by Arif Anwar
“Howard did his part, filed a Petition for an Alien Fiancée in Herndon, Virginia. It was approved in a month, and the paperwork was sent over to Kiev. We were both jumping for joy on the web-camera. My family was excited, frightened. I was too.
“Then one day in January, I took a thick file folder of all my vital documents: passport, driver’s license, birth certificates, police certificates, medical examinations, my diplomas and degrees, the copy of every email and letter Howard and I had sent each other. I stood in line for four hours on a freezing morning in Kiev in front of the American Embassy—which is big and blocky like a prison. When I got in, I was interrogated by this thin unsmiling woman who did everything except say that I was a fraud who was going to America just for a green card.
“But I must have convinced her. Because they granted my visa. And less than a month later, my Aeroflot flight was touching down in Dulles.
“Howard was the same man up close as I’d seen from far away. Just as kind, funny, charming and sweet. In just the first month, we visited New York City, Disney World, Chicago. I thought I was living in a dream. It didn’t seem that I’d have to convince myself to love him. Everything just seemed easier to do in this country. It was the air, I thought. It had to be the air.
“One night, over dinner, I built up the courage to tell him what I had been hiding for the last six months.” Katerina opens her clutch. The entire time she was speaking, she was staring ahead, too invested in her recollections to acknowledge him. Now she searches her purse until she finds an accordion-style picture holder. It unfurls from her hand, swinging in the mild breeze.
He takes it. The pictures are of a little girl. Blond, bearing a strong resemblance to the woman who sits next to him.
“What’s her name?”
“Ilyana. She’s nine now. She’s in Kiev, with my mother.”
“What was Howard’s reaction?”
“You can guess. He didn’t take it well. All the sweetness and kindness vanished overnight. Told me that it wasn’t that I had a kid. It was my dishonesty. He just couldn’t trust me anymore.
“I had to move into a hotel. I had very little money. I cried myself to sleep that night. Because I had no one else to blame. I had made the decisions. I owned every mistake. I thought I could bring Ilyana here. That we could build a life together. I was just too frightened to tell Howard at the start; I thought it’d scare him away. Then I just kept finding excuses, kept convincing myself that when we met in person, he’d find it easier to forgive me. I was good at that. Convincing myself.
“I found Mr. Ahmed’s advertisement in the paper, went to see him, and he said the same thing to me that he said to you—that this was going to be difficult, but that he would find a way for me to stay. But he couldn’t. In the end he made me an offer to stay on as his assistant. He would sponsor me himself until I got my green card. I could attend Strayer to become a legal clerk in the meanwhile. I go there Tuesday and Thursday nights now. I finish in May. I talk to my daughter every day. Sometimes we see each other on the webcamera. But the Internet is not so good in the Ukraine.
“Do you know what my biggest fear is, Mr. Choudhury?”
“That you won’t be able to bring her here?”
“No. That something will change. And she will not feel the same about me anymore. That feeling between a parent and a child, it’s so . . . delicate, like a spider web. It can be okay for so long, and then one mistake and it’s broken.”
She looks to him. Her eyes glisten, and she wipes them.
“What about you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You have a daughter. But you’re not married to her mother. What happened there?”
“It’s not a happy story. But my daughter’s in my life. For now at least.”
“Would you feel better if you shared it with me?”
He looks at her. She leans forward, her mouth slightly open. In the light, in this setting, her beauty is heartbreaking.
He looks away, takes a deep breath, and begins to speak.
Shahryar
Over the Atlantic Ocean
AUGUST 1993
At one point during the six-hour flight from Heathrow to Washington, DC, he awakes to darkness, the squeak of the flight attendant’s food trolley. He lifts up the window shade to peer outside. The plane has lost its chase of the setting sun. The ocean churns a deep blue beneath the clouds.
He has led a sheltered life—shuttled to and from school and university in a chauffeured car like so many others of his class and generation. Going out on weekends to play football (the international kind), cricket or to the cinema with friends from similarly well-groomed families.
Even by the conservative standards of a Muslim Bangladeshi family, he is a late bloomer. He has had paramours, but never one serious enough to ask his parents to have “the chat” with hers. Other than the occasional cigarette—whose evidence he diligently destroyed by chewing leaves from the guava tree in their garden before returning home at the end of the day—he has never been bad, never even had a drink.
In Dhaka, he was woken every morning by Rina, the woman who has cared for him for as long as he can remember, the one woman he is closest to apart from his mother. After greeting him with his customary cup of hot milk tea, Rina would lay out Shar’s clothes while he bathed. Once dressed, he would join his parents for breakfast at a dining table long as a river, often thinking of their low, cultured tones as vocal accompaniments to the music of clinking plates, glasses and spoon.
With his stocky build and dark skin, he bears little resemblance to his mother and father, who are both tall and slim, bearing the hooked noses and fair skin of Mughal aristocrats. A year before India was carved into three distinct wings—an event of great magnitude and unforeseen consequences that history has dubbed Partition—his parents journeyed across the border from one nation-to-be to another, from India to what would become East Pakistan and then Bangladesh. They were comfortably into middle age when Shar was born to them, twenty-one years later.
That is why his mother calls him her little miracle.
THE immigration agent in Washington, DC, is a black man with gray hair and kind eyes, the first he has encountered in the flesh. He peers at Shar over his half-moon glasses, scrutinizing him. “What will you study at Georgetown, young man?”
“Economics, sir.”
“And you’re doing your bachelor’s?”
“Master’s, actually.”
The agent hoists his eyebrows with surprise. “But you look so young!”
He collects his lone suitcase and steps out of the terminal at Dulles. He walks to the bus stop, where the view is ugly and drab and intimidating, where swooping lines of concrete block out the sky and wide yellow cabs skirmish with red-and-white buses for space. There are other passengers waiting for the bus, an array of faces of all shapes, sizes and colors waiting to be whisked away into this new world.
He shrinks into a corner of the shelter. Under a canopy of cloudy plastic that looks out to a placid Virginia sky, he makes himself as small and invisible as he can.
FOLLOWING a few weeks in a run-down rooming house in Kalorama, he seeks a more permanent home. An advertisement affixed to the bulletin board in his department catches his eye. Written in a fine, spidery hand, it reads—Responsible boarder sought. Well-appointed room. Laundry and separate bathroom provided. Must be quiet and studious. Possibility of meals. No horseplay.
The address is in Georgetown. One of the innumerable townhouses. After making a call to ensure that the space is still available, he arranges for a visit. The proprietor is an elderly gentleman named Karl Laurson, who meets Shar at the door and escorts him up to examine the room he might occupy. Located at the end of a hallway on the second floor, it is large and sun-lit, and looks as though the occupant is only out for the day. Hockey and lacrosse sticks cling to the wall like tangible graffiti; the desk shelters dog-eared copies of The Catcher in the Rye, The Stranger and Heart of Darkness.
They sit in the living room to discuss the details. Across a meandering hour-long conversation, he learns that Karl Laurson is from Wisconsin, from a line of Norwegians who settled in the area in the nineteenth century. A series of photographs on the wall shows Karl and his slim, dark-haired wife standing behind three boys and two girls who grow steadily taller and older. The latest series features a phalanx of grandchildren, but his wife is absent from the final two photographs.
“They’re scattered all over the country now,” he says, noticing Shar’s interest. He sees them twice a year, he says, at Christmas and Thanksgiving. His oldest son, Patrick, whose room Shar may rent, is now a civil engineer in Phoenix.
Shar feels a twinge of sympathy. He thinks of Dhaka—crowded and boisterous. Of waking up on Eid mornings with his parents, going to mosque, hurtling down the city’s suddenly barren roads in their car, visiting over the course of the day the few relations and friends they have in the city. Like most Bengalis, the thought of a child voluntarily and permanently distancing himself from a parent is unthinkable to him, the importance of family in his culture so paramount that there is a word for it—ekannoborti—a family of fifty-one.
Karl clearly seeks a boarder not for income but company. As a former economist for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, he has earned enough of a pension to lead a comfortable retirement.
“You seem a good sort,” he says to Shar. “A boy who keeps his nose stuck in a book and out of trouble.”
They rise together, embark on an extended tour of Mr. Laurson’s home, which is surprisingly large. Heavy wooden furniture (made by Shakers, assures Karl) huddles in room after spacious room, the desks and chairs refugees from past decades, fearful of a modern world. Shar likes the large house, imagining it to be a modern incarnation of the home in Wuthering Heights. He is certain to be productive here.
“Do you require a deposit?” he asks.
HE moves in and establishes his identity around the edges of Patrick’s, whose Dire Straits and Genesis albums dwarf Shar’s Miles and Souls LPs. Whose dusty Robert Ludlum and Stephen King hardcovers lean against his Siddiqua Kabir cookbooks and poetry collections. Whose frozen pendulums of swimming and wrestling medals gain the rustic backdrops of Bangladeshi macramé Shar brought from home.
Finally settled in America, he falls into a routine of bagels with cream cheese for breakfast while perusing the Post. He jogs, working off the softness settled around his belly during his first month in the country, even though the steep grade of the Georgetown streets makes his ankles ache. Karl takes an interest in his studies. Some mornings, he finds stories clipped from the business section on the dining room table, Karl’s commentary on economic theory penciled in the margins.
He purchases a used car, a 1983 Chevrolet Malibu. Small but rust-free, Shar finds it more assured on city streets than on the highway, where—going past seventy—it shakes like a malarial patient, swaying dangerously in the wake of semis rushing past.
It is on this precarious mode of transport that he takes a white-knuckled drive up I-95, headed for New England during the Christmas holidays, determined to witness a real winter in bucolic America. There, he rents a cabin from a farmer in Stowe, Vermont, and watches the snow smother the town until it piles high on hats and caps, streets and eaves, the branches of maple, birch and oak. For the first time in months—as he witnesses this silent, relentless accumulation in the deep loneliness of December—he realizes how far he is from home.
HE is less adventurous when the new year arrives, holing up in Patrick’s bedroom to complete his thesis—on Hayek’s Theory of Spontaneous Order as it relates to disaster response. Although he has promised his thesis supervisor a research proposal by early April, by February it becomes clear that this deadline was much too ambitious, thanks to his tendency to procrastinate on big projects. He begins waking to a sense of palpable dread, spends evening after evening at Lauinger Library, having convinced the librarian to grant him the use of study carrels normally reserved for doctoral students. Tucked into these wooden nooks, he plies himself with coffee and chips as he pores over textbooks, loses count of the dawns he emerges bleary-eyed, the light in the east only beginning to leak across the sky.
One such night in early March, he is reading one of Hayek’s more inscrutable works when he nods off. He wakes two hours later, the pages of his notebook embossed on his face. He rereads the last two pages of practically nonsensical notes, barks a laugh, and stands to stretch. Lauinger appears abandoned, but he can see a pair of Chuck Taylors peeking out from under a carrel by the window.
“Hello,” he says to their owner, this other lone citizen of the library. “Would you mind keeping an eye on my bag? I’m just going to get a coffee.”
Halfway through his request, he realizes that he knows the man. “Hi. How are you?” He nods to acknowledge their acquaintance. Nikhil? Nitesh? The man is Indian-American, bearing a shaved head that Shar remembers being told is for the intramural swim team.
“I’m good, man,” the man says, smiling. “Happy to look after your stuff. Don’t take too long, though. I might fall asleep.”
Niten. He remembers his name as he walks out to a gray morning. He is from Niagara Falls, where his parents run a motel. He has mentioned how he spends his summers helping them manage it, often driving across the border to Toronto on the weekends.
After buying coffee for himself and Niten at Peet’s, he returns to find the library entrance blocked by a campus tour group. The leader, a woman in a maroon duffle coat and a Hoyas cap, addresses the group in an upbeat voice that contrasts with the cold, depressing conditions.
Despite the chill, he does not go in. He stands, sipping his coffee, listening as the woman recounts the history of the Lauinger Library. Her auburn hair is pulled back into a ponytail, a striped muffler wrapped thick and high around her neck. She has green eyes. He cannot stop watching her, but when their gazes lock, she offers him nothing more than a quick impersonal smile. Remembering that Niten is still watching his bag, Shar goes in, and does not think of the woman in the Hoyas cap again.
A MONTH later, having made progress on a serviceable draft of his thesis, he comes home to find a letter. The stamp of an eagle appears on its top-right corner, the words Selective Service printed below in green ink. His own (egregiously misspelled) name greets him in the plastic window.
He rips the seal open and reads the letter, and then again, all the while wearing his backpack.
He finds Karl reading the New Yorker in the study, his glasses perched halfway down his nose. He barely glances at the missive and accompanying form when handed them.
“It’s a Selective Service request,” he explains. “The United States maintains records of men who are potentially subject to conscription. Those of a certain age are required to register.”
“Conscription?”
“The draft. For military service.”
“It must be a mistake.”
“They likely didn’t know that you’re international,” Karl says, licking an index finger and using it to turn a page. “I don’t think you need to send it in.”
But he is unable to dismiss the summons so lightly. He sits at his desk that evening, a copy of Invisible Cities open before him, the letter claiming a space on his desk. At the edge of his vision, stiff from its folds, it has the weight and presence of a corpse.
He reads it again. The penalty for not returning the form can be a fine of up to a quarter million dollars. Or five years in prison. Or both.
HE visits the international student office the next morning, signs in and waits for his turn to speak to a counselor. Two others are ahead of him in the queue: a tall blond man in black and a woman in a hijab. They are summoned by their last names—first Harakka, then Yilan.
After a long wait, Yilan e
merges from the counselor’s office, offering him an apologetic smile as she walks past.
The counselor, a red-haired woman, comes through the door, consults the list.
“Chou-dhu-ry?” She motions him to follow.
The carpeted office is spare and neat. A window looks out to the Potomac, the concrete arches of the Key Bridge skipping across. She gestures to an empty chair. “How can I help you today?”
He looks away momentarily, trying to remember where he has seen that smile. Then, remembering that avoiding eye contact is rude in America, he tells her why he is there.
“Can I see it?” She puts out a hand, freckled like her face and shoulders. Locks of her auburn hair are tucked behind her ears; her eyes are tilted and green.
She scrutinizes the letter for a full minute, pursing her lips. She admits with an embarrassed shrug that she has no idea what it is. She leaves the room with the promise to consult her colleague. She returns soon.
“Colin says that you can just fill it out and return it. You won’t get sent off to war,” she chuckles.
He laughs too, abashed at how ridiculous his fears seem in the light of day.
“Anything else I can help you with?”
“Maybe you can help me remember where we met before? You seem very familiar.”
“The tour group in front of Lauinger, I think. About a month ago.”
The day returns to him. “Yes. You’re right. You were buried under that hat and scarf.”
He holds out a hand. “I’m Shar.”
She takes it. “I’m Val.”
VAL’S smile, the firm press of her hand in his, consume his thoughts all evening. Impulsively, he had asked for her card before leaving the office—in case of more questions he might have—grinning sheepishly at the flimsy excuse.
Over the course of the next day, he opens the wallet and studies the card multiple times. Valerie Neider. The continued presence of her name in his pocket reassures him, a receipt acknowledging their chemistry.