The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas

by Anand Giridharadas

  Wonderful news—for everyone but Abida. Now she would join the trail of people, places, and things floating in Rais’s wake. The first thing she said was “You did it!” But her feelings were “sweet and sour” at best, Rais admitted. “You’re leaving me,” she said, after behaving with due pride. She was afraid that her mother would exploit her loneliness and turn her away from Rais. He remembers her warning: “I’m not saying that I’m negative, but I’m just feeling that maybe I won’t be able to see you anymore. I’m having this feeling in the back of my mind that something’s going to happen and then we’ll never be able to be together.”

  To a man of Rais’s disposition, this fear could seem like just another hurdle to jump. The anxiety seemed normal to him, even necessary. “That’s a good concern,” he told her. “Because you love me so much, you don’t want to lose me. So that’s why it’s coming in your mind. But you know me: I’m not going to go there and just forget about you. I’m coming back.” He would return, inshallah, within half a year to visit, he pledged. When he finished studying, he would fly home, persuade her mother just as he had the air secretary, and marry Abida grandly for the community to witness, maybe at the Air Force mess, perhaps on New Year’s Eve, and in the particular way they’d discussed, with lots of food given to the poor and no gifts accepted. And there in Dhaka they would weave their nest.

  Then again the plan changed.

  The change began in a cramped apartment in New York, on the immigrant landing strip of Woodside, Queens. The area was thick with newcomers and with the longing for other places, the stores hawking phone cards and flags and nostalgic home-style sauces. Rais lived with a group of other men from Bangladesh, on one floor of a house near the corner of 59th Street and 37th Avenue. It was under the flight path into LaGuardia’s Runway 4-22, and Rais often found himself unable to sleep after 5 a.m. or thereabouts, thanks to the roaring, house-quaking engines above. He and his three flatmates, whom he’d met through Bengali circles in New York and two of whom he happened to know of back home, first rented the basement for about $1,000 a month for all of them. Then they upgraded to the top floor for $1,500 or so.

  The guys teased Rais for his phone calls to Abida, seeking what Rais jokingly called “cook support.” When it was his turn to feed the house, he would sometimes dial her from in front of the stove, asking for help. Abida taught him how to curb the pungency of buffalo fish or tilapia using turmeric, lime, and water. She instructed him to hold his knife above the stove flame before cutting onions, in order not to cry.

  He had finally arrived in New York in 1999, twenty-five years old, with a vague interest in IT but firm plans to study commercial aviation, which was more in keeping with his background. At first, he worked a series of part-time jobs to make ends meet. His flat-mate who worked at a gas station told Rais about an opportunity doing the graveyard shift there: Rais could take daytime classes and study behind bulletproof glass at night. So Rais did that for a few months, changing buses twice to get to work, sleeping just two or three hours a night. When that job drained him, he found another short-lived one at a copy store in Manhattan. He also tried being a busboy at a thriving French restaurant in Midtown but burned out after a single twelve-hour shift spent entirely on his feet.

  Even before Rais could enroll in an aviation class, a friend of his, also ex–Air Force and now in New York, tried to convince him to switch to IT. He knew Rais loved computers and coding. He argued to Rais that technology was turning so many professions, including in aviation, obsolete. Why train to be a pilot when computers will soon fly planes? Much better to learn how to operate those computers.

  When Rais had a goal clenched in his jaw, no one could tear it from him. But for someone so gritty, he was also easily persuaded by advice not to release an ambition so much as upgrade to a juicier one. So it was with his friend’s suggestion: “I thought that would be nice, if I could go start a different career, different track.” Rais was one of those fleet-footed men who look in the mirror and see only future incarnations of themselves. He decided to enroll in a full-time course in computer studies at Pace University, housed in a giant concrete compound near City Hall in Lower Manhattan.

  But the visa that Rais had—the M-1, for vocational training—was different from the F-1 he needed to enroll as a full-time student. He had to leave the country and reapply. When he did so, after crossing over to Vancouver late in 1999, the embassy rejected him. He returned to New York for a few months, stranded in his plans.

  Some friends of his had applied for something called the Diversity Visa. It was part of a program to admit immigrants from places that sent relatively few people to America. The program employed a lottery, choosing about fifty thousand winners out of several million applicants. The chance of making it was, on average, less than 1 percent. For those who did, the visa paved the way to a green card and permanent residency. Rais decided to apply.

  Application submitted, he returned home to Bangladesh in February 2000. He had hoped it might be possible to marry Abida at this time. However, Abida’s sister had died during childbirth just before he arrived. “That’s not the time for going to wedding approach,” Rais concluded.

  Rais sensed that Abida’s feelings for him remained strong, but her mother continued to lobby her otherwise. It was strange: Rais went over to their house on this trip, and the mother fed him and was unfailingly kind to his face. Behind the scenes, for reasons he never could understand (or perhaps didn’t want to), she was pulling Abida in another direction. Abida, though, seemed resilient in her devotion. The young couple pined for each other, and on this visit a day without meeting gave them a sinking feeling. Rais’s bedroom window looked into the kitchen window at Abida’s, and Rais often checked to see if he could find Abida cooking and say hello through the layers of glass. On this visit, as before he left, Rais hung a few magnets on a nail on his door, where Abida could see them, as his signal to her that he was out of the house. He would remove the magnets when he returned, so that she knew he was safe. Abida, too, placed magnets—on the iron bars girding the kitchen window—and removed them upon returning home.

  Their love renewed but a wedding date still elusive, Rais returned to New York. Out of nowhere, he soon learned that he had won a Diversity Visa. “A new chapter opened that day for me,” he said. It was more than just a visa. In the hands of a man so ready for reinvention, it was an invitation to a wholesale change of life plan. Student visas, by definition, only allowed one to study in the country. Rais would have had to return home after finishing, or get an employer-sponsored visa in order to work and remain in the States; and, since they were unmarried, it would have been hard to get a visa for Abida. The Diversity Visa created a path both for his spouse to join him in America and for him to work indefinitely. And because Rais so easily reimagined himself, he resolved now that he would make a life in America. He would forget about Biman, fly home to marry Abida late in 2001, whisk her to New York, and make an American existence with her.

  Without Abida’s having much say in the matter, her life trajectory was swerving. And now it swerved again.

  Back in New York, Rais decided to go on a trip. Before leaving for Dhaka, he had received a phone call from a man it took him a moment to place. The man called himself Salim and said he’d been a few years ahead of Rais at Sylhet. Rais remembered now: he’d been a friendly guy. Salim had heard of Rais’s living in America from a common friend. On the phone Salim was instantly familiar in the American way, and he suggested that Rais pay him a visit in Dallas, Texas. Rais didn’t know it yet, but in Salim’s line of work, one was ever seeking fresh, hardworking immigrants whom you could trust.

  The thing about Dallas, Rais found when he visited Salim, was that the bathrooms there were as big as his bedroom in New York. The city somehow enchanted him. New York was, if you thought about it, not unlike Dhaka—full of life, yes, but basically an overgrown bazaar, suffocating and dense. It was great for a single man who wanted only to work. But Dallas offered
what Rais had begun to dream of as he drew closer to becoming a family man: space, freedom, twelve-lane roads. Rents were cheap and taxes low. Computer classes were abundant. It might not have appealed to him had he not won that Diversity Visa, but his calculations were now for building a family and for the long haul. America was no longer a training ground; it was home. In Texas, he could afford to study and pay his rent while working on the side; he could build a life for two and, with luck, more.

  Not long after his visit, he called Salim from New York. “If I move to Texas, what I have there?” he asked. “How you can help me?” Salim, as it turned out, had much to offer. He and his brother were businessmen in Dallas, and they were opening a new gas station there. If Rais moved down, he could work as one of Salim’s partners; if he did well, he might own a gas station of his own before long. It was not glamorous, perhaps, but it would earn Rais money for the wedding and his studies. “Like a team, we’ll help each other,” Salim told Rais. There was enough trust between them that they didn’t talk about money. Rais planned to live in Salim’s house upon arriving.

  The Dallas opportunity was Rais’s seventh victory in a row. What a streak it had been: Sylhet, then the Air Force, then the escape from the Air Force, then Abida, then a first visa and an improbable second, and now Dallas, Texas. All this helped Rais not to mind the long, smelly month of purging trash and scrubbing floors at the Buckner Food Mart, which had tumbled into disrepair before Salim bought it. Rais didn’t mind the petty thieves and the deadbeat refuelers; he even got used to the guns. His eyes were, as ever, on the horizon. He would save up for the flight back to Dhaka in October, and finally the wedding would happen. He told Abida, “You do some groundwork with your parents, so that they should not be blocking and blocking. Once I come, it should be, ‘OK, then let’s get the business done.’ ”

  Even amid this excitement, Abida wanted Rais to know of her very real concerns. “First thing she was telling that, ‘That’s too far from New York. Do you really want to go to Texas?’ Back home, Texas was always wild, wild, with lot of gunshot, cowboys, this and that—from all the Western movies.” She urged him to rethink it: “Do you have to go? Can’t you stay in New York?”

  But she also knew how little she knew, and Rais was adamant that this was the right move for them. He would have preferred New York were he thinking just for himself, he explained to her. The whole point of moving south was to build a life suitable for a family—their family. Rais had convinced himself, if not yet Abida, that he was going to Texas for her.

  RAIS WAS HANDSOME in a way that didn’t impose on a room, with a commanding nose, a full head of jet-black hair, a prominent forehead, and pecans for eyes, which stared intensely even when they smiled. His shoulders plunged humbly instead of spreading out, as though wary of hogging space. He was solidly built, but slender in the way that makes mothers want to cook things.

  On the second Tuesday of September, four months into his Texan life, he was at home on a rare day off. He learned that jetliners of the kind he once dreamed of commanding had pierced into that pair of towers he knew so well. Rais was a movie buff who had the ability to see the cinematic analog to almost anything, and the sight of the first tower aflame made him marvel at what those Hollywood types can do. When the second was hit, it chilled him. He thought of how often he had tried to ascend those buildings but been thwarted by the lines.

  For the next many days, Rais watched the television throb with rage. He overheard customers venting their anger at people from places whose names they had never pronounced. He remembered them saying things like “Foreigners are taking over our country” and “Kill all the Muslims in the Middle East.” Some of them, seeing a brown-skinned man behind the counter, pressed Rais for his opinion of recent events. He sought to affirm their outrage and partake of it, without getting into too much discussion. What he thought, above all, was that the men who did this were not Muslims, but—and to him the distinction mattered—“people who practice Islam.” They claimed to be Muslim and chanted “Allah” when they prayed and had maybe even gone to Mecca. But in Rais’s vision of faith, they were automatic heathens, disqualified by their deed.

  Some long, hot days passed. On the morning of September 17, scanning the Dallas Morning News, Rais saw a story that tensed his chest, under the headline “Fatal Shooting Draws FBI.” A man grilling burgers over at Mom’s Grocery, two and a half miles down on Elam, had been shot and killed under a WE APPRECIATE YOUR BUSINESS sign. He was the owner of the store, this man, and apparently he was a Muslim—a Pakistani named Waqar Hasan. The bullet had entered his right cheek, pierced through his skull, and stopped in the neck muscles behind his left ear. That much the police knew, but they had little else. “No motive, no robbery, no suspects, no witnesses,” the police report said. Or, as Rais put it, “No one knew who did, and how, and why did.”

  In the nights after the murder, Rais’s mind churned with violent dreams. The setting was always the Buckner Food Mart. He went to Salim with some constructive suggestions. Why not install a real security camera in the store, instead of the fake one they used as a deterrent? Why not maintain two employees in the store at all times?

  “It’s just a dream,” Salim said. He sought to calm Rais down. He and his brother knew what they were doing, and they weren’t millionaires. Who would pay for these refinements? It was natural that some angry customers would visit the store. They’d been attacked, after all. They didn’t mean any harm. The best thing was to keep your head down. Salim gave Rais some easy-to-follow advice: “Try to stay away from any kind of conversation with people.” The boss made his friend a deal: no more nights, OK? From now on, Rais would only work mornings. That sounded doable. In Rais’s hierarchy of sentiments, loyalty trumped fear.

  SEPTEMBER 21 DAWNED dreary. The monsoon from back home seemed to have followed Rais to Dallas. The big Texas sky crouched low and gray over the station. Unpleasant as it was to people, the half inch of rain brought the soil tremendous relief after a summer that had baked it mercilessly.

  Rais had opened the store that morning and would ordinarily have worked until noon. Then a colleague would take over, and Rais could go off to Friday prayers. That colleague had quit a few days earlier, though, so Rais was stuck there all day. So much for the mornings-only deal. Salim was in and out of the store. On a typical day, he might help Rais during the busy morning shift, then drive over to his brother’s construction site, returning to the store in the evening. On this particular day, he came in for less than an hour, then left to pick up some inventory.

  Around half past noon, at last, a customer appeared. It was the barber from the Strictly Cuts next door. A tall guy—six foot six or thereabouts. He did his usual American-style lunch of chips and a soda; on occasion, he threw in cookies or candy for a treat. He said something to Rais about all the tension in the city: a lot of people were coming into the barbershop and saying bad things about other people and groups. “Stay safe, man,” the barber said.

  The barber appeared to bring luck. Within a minute of his parting, the door opened again—yet another customer defying the rain. The man in the entrance immediately seized Rais’s attention because of the red bandana around his mouth. He wore a wife-beater, shorts, a black baseball cap, and wraparound sunglasses that concealed the very parts of his face Rais might otherwise have probed for context. His arms were like massive hams, painted 360 degrees around with inscriptions. He was holding something black and shiny, which he seemed to wish to conceal from the people outside but reveal to the man inside—to Rais. Rais’s institutional memory was improving: “I knew that this time he was not going to sell it to me, because nobody sells guns in the store. They come to rob you.”

  Now the man was walking into the store, toward the counter; now he was just feet from Rais on the other side. Proximity revealed that, yes, that shiny black thing was a gun—a double-barreled pistol, it seemed. The man pointed it at Rais’s head.

  “Oh, no. Again robbing today?” Rais th
ought. Oh, Texas—it was becoming a major irritation. “I know the drill,” Rais said, “that I have to open the cash register, open the cash, give him the money, and just stay safe.” Click-whoosh: the register opened. Rais removed $150 or so and placed it on the counter. He made the perfunctory noise about please-take-the-money-but-don’t-hurt-me. He knew his lines by heart now; he was getting good.

  But in this play the other player seemed not to know his part. The money did not faze him. All he said was “Where are you from?”

  It was obvious to Rais that this question had very little to do with robbing. Maybe he hadn’t heard the man right through his bandana. “Excuse me?” Rais asked faintly. Even as he said this, he felt his spine become an icicle. “Oh my gosh, he’s not here for money,” Rais said to himself. He took a step or two backward and turned his face away from the man.

  Then millions of bees came out of nowhere and, as though their last earthly hive had just been destroyed, began what felt like a synchronized mass stinging of Rais’s face. He heard the explosion afterward. The melody of his “Excuse me?” had been revealing enough. At first, he couldn’t bring himself to believe it was a gunshot. “I wanted to give myself benefit of doubt that I was not shot,” he said. Rais tried to reassure himself: “Maybe he shot some drink or something. Not me; I was not shot.” He briefly wondered if he might be hallucinating.

  It took the sight of blood, pouring from his head as if from a faucet, to know what had happened. He screamed “Mom” to no one. He had the wherewithal to cup his hands around his head: “I thought that my brain was going to come out any moment—first blood, now the brain.” But the soldier within him couldn’t stop telling himself that this didn’t make any sense. Blood was spilling out of his head, which meant he’d been shot, but a bullet fired into a man’s head from an arm’s length or two away will end him at once. Not only was Rais alive; he was somehow also standing. Why in God’s name was he standing? He considered the notion that he had already died and this was the transition to the Afterward.