Homeland Elegies(100)

“In research, probably higher.”

“Right. And what could be more important than that? New cures, new vaccines—where are they coming from if not from the immigrants? He doesn’t like Mexicans, he doesn’t like Muslims, he doesn’t like Africans—in the process, he’s making it more and more unlikely that any good doctor, good scientist, will come here. No matter where they’re from. And who will suffer the consequence? The American patient suffers. That’s who.”

“But Uncle, I mean…since when has the system cared about the American patient?”

“Okay, beta. But I’m not just talking about people from North Omaha. I’m talking about the ones with money, too. The ones who can get the best care. They’ll suffer like everyone else. I mean, when that bastard in the White House had a heart problem, who did he call? Your father. First in his class at King Edward Medical College. That’s who. You get rid of that pipeline, who benefits? No. One.”

“Then they’ll be stuck with the local boy who postpones a procedure so he can get an extra day on his ski trip in Aspen,” Father said acerbically.

“I guess I’m just saying, patient care has never been a priority,” I said.

“I’m not sure that’s true, beta. Democrats have tried. They have. Obamacare—”

“What a disaster,” Father interjected.

“Okay, Sikander. I get it. But at least he was trying. Right? At least it was an effort.”

“You left medicine before that debacle started. Okay? You don’t know the first thing about it. Don’t lecture me about—”

“I’m not talking about your salary, Sikander. I’m talking about the system. They can put a man on the moon, but they can’t solve health care in this country?” Father signaled his lack of interest by waving at the waiter and asking for another beer. Sultan continued: “Look, this country has been good to us. I had my children here. They’re miserable—there’s no secret there—but they would have been just as unhappy back home in some different way.”

“What’s your point?” Father was irritated.

“You know what my point is.”

“Our lives are here, okay? Our kids are here.”

“No one’s saying they’re not.”

“We don’t like what’s happening politically, so we jump ship? Is that it? After all this country gave us?”

The conversation between them had taken a sudden turn I wasn’t following, as if they were picking up an argument they’d been having for some time.

“We paid our taxes, Sikander,” Sultan said. “At least I paid mine. I took no money from the state. I cared for these people, their children. I don’t feel I haven’t given back. Maybe what I didn’t do—and what you didn’t, either—was give back to the country that really needed us.” Father shrugged. Sultan turned to me: “The thing I never got used to here was not really understanding what people are thinking. Everybody coming from so many different places, so many different experiences, everybody looking at the same things in completely different ways. For years, people are telling me, ‘You don’t smile. You have to smile more.’ I heard it so much I ended up taping a note card on my bathroom mirror to remind me. ‘Glue a smile to your face before you leave the house.’ If you smile like that in Pakistan all the time? They think you’re a fool. But if you don’t smile like that here, you have an attitude problem.”

“You do have an attitude problem,” Father said playfully.

Sultan ignored him. “They call it a melting pot, but it’s not. In chemistry, they have what they call a buffer solution—which keeps things together but always separated. That’s what this country is. A buffer solution.”

“Are you taking notes?” Father asked, turning to me as his beer arrived.

“He doesn’t need to,” Sultan answered for me in a tone somewhat sterner than I thought made sense. “Your son knows these things already, Sikander. He’s writing about it. We’re the ones who didn’t know.”

Father sipped, sipped again, then placed his beer carefully on the napkin before him. He looked up at Sultan with a wooden stare. He didn’t speak.

I finally asked the obvious question: “Are you thinking of going back to Pakistan, Uncle?”

Sultan’s reply was careful, cagey, intending—I realize now—a meaning beyond its words. In retrospect, it’s hard for me to believe that I didn’t divine what he was trying to tell me, but I didn’t: “So many of us are thinking about it, beta. We’re all wondering in our own different ways about how to find our way back home.”





7.


October was the cruelest month that year, with our country awash in violence. Back on the first of the month, in Las Vegas, a shooter had opened fire on an outdoor country music festival from the makeshift turret of his thirty-second-floor hotel suite. For ten minutes, bullets poured onto an unprotected crowd, injuring 441 and taking fifty-nine lives. The following twenty-eight days would see a further twenty-four mass shootings in fifteen states, bringing the month’s toll of fatalities to eighty-two, with 532 injured.

On the last day of the month, Halloween, sometime after 3:00 p.m., as my father was likely returning from lunch for an afternoon session of his second week in court, I was waiting for a latte at a West Village coffee shop when I heard an onslaught of passing police sirens. I went to the window to see what was going on. Behind me, a patron announced there’d been an attack of some sort along the West Side Highway. The barista behind the counter—now staring down into her phone—read out a bystander’s description on her Facebook profile of a pickup truck plowing into pedestrians along the Hudson River bike path. Within minutes, eyewitnesses on Twitter were being retweeted, their accounts already referring to a “terrorist attack.” Some claimed they saw the perpetrator escape from the truck—dark-skinned, long-bearded—and heard him shouting “Allah-u-Akbar” just before being shot in the gut by the city police. I retreated from the ad hoc comity forming itself in that coffee shop; I didn’t want to pick through the details with my fellow patrons. I’d learned my lesson on that day sixteen years earlier when my curiosity led to a downtown encounter from which my American self would likely never entirely recover. I went out into the street and flagged the first cab home.