Homeland Elegies(10)

Realizing my reticence was proving counterproductive, I tried a different tack: For me to indulge the question—I would say—and point away from the work back to the life of the one who created it only undermines the particular sort of truth that I believe art is after. Art’s power, unlike journalism, has little to do with the reliability of its sourcing, I would say. Finally, I would quote D. H. Lawrence: “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.” For a time, this seemed to work well enough.

Then, in November of 2015, some four months into his candidacy, Trump announced he’d seen Muslims celebrating in Jersey City on the day of the attacks. My agent’s phone started ringing. I turned down a request to appear on Bill Maher’s show to discuss the claim, and two days later, I declined a similar invitation to appear on Fox & Friends. But the questions kept coming as people now cited my play as proof of a deeper, alarming truth about the American Muslim response to 9/11. My evasions started to seem irresponsible to me. Wasn’t it important for me to say something substantial? But what? The sentiments expressed in the play had, of course, come from somewhere, but how to express the complex, often contradictory alchemy at work in translating experience into art? The only thing I could put simply was that there was no simple way to put it. There was no straightforward way to speak of the tortured vein opened up in my family by the killing of the man I believe my mother was in love with most of her life—not my father but one of his best friends from medical school, Latif Awan. It was during my mother’s grief over Latif’s murder that she would make comments that led to the lines in my play, comments in which I would educe not only the startling depth of my mother’s divided loyalties but also the contours of the deepest fault line, I believe, separating so much of the so-called Muslim world from the so-called West. Just a few words, but ones for which I had a lifetime of context. I’d buried both context and tale inside the play I wrote, masking its true source from the audience. I didn’t believe a more obvious rendition would meet with greater understanding. I still don’t. But I suppose we’re about to find out.





First Things, or Partition


To have heard my parents reminisce about medical school in Pakistan in the 1960s was to be treated to the aureate tones and hues common to most reports of halcyon days, though the lengthening view on Pakistan’s subsequent turbulent history has certainly made its ’60s era look like a never-again-to-be-seen high-water mark. In 1964, when my parents met—the same year my mother met Latif—one could have imagined that the rivers of blood spilled to found the Pakistani nation had finally dried, that the ghosts of India’s partition had wreaked their last havoc and finally decamped for the brighter beyond. It was not to be. For Pakistan’s late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century obsession with terror-as-tactic—learned of course from the CIA—was the paranoid calculus born of partition’s trauma, a self-corroding defense that speaks to the still desperate, still feverish Pakistani fear of its Indian progenitor. There’s no good reason to give short shrift to the story of partition, still too little known to most, of how India was sundered and Pakistan created by the beleaguered, ever-duplicitous British in the wake of the Second World War; there’s no good reason not to tell the tale in its epic amplitude, except that it’s been well told many times, and because these pages are not the place—and I am not the person—to attempt any such full account. My tale is entirely American. But in order to understand it, you’ll need to know at least this much: by 1947, Britain’s long-practiced imperial strategy of divide and conquer resulted in the to some ill-conceived, to others God-ordained decision to carve off zones of the Indian motherland so that Hindus and Muslims would not have to live side by side any longer. Little matter that Muslims and Hindus had lived together for hundreds of years in India; after a century of British policies pitting them against each other, stoking a constant conflict for which the British Raj offered itself as the only containing force, the king’s empire could no longer ignore the fact that the social fabric was on the verge of coming apart.

Before the Second World War, the British paid ample lip service to the idea of self-government in India, but granting full independence was never a serious option. The Raj was the jewel in His Majesty’s crown; giving it up was unthinkable. But by 1947, the British nation was exhausted and traumatized by German bombing; discouraged by the loss of so many of its soldiers; shocked by the desertion and mutiny of its Indian servicemen; benumbed by unprecedented winter cold and an energy shortage that had the population shivering and its factories shuttered; broke, owing not only the Americans for the money that was keeping its economy afloat but India, too; and disgusted by the growing violence between Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs for which it took no responsibility, violence that would shortly lead to a bloodbath of historic proportions. Overwhelmed by these troubles at home and in its disintegrating colony, Britain concluded that exit from the subcontinent was the only option.

This standard reading of the history was one Father hated. He called it the “blame game” and found faulting the British for partition’s violence particularly difficult to stomach. Who had done all the senseless killing? Was it the British hacking apart their former schoolmates limb from limb, beheading their Muslim or Hindu neighbors, roasting their infants on spits? Was it the British who had done all that—or had we done it? Sure, fine, yes, they had perpetrated evil and enslavement in their endless plunder of the Indian motherland since the early 1600s—but so what? Were we robots? Did we have to keep repeating the violence? And since we were the ones repeating it, what sense did it make to blame them for it? What was the value in it? Wasn’t the history clear? We’d long sued for independence; the British had finally conceded; we were the ones who couldn’t make it work without the bloodshed—so how exactly were they to blame? And if we hated them so much that we couldn’t see the facts for what they were, why, then, were we still speaking their language when we had so many of our own? Why were we quoting Shakespeare and playing squash and eating cucumber sandwiches? And why didn’t we tear up the roads they’d built and pave our own? Or fill the canals they’d dug to transform dusty Punjab into the most fertile land on the subcontinent? Why didn’t we complain about all this, too?