was learning Hindi, having spent time in India; that she was funny and smart and entertaining; that she was single.

  The train rumbled towards London and I knew that if I let this opportunity pass I would spend years wallowing in regrets. ‘I’d like to see you again,’ I said, with a boldness that surprised me. ‘Here’s my number, I won’t take yours – that way it’s up to you if we meet again.’

  I told myself that I was not really dating her. Yes, we had met the following Saturday and, true, we had gone to see films and concerts and had meals in those first few weeks, but she could not be my girlfriend – because she was white and any relationship with a white girl was always going to be doomed. Except that when I was with her the fear of being a cliché evaporated in the heat of lived intimacy. ‘Why do you preclude the possibility that I could make you happy?’ she asked me one afternoon after I had spent some time bemoaning how much I hated being single. We were sitting in a park in east London, watching a band we both loved. ‘We don’t really do happy in my culture,’ I told her. ‘We try to find reasons to be miserable.’ It was true, but it was not an answer. I had grown up being told that white girls only brought misery and so being with a white girl was unimaginable. Yet now I was with someone who was making me happier than I had ever been and the only thing unimaginable was not being with her.

  And so we kept seeing each other and I became accustomed to the idea of her as my girlfriend. I was deliriously happy but that happiness came at a price: in traditional Pakistani families like mine, the power of love was eclipsed by the expectation of duty. I had always assumed that my wedding day would be the saddest day of my life because I could not envisage being able to marry someone I truly and completely loved. Now I had met the girl I wanted to spend the rest of my life with – the girl I would end up marrying – and after thirty years of living in fear I have finally decided to place my faith in love.

  GRANTA

  THE TRIALS OF FAISAL SHAHZAD

  Lorraine Adams

  with Ayesha Nasir

  On 1 May 2010, Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistan-born naturalized American citizen residing in Bridgeport, Connecticut, drove an SUV loaded with explosive devices to the corner of 45th Street and Seventh Avenue in Times Square, New York. He began the detonation process, walked away, and took a train back to his apartment. The bomb failed to ignite. Police found him easily through the car’s Vehicle Identification Number. He was arrested on 3 May 2010 on board an Emirates flight to Dubai that had pulled away from the gate but had not yet been cleared for take-off.

  Bridgeport is a beaten-down city of 140,000, only a half-hou
r away from yacht-friendly Westport on the Manhattan-bound commuting coastline. An abandoned port hobbled by lower-than-average incomes and education, it seems an unlikely place to call home for Faisal Shahzad, the thirty-one-year-old, MBA-graduate son of an eminent Pakistani father. Shahzad rented a second-floor apartment (for $1,150 a month) in a three-storey tenement similar to others on the block. Recently renovated, his was the cleanest. Even so, its pale biscuit siding was gimcrack vinyl, its chalk-white trim a flimsy metal. The garage in the back, where he assembled the bomb inside his Nissan Pathfinder, was missing its door and guarded by a barking dog on a heavy chain.

  This apartment was a month-long way station for Shahzad. He spent most of his ten years in America in Shelton, Connecticut, a slice of exurbia fifteen minutes north of Bridgeport. His house there is empty and strewn with discarded toys and two lawnmowers. A front window is smashed, another above the front door gone. He abandoned it exactly one summer ago. His income as an account analyst – a position which pays on average $50,000 a year and sometimes as much as $70,000 – wasn’t enough to sustain making payments on the $218,400 mortgage. Shahzad’s American career began in disappointment and mired in that house. With two degrees from the University of Bridgeport, a school so poorly rated by its peers that it doesn’t even have a ranking in the US News and World Report college list, the best work he could find was a series of jobs as an account analyst, the last of which he quit last summer. By his own account, Shahzad was ditching Shelton to return to Pakistan with his family.

  Shahzad’s father, Baharul Haq, began life as the son of a servant in Mohib Banda, a poor village near Peshawar in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, formerly called North West Frontier Province. He trained as an airman and rose to one of the highest posts in Pakistan’s air force. In a country where who you know is far more important than what you know, Haq defeated phenomenal odds. Shahzad, one of four children, grew up on military bases in Peshawar, Sargodha and Karachi, studying at air force schools. His grades were average; he developed a weakness for fast cars and a taste for the Eurotrash look. ‘He was a loafer, always wasting his father’s money,’ said Faiz Ahmed, a villager who knew the family. ‘There were problems between him and his father – Bahar sahab was tight-fisted while Faisal was a spendthrift.’

  Baharul Haq’s economizing paid off. When he retired he moved into Hayatabad, a Peshawar neighbourhood of palatial villas staffed by guards, servants and chauffeurs, favoured by foreigners, military grandees and business notables. Shahzad’s Shelton neighbours, by contrast – among them a dental technician, a computer consultant, a schoolteacher and a nurse – drive their own mid-range cars and mow their own lawns. ‘He was here by himself at first,’ his next-door neighbour, a Shelton native, told me. ‘Then, he got married. It was an arranged marriage. She was very quiet. I talked to him more than her. We used to talk when he was mowing the lawn. She’d had a really good job. He told me they were getting the children phase over and then she was going back to work.

  ‘He worked in Norwalk. It’s about thirty-five minutes away, but it’s a terrible commute, and he used to talk about that. Much worse than he expected. I could tell he wasn’t happy …’

  I asked about visitors.

  ‘It was always her family. There was a sister who came from Massachusetts, and she was always in traditional dress. I don’t know what you call it, but the kind of clothing you see in India.’

  It was the house, the neighbour said, that increasingly preoccupied him. Records show that Shahzad had bought it in 2004 for $273,000. He tried to sell in 2006 for $329,000, in 2008 for $299,000, then dropped the price again. Trapped in the collapsing American housing market, he took out a second mortgage for $65,000 in January 2009.

  I asked why they wanted to sell.

  ‘He told me his parents were in Pakistan; he was the youngest child and it was the custom in their culture that it was up to him to go back and take care of the parents.’

  What, I asked, is the most lasting image she has of him? The videotape capturing him buying fireworks? The mugshot after his arrest?

  ‘I see him in the yard with her.’

  His wife?

  ‘The little girl. He was so good with her.’

  Ajani Marwat is an officer in the New York Police Department’s Intelligence Division, formerly Special Services, or the ‘red squad’. After 9/11, Adam Cohen, a streetwise Boston native formerly of the CIA, came out of retirement to revamp the Division. Marwat is an unlikely Cohen acolyte. He has a sinking feeling that Jewish financiers control the world. He thinks the United States is being used by Israel to do its dirty work. But Marwat is also a man in possession of the highest level security clearance. He is fluent in seven languages and three of them – Urdu, Pashto and English – he shares with Faisal Shahzad. The other four – Hindi, Farsi, Dari and Tajiki – enable him to work with informants or witnesses from India, Iran and Afghanistan.

  Today Marwat is sitting in my kitchen drinking tea and eating cherries. He does not want his birthplace or real name mentioned in this story; Intelligence Division officers are not allowed to talk to the media. What he will do is offer a window into what he thinks motivated Shahzad, and what his New York-born colleagues do not, and perhaps cannot, understand about the Shahzads they encounter. Marwat lost eight brothers and sisters to starvation, rocket strikes and bombings in his native country. One day when he was eleven, he had to go to the market to buy bread. At that time, any such excursion was a risk. His best friend went with him.

  ‘There’s a big noise. All I see is smoke. Then I can’t hear anything. I look at my friend. He’s running. But he has no head.’

  The damage that United States aerial bombing causes in Pakistan is most heavily concentrated where ethnic Pashtun live. Shahzad’s family was Pashtun, and he married one. The village of Shahzad’s father is only a twenty-minute drive from one of the largest madrasas in Pakistan, the Dar-ul-uloom Haqqania, widely considered the incubator for the Taliban movement. But the village itself is in Nowshera, one of the most secular districts in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where the liberal Pakistan People’s Party regularly wins elections. It is also not an area saturated in drone attacks. That distinction belongs to a belt of villages further south-west along the Afghanistan border.

  In 2009, the year Shahzad abandoned his Shelton home and was living with his parents in their posh neighbourhood in Peshawar, approximately forty-seven drone attacks killed 411 people in Waziristan. Peshawar, however, suffered no drone attacks. The violence there is different. In the last year, Taliban suicide bombers have struck an average of three times a week, killing civilians in markets, mosques and police stations. As a military man, Shahzad’s father’s allegiance would be to the government, his sympathies with the victims of the suicide attacks in the city where he and his wife now live.

  These intricacies are beyond esoteric for most NYPD police officers. Disrupting plots is more about interpretation than enforcement. But what if, as is so often the case, a man’s history is not enough to fathom his future intentions? Marwat is a striking example. Like Shahzad, he too left for the West as a teenager. But Marwat didn’t arrive the way Shahzad did – a proficient English speaker in designer sunglasses with a university scholarship. Marwat was a seventeen-year-old who slept in train stations. His life story, not Shahzad’s, should have produced a militant.

  Instead, Marwat’s exposure to atrocity and poverty galvanized him. He laughs at what some might consider Shahzad’s minor deprivations – a suburban house that wouldn’t sell, a lousy commute. And he doesn’t think they had much to do with Shahzad’s radicalization.

  ‘If I put myself in his shoes, it’s simple. It’s American policies in his country. That’s it. Americans are so closed-minded. They have no idea what’s going on in the rest of the world. And he did know. Every time you turn on Al Jazeera, they show our people being killed. A kid getting murdered. A woman being beaten. 24/7.’

  ‘We don’t have to do anything to attract them,’ one terrorist organiz
er in Lahore explained to me. ‘The Americans and the Pakistani government do our work for us. With the drone attacks targeting the innocents who live in Waziristan and the media broadcasting this news all the time, the sympathies of most of the nation are always with us,’ he said. ‘Then it’s simply a case of converting these sentiments into action.’

  Marwat’s fellow counterterrorism colleagues on the force mean well but they don’t always know what to look for. ‘They’re constantly looking to see if a guy goes to a mosque,’ he says. ‘I tell them, people who go to mosque, don’t worry about them. People who go to mosque, they learn good things. People who don’t go to mosque – you have to worry about them.

  ‘A lot of times when cops are interviewing people, they think everyone’s a terrorist. I have to tell them, actually, the way this guy’s talking, it’s nothing. Every Muslim in the world thinks what this guy thinks. This is the problem. If you train American-born guys, spend a lot of money teaching Arabic, the culture, the most they get, even after all that, is 30 per cent.’

  Martin Stolar was one of four lead attorneys in Handschu v. Special Services Division, a landmark federal civil rights case filed on behalf of Barbara Handschu, a political activist and lawyer who represented the Black Panthers and other groups under surveillance in the 1960s. The 1985 decree that resulted prohibited unfettered police monitoring of religious or political groups. In 2002, when Adam Cohen was revamping the Intelligence Division, the police department sought a weakening of the Handschu decree from the original judge, paving the way for the surveillance of Muslims. They won it in 2003.