A Time Outside This Time

by Amitava Kumar

  As far as experiments go, my favorite is the psychological study that tells me a story so good that I don’t want to verify it. I don’t want to lose the story to science. In those instances, I do not question; I’m merely the grateful recipient of Vaani’s reports. So, for example, sad people not only buy more, they also pay more. This is because they are desperate for change. They want to change their situation. This is why stores like to pipe out mournful music. There’s your explanation for why Walmart plays Céline Dion on a loop.

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  I HAVE DELAYED it so far, but this is what I need to say: the writer’s job is to reveal where the experiment in living goes wrong. I have come to this residency to write about the state and its experiments with truth. I have my biases: I was primed for it by the global war on terror.

  Several years ago, after I published a nonfiction book on terrorism called Evidence of Suspicion, I was doing a reading at a college in Connecticut. I told my audience that just as I was completing the book, an arrest was made in the nearby town of Newburgh, New York. Four men were accused of plotting to bomb synagogues in the Bronx and fire a Stinger missile at a military jet. The accused were felons with some history of crime but they had shown no prior interest in bombings and terror activities. In fact, one of the accused, described by his lawyer as “semi-retarded,” was arrested at a crack house where he lived surrounded by bottles containing his urine.

  All four accused had been recruited by an informant for the FBI, a Pakistani man code-named Malik, who provided cash and drove the men in his shiny black BMW to a Denny’s to talk about jihad while feeding them hamburgers. A familiar strategy of the FBI: a Muslim immigrant caught for, say, credit card fraud was then used as an informant to inveigle men into conspiracies for which they had neither the motives nor the means. The informants were well paid over several years. The war on terror is an industry; like many industries, it has a dubious record. It has benefited immigrants, the ones who were complicit with it as informers, but it has also ruined countless immigrant lives. Malik, whose real name is Shahid Hussain, was caught in the FBI’s web after he was convicted of trying to defraud the state’s DMV. Such convictions launched the careers of informants interested in evading deportation or long prison sentences. Malik was no different and he profited from it. I had told such stories in my book. I didn’t know this then, but, after Malik’s successful deceptions in several cases leading to the arrests of a number of Muslim men, he used the money to buy a motel near Saratoga Springs. The motel was also the business address for the Prestige Limousine Company, which he owned. Years later, a Prestige stretch limo that had failed the inspection test, driven by a driver who also lacked the proper license, slammed into a ravine and caused the death of twenty people, the deadliest U.S. transportation disaster since a 2009 plane crash near Buffalo in which fifty people died.

  At the college that evening, I was telling the story of the Newburgh arrests when I noticed a slender man leaning against the wall on the left and shyly smiling at me. He approached me after the Q & A was over and from the way he spoke Urdu I knew he was from the tribal areas in northern Pakistan. He had read my book in his class, he said. Even as he was saying this, his professor joined us and said that I should listen to his student’s story. I told the man that I’d get in touch with him the following week, when I was going to drive up to Massachusetts. We exchanged numbers, shook hands, and went our separate ways. On the way to dinner, I asked my host if this man was a good student. I was just making conversation. And the professor replied, “No, it’s difficult. He works long hours. His wife often comes when he is in my class and asks him to step out because they are fighting.” (“Pakistani?” I asked, interrupting. He said, “No, white girl. From West Haven, I think.”) “But the reason I wanted you to talk to him was that he was recruited by the FBI.”

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  I’LL CALL THIS student Khalid Farooq, a name that he himself chose when I first mentioned that I would be writing about him.

  It was hot, the middle of June, and I was headed for a weekend in Provincetown. I stopped in the Domino’s Pizza where Farooq worked. (Two tables with red-and-white tops and four red chairs—Vaani tells me that red is a color that makes people hungry.) Farooq was the deliveryman. I had arrived at the time he was getting off from work. We went to a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts to talk. He asked for green tea with lemon and six bags of sugar. The server knew what he wanted even before he had finished speaking. Farooq told me he often brought his son to this shop for a donut on the way to school.

  “Tell me about yourself,” I said.

  Farooq told me that he was either thirty-three or thirty-four years old, older than the other undergrads in his college. (He used a phrase that a professor had given him to describe himself: a nontraditional student.) He had been born in a village near Abbottabad—the town where the previous month, in May 2011, Americans had killed Osama bin Laden. Farooq’s family were farmers. People in the region had cultivated opium because it didn’t need much water and could be sold at a profit, but the government had been trying for a few decades to discourage this practice. The more popular crops now were lentils, wheat, and mustard. The entire region, he said, was a tribal area and backward.

  Farooq had arrived in the United States on September 5, 2001—which meant, although I didn’t say anything about it to him, that he had come here at the same time as Vaani. His arrival had been delayed, he had not communicated with the institution that had admitted him, and he had now lost his place at the college. After the September 11 attacks, there was a lot of anxiety in this country about young Muslim men. Farooq was especially suspect, he said, because his records showed that he had served in the Pakistan Air Force. His visa was withdrawn and he was put in detention in Elizabeth, New Jersey. It was there that one night an officer from the FBI visited him and asked him to work for them. He was told to go into a photocopying shop and ask for a Latina woman there. He was to offer her money and find out if he could get a fake license. Farooq did as he was instructed and he received a license that to any ordinary person would look legitimate. The FBI quickly arrested the woman and her accomplices. At this time, Farooq wasn’t enrolled in any academic institution; for months, he worked at a Subway and at a gas station owned by a Pakistani man. I asked him where he lived and he said that he didn’t have money for an apartment. He needed to pay a lawyer who had filed an appeal for asylum on his behalf. At the gas station, the owner had taken pity on Farooq and allowed him to sleep in the storage room after they shut down for the night. A bench, he said, rather than a bed, with red plastic bottles of Valvoline motor oil stacked underneath.

  The hearing that would determine Farooq’s future was held in Hartford. After the judge asked only a few preliminary questions of the lawyer and looked over a couple of sheets of paper, the entire process taking seven to ten minutes, the judge denied the appeal. Farooq said that he had spent eight thousand dollars of his hard-earned savings on the case. Around this time, he was again visited by the men from the FBI. This time they were brusque with him. He was asked for help translating a few recordings and it was made clear that if he didn’t do the job he would be given a one-way ticket home. Farooq set to work. These were interrogation recordings from the AfPak area; the men being interrogated were speaking in Pashto. Even though Farooq is fluent in that language, he described it as a difficult task. The men whose voices he could hear in the recordings were also being tortured. He wasn’t paid for this work, but he was granted a green card with a Z11 stamp on it, attesting that his deportation had been suspended.

  While narrating this story, Farooq held a finger against his temple, as if he was in pain. He had finished his tea and I asked him if he wanted more. He said no and that he was coming to the end of his story. Three or four months later, Farooq said, the men from the FBI were back. This time he was asked to travel to Waziristan with the officers of the Jo
int Terrorism Task Force. He had two supervising officers; one of them, Farooq wanted me to know, was a man of Indian origin named Jagdish. He spent six months on this tour. When Farooq came back to the United States, he was hoping to become a citizen, but he discovered that his green card was canceled after his return. He called the men in the FBI who had hired him, but they said they couldn’t help. They had returned to find him at Domino’s and offer him money but not citizenship for more work with translations. This time he said no. In Pakistan, he had given up his job in the air force because the government was carrying out bombings against its own people in Balochistan, and he wasn’t going to help the Americans with their interrogations during which he had once seen a man’s chest being split open.

  “What is your status now?” I asked Farooq.

  “I’m married to a U.S. citizen. We have a child. So, I have applied for citizenship.”

  I shared with Farooq what his professor had told me about his marriage. He didn’t appear surprised or hurt at this sharing of information; despite the fact that Farooq had only recently met me, he spoke candidly. His wife’s name was Julie. Farooq said that Julie often fought with him and that after their troubles began she had humiliated him by going out with a Saudi man.

  Did this white American, a Christian, only go out with Muslim men?

  He shrugged and stayed silent.

  How does it make you feel?

  He said it was dishearting, and that odd word, I didn’t know whether to call it a nonnative speaker’s mistake or neologism, endeared him to me.

  Julie was depressed and angry, he said. They had met while both of them were working at Subway. For a while Julie had been employed as a salesclerk at JCPenney but she was now without a job again. Then Farooq told me about their dog. The dog, Simba, was a German shepherd. Farooq had bought him at a high price because Julie wanted a puppy. How much had the dog cost, I asked. Nine hundred dollars. Simba was huge now, over a hundred pounds, and spent much of the day in his crate. Julie spent a lot of time in bed too. When he returned home late from working at Domino’s, Farooq said, he would need to empty the tray at the bottom of the dog’s crate. When he pulled the tray out and carried it to the bathroom, the dog’s urine spilled on his uniform.

  Farooq and I met a few days later in an Indian restaurant. Farooq liked that I would write down what he was saying in my black notebook. He said, “You must tell my story.” I told him that I would but then found that I didn’t have any free time; I was teaching and I was trying to complete a book on writing. Nevertheless, I was interested in Farooq’s story and we met a couple more times over the next several months. I should pause here to explain something. I found that Farooq could remember distant events and—a gift for a journalist—he offered details in his stories. He was specific. (He told me the color of the bedsheet and the pillowcase when he was circumcised in his childhood by the village barber, Baz Gul. “Look up at the plane up there,” Baz Gul said, and quickly used the razor on Farooq’s foreskin, which had been extended over a tender bamboo shoot. “How old were you?” I asked. “Two or two and a half years old,” he replied. I didn’t know whether I could trust this memory.) I hadn’t yet begun to wonder whether his stories were so detailed because they were fiction or because he was a good storyteller with an amazing memory. Or both. But I do remember being dissatisfied. This was because, despite his penchant for details, there were so many turns in Farooq’s story that remained hazy to me, the chief one being his account of repeated stays in jail in upstate New York. I wanted to keep talking to him so that I would get to the bottom of his story.

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  SOME MONTHS LATER, when Farooq graduated from college, I was his only guest at the ceremony. Earlier that morning, I had published a short piece about him in the local newspaper. I didn’t know how to introduce him, so I decided to be direct. I wrote about what our recent meetings had been about. He will be graduating today, I wrote, but he is not a very good student. His GPA is only 2.7. Once he was even threatened with expulsion because he had been quarreling with his wife and had missed classes. He had surprised me a few days ago, I had added, by saying that he wanted to give a speech at his graduation ceremony. Would I read the draft he had written?

  There had been a further surprise. In what he had sent me, there was mention of his incarceration in a federal prison in upstate New York a few months after the events of 9/11. He was suspected of being a terrorist. I had known of this, but so far I had also found him taciturn and secretive about that experience; I was surprised that he was prepared to stand in his blue and gold robes at graduation and read aloud about having been put behind bars.

  Over the time that I had known him, Farooq had mentioned his arrests—the first only a few days after the September attacks—but the details I was now reading in his draft were new to me. He had written that one early morning in 2002, he was taken out of his apartment and asked to sit in a car. Then one of the Joint Terrorism Task Force officers came back and pulled Farooq out. He wanted to take pictures of him being handcuffed. Farooq was ordered to hold his head up. He felt he was being treated like a trophy. (This wasn’t as grim as the stories we had heard about the prisoners at Guantánamo. But the prison camp at Guantánamo was a part of the war on terror. It is something I thought about here at the residency when, during my reading of 1984, I came across these lines: “In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night.”) Aiming for a kind of honesty, I wrote in my piece that my heart sank when I read Farooq’s prose because it seemed that each paragraph could arouse the suspicion of those who followed the rules of grammar: “I used to get a quartz of milk, and bread tost for breakfast. Quartz orange juice and rice with chicken and French fries for lunch and same for dinner. After spending six months, I was let free.” Why would the young men and women holding office in student government at Farooq’s college accept a speech written in faulty English? And yet, I encouraged him to go on writing.

  The truth was that Farooq’s essay had made me even more curious. Instead of asking him to correct his grammar, I suggested that he share additional details. (I sent him rule no. 16 of Strunk and White: “Use definite, specific, concrete language. Prefer the specific to the general, the definite to the vague, the concrete to the abstract.”) There was another reason. I had realized that Farooq was also bringing news from the other side of the class divide. “My dear colleagues, every day once we left our class, you went to library to complete a project or a paper, I drove to Domino’s to deliver pizza. Over the weekend, while driving, I would see many of you having breakfast at the Goldberg’s Bakery, in West Hartford. During all this time, I had worked tirelessly, to the brinks of insanity.”

  I had myself seen him in the pizza store and spoken to his boss, who had told me about Farooq putting in upward of forty hours for him. This part about his hard work I knew was true. A huge gap divided him from the well-heeled students in his graduating class.

  When I asked Farooq why he wanted to present the speech, he answered that he wanted his fellow students to know how difficult it had been for him. And then, perhaps realizing that this motive was somehow inadequate or didn’t do enough for others, he added that his speech would teach others the virtues of persistence. Sounding very much like an American, he said, “I didn’t give up.”

  Each year there are countless speeches delivered at graduation ceremonies, and most use words like the ones that Farooq had been careful to include in his draft: ideals, education, struggle, persistence, success. I wanted him to get the chance to present his story. It didn’t happen, however. I got an email from Farooq informing me that the mantra hadn’t worked. His speech hadn’t been selected. I’m sure he was disappointed, but I hoped Farooq had gotten to lighten his load—of secrecy, but also of injustice—by writing about his imprisonment and his struggle to make ends meet in this new societ
y.

  In my piece, I had aimed for a certain pathos. I wrote that I had seen Farooq in his Domino’s uniform, which granted him a kind of invisibility, and now I was curious to see how he would look during the graduation ceremony. I pointed out that if Farooq had been given the opportunity of delivering his speech, his audience would have been conscious, I think, of what is left unsaid in many such conventional speeches. And I, listening to him, would have been aware of what he was leaving out of the account he was sharing with his fellow students and teachers. I brought my piece to an end by then mentioning that after his stint in prison, the federal authorities picked Farooq up several times and asked for his help. If he said no, Farooq feared he would be deported. In the fall of 2004, he was taken to Afghanistan for a few months to help U.S. interrogators when they spoke to suspects whose only language was Pashto or Hindko. It was tough work, Farooq said, translating what a man was saying when his nails were being pulled out.

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  AT THE VILLA, I looked over the notebooks where I had recorded parts of our conversations. Farooq’s story would perhaps be the opening tale—or maybe the second—in my Enemies of the People. But during the lazy hour after lunch, I liked to walk down to the water or take a cup of coffee and sit in the garden reading 1984. There, among the flowers, the tiny sprinklers, and the darting lizards, I felt I was safely distant from the dark despair of Orwell’s dystopia. At the villa, we felt safe even when we heard troubling news coming from the villages just a few miles to the north: people were now dying from the novel coronavirus that was proving to be very infectious.