The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas

by Anand Giridharadas

  At first, Rais made nowhere near that much in tips. It was partly because he shied away from conversation, skipping the customary “So, what brings you out tonight?” or “Heading to the rodeo after dinner?”—which, at this particular branch, people often were. It was also because Rais knew nothing about what he was serving, especially the alcohol. The only time in his life that his friends had experienced him drunk was on graduation night at the military academy, when he stumbled about and teased a guy in the bathroom. But his stupor had been fake: he pretended to take a gulp, then furtively dumped the wine into a friend’s glass. (“By the mercy of God, I avoided.”) He had never touched a drink in his life. But he now realized that if he wanted to make any money at the Olive Garden, he had not only to serve alcohol but also to promote it like a connoisseur.

  First, he had to persuade himself that it was religiously acceptable to sell what was haram, forbidden, to drink. It required him to argue to himself that his economic survival was at stake and that God would be amenable so long as Rais planned to live better down the road. “You shouldn’t die to keep a religion” was how Rais rationalized it. He also had to learn the art of small talk, of chitchat, of local political griping. “Anybody can drop the food on the table,” he said. “It’s also, like, make them comfortable, talk to them, see what they need, communicate with them, join with their conversation. Those are the good serving techniques.” To refill his stash of utterances, he sidled up to his fellow servers whenever he saw them talking: “You have to understand the football game. You have to understand the baseball game a little bit. You have to understand what is going on in the city.” He would press them for help: “How can I do good? What I’m lagging behind? Tell me because I never served before, so I have to learn. So what I’m supposed to do?” He also picked up that, here more than back home, humor was acceptable in almost any situation. The purpose of life seemed to be the pursuit of an elusive quantity called fun. As a server, being able to make light of things could prove even more important than bringing the food.

  Learning these things was not unlike learning to fly a plane or unload server memory. It was a skill set, and Rais felt most at home when coating himself with skills—and moving forward rather than hunkering down, as he had been of late.

  Amlong liked to give Rais and Malik their own section of the restaurant on weekends. They worked well together: Malik the playboy, flirting and hamming; Rais the good soldier, able and earnest. They each could pull in five or six hundred a day on weekends. A few times a month, on their days off, the two of them would come in and dine together, availing themselves of their 50 percent employee discount. They served the motley parade of humanity that passes through a Dallas-area Olive Garden—local big shots, unknown to the world, who could throw down $100 for a special bottle of Amarone; the fifteen-minute celebrities of So You Think You Can Dance?; guests at a three-hundred-person rehearsal dinner; a foursome of elderly ladies who introduced themselves as widows, prompting Malik, who heard “weirdos,” to laugh inappropriately; a guest who interrogated Rais about what he sucked at night to get his teeth so white; a customer on whose head Malik accidentally dropped a bowl of salad; people who they discovered tipped white waiters more; a football player who wouldn’t remove his sunglasses in the restaurant and made Rais read the menu out loud, before leaving a trifling tip, which one of his friends returned later to supplement.

  For Rais, the greatest challenge remained alcohol. On a good night, it could account for most of a server’s tips. Rais, devout to the bone, was also pragmatic and driven enough to decide that if one was going to sell alcohol to the godless, one might as well be good at it. He was mostly blind in one eye, but his other senses stepped up to help him get around. He saw his promotion of alcohol in much the same way: to succeed, he had to lean on abilities other than his sense of taste.

  “You have to talk in such a way that you really drink that, and you know the taste,” he said. “You can tell the details—like a car seller. Like all the ingredients, how it tastes, the flavor, if it is crispy, chocolaty, spicy—the wines, the cocktail drinks, everything. You have to memorize the description, where it came from, and what kind of body structure of the wine, what are the ingredients in the cocktail drinks. And also you have to understand the guest—what kind of mood they are in. So should you offer them a cocktail drink, or should you just offer them a glass of wine? You have to read the guest as well, according to their appearance. And if they’re not knowledgeable, if they have no idea about wine and alcohol, then you have to give them some education. Then they will feel comfortable.”

  He was relying on Amlong’s advice but was also growing confident enough to write some of his own rules. And his new talent at sizing people up and schmoozing and educating folks about drinks he’d never tasted began to pay off. In some months, the mimic became the highest-grossing alcohol seller. Years later, Amlong still couldn’t believe that Rais had achieved these things while all but blind in one eye. “I never knew,” he said. “He never conveyed that.”

  Two castes of people, broadly speaking, work at the Olive Garden: those passing through, maybe while in college or on the side of a more prestigious but low-paying job, on the way to bigger things; and those bound to stay there, or places like it, forever. If you look closely, you will notice that the two castes are physically distinct—in haircuts and weight classes and textures of skin. It didn’t take long for Phil Amlong and the others to realize that Rais, though he came to them needy, belonged to the former caste: he was one of those onward people who sometimes blew through their lives. Amlong knew that he would turn up every weekend in that uniform that was always so nicely starched and pressed, until the inevitable day when he would outgrow it, as he had so much else.

  Rais’s contact with the more rooted underclass was an education. What struck him at the Olive Garden, making these new friends, was that the Americans he worked with didn’t share his ability to reimagine and remake himself. They seemed not to know how to take advantage of their own, fortunate country. And they were often left to themselves, without anyone to cushion their falls or witness their triumphs.

  Little things stood out to him. A fellow server wanted to lease a car but complained of having no one to cosign the agreement. Rais couldn’t understand that: “I feel that, how come they have no one in their family—their dad, their uncle?” If he had only recently settled in America and already had friends who would sign on a lease for him, how could people who had been here for donkey’s years lack such connections? Rais saw his colleagues having to beg for rides or commute by foot on major roads in the searing heat, and he wondered why their family members weren’t picking them up—especially the young women. He felt offended on their behalf.

  Nor could he make sense of the draining dating lives his colleagues led, cycling through one fling after another. “Once you go through multiple partners,” he said, “then you always think that maybe the next one will be good; maybe the next one will be good. And that’s why you keep dating people to find out.”

  He inquired about the family backgrounds of his colleagues. He often couldn’t believe what he heard. “Why family is not really together?” he wondered. “Yes, they come together for Thanksgiving or maybe Christmastime, but rest of the year, I don’t see the strong bonds. People ask me, ‘When is the Mother’s Day in your country?’ It’s every day. I don’t just call my mom or send some gift for them once in a year. I call them every day. And whenever I call them, I say, ‘What do you need? Do you need some money? Do you need anything? What I can do for you from here?’ Because as their son, as in the Islamic teaching, I’m supposed to wipe my parents’ feet every single day, just to show them how thankful, how grateful I am to my parents, just to give me birth and brought me this world.”

  The parent-child relationship seemed very different in his colleagues’ lives. He sensed that many of them had been damaged, long before they got to the Olive Garden, by the chaos of their childhoods. “Most of them said t
hat there is no peace at home,” he said. “Whenever they go home, they feel no love, no affection at home. Parents are busy with their own lives. Other siblings, they’re with their own world. So they will come out on the street and hang out with their buddies, do stupid things that make them feel happy. And few of them, they said that’s why they end up doing drugs; that’s why they even end up selling drugs.”

  He sometimes referred to the resulting style of existence as the “SAD life”—his acronym for a life beholden to sex, alcohol, and drugs.

  A part of him wondered if it was some kind of commercial conspiracy—getting all these young people to quit school, unskilled, to create a labor force for unpalatable jobs: “There have to be some kids that drop out from college, from high school. Otherwise, some jobs, they wouldn’t get people. If everybody becomes successful, then who will populate the strip clubs or the nude bars? Somebody has to go and work there. Somebody has to go and promote the alcohol business.”

  Conspiracies aside, what Rais was perhaps discovering was that the liberty and selfhood that America gave, that had called to him from across the oceans, could, if carried to their extremes, fail people as much as the strictures of a society like Bangladesh. The failures looked different, but they both exacted the toll of wasted human potential. To be, on one hand, a woman in Bangladesh locked at home in purdah, unable to work or choose a husband, voiceless against her father; and to be, on the other, a poor, overworked, drug-taking woman in Dallas, walking alone in the heat on the highway’s edge, unable to make her children’s fathers commit, too estranged from her parents to ask for help—maybe these situations were less different than they seemed. What Rais was coming to see, through his Olive Garden immersion, was the limits of the freedom for which he had come to America—how chaos and hedonism and social corrosion could complicate its lived experience.

  Rais had come from where the self was given too little, and now he lived where at times it seemed to take too much. “Here we think freedom means whatever I wanna do, whatever I wanna say—that is freedom,” he said. “But that’s the wrong definition. That’s why people end up making more mistakes. Freedom is not whatever you want to do, whatever you want to say.” Freedom, by Rais’s lights, was “nothing but a responsibility.”

  He compared these observations he made about America to how, years ago at the cadet college, his nose had almost burned off at the extraordinary stench of his classmates’ dorm room, while they, who had grown accustomed to it, no longer detected it. “There is something good here, something bad here; something good over in our place, something bad there,” he said. “We can see these kind of things, like how I used to feel the smell in those rooms. As an immigrant, we see what these people are missing here. But if they live here, they got used to it.”

  He did, though, share one burden with the Americans: debt. By the middle of 2003, he still had $60,000 in unpaid medical bills. The surgeries were complete and had failed to restore anything near a quarter of his vision, as once hoped; he was resigning himself to a life with one good eye. The good eye—a superb eye, in fact, with 20/10 vision—would have to compensate for the bad one, which could perceive only the barest hints of light. He had to give up whatever hope he had of seeing three-dimensionally, or of being aware of what was coming at him from the right side. He had to accept not being good at things he was good at before. There would be headaches, surely, and a need to focus fiercely where others cruised. All of that he could handle. He had even, at last, found an affordable clinic called Pathways to treat his depression. He went for a series of therapy sessions and was prescribed some mood-enhancing medications.

  But the debt hounds still haunted Rais. Above and beyond the problems he observed with sex, alcohol, and drugs, Rais was jarred by the American relationship to money. “Is everything all about business and money?” he would ask the collectors—for whom, understandably, it was.

  AS RAIS STRUGGLED through the rebuilding of a life, the Hasan family had their own troubles. It was Waqar Hasan, in the midst of grilling a burger, who had been the first victim of Stroman’s war. Not long afterward, his widow, Durreshahwar, learned that his death was only the beginning.

  She and her four daughters had been in the country since 1994 on temporary visas. In 1996, Waqar applied for a green card, which would allow the family to stay indefinitely. His petition approved, he filed for Durreshahwar and his daughters to be converted to permanent residency, too. Their applications were pending when Stroman went out Arab-hunting.

  Durreshahwar now learned that because her husband was the sponsor of the application, and because he no longer existed, she and her four adolescent daughters could not remain in the country. Her brother, Nadeem Akhtar, said the family understood that they had just weeks or months before having to leave.

  They hadn’t come to the United States for the obvious reason and in the obvious way; their story didn’t fit what a visitor might have imagined seeing Waqar working the grill where he would one day die.

  Waqar was, as his brother-in-law tells it, a quiet man—a slogger at work, a Muslim who tried to get in his five prayers but was not very religious, the kind of guy who receded and listened when the conversation turned to knotty subjects like God or politics. When working at the store, he would phone his mother—who lived with his wife and daughters back in New Jersey—and linger on the line with her for two or three hours each day.

  A few years earlier, Waqar had been a successful businessman in Karachi, the dense and maddening port metropolis on Pakistan’s western coast. Nadeem described the family as living in a house with more bedrooms than they had use for; they employed a chauffeur, a gardener, domestic servants. The money came from rent on properties they owned, some gas stations, and a business importing infant chicks from Holland and growing them into curry-bound chickens.

  It was a good life, but it was also a lawless period in Karachi and in Pakistan generally, and the Hasans found themselves a target. Nadeem said Waqar’s father was kidnapped and held for ransom twice: they got him back for around $100,000 on one occasion and double that on another. Waqar’s office had apparently been plundered by armed men. The family’s home had been robbed of much of its gold. It was not entirely clear if their money alone, or also some political connection, was responsible for these incidents. Waqar and Durreshahwar began to wonder every time they sent the girls to school whether they’d get them back. It was time to go.

  Waqar Hasan ended up in New Jersey, where his brother was running a business of his own—an Exxon station. Within a year or so, his wife and daughters joined him from Pakistan.

  Like Rais, Waqar eventually found himself talked into Texas. He hated the cold in New Jersey, hated shoveling all that snow. Nadeem, his brother-in-law, was already in Dallas and spoke reverently of it. The weather was like Pakistan’s. It was easy to start a business. Houses were cheap. Once again, Waqar left his family behind and flew away to establish a suitable life. Once it was ready, he would bring them to Texas. He started working at a mini-mart called Mom’s Grocery and soon bought it out. He worked at the store himself, along with a few employees, sometimes putting in more than twelve-hour days. He could see the horizon drawing closer: this new peaceful life with his mother, wife, and daughters around him, his brother-in-law close by, a fine house in a neighborhood with good schools.

  Then the bullet entered his right cheek and swam through his jaw and halted in the muscles of his neck.

  That was mid-September. Durreshahwar and the kids had planned to leave New Jersey and join him in December or January. Now she would have to leave America.

  In Washington, a Democratic congressman from New Jersey heard about the Hasans’ situation from a staffer. Rush Holt’s district had a sizable immigrant population, and he considered himself a special friend of South Asians; at election time, he hoped they would consider themselves special friends of his. Because of the demographics of the 12th District—which spread across four counties and included Princeton as well as vario
us towns containing the word “Brunswick”—constituents’ visa problems were nothing unusual. Still, something about the Hasan matter stood out to Holt when it came to his attention. Somehow the thought of those young daughters, their father recently murdered, being booted out of the country seemed so manifestly unjust. Holt was among those politicians who in the aftermath of 9/11 were vocal not only about thwarting further attacks but also about preventing an American turn toward intolerance.

  “All across the country America reacted in dismay when they heard in September 2001 the news of the hate crime that took the life of Pakistan-born Waqar Hasan,” Holt later wrote. “When they learned that the murderer committed his brutality as a perverse retaliation for the attacks of September 11, as an act of twisted patriotism, they knew this was a blot on our country. And all Americans felt the pangs even more deeply when they learned that Waqar Hasan left behind a struggling widow and four little girls. For most Americans that was the end of the story, as they went back to their busy lives. The wheels of justice will turn and take care of this, they thought. What they did not think about was that the United States had already incurred an obligation to the Hasan family.”

  Holt visited the Hasans in New Jersey. He paid his condolences and offered to help. He promised to take on the deportation issue as a personal challenge. His devotion was not easily explained. For more than a year, his staff called around to the relevant agencies to ask what might be done. The answer came back again and again: nothing. Waqar’s application wasn’t transferable. “When he died, their right to stay in the United States ended,” the congressman said.

  The silver lining, for now, was that the flurry of inquiries from a congressman’s office froze the Hasans’ situation and kept them from having to leave immediately.

  Their conventional options exhausted, Holt and his staff began to ask what else they might do to create an exception for the Hasans. Someone on the staff had a wild idea. “It required a new law to create a place for this family,” as Holt later put it.