by M G Vassanji
The American embassy protested; and a local man gave an interview in which he said that all the gasia, the palaver, was about nothing, his nephew who lived in America had simply brought over the Iranian boys as his guests to the country. The story sounded fishy, the man was not available for further interviews, and so Darcy’s paper, the Clarion, did not retract its version. Its editor and proprietor, however, was a little apprehensive. His visa application to go and visit his grandchildren was pending at the American embassy.
But the Americans did not make life difficult for him. The visa arrived without delay, perhaps was even hastened. He had applied for a resident permit, a green card — so he could begin to spend long periods with his family. On the day he went to pick it up (he said he felt like an outlaw in the castle of the Sheriff of Nottingham), he was invited to meet the cultural attaché, Darlene Blake, a heavily madeup elderly woman. In the course of this interview, Mrs. Blake, treating him with a deference that accorded with his age and status, gave him a short list of addresses of foundations and people who might help him put his media experience and activism to use in the service of the immigrant community in the States. He was not unappreciated, her manner told him; and there were more sides to America than he might have realized. It occurred to him, though, that the addresses had possibly been given to him to keep him out of trouble, perhaps even for his own good.
In Los Angeles, of all places, in his son’s home, he found himself in the midst of the Community, which he had shunned in the past because of its narrow-mindedness and backwardness. His daughter-in-law’s false piety repulsed him, her interest in the Third World was a public-relations gimmick. In his new home in affluent Brentwood he was irritable and unhappy, at a loss for what to do.
This was when he discovered the newsmagazine Inqalab and became friendly with its editors, Zayd and Basu. It was, despite its limitations, tailor-made for him. With his experience and abilities, what could he not do with it! What he needed was a sponsor, to help him get the paper out of its financial hole and put him in charge.
He wrote without much enthusiasm to the addresses he had been given, and was surprised when he received two replies to his queries, both of which required him to travel for interviews. The first of these was from an elderly woman, a former volunteer nurse in East Africa. Darcy spent a week at her farm in Virginia and nothing much came of the visit besides goodwill.
His second interview was in Houston, with an outfit called the Overland Foundation. He was sent an airline ticket, given a room for a night in a high-class downtown hotel. When he went for his interview he was met, much to his surprise, by a man who turned out to be an educated and cultured Pakistani, and with whom he shared a love for Persian and Urdu poetry. By the end of the interview, Darcy had obtained a commitment for assistance if he took over Inqalab International and expanded it to include cultural publishing to benefit ethnic communities.
Darcy was a professional newsman and brought to the journal a vital credibility. It was a measure of its success that it reached far enough and was believed. But as subsequent events went on to prove, that success was ultimately its tragic failure.
5
On the night of January 20, 1995, a Friday, in the main street of the town of Ashfield, Michigan, a bookstore was bombed. The blast demolished the front end of the store and a portion of the residence above it, killing all the occupants, a family of three. In a picture that shocked the nation and provoked a presidential remark, the upper portion of a woman’s body was shown among the wreckage, the rest of her body presumably blown away by the explosion.
This was the climax of the letter-writing campaign that had become known as the Phantom Affair; or rather, in retrospect, this was the first of its two climaxes.
In the weeks following, Ramji would stare at that picture, close up, many times over; the shambles it depicted would seem to him a visitation from the past come to make a mockery of his new life, the second chance he had given himself. But he’d first caught that grisly scene on TV on Saturday night, the day following the bombing, after the president’s comment. The news depressed him. The tragedy of the dead family was real, and poignant enough, though in the scheme of things not an unusual news event for the small screen. But he was bothered by the possible consequences of the incident. By its connection to the Phantom Author, it was bound to touch the lives of all Muslims on the continent, good and bad and apostate alike, from the mainstream to the heretical fringe. What possible end could the bombing achieve? Who could be responsible for the madness? Who was the Phantom?
Ramji had initially paid little attention to the Phantom phenomenon, but after he came to Los Angeles it seemed impossible to avoid keeping at least partly abreast of the Phantom’s activities through Zayd’s obsessive interest in them. No one else at the Company took the Phantom seriously, though Basu gave Zayd a sympathetic ear, and Darcy was mildly concerned that the magazine had not merited a Phantom letter.
Apparently inspired by the tactics of the notorious Unabomber, the writer — who signed himself simply “K. Ali” — had been targeting well-placed academics, newspaper editors, columnists, imams of mosques and church leaders, even chapters of B’nai B’rith, sending them his notorious communiqués, which always began with the words THE PEN IS MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD. Each time, exactly fourteen copies of a single letter would arrive at different addresses in the United States and Canada. They were mailed from different cities. In one well-known letter, published in the New York Times and reprinted throughout the country, K. Ali had openly stated his mission, which was to disseminate arguments and protests against what he termed “the current Arabic-dominated practice, study, and interpretation of the Islamic faith.”
“My aim in these letters is to ring the knell of freedom, call upon thinking Muslims of diverse cultures to declare a Boston Tea Party and throw overboard the tea of imposed colonial practices which are narrow-minded, backward, and opposed to new interpretations.”
What was offensive to many Muslims (and what got Zayd’s goat in particular) was the manner in which the author, in a bold expression of his freethinking, cited and pronounced extremely critical opinions on certain controversial incidents from the early history of their faith. These citations and opinions only reinforced the negative views of Islam currently in vogue in the Western world. The Phantom’s extreme pronouncements inevitably were quoted and requoted, only to increase their offence in the eyes of concerned Muslims and their sympathizers. Undoubtedly there was a malicious pleasure to be had in the knowledge of hot-headed clerics and orthodox priests being subjected to such a provocation. The Phantom by his elusiveness had acquired an aura of mystery, and the media came to call him, variously, and sometimes gleefully, the “Holy Pimpernel,” the “Unawriter,” and the “Blasphemer.” It was pointed out that the paranoid tone of the letters, the us-against-them mentality, was characteristic of terrorist thinking. But commentators also saw in the letters a “cri de coeur of a man or woman caught behind the prison bars of tradition and custom, too frightened to disagree in public.” This image was popularized in a caricature of the author that appeared in many newspapers.
In academic circles, it became a matter of prestige to belong to the select few who had received the Phantom’s attention. (The first letter, according to rumour, was sent to an eminent, but controversial, Islamic scholar at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton.) Inevitably, meetings were organized by university and college groups to discuss the contents of the letters. One such meeting, at nearby Tomonaga College, was addressed by both Basu and Zayd. Ramji had not attended it, and consequently the gulf between him and Zayd was that much the wider. To Ramji it seemed wrong and dangerous to blow the issue out of proportion; and it was incomprehensible to him why Basu should involve himself, except out of typical left-wing sympathy. Ramji did think of asking his professor friend Sona to write a sober assessment of the Phantom phenomenon for Inqalab, but he recalled, with a startle, that some of Sona’s views were not diss
imilar to the Phantom’s and thought better of it. Zayd would surely not take kindly to a serious consideration of the “cri de asshole,” as he put it, in a magazine of which he was one of the editors.
There had been a public event to which the Phantom Author apparently made a visitation and turned the proceedings into a farce. The event was the annual meeting of the American Religion Society in New Orleans, at which, Ramji thought, Sona might well also have been present, because of his specialty. Late at night, copies of the Phantom’s Letter Number 19 were slipped under the hotel-room doors of many of the conference participants (thus deviating for the first time from the usual method of dissemination). One of the recipients claimed to have seen an intruder in the hotel corridor at 2 a.m., whom he scuffled with and briefly apprehended, later describing the person as “a dark-skinned, though not entirely black, female.” This description cast suspicion on the sole Indian and Bangladeshi participants, who in an emotional press conference vehemently denied association with the Phantom and condemned him. It dawned on the learned academics that in their excitement they had turned into hunters; they also realized that anyone could have walked into the hotel from the still-swinging Bourbon Street and delivered the letter.
As time went on, it seemed to Ramji that the mysterious messenger had became more important than the substance of the messages. After the learned commentaries and the liberal pronouncements of sympathy had been superseded by other matters in the press, there remained the contest between the Phantom and those determined to hunt him down. The hounds were out and panting, nostrils flared.
Although the federal authorities refused to consider the case as one of disseminating hate literature and to act accordingly, a profile culled from various sources, including crime experts, was in circulation for the benefit of the amateur sleuth. There were studies of the typefaces, the paper, the postmarks, even the fingerprints, not to mention the quirks of language and punctuation. Simulation studies from several universities were reported, all of them inconclusive though promising, with the arrival of more missives, more definite locations of “focal points” where the Phantom might be found. The Phantom was believed to be a man. His signature, “K. Ali,” was a pseudonym. He was thought to be a mischievous, frustrated, and frightened academic versed in Islamic study. Evidently he had been to an American university. His knowledge of the sceptical, secular, and Western interpretations of Islam seemed thorough, greater even than his knowledge of the traditional ones. The contents of many of the letters — for example, a short piece on the compilation of the holy book after the prophet’s death — were academically sound though less known even to the Muslim public. His knowledge of Islamic Studies departments and their staff seemed detailed and up-to-date. It seemed obvious from the way he berated the predominance of the Arabic language and tradition that the Phantom did not come from the Middle East. There had been suggestions that a divorced man without children or close family ties was behind the letters.
Perhaps the author had at last become wary of the hounds hotly on his scent. In his now famous manifesto, first published in the Times, he had promised a total of ninety-nine letters. But soon after the delivery of his Letter 33 there appeared a book, A Personal Handbook of Dissent: 101 Letters, reproducing the already published letters and adding new ones. This seemed to be the conclusion of K. Ali’s campaign.
A publisher in Canada addressing an annual writers’ gathering had protested passionately against book censorship. A few months later, she received at her office in Toronto three thousand books and a letter from K. Ali expressing admiration for her fine speech and requesting assistance in distributing the books. The proceeds from their sale were to be used in aid of children who had been orphaned as a result of the ongoing conflict in Bosnia. Simultaneously, letters were mailed from Seattle, Washington, to bookstores, with instructions on how the book could be ordered. The publisher, in a press release, said she did not believe that books should be suppressed for their contents, or out of fear of intimidation, and so she had distributed 101 letters as quickly as possible. She wished she had not been selected for the purpose, and she had expressed no opinions on the book’s message. It sold out in North America within a few weeks.
Within days after the book first appeared on its shelves, a store called Book and Video Haven in Ashfield, Michigan, was bombed. There seemed no doubt that the explosion was related to a provocative window display of K. Ali’s work. There had been protests and a large demonstration in the town regarding the display, and the store owner had received threats. A media expert concluded that, judging from the size of the explosion, it was another example of an ongoing terror campaign by “Mideast nationals” in the United States. The FBI promised speedy arrests.
And so the self-styled liberator of Muslims from orthodoxy and Middle Eastern domination had set off something he had obviously not intended. But the cycle of events had to go on, reach its conclusion, and, in the process, would strike like a bolt of lightning a conspicuous and sympathetic target in its path.
6
It was the following Monday.
Noon break began quietly at the Company offices, as always in an atmosphere of serene calmness, with a lull in the daily exertions, close attention paid to the simple needs of a packed lunch, and restrained chat in the large, bright common work room at the back. Ramji was on a high stool before a PC, contemplating the pages of a forthcoming catalogue of Company publications, Sajjad and John sat together munching sandwiches over sections of the L.A. Week, careful to curb the rustle of paper. Halfway through the hour Mohan arrived from the travel agency next door to tell the young men, whose mentor and hero he was, about his latest sexual exploit. The quiet was broken, but not shattered entirely, for he had a matter-of-fact, low-key manner of narrating even the most risqué of his adventures. This time he had met the perfect-looking chick, he said, a beauty with real class, a Catherine Deneuve lookalike (which did not mean much to his two young admirers, but they trusted his taste) in the Torrance public library, checking out tomes of Hegel and Kant. He had walked her to her bike outside. He described for his rapt audience the natural unvarnished beauty of this woman, her quiet charm and grace, her long limbs and lovely blonde hair. After much difficulty (she would not return his phone calls at first) he managed to date her, and then he accompanied her to her apartment.
“And you made out.” The two boys smirked, anticipating details of the feat.
“Hold on, guys, it’s not so simple as that.”
A teasing smile as Mohan waited for his cue.
“What happened? Give, man!”
“We made out, a little, not all the way, and it was nice, and we drank wine, and we made out some more, and it was going smoothly, you know, and then she stops. Just stops. ‘What’s the matter?’ I ask her. ‘Is it that time of the month?’ And she said, ‘You know I charge for my services.’ ”
“What!” “Wow” they exclaimed, and Ramji thought, At last a deviation from the script.
“A high-class hooker — probably earning her fees for a Ph.D. at UCLA. ‘How much do you charge,’ I asked her. She was gorgeous and having gone so far … oh man —”
“How much?”
“Five hundred bucks.”
“Five hundred bucks!”
“And worth every penny, I bet — only I was broke … I’ve got to get my hands on those pesos, now.”
Meanwhile a thirtyish, good-looking man had arrived. He stood just inside the room, watching the scene with amused interest. Mohan, becoming somewhat conscious of himself, took off, saying to Sajjad and John, “She promised a discount. Talk to you later.”
Ramji looked at the visitor, feeling ridiculous at his own engrossment in the tale, and said, “It’s nice to have simple obsessions —”
The man, who had been watching Mohan, turned to Ramji and said, “I would like to see the editor of Inqalab — Mr. Darcy —”
“I don’t believe Mr. Darcy is in, is he?” said John, and Ramji shook his head. “Come
, let’s see — I believe the other two are around,” and John took the visitor down the corridor. A minute later he returned, motioned behind him with his thumb. “He’s with Zayd.”
The matter should have ended there. John and Ramji began discussing the layout of the catalogue, Sajjad began tinkering with the imagesetter. Zayd’s voice could be heard intermittently. Darcy was away at Stanford on assignment with the Africa Club. Basu was somewhere, buried in his room perhaps; the Bengali newspapers had arrived yesterday.
Some fifteen minutes after the man was taken to see him, Zayd came over to the backroom and beckoned from the doorway: “Ramji, come and listen to this.”
As Ramji walked into Zayd’s office, the visitor stood up respectfully, hesitated a moment, then stretched out a hand.
“Hi, I’m Ramji,” Ramji said, shaking hands.
“Michel,” came the reply, somewhat softly.
Ramji wondered, Have I heard right? and looked towards Zayd, who had gone on to sit behind his large desk. There was a computer monitor to one side of it, and in front of him the New York Times for his daily fix of international news. Behind him on the wall was a black and white photo of himself shaking hands with an Iranian ayatollah, pictorial evidence of a full interview which he’d obtained during a visit to Pakistan. That interview had been widely quoted.